Part 2
They fell into a companionable silence, treating every bit of the rash they could find, taking their time, making
sure nothing got missed. Along the way a generous supply of sores received their own application of a
different but equally repulsive paste, and a watery disinfectant was applied to already healing cuts and
abrasions, insurance against any possibility of infection. The narrow shelf running along the inner wall of the
shower partition disappeared under a collection of astringents, ointments, and various botanical potions. After
half an arn worth of work, Aeryn inspected him one last time, and declared him cured of all varieties of skin
ailments.
“Can I wash this stuff off yet?” John asked. The listless, disinterested stranger had reappeared toward the end
of the process. His head and shoulders had slumped, as if to say that he didn’t have enough energy to hold
them up, and the purplish paste and its associated stench no longer seemed to matter to him beyond the need
to remove it at some point.
Aeryn did her best to behave as though there hadn’t been a shift in his behavior. The relapse itself didn’t
bother her. It had been little more than an arn since she had extracted the promise from him, too soon to
expect any significant improvement in his overall mood. It was the abrupt disappearance of the person she
wanted restored to her that generated the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and sapped her of energy.
Everything had been going so smoothly that she had dared to hope that this would turn into an evening of
sloshing watery proximity, extended soapy hugs, and a return of the hovering protective presence that had
become as important to her existence as breathing.
It felt as though she had been holding herself together by shear determination and willpower for close to a
cycle, not the twenty-six solar days that had passed since they had left the Command Carrier. It felt as though
enough time had passed that she deserved to have John Crichton back alongside her, the complimentary half
that made her whole. Instead, the remnant of that person was staring aimlessly at the floor, dull-eyed and
listless, clearly in need of an infusion of strength.
She wanted it to be the other way around. She wanted to yell at him to snap out of it, to have John respond
with his customary combination of shock and hurt, and for him to come to his senses. More than that, she
wanted John to wrap his arms around her, whisper an apology into her ear, and for him to be the strong one,
bolstering her up both physically and emotionally. There was a snarled knot in the pit of her stomach
consisting of loneliness, fear, and hurt feelings. It screamed out a silent complaint concerning the fact that she
was the one who had been shot, the one who had battled back from mortal injuries, the one who deserved to
be looked after and coddled for once. She wanted to be picked up, cradled in one specific person’s arms, and
told that she was allowed to be weak.
But none of that would help either one of them. Logic snared the runaway emotions, dampened them down
until they no longer urged her to do or say something rash. Cold reason dictated that at this point in their
respective recoveries, John needed the support more than she did.
Trying to provide him with some direction, she said, “Get rid of the beard.”
John scrubbed at the matted snarl obscuring one cheek, examined the smears of diluted mud coating his hand,
and didn’t move.
The idea of drawing a razor through that mess was enough to make Aeryn’s stomach knot even tighter and she
wasn’t the one who was going to have to shave. The problem was obvious, the solution even easier. “Wash it,”
she ordered.
John looked at her, inspected the interior of the shower, gazed out at their living quarters for several microts,
and didn’t move. The apathy had returned in full force. What had triggered the transition from an almost
cheerful level of cooperation to this disinterested sullenness, she couldn’t imagine. What she did know was that
she didn’t have the expertise to talk him out of it a second time. It would take something else to draw him back.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
A small glimmer of enthusiasm returned. “You don’t mind?”
She didn’t mind at all. It was a chance to be close to him, to touch him, and to embark on the first stage of a
slow, careful inventory of his body that had a far different purpose than the clinical inspection for injuries. John
dragged a seat into the shower, adjusted the spray so he could duck under by simply leaning forward, and then
took his place in front of her with obvious eagerness. It did not take long to slide into a peaceful realm defined
by the steady hissing impact of hot water punctuated by the quieter slop of lather, of being close to each other,
and of small random touches amidst the more deliberate contact.
She washed his hair the first time with John leaning forward so his head was directly underneath the heaviest
portion of the shower, using lavish fistfuls of hair cleanser that rinsed out as fast as she could work them in.
The floods coursing down his shoulders and back once again ran thick with dirt and grit, leaving snaking
deposits of sand in their wake until the next surge of water carried them away. She could feel the filth running
between her fingers as she scrubbed, and tried hard not to envision what she was dislodging aside from mud.
It took several circuits of his scalp and face before they started to feel like they were covered with hair again,
instead of a soggy, grime-stiffened pelt.
