farscape fanfiction, john/aeryn - sometimes in the city.
Sometimes in the city
Notes: missymeggins' fault, both because she made me watch Farscape and she left this prompt in my tumblr ask: Aeryn Sun - that time she got drunk on some foreign alien alcohol and booty called John. So obviously, I had to oblige (what m'lady wants m'lady gets).
It's set some time in Season 2, between Remember The Princess and when shit gets real plot-wise. I also started writing it then, so you know, it's a bit carefree and happy and silly because I DID NOT KNOW the horrors to come. Basically, retrospectively, I don't see this being a thing that would have happened canonically at that point, but when I was watching the show it seemed plausible enough that pre-extreme angst John and Aeryn would get a bit drunk and hook up one time, because you know, clearly Aeryn has always wanted to climb on top of Crichton, she does it at every opportunity in season one. So suspend your disbelief.
Flippy floppy with POV but strict third-person limited in spite of that, so the language changes and the interpretation of reality also shifts depending on whose head we're in. (Not explicitly, but something to bear in mind w.r.t. characterisation.)
(First fic in this fandom, it's a bit cracky and it's really porny, so play nice with me please? There's some strong language, if you don't like the c-word I'm sorry that I'm not sorry.)
“Crichton.” Her voice is breathy over the comms system. “I need you to get down here. Now!”
He’s never been so afraid in his life because it sounds like she’s in danger and she’s admitting that she needs him and nothing will ever terrify him more than that.
(He goes.)
He finds her in a bar looking decidedly less distressed than she sounded. It’s the kind of establishment that sells cheap drinks and rents cheap hotel rooms by the arn. In short, the kind of place that spells trouble. And when she sees him, he’s pretty certain it’s trouble that she’s looking for, because she gives him a wide smile and presses her lips together, like she’s hungry - which is unfair, really, because he’s prepared for a different kind of on-world danger.
“There you are,” he says when he reaches her. “Not where I expected to find you.”
On her part, the greeting is wordless. She pats the bar stool beside her and hands him a tall, thin glass that reeks of jet fuel but covers it (and most of his hand, which he tries very hard not to notice) with her palm.
“Don’t drink it yet. It’s awful. You have to-” She holds out her other hand, where the skin between her thumb and forefinger is covered in very unappealing purple goo. “Lick this.” (She demonstrates, giving him a full view of it on her tongue.) “Then drink.”
She downs her own shot with one hand while the thumb of her other works in circles against the back of his palm. Aeryn wipes her mouth and exhales a mouthful of greenish steam before smiling. “Then it’s quite good.”
She applies a little more goo to her hand and holds it out to him. “Try it.”
He wants to say no, wants to ask her what the hell kind of game she’s playing but the temptation of his lips on her skin is too great. He follows her instructions and breathes out the same green steam and moves his tongue in his mouth experimentally. “Tastes like honey.”
“I told you it was good.”
“Don’t you think,” he says, “That you could have told me what you wanted me for before I left Moya thinking you were in some kind of trouble.”
She can’t contain her amusement. “Were you coming to save me?”
“You sounded like maybe you needed it.”
“I can look after myself, thank you very much.”
She’s still laughing far too much for his liking.
He gives her an indignant look. “Hey, it’s not like it’s never happened before.”
“No.” She tries to keep a straight face. “Thank you Crichton, really.”
He pours himself another drink and reaches for the purple goo, which puts his arm across her body and her lips close to his ear when he throws it back and as he swallows she says, “I couldn’t exactly tell you what I wanted you for in front of the others.”
He nearly chokes.
“And what exactly did you want me for?”
“Company,” she says, “It’s much better licking this sort of thing off of somebody else.”
He groans, just a little. Don’t say licking Aeryn, that’s a low blow…. poor choice of words. She is teasing him, or torturing him, or maybe both, and the liquor is going straight to his head just as his blood is going straight to his … he gulps at her hand curling around his knee.
“Have another drink,” she says, so he does.
Time passes, she’s not sure how much. Similarly she’s lost track of the liquor consumed by all parties. What she does know is that she’s letting him lick the purple goo off her stomach - something he calls a body shot - and every time he takes one his mouth gets lower and lower and actually, the goo kind of burns a little but that’s kind of gratifying and he’s steadying himself with a hand on her thigh and that is also gratifying, but not as gratifying as it could be.
“You know, we do something similar on earth, with something called tequila. Lick, sip, suck. All that’s missing is the sucking part.”
She sits up and flings her arm around his neck so she’s got him in a kind of headlock. “We don’t have to miss that part.” And she kisses him, the green smoke clouding the air between them, and he tastes so sweet, and he responds so keenly to her mouth. She releases her hold, arches her back and lets her hair fall so the ends glance her skin which is something she’s particularly fond of in this kind of situation. Her teeth are in his lip, so he goes with her and when she lies back down over the table, he’s half on top of her.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she murmurs with her eyes half-closed and she leaves her mouth half-open. She’s warm from the drink, it’s numbing in her veins but it heightens the sensation of her skin and it feels so good to be so honest about what she wants.
“How many of these have you had?” he asks when she arches her back again, against the table this time, her hips pressing into whatever part of him they find.
(It’s his wrist, his hand is so close to where she wants it but he withdraws it quickly. She’s confused by that, it stings.)
“More than enough, why? Haven’t you?”
“Aeryn. That’s not my point.”
She sits up and rearranges her clothes and tries to school her emotions and retain a little of her dignity. “Then what is?”
“Is this… just the Kool Aid talking?”
He reaches out for her, brushes a thumb over her cheek, and she lets him because she’s always liked it when he does it, always liked it when he plays with her hair and runs his hands over her shoulders to comfort her. And she’s drunk enough to feel like indulging herself.
Aeryn looks away, and how offended she is creeps into her answer. Suddenly - as it so often happens with him - she can’t help but lash out, pin his wrists against the table. She glares. “No. This is me talking. Did you ever think, Crichton, that maybe the shots - ” to use his human word, “- are just helping me say it?”
She can see that her words make him happy and the anger and the hurt that inspires it fade and in the moment she hates that he softens her in this way so easily.
(Later, when she is calmer, she will know that she does not hate this about him, in fact this is one of the things she loves. He is one of her catalysts; he makes it easier to be the person some part of her has always known she could be.)
“There are many things I would say to you, unaided by intoxicants, if I knew how. I’m learning Crichton.”
“You’re learning,” he echoes.
She lets him pull one hand free of her grasp and thumb over her lips. He rests the pad of it against the corner of her mouth and she kisses it. If she can’t say how much she has already learned, maybe she can show him.
That is what she wants. That’s why she called him down from Moya.
Well, that and the fact that they’ve been alone in space for nearly a quarter cycle and frell it, she has needs, which the Ta’thian drink is certainly making harder to ignore. But she does want it to be with him. For a great while now the thought of anyone else has been not only obsolete - (because she hasn’t willingly thought of anyone else) - but also slightly repulsive. She is not used to that feeling.
