The Chrysalis - Part 5:  The Tag

Aeryn woke several arns later, momentarily confused by the combination of pressures and sensations against
her midriff.  The warmth of John’s body resting alongside hers was supposed to be accompanied by the
muddled confusion of drugs and unending pain.  It was a pleasure that came with a cost, an indulgence of her
mind that only lasted as long as she hovered in the brief territory between waking and sleep.  This time she was
fully awake, she was alert, she didn’t hurt, and John was still there.  Taking care not to disturb him, she tucked
an extra pillow under her head so she could look down at where he lay sprawled beside her, half on and half off
her body.  They had migrated while they slept, coming to rest with John at an angle to her, lying facedown with
his head on her stomach and one arm draped across her ribs.  

She watched him sleep, half expecting him to disappear each time she blinked.  It had happened too many
times while she was aboard the Command Carrier for her to be absolutely certain it wouldn’t happen again.  
Finally, aching for the additional proof that he really was there despite what her eyes and body were already
telling her, she ran her fingers lightly over the close-cropped hair, doing her best to balance her need for tactile
reassurance against her desire not to wake him.  

The light touch triggered a small chuffing noise, a cross between a snort and a sigh, followed by John’s arm
tightening around her midsection.  Aeryn froze, waiting to see if the squeeze was a random movement on his
part or if she had disturbed his sleep.  As far as she could tell, it was the former.  His breath went on streaming
across her stomach in warm rhythmic floods, a sensation she had at one point feared she would never
experience again except in her dreams, and his grasp around her body gradually relaxed, eventually returning
to nothing more than the slack weight that had been resting against her when she woke.  

Aeryn let out the breath she had been holding out in an inaudible sigh, closed her eyes, intent on going back to
sleep, and for the first time in too many days, finally relaxed.  The grasp around the middle of her body had
done what nothing else could achieve:  It had satisfied her subconscious that John was alive and had been
returned to her in one piece.  Her quiet prayers and fervent wishes had been answered.  Whatever the future
held in store for them, they would face it together.   

Just as she started to fall asleep, John became restless.  It began with a series of twitches, an uncoordinated
combination of jerks, miniscule muscle contractions, and a change in his breathing.  The tiny quivers began to
escalate.  They merged, compounding, developing into a non-stop battery of fluttering eyelids, larger muscle
contractions, uneven breaths, and the occasional gasp for air.  A nightmare, she realized at last, and she had
left him mired in its grasp for too long.

Aeryn grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and gave him one hard jostle.  “John, wake up.”      

What happened next wasn’t so much a case of John falling out of bed as a display of human levitation.  One
moment he was lying beside her, the non-stop twitches and shudders the only outward sign of whatever his
inner mind was viewing, and the next moment he was lunging after something that wasn’t there, hands grasping
at empty air.  Two microts later he was crouched on the floor beside the bed, looking as though his worst
enemy was lurking somewhere close by.  Aeryn froze, in part because he had startled her, but also in order to
give him time to recognize his surroundings.  She knew all too well the short-lived disorientation that
accompanied this sort of lurch from sleep to awake, and the tumult of wild, illogical thoughts that would be
bombarding him at that moment.  

John’s eyes flicked from one side to the other several times, performing a fast, erratic survey of their quarters,
searching for something.  There was a final attack of muscular tremors, and then he seemed to contract in
upon himself, pale skin melting into the half-lit gloom of their cell until only his head and shoulders were
visible.   

Aeryn sat up, moving slowly, and started to say something.  What it was, she never could remember
afterwards.  

John snarled.  There was no other word for it.  It was a silent snarl, consisting of bared teeth and a defensive
cower, one of feral ferocity comprised entirely of instinct, devoid of sentience, as though somewhere in the fast
transcendence between dreaming and this moment he had left his humanity behind.  The pre-waking twitches
returned, but with new purpose.  Crouched on the floor with his body hunched protectively behind his forearm
and knee, he looked ready to bolt out of the cell at the slightest provocation.  