The second stage took almost as long, and worked a slightly different layer out of his hair. Whatever she was
removing this time turned frothy bubbles into a drippy anemic lather, suggesting that it consisted of oils,
chemicals that he had probably crawled through, and biological substances that she did not want to consider
any more than she had wanted to know what might have been alive in his hair. All in all, it meant that John was
lucky not to have died from some sort of poisoning or an out-of-control infection.
John sat silently with his back resting lightly against her hips and stomach while she applied more cleanser and
went on scrubbing. One of his hands fumbled behind him for a microt, sought out her leg, and came to rest
there, fingers gently stroking the back of her thigh, often moving in time with the motion of her hands on his
scalp. If it hadn’t been for the caresses, it might have felt as though he was simply making sure she couldn’t
move away from him without his knowing it. Aeryn understood the compulsion behind the touch without having
to ask. The way his shoulders fit into the curve of her stomach when she leaned against him and the easy slide
of his hair between her fingers were restoring something critical to her existence. There was no doubt in her
mind that the slow up-down movement against her leg was serving the same purpose.
The peaceful interval ended all too soon. Aeryn gave John a nudge to let him know he should lean forward,
and helped him rinse out the last of the suds. The person who sat up, slicked back dripping locks with both
hands, and blew several clinging droplets of moisture off the lower fringes of his mustache was closer in
appearance to the man she had left behind on the planet. A lot of the dirt on his face had gone down the drain
along with the hair cleanser, leaving behind someone more recognizable.
“Shave,” she ordered firmly, hoping that if she could keep him moving the depression might dissolve along with
the layers of dirt.
It seemed to work. John let out an extravagant sigh, plucked at the dripping whiskers covering one cheek, and
then leaned to one side so he could peer into Aeryn’s gear bag.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“You’ve got everything else in there. I was hoping for a barber’s chair and Phil, the guy who used to cut my dad’
s hair. I may need a blood transfusion by the time I get this off.” He went on fingering his wet beard without
making a move to get to his feet. “This is so going to hurt.”
“Wait.” Aeryn retrieved the last item from her bag and placed it in his hand.
John turned the object over several times. “This is Luxan,” he said after three revolutions. “This is D’Argo’s.
It’s the gadget he used to trim his mustache and whatever you call the rest of that hair on his face.”
“I asked Jothee if you could borrow it. He said D’Argo would want you to keep it. It’s yours now.”
John examined the bulbous, asymmetrically shaped trimmer, fingers leisurely tracing the grip and controls
where his friend’s hands had once held the device. In the end, he gave it one final caress, as though he had
just received permission to use it from its dead owner and, with increasing enthusiasm, asked, “How do I make it
work?”
She leaned over his shoulder and pointed. “You put that part against where you want to remove the hair and
then push that control. Since it is Luxan, two very large sets of pincers will come out of the opening, grab the
clump of hair, and rip it out by the roots. It is very painful.”
John let his head loll back until he was looking at her ostensibly upside down, staring up at where she was
standing behind him with one hand resting on his shoulder. She waited, meeting his stare steadily, discovering
for the first time in her life how difficult it could be to keep a straight face under certain conditions.
“We need to talk about your sense of humor,” he said.
“I’ve told you before, John, soldiers don’t have a sense of humor.”
“That’s the point I’m trying to make. Just show me how to keep from cutting my throat with this thing.”
She rested an elbow on his shoulder, leaning against him more heavily than before, and pointed again. “The
cutting surfaces remain recessed until you turn it on. Set the length with this slide. This end of the scale is for
removing a beard; the symbol at the other end is Luxan for two denches. Press that” -- she pointed to what
looked like an imperfection on the casing -- “to turn it on and off.”
Wandering an erratic course toward the corner where the mirror was located, John peered into the opening,
fiddled with the adjustment, and then gave the power nub a nudge with his thumb. After peeking into the
business end of the trimmer one more time and glancing over his shoulder suspiciously at Aeryn, he touched it
cautiously to his face just above his right cheekbone. Bare skin appeared in the trimmer’s wake. He made a
snorting noise that might have been a small laugh, stepped closer to the mirror and set to work.
Aeryn drifted in the same general direction, choosing to remain inside the shower enclosure instead of joining
him in the cramped confines outside the chest high partition separating the bathing area from the rest of the
waste alcove. She rested her forearms on the top of the half-height wall, propped her chin on top of her arms,
and was content to watch the slide and stretch of his muscles and the slow-motion rainfall of damp hair.