“So do you want to go to bed with me or not?”
Being blunt, forceful, comes more easily. She retreats to safer territory, because the drink is making her feel everything more acutely, not just how much she wants to throw him against (or be thrown into) some hard surface and … do so very many things.
“Aeryn,” he says (half-slurs really), looking at her so intensely, in that way he has that makes all her insides sing at her but also terrifies her. “So much. I want you so much.”
She knows it’s not a simple answer to what should be a simple question, what always would have been a simple question before, she knows there’s more meaning to his words than what he plainly says.
(An irritating human trait; she may belong to a race of soldiers, but at least they don’t use tactics outside of battle, not on purpose, not for the sake of sounding pretty.)
She thinks maybe she hears more than what he says, maybe she hears love, and she knows he wants all of her. She feels undeserving of that, but she wants to be, thinks that one day soon she might be ready to try to be.
“Okay then,” she says, standing and dragging him with her. “Good.”
She fights him into the door, her mouth demanding on his, one of her legs wrapping insistently around his ankle. He refuses her though; his hands are on her wrists, holding her body back even if he does return her kiss. The struggle leaves him pinned by her hips against the door but his grip on her hands is iron tight and she can’t shake him without surrendering ground where she is unwilling to submit.
(She grinds into him, groans at the contact, sinks her teeth into his lip when he still refuses to release her hands.)
Her mouth moves to his neck, which gives him a chance to speak. “Slow down,” he says.
She bites him, not hard enough to be truly painful, just hard enough to make him shiver. “No.”
“Aeryn.”
“I didn’t call you down here for slow.” Her tongue laves at his jaw, she rolls her hips into him. “Besides, you’ve been licking me for an arn now. There’s been enough foreplay.”
He releases one of her hands so he can draw a thumb along her cheek until his fingers reach her hair. She immediately busies it between them, undoing zips, working her fingers into his pants and shedding her own, kicking them aside.
“Later,” she promises. “Later we can do it your way, just now, please, let’s just…” She forces his pants down over his hips and he lifts her and then their positions are reversed, it’s her back against the door and his palms are hard against the bones of her hips and he is frelling her up against the door. She lets her head fall back against it.
“This?”
She tightens her legs around him, “Yes. Exactly this.”
It's as good as she remembers, probably better because she feels everything coursing through her veins like the alcohol. He echoes, all her nerve endings remember what has come before even as they sense the new. It's the perfect antidote to all her conflicted feelings. They fade; her mind is silent enough to allow her body what she wants and has wanted.)
The door's hinges are rusted though and she doesn't trust them, not when he moves (at her behest) harder, and the wood starts to give under their combined weight. And it's not enough, she's pleasantly out of her mind: she needs more. More Crichton. She needs to just ... climb out of her body and pull him into hers.
“Wait.” She pushes on his shoulder. “Bed, now, you sit.”
“You’re bossy.”
“I know what I like.”
“Do you like me?”
They fall onto the mattress, land hard, she sucks on his lip. Her hands are holding his mouth where she wants it and her hair is falling over her shoulders but she pushes it back so he can see her face when she answers. “Yes.” She kisses him again. “I like you.”
His grin turns dopey, like she’s told him she personally hung the stars in the sky just for him. Her hand shoves him hard in the shoulder, down onto the bed and she gives orders well, she’s spent her whole life learning how: “Now move. Back, against the wall.”
Complying means loss of contact though, and her body misses his. Which is a welcome sensation, allows anticipation, allows her stomach to wind tighter, allows her to see him naked, leaning up against the wall behind the bed, wanting her. She licks her lips.
He’s watching her mouth very closely as she does, and it sends a small thrill of accomplishment through her when his hips move in an involuntary half-thrust.
She crawls over him, purposefully avoiding touching him, leaving her half-naked weight poised sinful inches away from him. He crawls his hands along each notch in her spine leading by his fingers, his thumbs tracing her waist.
“What?” he asks, at her pause.
She wavers for a moment, at the gentleness of his touch and the way he looks at her, the way she finds herself looking at him. She’s smiling. She can’t stop frelling smiling and he smiles back at her and she needs to break this trance, she needs to angle her hips and fall with all her weight over his cock which he groans at. She echoes him, her tongue at the corner of her mouth in concentration.
She’s still smiling though, and he’s still smiling, and she presses her hands flat against the wall for leverage, looks him in the eye, and lifts herself off him so she can do it again. And again. And again.
Crichton says nothing, and she says nothing, but they both know the words anyway.
She shifts, lifts herself off him so she can reach a hand between them, she curls her fingers around him, strokes him twice, rubs the head of his cock up against where she wants it, the spot that makes her groan. The muscles in her thighs tense. His hands are hinting at her breasts, which she thinks is somehow better than touching until he does touch, does explore her until she curses, rocks her hips into him harder. He’s still not inside her and she wonders if this is working for him, especially when he cries out in a way she cannot be certain is pleasure.
She stills.
“No.” He shakes his head, kisses up her neck. “It’s good.”
“Had to check,” she murmurs.
“Can I… try something?”
She nods, her teeth in her lip, concentrating, so close but. He stills her hips with one hand, slips the fingers of the other into her cunt and curls them, rubs his thumb up against her, just once, and she glares at him when he pulls it back, because she’s trembling now and it’s unfair of him to tease her this way, but he leans back against the wall and says, “Not yet.”
And frell it all, she likes it. This is not how it’s meant to go, she isn’t meant to like it when he tells her what to do, but she does. (She really does when he twists his fingers again. No one’s ever tried that before, and he has a better angle than she can ever manage herself.)
She fights the hand at her hip toward the hand between her legs, rocking impatiently. “Do you want to make me beg? Is that what this is? Because I won’t. Not even for you.”
Crichton grins, looking quite confident in his ability to test her resolve. (She is not entirely opposed to that idea.)
“Another time I’m going to accept that challenge.”
Then he pulls his hands from her, lets her body find his, fit around him. He leans in to her ear, “Right now, I want you to let go.”
His fingers are wet with her, she grinds against them, her words punctuated by the force of her movements. “I. will. if. you. will.”
“Aeryn.” He presses his thumb into her mouth, says it like he’s making sure it’s her. She closes her eyes, nods, yes, it’s me.
Then he kisses her, and mumbles into her mouth, “Come for me baby.”
She does what he asks of her, her nails digging into his shoulders, her tongue pressing hard against his. And he does too, saying her name against her mouth, over and over, his fingers working to a still against her.
She slumps into him, and he hugs her, hands engulfing her scapulae, face buried in her neck.
They pause, she pulls back and tames her hair with one hand, and he runs his finger along her jaw.
“We can do it your way now,” she says, with a quiet smile. “If you like.”
