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The fic © Cyril the Sixteen Goldfish
John lay in the dark and stared at the bottom of the bunk above him, which creaked occasionally as Aeryn moved in her sleep. Of the crew, she was the only one who had elected to come with him rather than stay on board, presumably out of some kind of nostalgia for her Peacekeeper days. Wriggling around to try and find a position in which some bone or other didn't poke into something hard, he wondered how anyone could possibly be nostalgic for sleeping on something which seemed to have been designed as a special variety of endurance training. His quest for comfort wasn't helped by the fact that Scorpius was apparently still awake, and receiving the second-hand sensations of somebody else was very surprising and not a little alarming - every time Scorpius scratched his nose or stubbed his toe John jumped at the unexpected feeling.
He turned over and burrowed into the pillow, reaching under it for the comforting shape of Wynnona, with whom he had a relationship very much like the one he had had with Bingle the bear at age six. Reached further. Scrabbled a bit. Was suddenly very wide awake indeed, throwing the pillow off the bed and revealing an expanse of extremely empty sheet underneath, trying to be quiet about it so as not to wake Aeryn up, lifting up the mattress and feeling under the bunk. There was, unfortunately, no doubt about it. The pistol was gone.
Unfortunately, that is, for whatever poor soul had been responsible for her removal. John tried to think through lack of sleep and utter fury. It couldn't have been Scorpius, he had been on Moya all day overseeing Pilot's treatment. But he was the only other person with the code for John's door - he'd been adamant about that, which made sense, considering. So he must have been behind it. Someone he trusted with his life.
Oh. Of course. Who else?
~~~
Fifteen minutes later, after getting lost, having computer terminals refuse to tell him anything and accosting several random Peacekeepers, John had succeeded in locating the door belonging, or at least lent, to Lieutenant Braca. He glared at it and, finally, when it failed to melt, stabbed at the pad beside it.
"Braca! Wake up!"
Silence.
"Wake up, dammit!"
More silence, then a voice which had the definite feeling of a calm veneer under extreme strain.
"What do you want, Crichton?"
"I want to come in."
"Why?"
"Let me in, you little..."
"Why?"
"You've got Wynnona, and you are going to give her back."
Yet more silence, this time with overtones of extreme puzzlement.
"And who, exactly, is Wynnona?" The veneer was rapidly disintegrating entirely. John snarled.
"Wynnona is my pulse pistol. And you, Igor, have got her. In there."
"Igor?"
"Never mind. Let me in!"
The door slid open, revealing a harassed-looking Braca. He had apparently succeeded in getting more or less dressed at some point since being awakened, unless he slept in his leathers. John wouldn't have put it past him.
"Right! Give her back!"
"Crichton, I don't have your weapon."
"Oh yeah? So where is she?"
"I can't tell you that. Scorpius' orders. He thinks you might do something stupid - and I agree."
"Stupid? I wouldn't do anything stupid. Why's he think I'd do something stupid?"
Braca raised one eyebrow disbelievingly. It was the first open display of emotion John had ever seen from him.
"Well...all right. But I want my gun back. She's important to me, man."
"It is merely a pulse pistol. A standard weapon. How can you have formed an emotional attachment to an inanimate object?"
"Christ! Didn't you ever have a teddy bear or something when you were a kid? A toy? Oh, no, sorry, I forgot, Peacekeepers don't believe in children."
"Your interpretation of the system of training begun in childhood is..."
"Okay, Spock, I didn't mean it. Would it really hurt you that much to disobey ol' man Scorpy just this once, though? Not as if he'd ever find out."
Braca couldn't have looked more incredulous if John had asked him to don a traditional morris-dancing outfit and give a demonstration to every officer who passed his door for the next twenty-four hours. Clearly another tactic was needed.
It was then that John had his amazing idea.
Years ago, back on Earth, someone had given him a book of fairytales, including one in which a man had tried to escape death by challenging the Grim Reaper to a game of chess. He had lost, if John remembered correctly, but Death was a rather more worthy opponent than a stuck-up Peacekeeper lieutenant, all things considered. Wasn't likely to have a chessboard, though. However...
John grinned. Braca eyed him suspiciously.
"Tell me, lieutenant...do Peacekeepers have any tradition of, uh, duelling?"
"Of what?"
"Duelling. You know - I fight you, I win, you give me my gun back, everyone's satisfied and we get to engage in manly combat. And if I lose you get something from me. Traditionally that would be my life, but I'm thinking Scorpy would be pissed if we started killing each other. Name your stake."
"You truly believe that you would have any chance of beating a trained Peacekeeper officer in combat?"
John tried to suppress another smile. He'd been right.
"I dunno. I'm up for it, though. How 'bout you?"
"Peacekeeper regulations strictly prohibit..."
"Oh, stop quoting the damn instruction manual. You're just chicken, aren't you? Scared of the inferior being, that it?"
"Of course not!" He floundered for a moment, then came up with something. "The bracelet. You think Scorpius wouldn't notice if we were to...doo-ul?"
"Then we do it the non-physical way. A game, if you like. Chess is traditional, but unless there's been a really weird coincidence you don't have a set and neither do I. I do, however, have these." He fished in a pocket and, triumphantly, brought out the pack of battered playing cards he'd packed when he set off on the Farscape mission, as a kind of lucky charm. Since then he'd kept them around his person and used them for nothing but the occasional game of solitaire - the only other person on the ship who showed much interest in complicated games was Rygel, and John didn't trust him not to steal them, or, for that matter, eat them.
"And what are they?"
"Cards. Playing cards."
Braca stared at them curiously. Peacekeeper games tended towards to warlike, strategic end of the spectrum or those requiring physical endurance, so the idea of playing a game with a few bits of thick, grubby paper was quite alien to him.