There was something indescribably masculine about what he was doing. It wasn’t anything as simple as the
fact that she had never lived in close proximity with any species where the females had facial hair. This had
something to do with the deft, assured motions, the product of cycles worth of shaving, and the way his left
hand seemed to operate on its own, shifting in easy concert with the movements of the trimmer. It had to do
with the way he could glance at her in the mirror from time to time without stopping, and the way his face
gradually reappeared from beneath the reddish-brown ruff of fur. Best of all, watching him shave redoubled the
warm, relaxed feeling along her spine, the sensation that came and went in time with her thoughts about having
John back beside her, healthy and whole.
They’d only been given a quarter cycle’s reprieve after the end of the war in which to get to know each other on
a much more intimate basis than ever before. That interval had been long enough for her to learn that he
preferred to shave from the left side of his face to the right, and that there was a spot on the underside of his
jaw where he would always slow down and take particular care when he was using a razor. She knew the spot
well. Kissing him there had an almost miraculous effect on the rest of his body. But it hadn’t been long enough
that the spectacle of watching him shave had lost its fascination.
John shifted his grip on the trimmer; his mustache disappeared in a series of short strokes. It left a shadow of
closely shorn stubble in its wake. They had been together long enough for her to know what that shadow
meant for her. She waited until his eyes flickered in her direction, checking on her, to motion for him to come
closer. John dutifully presented one cheek for inspection.
“You’ll need to shave afterward,” she told him. “I could strip ion charring off the Prowler’s hull with that.”
Straightening up, John nodded agreeably, turned his head to one side, and removed the first of his sideburns
all the way to the top of his ear. Before Aeryn could blurt out an objection, the other one disappeared with the
same firm swipe of the trimmer. Aside from the fact that it accentuated the gaunt look to his face, the sudden
disappearance of the familiar strips of hair transformed the starvation-altered features into someone she no
longer recognized. One microt there was someone who looked and acted like her husband standing in front of
the mirror. A moment later, there was a stranger poised there, hollow eyed and behaving more unpredictably
than usual.
It didn’t stop with his sideburns. John gave the length setting on the trimmer a fractional nudge, smoothed back
the hair on one side of his head with his free hand, and before Aeryn could put together a coherent reason why
he shouldn’t do it, he cut an arcing swath from his temple to the back of his neck. The Luxan-built device
worked all too well. It took no more than twenty or thirty microts for that side of his head to be transformed from
a luxuriant auburn thicket to a close-cropped dark shadow of stubble less than a quarter dench long. He
transferred the trimmer to his left hand, and the other side of his head was subjected to the same treatment.
The segment of her reactions that operated on instinct rather than reason was insisting that this wasn’t John
Crichton. John hated his hair that short … as did she. She liked him with more hair on his head, not less. It
was when the unruly waves and tufts developed enough length to give him a boyish, roguish look that she liked
it best. She cherished the rare moments when they had time to sit in a secluded corner with John’s head in her
lap, either talking or simply enjoying the opportunity to be together, and she could tug at one lock at a time or
grab a fistful and rock his head gently, reveling in the fact that he loved being manhandled in that fashion.
In the time it took for her to recover from the shock, John had finished the back of his head and was making his
first, careful foray into the hair remaining on the top, working from front to back. If the situation had been
different, Aeryn might have enjoyed watching his hairline appear, or even derived some small amount of humor
from the sight of an unruly mop of hair perched on top of an otherwise hairless skull. Or she might have even
asked to finish the job in order to see what it felt like, severed strands falling away in slithering cascades.
Given the chance, she might have chosen to work from the sides toward the crest of his skull, prolonging the
process by cutting away narrow swaths on each side until there was a dench-wide strip along the top, and then
removed that last portion in a final front-to-back swipe.
In John’s hands, the trimmer burrowed in aggressively, taking out a rectangular bite and then moving to one
side or the other for the next assault. The lush landscape was pushed back one thrust at a time, retreating
before a firm, determined onslaught. The quick twist of his wrist at the end of each stroke suggested that he
had done something similar at some point in his life.
Before Aeryn could begin to assemble some sort of theory why John was doing this, the last fat hunk of hair
tumbled down the back of his head. John ran the trimmer over the top of his head several more times,
checking the results with his free hand, and then he snapped the device off, swapped it for his razor, and for
the first time since he started cutting his hair, looked at Aeryn in the mirror.
A dead man stared out at her. It wasn’t just the dark shadow of remaining hair, the haircut of an unwilling and
untrained conscript who was facing certain death in an upcoming battle. It went much deeper than that.