“Might need a few microns.” He noses into her hair, kisses the dew of exertion off her hairline.
“Mmm?” she murmurs as he plays with her hair, pleasantly still, “Did I wear you out?”
“No. We are definitely revisiting that later. I just need some time.”
Then she shifts, stretches out on the mattress and twists so her back is to him, bares her neck in invitation to his mouth, takes his hand and places it on her hip. He nuzzles her neck, she turns her head to him, tells him, in the kind of voice that could definitely cause an intergalactic incident, rich with sin: “I don’t.”
His lips press against hers. “Well I can work with that.”
He kisses her neck then her shoulder, then works his hands down her back. She has an excellent back, an excellent backside and excellent, excellent legs. Actually, all of her is amazing, and so very, very touchable. So much so that when his hands still on her waist and he cannot decide where to touch first.
She shifts onto her back to watch him and he shifts to lie between her legs because the view is even better from there, and well, all of her is touchable, and he wants to touch all of her.
In the half-light her nipples are a dark contrast to her pale skin and he thinks that next time they do this - (please god let there be a next time) - they are going to have to leave the lights on. He needs time to study her, memorise her body, properly appreciate every perfect inch of her. Forget fucking her, he could probably never get sick of looking at her.
Aeryn, on the other hand, would probably be too impatient for that, he thinks, because she’s frowning at him and then one of her feet is on his shoulder, nudging gently (or at least, gently for her).
“What?” she asks.
“What do you mean what?”
“You’re staring.”
“Admiring the view.”
She stretches out, obligingly, affording him a view of her hips and her chest synchronous in motion. Then, smirking at his expression which he imagines is fairly slack-jawed - (you could forgive a man, for gaping a little at the subject of many fantasies lying naked before him) - she hooks her heel over his shoulder and pulls him forward.
Can’t argue with that.
He noses up between her legs, stops to nip at her thigh. She doesn't expect it; cries out, doesn’t expect his tongue so soon after. His hands pin her down, he takes his time. She tastes like them both, which has his dick twitching against the sheets.
Wonderful, he thinks, she is so god damn wonderful and this has always been one of his favourite challenges; he flicks his tongue, experimentally. It elicits a moan. Sucking, a breathy frell. The flat of his tongue with the force of his head behind it, an all-out cry. That he decides to try again.
It has his blood moving, he can feel his pulse, most notably in his growing erection.
The best combination is the tongue flick followed by the long hard stroke, slow then faster, and his eyes are on her the entire time, on her swelling chest and the graceful arch of her neck. She’s thrusting against his mouth, her hips press into his nose, but it’s worth it, because she gets louder and it’s almost getting too good, he’s trying incredibly hard not to rub against the sheets because … well, he has other ideas about how he’d like to put this hard on to use, but it’s proving difficult because she’s a sensory overload, sound, sight, taste, touch, smell. (She smells really fucking fantastic, he feels dirty for thinking it, but it’s a fact.)
She holds his head where she wants it, and he can’t breathe, and her hands are clamped over his ears but he can feel her crying out, the sound carries through her body.
(Her god damn fantastic body.)
Her thighs grip tighter around his shoulders. And she’s hurting him a little, and he really does need air, but if he had to pick a way to die, this would be it.
She breaks at the next stroke of his tongue, not a moment too soon, shudders against him, curses, rakes her nails through his hair. Her muscles release, he breathes without removing his mouth entirely.
Her eyes are still closed, but she opens them one at a time, props herself up on her elbows so she can look at him, smirking with enjoyment. He smirks back, face still in her sex, and he can’t resist one last swipe of his tongue.
She thrusts against his mouth once more, and moans which might be the most pornographic sound he has ever heard in his life and he realises he is both hopelessly hard and hopelessly, hopelessly in love with her.
(He’s had suspicions for some time of course, but in the moment it hits him like a revelation, which it is, in a way, because he is finally sure of nothing else but these three things: John Crichton loves Aeryn Sun, there is never going to be anyone but her and he is really frelling screwed.)
She's still shaking when he eases his cock into her, and he inhales sharply which makes her smile.
“God Aeryn.” He rests his forehead against hers, like the effort of holding himself up is suddenly too much, and she lets her nose brush against his.
“Are you going to move?” she asks, in her usual dry tone, but quietly which softens it slightly. “Or should I?”
“You said we could do it my way.” He kisses the corner of her mouth lightly.
“Mmm.” She hums against his ear. “I think the basic concept is still the same.”
“You feel good,” he says. “Like this.”
She arches her neck, which brushes her breasts against his chest, and the contact with her nipples is the barest glance; she shivers anyway. At that he does move, deliberately and unhurried, by turns gentle and forceful, and she can tell he’s watching her, but her eyes are closed and she’s enjoying the feeling with her teeth in her lip and she doesn’t care. It doesn’t feel strange. It feels … like he likes what he sees.
It's slow, as promised which is mostly a new thing. The majority of her sexual encounters have been about relieving an urge: stolen in between fulfilling her duties, hard, sometimes anonymous, quick, and dirty. Which is how she’s always thought of herself as liking it: only the right kind of mess, easily containable. But she’ll admit, with the right men, slow has its merits. It’s just that she has spent her life avoiding the right men.
(Men. Man. She is still uncertain whether Crichton is really the first; it feels like he is sometimes but maybe she is denying the past; lately it has felt so far away.)
Actually slow is pleasant, pleasurable, even as the liquor makes her eyelids and her bones heavy equally and her limbs are slack with satisfaction and she’s still tensing around him, little aftershocks humming between her thighs.
She almost falls asleep like that, the most content she may have ever felt, but he kisses her, deliberate and thorough and unhurried. Then she can't breathe, and she wants him all over again, not that she thinks she's capable of it. But she wants him to feel like she feels, so she groans and her hips encourage his to hasten and she holds his head against her neck where his mouth is alternating between tongue and teeth.
This would be the time, she thinks, to say something maudlin, if she knew any such endearments, but she doesn’t so instead she kisses whatever skin she can reach with her mouth (his temple), digs her fingers into his back, breathes his name. “Crichton.” And then, “John.”
She hugs him close, her hands in his hair, when he stills over her, and she arches her back to the last thrust of his hips so they are pressed together as close as she can manage.
He doesn’t really want to move, ever, but she shifts beneath him and he realises all his weight has been on top of her for untold time. So he moves, lies beside her, searching for her hand in the tangle of the sheets. She lets him hold two of her fingers linked in his.
The ceiling is spinning and their breathing is still heavy. He moves to reach for her, guides her face towards his with a hand on her cheek. (The weird alien alcohol is making him bolder than usual. Then again, she rarely resists this kind of touch any more.)
He curls his fingers against the side of her face, delights in the softness of her skin, in her breath slowing, now gentle against his wrist. Of all the strange and wonderful things he has seen since crossing through the wormhole, Aeryn Sun might be the most remarkable.