"How do they work?"
"That depends what you're playing. Here, look..." John stepped forward to show the cards to Braca, which quite coincidentally left him standing inside the lieutenant's quarters. "See, there are four suits - that's the different-shaped little blobs - in two colours, and a set of ten numbers and three, uh, people, for each."
"I see. What do you propose we do with them?"
"Well, I suppose the traditional one would be poker. Do you have a table?"
Braca looked helpless. He seemed to have agreed to this without noticing himself doing it, and was now obliged to participate in the human's insane scheme.
"Well, do you?" John waited for a response and then, concluding that Braca was going to be no help to him, pushed past, commandeering a low, round table and a couple of extremely uncomfortable-looking chairs from around the room.
"Well, sit down! Or are you going to stand in the doorway all night? Thinking of which, could you close the door before somebody notices and gets suspicious?" Braca punched at a button by the side of the door and stumbled over to the table, flopping into the seat opposite John.
John, in the meanwhile, was trying to deal a game of poker but was running into some minor difficulties, foremost of which was that he had never actually played it. Oh, he'd watched his dad play when he was a kid, although from a vantage point of three feet off the ground it was quite hard to see detail, and he vaguely remembered something about making bets and aces being a good thing to have. The groups of people had tended to be larger than two, of course, but that probably wasn't important. They didn't have anything to bet, either, which might make deciding who had won a little tricky.
"Crichton? What are you doing?"
He looked up, startled, to discover that he'd been tapping the three of clubs against the side of the table for long enough to make an appreciable dent in its side.
"Damn..." he muttered.
The pause had allowed Braca to recover some of his composure, and he managed to muster an affronted glare.
"Crichton, if you intend to force your way into my quarters and then sit and do nothing all-"
"Calm down, sweetie," John snapped. "I've changed my mind. I think this situation requires something...simpler. We're going to play snap."
"Snap?"
"Snap," he confirmed, shuffling the cards and placing the stack in the middle of the table. "We'll play a practice round first. Take a card and put it in front of you with the blobs facing up."
Braca picked up the ace of diamonds. John picked up the eight of hearts.
"And another. Nope...okay, another...and another...and another...snap!"
Braca jumped. "What?"
"Snap. See, you got the queen of spades and I got the queen of hearts, and they match. So I shout 'snap!' and then I take your cards and add them to mine, and we carry on. And then, when we finish the pack, the one with the most cards wins. Shall we do it properly now?" He took the two piles of cards, shuffled, and replaced them on the table. "Right. You go first."
The four of clubs showed its face.
Slap. Ten of spades.
Slap. Eight of clubs.
Slap. Jack of diamonds.
Slap. Two of hearts.
Slap. Two of diamonds.
"Snap! Now, you have to take something off."
"What?"
"Oh, that's half the fun! And, more importantly, it's how we know who's won at the end. Every time you lose a round you take off an item of clothing, and I do the same, and when we get to the end the one with least on loses."
Braca didn't dare ask how one knew when the game was over. Judging by the human's apparent level of sanity, the answer would probably be 'when my toe tells me so' or 'when you suddenly become a small asteroid and start eating the table'. Besides, there was no possible way that this could really be happening. He gave John a glazed look, decided that, since he was dreaming, it didn't really matter what he did, and slowly removed his jacket.
John smiled. One round in, and he was winning. The game was going well. But there was still something missing. Something which, if he remembered correctly, had been an absolutely vital component of his father's poker games.
"Tell me, lieutenant, do you have anything to drink?"
"You want water?"
"No, no, no. Drink. Alcohol."
"Oh. Well, yes. We are provided with a supply. The Peacekeepers understand their troops' need for-"
"Enough already. Just get it out, yeah?"
"I fail to see why-"
"Part of the ritual. Humour me, okay?"
Braca sighed and went to fish around in a cupboard, eventually unearthing a large bottle of colourless liquid and a couple of largish black cups, which he placed on the table and filled from the bottle. John picked one up and sniffed it, then took a sip. He blinked for a while, until his eyes stopped watering.
"Whew. Strong stuff. Tastes a bit like vodka."
"Something from your planet?"
"Yeah. Made from potatoes - tubers," he added, to Braca's questioning look.
"Interesting. I believe that this is fermented from the ship's waste."
John made a careful mental note to think of the stuff as vodka, and took a bigger mouthful. "Not bad. Anyway, shall we continue?"
Slap. Seven of diamonds.
Slap. Five of clubs.
Slap. King of hearts.
Slap...Slap...Slap...
~~~
On reflection, John mused, the 'strip' method of scoring had possibly been a mistake. Of course, he'd decided on it before he realised just how much stuff Peacekeepers seemed to keep on their persons, or at least this one did. The pile of miscellaneous items beside his chair included his jacket, a comm. (there had been quite a long argument about whether or not that counted as jewellery and, if so, whether it counted as a removal. John had eventually conceded defeat and let it pass) a pulse pistol and its holster (another argument there, over whether they were one item or two), a sort of wristband with assorted little devices in and some unidentifiable metal objects that Braca had found in his pockets (by that point, John was past arguing). The net result of this was that, despite having been losing quite badly, the two men were in exactly the same state of dress, or undress: clothed from the waist down.
The worst part of it was that the Peacekeeper seemed to be getting into the swing of things now. He certainly wasn't losing as often as before. John wondered if his training had included reaction speed. It probably had, and now it was starting to show - If John didn't pull his act together, he ran the risk of losing. At snap, ferchrissakes! To someone who could have defined 'anal-retentive', although he'd started to look more cheerful now. In fact, he was positively beaming as he sloshed more of the whatever-it-was into their cups. The bottle was a quarter empty, but it was a big bottle. It would last.
"Another round, Crichton?"
Slap.