Between the sharply exposed cheekbones, the harsh lines of a jaw stripped of all excess flesh, and the hollows
near his temples, the face in the mirror belonged to a specter returned from the dead -- one well suited to play
the lead role in the most frightening of her nightmares.
“Aeryn? You okay?” John had stopped moving and was watching her.
The hair at the back of her neck was doing its best to stand on end, there was a constriction behind her
breastbone that felt like her heart was on the verge of coming to a complete stop, and an unpleasant tingling in
her hands and feet was making it difficult to know what portions of her surroundings were real or imagined. And
underlying it all was the irrational fear that this was all a delirium-generated dream that would end with her
waking to the reality that John had died fighting an unstoppable wave of charrids.
The fragmented, frequently horrifying hallucinations summoned up by the constant load of pain killers and
stasis drugs while she was in the medbay of the Command Carrier had been all too similar to the distorted
dreams she had suffered through while imprisoned on the Scarran freighter. The loss of control, both mental
and physical, had been every bit as distressing, and the familiar surroundings of the Command Carrier’s
medical sector had done nothing to blunt the irrational belief that she would eventually wake to find a Scarran
leaning over her. Just when she had needed John most, if only to hold her hand and assure her that her
surroundings were real, he had been far away, mired in his own waking nightmare.
Eventually, after enough repetition, the boundary between dreaming and waking had blurred to the point that
she was never sure which was the dream and which was the equally unpleasant reality: Scarran imprisonment
or injuries that had been every bit as painful as deliberately inflicted torture.
“Aeryn? What’s the matter?”
She had been silent too long, immersed in memories both real and imagined. John was standing half a motra
closer to her than she remembered, gazing at her intently. The icy fist that had formed in the center of her
chest made it difficult to answer him. “I’m fine. Don’t stop what you’re doing,” she managed to say.
“Bullshit, Aeryn. I’m not sure what that was, but it sure as hell wasn’t ‘fine’.”
“It was a chill,” she said. It wasn’t a complete lie. There was a clammy sweat creeping down her back, and she
felt mildly nauseous. “Get back to work.”
He watched her a little longer, started to say something, hesitated, and then turned back toward the mirror and
began to lather his face. It wasn’t until he had made the first careful pass with the razor, flicked it free of foam,
and was getting ready for the next stroke that he said, “Something to do with a dream.”
For the next several hundred microts, the only noise in the waste alcove was the hushed scratch of the razor,
the occasional quiet rap of metal against metal, and the periodic splash of water into the funnel. John had
finished the tricky area in front of his second ear and was leaning close to the mirror to do his upper lip by the
time she answered him with a simple, “Yes.”
She had to wait a while for his next comment. John took his time, moving with what seemed to be an absurd
degree of deliberation. A dentic -- the second he had exhausted since he had started shaving -- got spat into
his hand, dropped into its fluid-filled container to recover, and a fresh one was fished out. “Thish ishn’t a
dream,” John said once it was tucked into his cheek.
Aeryn thought about his simply stated assurance and how John had known that she was fighting off an absurd,
wholly emotional belief that having him back was not real. “You,” she said.
He spent more time than was necessary rinsing the razor, dried it, examined the blade and then rinsed it again
before answering. “Once in a while.”
“Every time you fall asleep,” she said.
John’s eyes flickered toward hers for a microt. “More often than that,” he confessed. “I can’t shake the
feeling --”
“-- that you’re going to wake up and find out that the good moments are a dream.”
This time when he nodded, it looked like John was fighting back tears. “After going through it thirty or forty
times, it kind of sucked,” he said.
There didn’t seem to be an adequate reply to that final summation. Aeryn let her eyes follow his hands while
the silence stretched out, watching the way they cupped handfuls of water in order to rinse his face, the manner
in which his fingers wiped away the last blobs and smears of shaving lubricant, sneaking one small daub out
from beneath one nostril, and made a quick but thorough circuit of his face, checking for missed patches of
stubble. One thumb, the knuckle still creased with dirt, rubbed a spot on his jaw several times. A moment later
the razor made a cautious pass across the offending area.
John made one final cursory inspection of his lower face, wiped it dry with a towel, got rid of the last overworked
dentic, and turned to face her. “How about now?” he asked. A glimmer of a smile appeared, showing mostly in
his eyes.