Aeryn closed her lips on the words she had been about to utter, certain that whatever she chose to say would
only make matters worse.  Shifting closer to the edge of the bed was accomplished in a series of slow cautious
movements designed not to startle him.  Her silence and the absence of fast movements worked.  By the time
she reached the limit of the padded mattress, he had already begun to relax.  There was no change in his
position or in the wary scowl that remained locked on Aeryn, but he no longer looked as though the smallest
noise would send him fleeing into the corridors.  She reached toward him with one hand, inviting him to return
both to where he had been lying just moments ago as well as to the waking, tangible world.  

John stared at the outstretched hand, started to reach for it, retreated, and then made a second, more hesitant
foray toward her fingers.  His hand stopped a full four denches from hers.  The twitches and jerks increased in
intensity.  

Dreams, she remembered, and froze with her hand extended, uncertain whether words would make it worse or
break the spell.  There were ten or more phrases begging to be spoken.  She wanted to say the simple and
concise, “Come back to bed,” or at least assure him with an “I’m real,” hearkening back to a time when she
hadn’t been sure whether John had been human or hallucination.  Her tongue and jaw ached from wanting to
say, “You’re home now,” and she didn’t dare speak until she was certain she wasn’t about to repeat something
that had happened in his dreams.  

In the end, after several microts worth of contemplation, Aeryn crossed the remaining distance herself.  She
paused for a moment with her hand almost touching his, and then, for no reason she could explain, moved on.  
Leaning forward, feeling a quiet twinge in her back from muscles that had not yet been asked to stretch this far,
she touched his cheek.  John let out a strangled-sounding breath, closed his eyes, and leaned into the palm of
her hand.  

“Dream,” she said.  

“Yeah,” he said on an extended sigh.  

“The bad one … from before?” she asked, although she already knew the answer.   

John’s reply wasn’t what she expected.  He pressed her hand against his cheek with both of his, leaned his
head into the combined caress, and said, “Not this time.”    

He released her hand, crossed the short distance to the bed and crawled in next to her, resuming the position
he had been in before his abrupt departure.  Even after he was settled with his head resting on her stomach
and one arm draped across her hip, John continued to shift restlessly for a short time.  It was as though the
physical contact was more than he could bear, an exquisite torture that was nine-tenths pleasure and one-tenth
excessive delight that demanded physical outlet.  Whatever he was feeling, it ended quickly.  He brushed his
lips across her stomach, bestowing a soft sliding kiss to one side of her navel, and then set his head down and
didn’t move again except for an occasional bout of tiny trembles.  Aeryn went on caressing as much of him as
she could reach without sitting up:  tracing the contours of his skull with the tips of her fingers, rubbing his
shoulders, doing her best to provide his subconscious with the proof that she wasn’t a dream.  

It would be the touches, Aeryn decided, that would eventually heal him.  

Unprovoked hugs in the middle of the day; holding his hand when she normally wouldn’t choose to hang on to
him; and leaning against his shoulder when they were sitting together at mealtime.   These were the things that
would banish John’s lingering demons.  She would have to waylay him in an empty corridor, pull him into a
secluded corner and kiss him for no other reason than to let him feel her body pressing against his.  There
might have to be more long showers together, and the half-clothed hugging and wrestling silliness that John
liked so much while they were getting dressed.  It would take time and effort, and deliberate intent.  

Just when she thought that it had worked, that the slow massage and her presence had allowed John to fall into
the type of deep, dreamless sleep that did the most to heal and restore, he pushed himself up with both arms,
rolled off the bed, and was gone.  It took Aeryn several microts to interpret the dim flashes of pale skin moving
about the darkened chamber.  In the short time he had been on the planet, he had learned a new level of
stealth.  There was no sound to provide extra clues as to what he was doing.  By the time she translated the
fast moving patterns of light and dark into John locating a pair of the loose pants he preferred to sleep in and
pulling them on, he had opened the grated doors of the cell and disappeared into the corridor.

Aeryn stared in the direction he had gone, considering the sorts of instincts that might have summoned him into
the night when he could have remained with her.  She had hoped that the mental and emotional healing would
begin right away, that there would be an immediate, even if incremental, improvement in his moods and
behavior.  The silent, feral movements and his disappearance suggested that it might take much longer for him
to recover.  Sighing, Aeryn mimicked his initial activity.  She wandered about the extensive mess in their
quarters, managed to sort out a pair of her own pants and one of John’s insulated shirts without turning up the
lights, pulled them on, and then crawled back into bed.