She doesn’t say anything, but she does smile at him, and that, he finds, sleepy with sex and the drink fading from his system, is more than enough.
He leans forward and brushes his nose against hers, buries his face in her cheek. She murmurs something he can’t quite hear, squeezes his fingers.
They fall asleep like that, cheek to cheek, her hand curled through his.
He leaves her, she never expected that. Her head is heavy from the alien liquor when she wakes, alone and naked and twisted in unfamiliar sheets. The aloneness hurts. And she hates that it does, hates that she craves him in this entirely disarming way. She wants his warmth in the bed as she wakes and she misses it even though she’s never had it before, she wants his scent and his hands on her, hot where he touches her - a little possessive, maybe a little protective. (She has never wanted that from a man, actually she abhors it and she abhors herself a little at the thought).
Wanting him physically is one thing and she is so pleasantly sore from it that she wonders why she doesn’t allow herself that more often, but this, this need to be special to him - to elicit his culture’s pet names and drive him crazy with the smell of her hair and take comfort in his very presence - that is entirely another.
It feels like she is going mad.
He does come back to her, with water and the news that he has paid for the room and told the others they’ll be back in a few arns and a reason for leaving (which she surlily labels as an excuse in her mind): “It was getting late and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You should have,” she says, far more harshly than he deserves.
“Oh no,” he says, stepping forward as she pulls on her shirt. “No you don’t. You don’t get to do this.”
She pulls her hair from the collar and glares at him, feigning indignant ignorance even though she knows exactly what he means and it’s obvious that he knows that she knows. “Do what?”
“Pull this emotional yo-yo crap.”
She is genuinely confused by that. “Translation please.”
“Pull me in, push me away. Not this time.”
“Crichton it was just -”
He clamps a hand over her mouth. “I know what it was Aeryn.”
And that’s the trouble, from the way he looks at her, piercing and right in the eyes, she suspects that he’s seeing more of her than she intends to show him.
The hand over her mouth is suddenly cradling her cheek. “I was hoping you’d still be asleep,” he says gently and his tone breaks her resolve to be angry with him where it starts in the pit of her stomach. Her insides shatter. Somehow she keeps it from reaching her face until he lowers himself onto the bed and moves to sit behind her, to pull her back into his arms.
She’s curious though, in spite of her better judgement she wants to know just how closely his desires parallel her rather pitifully sentimental ones, so she lets him continue, twisting her hair around his fingers as he does. “I didn’t want you to wake up and find me gone. I hope you know I wasn’t sneaking out on you.”
“There’s no need -” her perfunctory reply halts when he finds the juncture of neck and jaw, first with his fingers, then with his mouth.
“I wanted to wake you myself,” he murmurs in her ear.
“Crichton,” she whispers back, half-involuntarily because suddenly her blood is singing his name, in her chest and low in her stomach.
This is their usual game, him behind her, mouth at her ear, breath on her neck, hands in her hair - this is what she knows, the desire they flirt with, but it’s all the worse for the previous night, all the worse now she knows how his mouth feels against her stomach, how his hands feel
(Yes, it wasn’t the first time, but that was different, somehow - more about him than her, about taking solace in each other not exploring their possibilities. It was more reserved, less emotionally charged. Not that she wasn’t beginning to love him then, just that she is certain that she does now.)
Now though… now he buries a hand in her hair and she has to grip the edge of the mattress. She shifts on it, at turns comfortable and uncomfortable. This is going to pose problems.
“Please don’t,” she continues, so soft and unlike her that he complies almost instantly. The warmth at her back and the hands in her hair are gone and she misses them fiercely.
The words of Dregon on the Breakaway Colonies haunt her. Because of all the days before it hurts. She wonders if it truly is worth the hurt, aches to know for herself.
“I’m sorry.” She turns to him, hoping her face is contrite. He’s leaning against the wall, a hand on his temple. When he looks up, he sees her looking at him, reaches for the water, hands it to her and waits while she drinks it quickly. (Suddenly she is very aware of a deep thirst which feels unquenchable, something which he evidently discovered was an after effect of the liquor before she woke.)
“I shouldn’t have called you down here.” She moves closer at his expression when she says it. “No, you misunderstand me, not because it wasn’t something I wanted to happen, because it was wrong of me to expect it not to change things.”
“It does change things.”
“Yes. I know that. But in ways I’m not sure I’m ready to acknowledge after the fact, at least - not when I’m not in bed with you.”
“When I am though.” She wants to grin wickedly, to pretend she is just flirting with him, but instead she just smiles because she’s not exactly talking about sex when she says it: “I might be amenable. To being close to you.”
“Close huh?”
She crawls across to him, shifts herself over him until she’s straddling him and pushing her hair out of her eyes very deliberately. “Yes Crichton, close. If that’s something you could… be okay with. For now.”
“You’re learning,” he says.
“I’m learning.”
He kisses her instead of saying ‘I understand why you are afraid’ but she takes his meaning. And when their mouths part she rests her forehead against his shoulder, sighs, says, “Thank you.”
"You don't have to thank me," he says.
She takes him very literally. "But I want you to know that I am grateful."
"I meant." He sighs. "You shouldn't have to thank me Aeryn. Not for that."
"I think," she says, "That you're learning too. And I know that that it isn't easy."
She clings to him for a very long time.
That night - or, because they’re back on Moya, the next time they sleep - he wakes her. She mumbles something in her sleep and tries to roll away from him, but he persists and she sits up suddenly, curses, then says: “What’s wrong?”
She’s already reaching for her weapon.
He stills her hand. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Then why did you frelling wake me - oh.” Aeryn answers her own question in her head. “You know that what I said earlier was not an invitation for you to crawl into my bed whenever you felt some basal urge.”
“Are you telling me to leave?”
It’s dark, but not dark enough that she cannot see his smile, which is equal parts smug and imploring. She considers hitting him for the former.
Still, she thinks for a moment before answering truthfully. “No.”
He kisses her, but pulls away when she tries to deepen it. She leans up into him until her head is free of the pillow, but still, he evades her. She slumps backward, bemused, and pushes him off her, into the wall her bed is up against.
“You’re confusing me Crichton. You insinuate yourself into bed with me wanting sex, now you don’t want it. I don’t understand you.” She frowns. “Why did you come here?”
“I want to sleep with you.”
“That’s not a euphemism is it?”
“No.”
He suddenly looks incredibly nervous, which she would think was ridiculous, given the things they’ve faced together and how obvious it has been for nearly a cycle now that she cares for him, but she understands. Somehow this is more terrifying than their enemies, their many brushes with death.
Dregon’s words come back to her again: you’re not trained to deal with emotions. But she suspects no amount of training can make this kind of vulnerability, the potential for the emotional pain he described in the barren lands, easier.