“Yes.” Aeryn stepped around the end of the shower partition, and for the first time in almost sixty solar days,
kissed him.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
They fell into a companionable silence, treating every bit of the rash they could find, taking their time, making
sure nothing got missed. Along the way a generous supply of sores received their own application of a
different but equally repulsive paste, and a watery disinfectant was applied to already healing cuts and
abrasions, insurance against any possibility of infection. The narrow shelf running along the inner wall of the
shower partition disappeared under a collection of astringents, ointments, and various botanical potions. After
half an arn worth of work, Aeryn inspected him one last time, and declared him cured of all varieties of skin
ailments.
“Can I wash this stuff off yet?” John asked. The listless, disinterested stranger had reappeared toward the end
of the process. His head and shoulders had slumped, as if to say that he didn’t have enough energy to hold
them up, and the purplish paste and its associated stench no longer seemed to matter to him beyond the need
to remove it at some point.
Aeryn did her best to behave as though there hadn’t been a shift in his behavior. The relapse itself didn’t
bother her. It had been little more than an arn since she had extracted the promise from him, too soon to
expect any significant improvement in his overall mood. It was the abrupt disappearance of the person she
wanted restored to her that generated the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and sapped her of energy.
Everything had been going so smoothly that she had dared to hope that this would turn into an evening of
sloshing watery proximity, extended soapy hugs, and a return of the hovering protective presence that had
become as important to her existence as breathing.
It felt as though she had been holding herself together by shear determination and willpower for close to a
cycle, not the twenty-six solar days that had passed since they had left the Command Carrier. It felt as though
enough time had passed that she deserved to have John Crichton back alongside her, the complimentary half
that made her whole. Instead, the remnant of that person was staring aimlessly at the floor, dull-eyed and
listless, clearly in need of an infusion of strength.
She wanted it to be the other way around. She wanted to yell at him to snap out of it, to have John respond
with his customary combination of shock and hurt, and for him to come to his senses. More than that, she
wanted John to wrap his arms around her, whisper an apology into her ear, and for him to be the strong one,
bolstering her up both physically and emotionally. There was a snarled knot in the pit of her stomach
consisting of loneliness, fear, and hurt feelings. It screamed out a silent complaint concerning the fact that she
was the one who had been shot, the one who had battled back from mortal injuries, the one who deserved to
be looked after and coddled for once. She wanted to be picked up, cradled in one specific person’s arms, and
told that she was allowed to be weak.
But none of that would help either one of them. Logic snared the runaway emotions, dampened them down
until they no longer urged her to do or say something rash. Cold reason dictated that at this point in their
respective recoveries, John needed the support more than she did.
Trying to provide him with some direction, she said, “Get rid of the beard.”
John scrubbed at the matted snarl obscuring one cheek, examined the smears of diluted mud coating his hand,
and didn’t move.
The idea of drawing a razor through that mess was enough to make Aeryn’s stomach knot even tighter and she
wasn’t the one who was going to have to shave. The problem was obvious, the solution even easier. “Wash it,”
she ordered.
John looked at her, inspected the interior of the shower, gazed out at their living quarters for several microts,
and didn’t move. The apathy had returned in full force. What had triggered the transition from an almost
cheerful level of cooperation to this disinterested sullenness, she couldn’t imagine. What she did know was that
she didn’t have the expertise to talk him out of it a second time. It would take something else to draw him back.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
A small glimmer of enthusiasm returned. “You don’t mind?”
She didn’t mind at all. It was a chance to be close to him, to touch him, and to embark on the first stage of a
slow, careful inventory of his body that had a far different purpose than the clinical inspection for injuries. John
dragged a seat into the shower, adjusted the spray so he could duck under by simply leaning forward, and then
took his place in front of her with obvious eagerness. It did not take long to slide into a peaceful realm defined
by the steady hissing impact of hot water punctuated by the quieter slop of lather, of being close to each other,
and of small random touches amidst the more deliberate contact.
She washed his hair the first time with John leaning forward so his head was directly underneath the heaviest
portion of the shower, using lavish fistfuls of hair cleanser that rinsed out as fast as she could work them in.
The floods coursing down his shoulders and back once again ran thick with dirt and grit, leaving snaking
deposits of sand in their wake until the next surge of water carried them away. She could feel the filth running
between her fingers as she scrubbed, and tried hard not to envision what she was dislodging aside from mud.
It took several circuits of his scalp and face before they started to feel like they were covered with hair again,
instead of a soggy, grime-stiffened pelt.