She had resigned herself to spending the rest of the night alone when she heard the hushed slap of bare feet
striking metalloid leviathan floors approaching their cell.  John paused in the doorway long enough to wave a
hand across the door controls before scrambling in under the covers, moving with a peculiar awkwardness
throughout the entire process.  Even his customary athletic gait had lost its usual relaxed grace.  

It was the lack of coordination that provided Aeryn with the critical bit of information necessary to realize where
he had gone.  He hadn’t been skulking about the corridors after all.  It hadn’t been the dark and the silence that
had drawn him into the labyrinthine corridors of the ship, urging him to reproduce some portion of his lethal
nightly patrols.  An entirely different type of summons had lured him away from their bed.  

“I’ll take him.”  Aeryn reached for the fragile cargo he was carrying, offering to relieve him of the reason for his
clumsiness.  

John transferred the warm bundle of a sleeping infant into her embrace.  Then he burrowed one arm beneath
Aeryn and wriggled in beside her.  She knew what he wanted without having to ask.  John loved to lie with her
tucked in alongside his body, with the baby resting securely in the angle between her torso and his chest.  He
didn’t care that her weight sometimes cut off all sensation to the arm underneath her.  The arrangement
allowed him to hug her and cradle his son at the same time, embracing both of them while leaving one hand
free to touch one or the other.  Aeryn shuffled carefully to one side to make room for him, taking care not to
jostle the lump of blankets and baby.  Miraculously, they managed to get settled without D'Argo.  

“Told you so,” John whispered with his lips brushing her ear.  

Aeryn spent several microts trying to remember a comment or event that justified an ‘I told you so’.  A hasty
mental review of most of the evening’s conversations yielded nothing worthy of what she considered one of the
most annoying of John’s many habitual phrases.  She raised both eyebrows and gave him an infinitesimal
shrug, signaling her confusion.  

“I told you I could get in and out of Rygel’s cell without waking the sprout,” he explained in the softest of
whispers.  “Mini D didn’t even bat an eyelash when I picked him up.”  

He might as well have yelled it.  The final syllable was barely out of John’s mouth when D’Argo let out a quiet
squawk of distress, looked up at his parents, and started to cry.  

John sat up, carrying both mother and child along with him.  “Me and my big mouth.”

“Could you repeat that last sentence?” Aeryn said, struggling to smother a laugh.  “I couldn’t hear it over the
crying.”  

“Go ahead.  Bust my chops.  I earned it.”  He paused just long enough to make sure the bawling bundle was
tucked securely in Aeryn’s arms; then rolled out of bed for the third time in less than half an arn.  There was no
sign that he might be tired, no hint that he had done anything physically strenuous within the past few arns, no
suggestion that the overly lean body required rest or nourishment.  Every bit of his energy was committed to
the needs of his son.  

John tripped over a heap of clothes, recovered, and spun around so he faced the bed.  “This time of night, he’s
probably hungry.”  He was walking backwards, headed for one of the cell doors, using both hands to puntuate
his sentences.  “You check him for a toxic waste discharge; I’ll get him something to eat.  Where do I look?  
Center chamber?”

“Rygel’s quarters will be faster.  He had the DRD’s install a warmer so everything he needed to care for D’Argo
would be close to hand,” Aeryn said.  “There are --” she began, intending to describe the feeding containers
and their contents.  

He waved off the impending description of the warmer and its contents.  “They’re baby bottles of some sort.  I’ll
figure it out,” he said, and disappeared at a run.  

Aeryn stared at the empty doorway and the vacant corridor beyond, letting her thoughts wander with little
impetus or direction.  It was the aimless journey of a tired mind, driven erratically from one thought to the next
by a combination of fatigue and the overwhelming clamor coming from D’Argo.  Some facet of John’s exit from
their cell was begging for a connection.  There was a conclusion to be drawn; she could feel it.  Her thoughts
ricocheted from John’s cheerful, energetic departure through most of the evening’s insights and revelations,
interspersed with fragments recalled from their cycles together.  All she managed to assemble was that she
would never understand how an infant’s tiny lungs could produce so much noise.  After several additional
microts worth of unproductive mental drifting, she shrugged, got to her feet, and began to wander around the
cell, hunting for the absorbent cloths they normally used to mop up the inevitable messy burps and slobbers.  