He continues: “I know you told me it’s not something that you do, Peacekeepers I mean. And I’m sorry if it’s one of those cultural differences we always seem to come up against. But you said you’re learning, or un-learning, and I think -”
“You don’t have to explain what you want. I do understand.” She frowns. “If I do this now, you can’t expect it all the time Crichton.”
“Humour me this once. You do what you did to me last night Aeryn, it gives a guy ideas.”
“Should I be offended that this is the idea it gives you? To sleep with me, instead of doing it again?”
“Hang on one microt, let’s not take doing it again off the table. I never said that. Just, not now.”
“Okay then.”
She nods once, settles into the mattress and rolls away from him
“Now I’m confused.”
She twists back to look over her shoulder. “You want to sleep together, so sleep.” She turns away from him again, and hesitates before she says it. “Come closer though, if you’re going to sleep here it has to be -” she reaches for his hand, tugs his arm until it’s wrapped around her, their fingers entwined and pressed against her chest. “Like this.”
He smiles and noses into her hair. “Okay. This is good.”
“Are you ever going to shut up?”
He ignores her. “You know, we call this spooning.”
She makes a face. “You come anywhere near me with an eating implement Crichton and this is never happening again.”
“No.” He laughs. “Because we’re like spoons, when they’re stacked. We fit into one another.”
She smirks. “Yes, we do. This is not the best way.”
He tightens his hold on her. “Oh, I don’t know. This is pretty good.”
Aeryn doesn’t reply, she lets him think she’s asleep, but privately, she agrees.
-
Title from the Gregory Orr poem:
The life I live,
The one I hoped
To live-
How seldom
They coincide.
Sometimes, briefly,
They do;
Sometimes, in the city.
Notes: missymeggins' fault, both because she made me watch Farscape and she left this prompt in my tumblr ask: Aeryn Sun - that time she got drunk on some foreign alien alcohol and booty called John. So obviously, I had to oblige (what m'lady wants m'lady gets).
It's set some time in Season 2, between Remember The Princess and when shit gets real plot-wise. I also started writing it then, so you know, it's a bit carefree and happy and silly because I DID NOT KNOW the horrors to come. Basically, retrospectively, I don't see this being a thing that would have happened canonically at that point, but when I was watching the show it seemed plausible enough that pre-extreme angst John and Aeryn would get a bit drunk and hook up one time, because you know, clearly Aeryn has always wanted to climb on top of Crichton, she does it at every opportunity in season one. So suspend your disbelief.
Flippy floppy with POV but strict third-person limited in spite of that, so the language changes and the interpretation of reality also shifts depending on whose head we're in. (Not explicitly, but something to bear in mind w.r.t. characterisation.)
(First fic in this fandom, it's a bit cracky and it's really porny, so play nice with me please? There's some strong language, if you don't like the c-word I'm sorry that I'm not sorry.)
“Crichton.” Her voice is breathy over the comms system. “I need you to get down here. Now!”
He’s never been so afraid in his life because it sounds like she’s in danger and she’s admitting that she needs him and nothing will ever terrify him more than that.
(He goes.)
He finds her in a bar looking decidedly less distressed than she sounded. It’s the kind of establishment that sells cheap drinks and rents cheap hotel rooms by the arn. In short, the kind of place that spells trouble. And when she sees him, he’s pretty certain it’s trouble that she’s looking for, because she gives him a wide smile and presses her lips together, like she’s hungry - which is unfair, really, because he’s prepared for a different kind of on-world danger.
“There you are,” he says when he reaches her. “Not where I expected to find you.”
On her part, the greeting is wordless. She pats the bar stool beside her and hands him a tall, thin glass that reeks of jet fuel but covers it (and most of his hand, which he tries very hard not to notice) with her palm.
“Don’t drink it yet. It’s awful. You have to-” She holds out her other hand, where the skin between her thumb and forefinger is covered in very unappealing purple goo. “Lick this.” (She demonstrates, giving him a full view of it on her tongue.) “Then drink.”
She downs her own shot with one hand while the thumb of her other works in circles against the back of his palm. Aeryn wipes her mouth and exhales a mouthful of greenish steam before smiling. “Then it’s quite good.”
She applies a little more goo to her hand and holds it out to him. “Try it.”
He wants to say no, wants to ask her what the hell kind of game she’s playing but the temptation of his lips on her skin is too great. He follows her instructions and breathes out the same green steam and moves his tongue in his mouth experimentally. “Tastes like honey.”
“I told you it was good.”
“Don’t you think,” he says, “That you could have told me what you wanted me for before I left Moya thinking you were in some kind of trouble.”
She can’t contain her amusement. “Were you coming to save me?”
“You sounded like maybe you needed it.”
“I can look after myself, thank you very much.”
She’s still laughing far too much for his liking.
He gives her an indignant look. “Hey, it’s not like it’s never happened before.”
“No.” She tries to keep a straight face. “Thank you Crichton, really.”
He pours himself another drink and reaches for the purple goo, which puts his arm across her body and her lips close to his ear when he throws it back and as he swallows she says, “I couldn’t exactly tell you what I wanted you for in front of the others.”
He nearly chokes.
“And what exactly did you want me for?”
“Company,” she says, “It’s much better licking this sort of thing off of somebody else.”
He groans, just a little. Don’t say licking Aeryn, that’s a low blow…. poor choice of words. She is teasing him, or torturing him, or maybe both, and the liquor is going straight to his head just as his blood is going straight to his … he gulps at her hand curling around his knee.
“Have another drink,” she says, so he does.
Time passes, she’s not sure how much. Similarly she’s lost track of the liquor consumed by all parties. What she does know is that she’s letting him lick the purple goo off her stomach - something he calls a body shot - and every time he takes one his mouth gets lower and lower and actually, the goo kind of burns a little but that’s kind of gratifying and he’s steadying himself with a hand on her thigh and that is also gratifying, but not as gratifying as it could be.
“You know, we do something similar on earth, with something called tequila. Lick, sip, suck. All that’s missing is the sucking part.”
She sits up and flings her arm around his neck so she’s got him in a kind of headlock. “We don’t have to miss that part.” And she kisses him, the green smoke clouding the air between them, and he tastes so sweet, and he responds so keenly to her mouth. She releases her hold, arches her back and lets her hair fall so the ends glance her skin which is something she’s particularly fond of in this kind of situation. Her teeth are in his lip, so he goes with her and when she lies back down over the table, he’s half on top of her.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she murmurs with her eyes half-closed and she leaves her mouth half-open. She’s warm from the drink, it’s numbing in her veins but it heightens the sensation of her skin and it feels so good to be so honest about what she wants.
“How many of these have you had?” he asks when she arches her back again, against the table this time, her hips pressing into whatever part of him they find.
(It’s his wrist, his hand is so close to where she wants it but he withdraws it quickly. She’s confused by that, it stings.)