The second stage took almost as long, and worked a slightly different layer out of his hair. Whatever she was
removing this time turned frothy bubbles into a drippy anemic lather, suggesting that it consisted of oils,
chemicals that he had probably crawled through, and biological substances that she did not want to consider
any more than she had wanted to know what might have been alive in his hair. All in all, it meant that John was
lucky not to have died from some sort of poisoning or an out-of-control infection.
John sat silently with his back resting lightly against her hips and stomach while she applied more cleanser and
went on scrubbing. One of his hands fumbled behind him for a microt, sought out her leg, and came to rest
there, fingers gently stroking the back of her thigh, often moving in time with the motion of her hands on his
scalp. If it hadn’t been for the caresses, it might have felt as though he was simply making sure she couldn’t
move away from him without his knowing it. Aeryn understood the compulsion behind the touch without having
to ask. The way his shoulders fit into the curve of her stomach when she leaned against him and the easy slide
of his hair between her fingers were restoring something critical to her existence. There was no doubt in her
mind that the slow up-down movement against her leg was serving the same purpose.
The peaceful interval ended all too soon. Aeryn gave John a nudge to let him know he should lean forward,
and helped him rinse out the last of the suds. The person who sat up, slicked back dripping locks with both
hands, and blew several clinging droplets of moisture off the lower fringes of his mustache was closer in
appearance to the man she had left behind on the planet. A lot of the dirt on his face had gone down the drain
along with the hair cleanser, leaving behind someone more recognizable.
“Shave,” she ordered firmly, hoping that if she could keep him moving the depression might dissolve along with
the layers of dirt.
It seemed to work. John let out an extravagant sigh, plucked at the dripping whiskers covering one cheek, and
then leaned to one side so he could peer into Aeryn’s gear bag.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“You’ve got everything else in there. I was hoping for a barber’s chair and Phil, the guy who used to cut my dad’
s hair. I may need a blood transfusion by the time I get this off.” He went on fingering his wet beard without
making a move to get to his feet. “This is so going to hurt.”
“Wait.” Aeryn retrieved the last item from her bag and placed it in his hand.
John turned the object over several times. “This is Luxan,” he said after three revolutions. “This is D’Argo’s.
It’s the gadget he used to trim his mustache and whatever you call the rest of that hair on his face.”
“I asked Jothee if you could borrow it. He said D’Argo would want you to keep it. It’s yours now.”
John examined the bulbous, asymmetrically shaped trimmer, fingers leisurely tracing the grip and controls
where his friend’s hands had once held the device. In the end, he gave it one final caress, as though he had
just received permission to use it from its dead owner and, with increasing enthusiasm, asked, “How do I make it
work?”
She leaned over his shoulder and pointed. “You put that part against where you want to remove the hair and
then push that control. Since it is Luxan, two very large sets of pincers will come out of the opening, grab the
clump of hair, and rip it out by the roots. It is very painful.”
John let his head loll back until he was looking at her ostensibly upside down, staring up at where she was
standing behind him with one hand resting on his shoulder. She waited, meeting his stare steadily, discovering
for the first time in her life how difficult it could be to keep a straight face under certain conditions.
“We need to talk about your sense of humor,” he said.
“I’ve told you before, John, soldiers don’t have a sense of humor.”
“That’s the point I’m trying to make. Just show me how to keep from cutting my throat with this thing.”
She rested an elbow on his shoulder, leaning against him more heavily than before, and pointed again. “The
cutting surfaces remain recessed until you turn it on. Set the length with this slide. This end of the scale is for
removing a beard; the symbol at the other end is Luxan for two denches. Press that” -- she pointed to what
looked like an imperfection on the casing -- “to turn it on and off.”
Wandering an erratic course toward the corner where the mirror was located, John peered into the opening,
fiddled with the adjustment, and then gave the power nub a nudge with his thumb. After peeking into the
business end of the trimmer one more time and glancing over his shoulder suspiciously at Aeryn, he touched it
cautiously to his face just above his right cheekbone. Bare skin appeared in the trimmer’s wake. He made a
snorting noise that might have been a small laugh, stepped closer to the mirror and set to work.
Aeryn drifted in the same general direction, choosing to remain inside the shower enclosure instead of joining
him in the cramped confines outside the chest high partition separating the bathing area from the rest of the
waste alcove. She rested her forearms on the top of the half-height wall, propped her chin on top of her arms,
and was content to watch the slide and stretch of his muscles and the slow-motion rainfall of damp hair.