Miraculously, D’Argo’s screams trailed off into irregular squawks of distress and the occasional hiccup, and
then he stopped crying altogether, possibly because he was being lulled by the gentle rocking generated by
Aeryn’s slow tour of the cell or because he had been shocked into stunned fascination by the devastation his
parents had wrought on their quarters.  Aeryn offered up a silent thanks to any deity that might have had a role
in the unexpected silence, tacked on a brief appeal that John would hurry, and kept walking.  

Under the combined influence of the unanticipated tranquility and the steady pacing, a memory tumbled loose,
one with a tenuous connection to her present situation:  John holding a newborn D’Argo at arm’s length while
he stared in disbelief at the cream-colored vomit adorning the front of his shirt and pants.  He had looked up to
discover Aeryn watching him from the doorway, and had begun to laugh.  The disorganized morass inside her
head shifted, rearranging the component parts.  Dissociated ideas fell into a swirling whirlpool, spun wildly until
they bumped up against other fragments of thought, and eventually began to take on some semblance of
order, all revolving around John’s delight at being a father.  

There was no great stunning revelation, no sudden thump of understanding or burst of enlightening insight.  It
was as though a fog inside her head was being pushed aside by a sun-warmed breeze, allowing her to survey a
landscape that had been hidden from sight.  What emerged into view was the fact that no one had gone
unscathed in their latest debacle.  There were injuries all around, ranging from her physical wounds, to the
emotional damage suffered by the littlest, most helpless member of their family, to the spiritual devastation that
John had inflicted upon himself.  

But they were healing.  The lingering discomfort and stiffness resulting from her injuries were fading with each
passing day.  Vitality was returning at the same rate that the occasional bouts of internal weakness were
fading.  

“And you’re almost back to normal, aren’t you?” she asked D’Argo.  

In lieu of an answer, he took in a deep breath, standard preparation prior to unleashing a shriek of
unhappiness … and then stuffed all five fingers of his right hand into his mouth and began to suck on them.  
This was her son, at last.  This was the child that had come into the world in the midst of a blazing battle, who
accepted most of life’s bumps and irregularities with cheerful equanimity, and who seldom continued to cry once
he had his parents’ attention.  He had disappeared for a short time, replaced by a fussy, insecure, permanently
unhappy creature who frequently went on crying long after he was changed or fed, despite being snuggled and
rocked for arns on end.  

The pattering thud of bare feet approaching their cell at a run heralded the return of the third and equally
damaged member of the family.  Aeryn couldn’t venture a guess at how long it would take John to put the
recent events behind him and begin to re-clothe himself in a protective armor built out of love, humor, and
intelligence.  The length of her recuperation was easy to measured:  thirty-one solar days had passed between
the moment she had been shot to the day she was discharged from the Command Carrier’s medical sector and
set foot back aboard Moya.  D’Argo’s emotional recovery was just as easily defined.  But only one person knew
for certain the distance John Crichton would need to travel and what difficulties lay ahead; only John could
predict how much time might pass before he was once again barging through life in his customary brash
fashion, spouting Earth nonsense the entire time.    

The focus of her thoughts rounded the final corner into the cell at a lope, nearly lost his balance, recovered,
and bounded to a stop next to the bed.  “One bottle of Chateau Moo, as ordered, warmed to twenty degrees
above ambient, and elegantly presented.”  He bowed, offered Aeryn one of the absorbent cloths of the sort she
had been hunting for, and then delivered the feeding container to her with an elaborate flourish.    

She checked on D’Argo’s reaction to John’s wild arrival.  Her once-again phlegmatic son was staring up at his
father, eyes wide, fingers still firmly inserted in his mouth.  Somehow managing to produce a look of deeply
philosophical serenity despite spit-covered fingers and a gleaming bubble of drool at the corner of his mouth,
his eyes shifted to Aeryn for a moment, then back to John, and finally settled on the person who was holding his
late-night meal.  

Aeryn smiled, leaned down to touch her nose to his, and whispered, “Daddy’s home.”  



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