“More than enough, why? Haven’t you?”
“Aeryn. That’s not my point.”
She sits up and rearranges her clothes and tries to school her emotions and retain a little of her dignity. “Then what is?”
“Is this… just the Kool Aid talking?”
He reaches out for her, brushes a thumb over her cheek, and she lets him because she’s always liked it when he does it, always liked it when he plays with her hair and runs his hands over her shoulders to comfort her. And she’s drunk enough to feel like indulging herself.
Aeryn looks away, and how offended she is creeps into her answer. Suddenly - as it so often happens with him - she can’t help but lash out, pin his wrists against the table. She glares. “No. This is me talking. Did you ever think, Crichton, that maybe the shots - ” to use his human word, “- are just helping me say it?”
She can see that her words make him happy and the anger and the hurt that inspires it fade and in the moment she hates that he softens her in this way so easily.
(Later, when she is calmer, she will know that she does not hate this about him, in fact this is one of the things she loves. He is one of her catalysts; he makes it easier to be the person some part of her has always known she could be.)
“There are many things I would say to you, unaided by intoxicants, if I knew how. I’m learning Crichton.”
“You’re learning,” he echoes.
She lets him pull one hand free of her grasp and thumb over her lips. He rests the pad of it against the corner of her mouth and she kisses it. If she can’t say how much she has already learned, maybe she can show him.
That is what she wants. That’s why she called him down from Moya.
Well, that and the fact that they’ve been alone in space for nearly a quarter cycle and frell it, she has needs, which the Ta’thian drink is certainly making harder to ignore. But she does want it to be with him. For a great while now the thought of anyone else has been not only obsolete - (because she hasn’t willingly thought of anyone else) - but also slightly repulsive. She is not used to that feeling.
“So do you want to go to bed with me or not?”
Being blunt, forceful, comes more easily. She retreats to safer territory, because the drink is making her feel everything more acutely, not just how much she wants to throw him against (or be thrown into) some hard surface and … do so very many things.
“Aeryn,” he says (half-slurs really), looking at her so intensely, in that way he has that makes all her insides sing at her but also terrifies her. “So much. I want you so much.”
She knows it’s not a simple answer to what should be a simple question, what always would have been a simple question before, she knows there’s more meaning to his words than what he plainly says.
(An irritating human trait; she may belong to a race of soldiers, but at least they don’t use tactics outside of battle, not on purpose, not for the sake of sounding pretty.)
She thinks maybe she hears more than what he says, maybe she hears love, and she knows he wants all of her. She feels undeserving of that, but she wants to be, thinks that one day soon she might be ready to try to be.
“Okay then,” she says, standing and dragging him with her. “Good.”
She fights him into the door, her mouth demanding on his, one of her legs wrapping insistently around his ankle. He refuses her though; his hands are on her wrists, holding her body back even if he does return her kiss. The struggle leaves him pinned by her hips against the door but his grip on her hands is iron tight and she can’t shake him without surrendering ground where she is unwilling to submit.
(She grinds into him, groans at the contact, sinks her teeth into his lip when he still refuses to release her hands.)
Her mouth moves to his neck, which gives him a chance to speak. “Slow down,” he says.
She bites him, not hard enough to be truly painful, just hard enough to make him shiver. “No.”
“Aeryn.”
“I didn’t call you down here for slow.” Her tongue laves at his jaw, she rolls her hips into him. “Besides, you’ve been licking me for an arn now. There’s been enough foreplay.”
He releases one of her hands so he can draw a thumb along her cheek until his fingers reach her hair. She immediately busies it between them, undoing zips, working her fingers into his pants and shedding her own, kicking them aside.
“Later,” she promises. “Later we can do it your way, just now, please, let’s just…” She forces his pants down over his hips and he lifts her and then their positions are reversed, it’s her back against the door and his palms are hard against the bones of her hips and he is frelling her up against the door. She lets her head fall back against it.
“This?”
She tightens her legs around him, “Yes. Exactly this.”
It's as good as she remembers, probably better because she feels everything coursing through her veins like the alcohol. He echoes, all her nerve endings remember what has come before even as they sense the new. It's the perfect antidote to all her conflicted feelings. They fade; her mind is silent enough to allow her body what she wants and has wanted.)
The door's hinges are rusted though and she doesn't trust them, not when he moves (at her behest) harder, and the wood starts to give under their combined weight. And it's not enough, she's pleasantly out of her mind: she needs more. More Crichton. She needs to just ... climb out of her body and pull him into hers.
“Wait.” She pushes on his shoulder. “Bed, now, you sit.”
“You’re bossy.”
“I know what I like.”
“Do you like me?”
They fall onto the mattress, land hard, she sucks on his lip. Her hands are holding his mouth where she wants it and her hair is falling over her shoulders but she pushes it back so he can see her face when she answers. “Yes.” She kisses him again. “I like you.”
His grin turns dopey, like she’s told him she personally hung the stars in the sky just for him. Her hand shoves him hard in the shoulder, down onto the bed and she gives orders well, she’s spent her whole life learning how: “Now move. Back, against the wall.”
Complying means loss of contact though, and her body misses his. Which is a welcome sensation, allows anticipation, allows her stomach to wind tighter, allows her to see him naked, leaning up against the wall behind the bed, wanting her. She licks her lips.
He’s watching her mouth very closely as she does, and it sends a small thrill of accomplishment through her when his hips move in an involuntary half-thrust.
She crawls over him, purposefully avoiding touching him, leaving her half-naked weight poised sinful inches away from him. He crawls his hands along each notch in her spine leading by his fingers, his thumbs tracing her waist.
“What?” he asks, at her pause.
She wavers for a moment, at the gentleness of his touch and the way he looks at her, the way she finds herself looking at him. She’s smiling. She can’t stop frelling smiling and he smiles back at her and she needs to break this trance, she needs to angle her hips and fall with all her weight over his cock which he groans at. She echoes him, her tongue at the corner of her mouth in concentration.
She’s still smiling though, and he’s still smiling, and she presses her hands flat against the wall for leverage, looks him in the eye, and lifts herself off him so she can do it again. And again. And again.
Crichton says nothing, and she says nothing, but they both know the words anyway.
She shifts, lifts herself off him so she can reach a hand between them, she curls her fingers around him, strokes him twice, rubs the head of his cock up against where she wants it, the spot that makes her groan. The muscles in her thighs tense. His hands are hinting at her breasts, which she thinks is somehow better than touching until he does touch, does explore her until she curses, rocks her hips into him harder. He’s still not inside her and she wonders if this is working for him, especially when he cries out in a way she cannot be certain is pleasure.
She stills.
“No.” He shakes his head, kisses up her neck. “It’s good.”
“Had to check,” she murmurs.
“Can I… try something?”