There was something indescribably masculine about what he was doing. It wasn’t anything as simple as the
fact that she had never lived in close proximity with any species where the females had facial hair. This had
something to do with the deft, assured motions, the product of cycles worth of shaving, and the way his left
hand seemed to operate on its own, shifting in easy concert with the movements of the trimmer. It had to do
with the way he could glance at her in the mirror from time to time without stopping, and the way his face
gradually reappeared from beneath the reddish-brown ruff of fur. Best of all, watching him shave redoubled the
warm, relaxed feeling along her spine, the sensation that came and went in time with her thoughts about having
John back beside her, healthy and whole.
They’d only been given a quarter cycle’s reprieve after the end of the war in which to get to know each other on
a much more intimate basis than ever before. That interval had been long enough for her to learn that he
preferred to shave from the left side of his face to the right, and that there was a spot on the underside of his
jaw where he would always slow down and take particular care when he was using a razor. She knew the spot
well. Kissing him there had an almost miraculous effect on the rest of his body. But it hadn’t been long enough
that the spectacle of watching him shave had lost its fascination.
John shifted his grip on the trimmer; his mustache disappeared in a series of short strokes. It left a shadow of
closely shorn stubble in its wake. They had been together long enough for her to know what that shadow
meant for her. She waited until his eyes flickered in her direction, checking on her, to motion for him to come
closer. John dutifully presented one cheek for inspection.
“You’ll need to shave afterward,” she told him. “I could strip ion charring off the Prowler’s hull with that.”
Straightening up, John nodded agreeably, turned his head to one side, and removed the first of his sideburns
all the way to the top of his ear. Before Aeryn could blurt out an objection, the other one disappeared with the
same firm swipe of the trimmer. Aside from the fact that it accentuated the gaunt look to his face, the sudden
disappearance of the familiar strips of hair transformed the starvation-altered features into someone she no
longer recognized. One microt there was someone who looked and acted like her husband standing in front of
the mirror. A moment later, there was a stranger poised there, hollow eyed and behaving more unpredictably
than usual.
It didn’t stop with his sideburns. John gave the length setting on the trimmer a fractional nudge, smoothed back
the hair on one side of his head with his free hand, and before Aeryn could put together a coherent reason why
he shouldn’t do it, he cut an arcing swath from his temple to the back of his neck. The Luxan-built device
worked all too well. It took no more than twenty or thirty microts for that side of his head to be transformed from
a luxuriant auburn thicket to a close-cropped dark shadow of stubble less than a quarter dench long. He
transferred the trimmer to his left hand, and the other side of his head was subjected to the same treatment.
The segment of her reactions that operated on instinct rather than reason was insisting that this wasn’t John
Crichton. John hated his hair that short … as did she. She liked him with more hair on his head, not less. It
was when the unruly waves and tufts developed enough length to give him a boyish, roguish look that she liked
it best. She cherished the rare moments when they had time to sit in a secluded corner with John’s head in her
lap, either talking or simply enjoying the opportunity to be together, and she could tug at one lock at a time or
grab a fistful and rock his head gently, reveling in the fact that he loved being manhandled in that fashion.
In the time it took for her to recover from the shock, John had finished the back of his head and was making his
first, careful foray into the hair remaining on the top, working from front to back. If the situation had been
different, Aeryn might have enjoyed watching his hairline appear, or even derived some small amount of humor
from the sight of an unruly mop of hair perched on top of an otherwise hairless skull. Or she might have even
asked to finish the job in order to see what it felt like, severed strands falling away in slithering cascades.
Given the chance, she might have chosen to work from the sides toward the crest of his skull, prolonging the
process by cutting away narrow swaths on each side until there was a dench-wide strip along the top, and then
removed that last portion in a final front-to-back swipe.
In John’s hands, the trimmer burrowed in aggressively, taking out a rectangular bite and then moving to one
side or the other for the next assault. The lush landscape was pushed back one thrust at a time, retreating
before a firm, determined onslaught. The quick twist of his wrist at the end of each stroke suggested that he
had done something similar at some point in his life.
Before Aeryn could begin to assemble some sort of theory why John was doing this, the last fat hunk of hair
tumbled down the back of his head. John ran the trimmer over the top of his head several more times,
checking the results with his free hand, and then he snapped the device off, swapped it for his razor, and for
the first time since he started cutting his hair, looked at Aeryn in the mirror.
A dead man stared out at her. It wasn’t just the dark shadow of remaining hair, the haircut of an unwilling and
untrained conscript who was facing certain death in an upcoming battle. It went much deeper than that.
