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Jool’s voice startled Crichton from his reverie – or maybe ‘brooding’ was a better word for what he was doing.
“Can I come in?” she asked from the doorway.
John sighed and called out, “Look, I don’t need a babysitter, okay?”
Undaunted, Jool entered his room. John was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“Who wants to babysit?” she said innocently. “I just stopped by….”
“Like D’Argo came by half an arn ago, and Pip showed up an arn before that. Look, I know you guys mean well, but…” He sighed again.
There had been another scene with Aeryn at lunch. Well, not a scene, exactly, since she hadn’t said a word after the argument had started. But it had ended with Aeryn stalking off and John torn between fury and tears. He’d hoped his reaction wasn’t obvious to the others, but, obviously, it had been.
“If you want to talk…”
“There’s not much point, Princess, the person I need to talk to won’t talk to me.”
Jool regarded him for a moment. “Look, I’m the baby of my family…”
“I never would have guessed that,” John said, finally turning his head and looking at his visitor.
Jool regarded him with irritation mixed with sympathy. “What I’m trying to get at is, the others in my generation were all older than me. They’d gotten started with their lives while I was still just a kid. One of my cousins was widowed young—“
John halfway sat up at the word “widow,” and he shook his head once. It did NOT apply to Aeryn.
Jool cocked her head at him and said, “You didn’t think the other you was just a recreating partner to her, did you?” Her tone of voice suggested she thought he was doing just that.
John just looked at her in stubborn denial.
“Look, Crichton, I don’t know Aeryn very well, and I don’t think I even like her.”
John stiffened at the implied criticism. He could be furious with Aeryn, but anyone else criticized her in his hearing at their own peril. Jool was either certain he didn’t have the energy to strike out, or determined to have her say, because she continued talking instead of scurrying off as she might have done in the past.
“But I HAVE seen that look in my cousin’s eyes. Aeryn’s had her whole future ripped away from her, and she has no idea what to do about it.”
John laid back down again and closed his eyes. “All I know is, she seems determined to keep me out of her life.”
“Self pity doesn’t become you,” Jool said. When he ignored her, she started looking around the room.
She noticed a small notebook in the back corner of a table. She picked it up and started leafing through it. She recognized the star charts for what they were, though she couldn’t read any of the text. Curious, she asked, “Crichton, what’s this? Are you charting our course?”
Feeling guilty about his sulkiness, John looked over to see what she was talking about. “No, no, it’s just a kind of journal. He took it with him when he left. I haven’t even had the chance to look at it.” If he were being honest, he would have told her that he’d simply tossed it there on the table and pretended he hadn’t gotten it back. He didn’t want to know what the other guy had had to say.
Jool flipped through it and said, “Funny, he didn’t write in it much.”
“Huh?” John swung his legs over the side of his bed and sat up. “He has to have, I write in mine all the time, and everyone keeps saying how he’s me…..”
“No, see,” Jool said, holding the notebook out to him, “only this last page looks different.”
John took the notebook then and flipped pages backwards to the point where he left off. “Look, Jool, this is the last page I wrote. We wrote, whatever, before we were split.” He segregated off the pages that had been written since then between his fingers. It was a fairly thick stack. “See, he wrote lots.”
“Then what about that last page, what’s that all about?” Jool asked, pushing his hand out of the way and showing him a page filled with only a handful of simple words, written in large letters.
John looked at it and started reading under his breath. “Cup. Gun. Sun.” He went totally still for a moment, and then looked up at Jool wonderingly. “It’s a primer. A schoolbook. He was teaching her to read.” Read. English. Earth. Widow.
John’s eyes filled with tears. He didn’t even try to hide them, or wipe them away, and Jool couldn’t decide if she’d accomplished what she came for, or made things worse.
“Look,” she said, “all I’m trying to tell you is, she’s in a bad place right now. It doesn’t mean she will be forever. But you need to accept that she’s not going to be able to snap her fingers and get over it.”
“Don’t push her. She takes time,” he whispered.
Jool looked surprised. “Oh, you knew that? Maybe you really are as intelligent as I thought you were. You haven’t been acting like it.”
“I’ve been pushing, huh?” he asked, thinking about his quiet desperation to get Aeryn to *talk* to him, confide in him, instead of just accepting the help and support she’d been ready to give him for his crusade.
“Big time,” she said, edging towards the door.
John sat staring at the notebook, and it was only as Jool actually started to go out through the doorway that he called, “Hey, Princess!”
She looked at him and he added, “Thanks.”
* * * * * *
Fingers crossed, John stood in front of Aeryn’s room. He held the notebook, the original one that his other self had taken to Talyn, in his hand. He fidgeted, chewing on his thumb, before he finally took a breath and said, “Aeryn?”
There was no immediate response, but he tried to keep a level head. “Aeryn, could I come in, just for a minute? I just need to tell you something.”
She appeared at the door then, her expression neutral, and gestured for him to come in.
He stood there, tongue-tied, for a moment, and Aeryn said, more gently than he would have expected, “You had something to say?”
John held the notebook out towards her and took a deep breath. “Well, I could start with, ‘I’m an idiot,’ but…I thought you might want to have this.” The look of pain that crossed her face was mixed with pleasure at seeing the notebook.
She took it and clutched it to her chest, not sure still what he wanted.
“I, uh, saw the primer page he wrote for you….It’s the only thing I read,” he assured her, feeling somehow that he should.
She continued to wait for him to get to his point, while he looked around the room, anywhere but at her and the frelling notebook.
“Aeryn, I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.” He looked away for a moment and then back to her. “If you want to talk about it….”
“I can’t,” she said regretfully, shaking her head.
“I’ve been making it worse, haven’t I?”
“A little,” she conceded. “But I do see how hard this is for you. This isn’t your fault,” she said, encompassing the whole situation.
“It isn’t your fault either,” John told her. “Look, if I get too pushy – Just tell me to back off, okay? I won’t take it personally.”
“That’s a load of dren, Crichton,” Aeryn said, but she smiled as she spoke, and he smiled back.
“All right, maybe a little,” he shrugged. “But I will back off.”
Aeryn regarded him thoughtfully. “All right.”
John shuffled for a moment, then said, “Well, I guess I should go.” She smiled once more, ruefully, and he turned to leave.
Her voice stopped him. “John. Can you teach me to read this?”
He knew she meant the notebook, and he knew it was for that other him. But it was a start.
“Sure,” he said, as casually as he could. “Let me work up a primer for you, okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Aeryn let him go then, and he thought maybe he could do this waiting thing after all.
Hmmm, should he write ‘Dick and Jane’? Or maybe ‘Star Wars’…. He hummed Darth Vader’s theme music all the way back to his quarters.