She nods, her teeth in her lip, concentrating, so close but. He stills her hips with one hand, slips the fingers of the other into her cunt and curls them, rubs his thumb up against her, just once, and she glares at him when he pulls it back, because she’s trembling now and it’s unfair of him to tease her this way, but he leans back against the wall and says, “Not yet.”
And frell it all, she likes it. This is not how it’s meant to go, she isn’t meant to like it when he tells her what to do, but she does. (She really does when he twists his fingers again. No one’s ever tried that before, and he has a better angle than she can ever manage herself.)
She fights the hand at her hip toward the hand between her legs, rocking impatiently. “Do you want to make me beg? Is that what this is? Because I won’t. Not even for you.”
Crichton grins, looking quite confident in his ability to test her resolve. (She is not entirely opposed to that idea.)
“Another time I’m going to accept that challenge.”
Then he pulls his hands from her, lets her body find his, fit around him. He leans in to her ear, “Right now, I want you to let go.”
His fingers are wet with her, she grinds against them, her words punctuated by the force of her movements. “I. will. if. you. will.”
“Aeryn.” He presses his thumb into her mouth, says it like he’s making sure it’s her. She closes her eyes, nods, yes, it’s me.
Then he kisses her, and mumbles into her mouth, “Come for me baby.”
She does what he asks of her, her nails digging into his shoulders, her tongue pressing hard against his. And he does too, saying her name against her mouth, over and over, his fingers working to a still against her.
She slumps into him, and he hugs her, hands engulfing her scapulae, face buried in her neck.
They pause, she pulls back and tames her hair with one hand, and he runs his finger along her jaw.
“We can do it your way now,” she says, with a quiet smile. “If you like.”
“Might need a few microns.” He noses into her hair, kisses the dew of exertion off her hairline.
“Mmm?” she murmurs as he plays with her hair, pleasantly still, “Did I wear you out?”
“No. We are definitely revisiting that later. I just need some time.”
Then she shifts, stretches out on the mattress and twists so her back is to him, bares her neck in invitation to his mouth, takes his hand and places it on her hip. He nuzzles her neck, she turns her head to him, tells him, in the kind of voice that could definitely cause an intergalactic incident, rich with sin: “I don’t.”
His lips press against hers. “Well I can work with that.”
He kisses her neck then her shoulder, then works his hands down her back. She has an excellent back, an excellent backside and excellent, excellent legs. Actually, all of her is amazing, and so very, very touchable. So much so that when his hands still on her waist and he cannot decide where to touch first.
She shifts onto her back to watch him and he shifts to lie between her legs because the view is even better from there, and well, all of her is touchable, and he wants to touch all of her.
In the half-light her nipples are a dark contrast to her pale skin and he thinks that next time they do this - (please god let there be a next time) - they are going to have to leave the lights on. He needs time to study her, memorise her body, properly appreciate every perfect inch of her. Forget fucking her, he could probably never get sick of looking at her.
Aeryn, on the other hand, would probably be too impatient for that, he thinks, because she’s frowning at him and then one of her feet is on his shoulder, nudging gently (or at least, gently for her).
“What?” she asks.
“What do you mean what?”
“You’re staring.”
“Admiring the view.”
She stretches out, obligingly, affording him a view of her hips and her chest synchronous in motion. Then, smirking at his expression which he imagines is fairly slack-jawed - (you could forgive a man, for gaping a little at the subject of many fantasies lying naked before him) - she hooks her heel over his shoulder and pulls him forward.
Can’t argue with that.
He noses up between her legs, stops to nip at her thigh. She doesn't expect it; cries out, doesn’t expect his tongue so soon after. His hands pin her down, he takes his time. She tastes like them both, which has his dick twitching against the sheets.
Wonderful, he thinks, she is so god damn wonderful and this has always been one of his favourite challenges; he flicks his tongue, experimentally. It elicits a moan. Sucking, a breathy frell. The flat of his tongue with the force of his head behind it, an all-out cry. That he decides to try again.
It has his blood moving, he can feel his pulse, most notably in his growing erection.
The best combination is the tongue flick followed by the long hard stroke, slow then faster, and his eyes are on her the entire time, on her swelling chest and the graceful arch of her neck. She’s thrusting against his mouth, her hips press into his nose, but it’s worth it, because she gets louder and it’s almost getting too good, he’s trying incredibly hard not to rub against the sheets because … well, he has other ideas about how he’d like to put this hard on to use, but it’s proving difficult because she’s a sensory overload, sound, sight, taste, touch, smell. (She smells really fucking fantastic, he feels dirty for thinking it, but it’s a fact.)
She holds his head where she wants it, and he can’t breathe, and her hands are clamped over his ears but he can feel her crying out, the sound carries through her body.
(Her god damn fantastic body.)
Her thighs grip tighter around his shoulders. And she’s hurting him a little, and he really does need air, but if he had to pick a way to die, this would be it.
She breaks at the next stroke of his tongue, not a moment too soon, shudders against him, curses, rakes her nails through his hair. Her muscles release, he breathes without removing his mouth entirely.
Her eyes are still closed, but she opens them one at a time, props herself up on her elbows so she can look at him, smirking with enjoyment. He smirks back, face still in her sex, and he can’t resist one last swipe of his tongue.
She thrusts against his mouth once more, and moans which might be the most pornographic sound he has ever heard in his life and he realises he is both hopelessly hard and hopelessly, hopelessly in love with her.
(He’s had suspicions for some time of course, but in the moment it hits him like a revelation, which it is, in a way, because he is finally sure of nothing else but these three things: John Crichton loves Aeryn Sun, there is never going to be anyone but her and he is really frelling screwed.)
She's still shaking when he eases his cock into her, and he inhales sharply which makes her smile.
“God Aeryn.” He rests his forehead against hers, like the effort of holding himself up is suddenly too much, and she lets her nose brush against his.
“Are you going to move?” she asks, in her usual dry tone, but quietly which softens it slightly. “Or should I?”
“You said we could do it my way.” He kisses the corner of her mouth lightly.
“Mmm.” She hums against his ear. “I think the basic concept is still the same.”
“You feel good,” he says. “Like this.”
She arches her neck, which brushes her breasts against his chest, and the contact with her nipples is the barest glance; she shivers anyway. At that he does move, deliberately and unhurried, by turns gentle and forceful, and she can tell he’s watching her, but her eyes are closed and she’s enjoying the feeling with her teeth in her lip and she doesn’t care. It doesn’t feel strange. It feels … like he likes what he sees.
It's slow, as promised which is mostly a new thing. The majority of her sexual encounters have been about relieving an urge: stolen in between fulfilling her duties, hard, sometimes anonymous, quick, and dirty. Which is how she’s always thought of herself as liking it: only the right kind of mess, easily containable. But she’ll admit, with the right men, slow has its merits. It’s just that she has spent her life avoiding the right men.
(Men. Man. She is still uncertain whether Crichton is really the first; it feels like he is sometimes but maybe she is denying the past; lately it has felt so far away.)