Between the sharply exposed cheekbones, the harsh lines of a jaw stripped of all excess flesh, and the hollows
near his temples, the face in the mirror belonged to a specter returned from the dead -- one well suited to play
the lead role in the most frightening of her nightmares.
“Aeryn? You okay?” John had stopped moving and was watching her.
The hair at the back of her neck was doing its best to stand on end, there was a constriction behind her
breastbone that felt like her heart was on the verge of coming to a complete stop, and an unpleasant tingling in
her hands and feet was making it difficult to know what portions of her surroundings were real or imagined. And
underlying it all was the irrational fear that this was all a delirium-generated dream that would end with her
waking to the reality that John had died fighting an unstoppable wave of charrids.
The fragmented, frequently horrifying hallucinations summoned up by the constant load of pain killers and
stasis drugs while she was in the medbay of the Command Carrier had been all too similar to the distorted
dreams she had suffered through while imprisoned on the Scarran freighter. The loss of control, both mental
and physical, had been every bit as distressing, and the familiar surroundings of the Command Carrier’s
medical sector had done nothing to blunt the irrational belief that she would eventually wake to find a Scarran
leaning over her. Just when she had needed John most, if only to hold her hand and assure her that her
surroundings were real, he had been far away, mired in his own waking nightmare.
Eventually, after enough repetition, the boundary between dreaming and waking had blurred to the point that
she was never sure which was the dream and which was the equally unpleasant reality: Scarran imprisonment
or injuries that had been every bit as painful as deliberately inflicted torture.
“Aeryn? What’s the matter?”
She had been silent too long, immersed in memories both real and imagined. John was standing half a motra
closer to her than she remembered, gazing at her intently. The icy fist that had formed in the center of her
chest made it difficult to answer him. “I’m fine. Don’t stop what you’re doing,” she managed to say.
“Bullshit, Aeryn. I’m not sure what that was, but it sure as hell wasn’t ‘fine’.”
“It was a chill,” she said. It wasn’t a complete lie. There was a clammy sweat creeping down her back, and she
felt mildly nauseous. “Get back to work.”
He watched her a little longer, started to say something, hesitated, and then turned back toward the mirror and
began to lather his face. It wasn’t until he had made the first careful pass with the razor, flicked it free of foam,
and was getting ready for the next stroke that he said, “Something to do with a dream.”
For the next several hundred microts, the only noise in the waste alcove was the hushed scratch of the razor,
the occasional quiet rap of metal against metal, and the periodic splash of water into the funnel. John had
finished the tricky area in front of his second ear and was leaning close to the mirror to do his upper lip by the
time she answered him with a simple, “Yes.”
She had to wait a while for his next comment. John took his time, moving with what seemed to be an absurd
degree of deliberation. A dentic -- the second he had exhausted since he had started shaving -- got spat into
his hand, dropped into its fluid-filled container to recover, and a fresh one was fished out. “Thish ishn’t a
dream,” John said once it was tucked into his cheek.
Aeryn thought about his simply stated assurance and how John had known that she was fighting off an absurd,
wholly emotional belief that having him back was not real. “You,” she said.
He spent more time than was necessary rinsing the razor, dried it, examined the blade and then rinsed it again
before answering. “Once in a while.”
“Every time you fall asleep,” she said.
John’s eyes flickered toward hers for a microt. “More often than that,” he confessed. “I can’t shake the
feeling --”
“-- that you’re going to wake up and find out that the good moments are a dream.”
This time when he nodded, it looked like John was fighting back tears. “After going through it thirty or forty
times, it kind of sucked,” he said.
There didn’t seem to be an adequate reply to that final summation. Aeryn let her eyes follow his hands while
the silence stretched out, watching the way they cupped handfuls of water in order to rinse his face, the manner
in which his fingers wiped away the last blobs and smears of shaving lubricant, sneaking one small daub out
from beneath one nostril, and made a quick but thorough circuit of his face, checking for missed patches of
stubble. One thumb, the knuckle still creased with dirt, rubbed a spot on his jaw several times. A moment later
the razor made a cautious pass across the offending area.
John made one final cursory inspection of his lower face, wiped it dry with a towel, got rid of the last overworked
dentic, and turned to face her. “How about now?” he asked. A glimmer of a smile appeared, showing mostly in
his eyes.
“Yes.” Aeryn stepped around the end of the shower partition, and for the first time in almost sixty solar days,
kissed him.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