Actually slow is pleasant, pleasurable, even as the liquor makes her eyelids and her bones heavy equally and her limbs are slack with satisfaction and she’s still tensing around him, little aftershocks humming between her thighs.
She almost falls asleep like that, the most content she may have ever felt, but he kisses her, deliberate and thorough and unhurried. Then she can't breathe, and she wants him all over again, not that she thinks she's capable of it. But she wants him to feel like she feels, so she groans and her hips encourage his to hasten and she holds his head against her neck where his mouth is alternating between tongue and teeth.
This would be the time, she thinks, to say something maudlin, if she knew any such endearments, but she doesn’t so instead she kisses whatever skin she can reach with her mouth (his temple), digs her fingers into his back, breathes his name. “Crichton.” And then, “John.”
She hugs him close, her hands in his hair, when he stills over her, and she arches her back to the last thrust of his hips so they are pressed together as close as she can manage.
He doesn’t really want to move, ever, but she shifts beneath him and he realises all his weight has been on top of her for untold time. So he moves, lies beside her, searching for her hand in the tangle of the sheets. She lets him hold two of her fingers linked in his.
The ceiling is spinning and their breathing is still heavy. He moves to reach for her, guides her face towards his with a hand on her cheek. (The weird alien alcohol is making him bolder than usual. Then again, she rarely resists this kind of touch any more.)
He curls his fingers against the side of her face, delights in the softness of her skin, in her breath slowing, now gentle against his wrist. Of all the strange and wonderful things he has seen since crossing through the wormhole, Aeryn Sun might be the most remarkable.
She doesn’t say anything, but she does smile at him, and that, he finds, sleepy with sex and the drink fading from his system, is more than enough.
He leans forward and brushes his nose against hers, buries his face in her cheek. She murmurs something he can’t quite hear, squeezes his fingers.
They fall asleep like that, cheek to cheek, her hand curled through his.
He leaves her, she never expected that. Her head is heavy from the alien liquor when she wakes, alone and naked and twisted in unfamiliar sheets. The aloneness hurts. And she hates that it does, hates that she craves him in this entirely disarming way. She wants his warmth in the bed as she wakes and she misses it even though she’s never had it before, she wants his scent and his hands on her, hot where he touches her - a little possessive, maybe a little protective. (She has never wanted that from a man, actually she abhors it and she abhors herself a little at the thought).
Wanting him physically is one thing and she is so pleasantly sore from it that she wonders why she doesn’t allow herself that more often, but this, this need to be special to him - to elicit his culture’s pet names and drive him crazy with the smell of her hair and take comfort in his very presence - that is entirely another.
It feels like she is going mad.
He does come back to her, with water and the news that he has paid for the room and told the others they’ll be back in a few arns and a reason for leaving (which she surlily labels as an excuse in her mind): “It was getting late and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You should have,” she says, far more harshly than he deserves.
“Oh no,” he says, stepping forward as she pulls on her shirt. “No you don’t. You don’t get to do this.”
She pulls her hair from the collar and glares at him, feigning indignant ignorance even though she knows exactly what he means and it’s obvious that he knows that she knows. “Do what?”
“Pull this emotional yo-yo crap.”
She is genuinely confused by that. “Translation please.”
“Pull me in, push me away. Not this time.”
“Crichton it was just -”
He clamps a hand over her mouth. “I know what it was Aeryn.”
And that’s the trouble, from the way he looks at her, piercing and right in the eyes, she suspects that he’s seeing more of her than she intends to show him.
The hand over her mouth is suddenly cradling her cheek. “I was hoping you’d still be asleep,” he says gently and his tone breaks her resolve to be angry with him where it starts in the pit of her stomach. Her insides shatter. Somehow she keeps it from reaching her face until he lowers himself onto the bed and moves to sit behind her, to pull her back into his arms.
She’s curious though, in spite of her better judgement she wants to know just how closely his desires parallel her rather pitifully sentimental ones, so she lets him continue, twisting her hair around his fingers as he does. “I didn’t want you to wake up and find me gone. I hope you know I wasn’t sneaking out on you.”
“There’s no need -” her perfunctory reply halts when he finds the juncture of neck and jaw, first with his fingers, then with his mouth.
“I wanted to wake you myself,” he murmurs in her ear.
“Crichton,” she whispers back, half-involuntarily because suddenly her blood is singing his name, in her chest and low in her stomach.
This is their usual game, him behind her, mouth at her ear, breath on her neck, hands in her hair - this is what she knows, the desire they flirt with, but it’s all the worse for the previous night, all the worse now she knows how his mouth feels against her stomach, how his hands feel
(Yes, it wasn’t the first time, but that was different, somehow - more about him than her, about taking solace in each other not exploring their possibilities. It was more reserved, less emotionally charged. Not that she wasn’t beginning to love him then, just that she is certain that she does now.)
Now though… now he buries a hand in her hair and she has to grip the edge of the mattress. She shifts on it, at turns comfortable and uncomfortable. This is going to pose problems.
“Please don’t,” she continues, so soft and unlike her that he complies almost instantly. The warmth at her back and the hands in her hair are gone and she misses them fiercely.
The words of Dregon on the Breakaway Colonies haunt her. Because of all the days before it hurts. She wonders if it truly is worth the hurt, aches to know for herself.
“I’m sorry.” She turns to him, hoping her face is contrite. He’s leaning against the wall, a hand on his temple. When he looks up, he sees her looking at him, reaches for the water, hands it to her and waits while she drinks it quickly. (Suddenly she is very aware of a deep thirst which feels unquenchable, something which he evidently discovered was an after effect of the liquor before she woke.)
“I shouldn’t have called you down here.” She moves closer at his expression when she says it. “No, you misunderstand me, not because it wasn’t something I wanted to happen, because it was wrong of me to expect it not to change things.”
“It does change things.”
“Yes. I know that. But in ways I’m not sure I’m ready to acknowledge after the fact, at least - not when I’m not in bed with you.”
“When I am though.” She wants to grin wickedly, to pretend she is just flirting with him, but instead she just smiles because she’s not exactly talking about sex when she says it: “I might be amenable. To being close to you.”
“Close huh?”
She crawls across to him, shifts herself over him until she’s straddling him and pushing her hair out of her eyes very deliberately. “Yes Crichton, close. If that’s something you could… be okay with. For now.”
“You’re learning,” he says.
“I’m learning.”
He kisses her instead of saying ‘I understand why you are afraid’ but she takes his meaning. And when their mouths part she rests her forehead against his shoulder, sighs, says, “Thank you.”
"You don't have to thank me," he says.
She takes him very literally. "But I want you to know that I am grateful."
"I meant." He sighs. "You shouldn't have to thank me Aeryn. Not for that."
"I think," she says, "That you're learning too. And I know that that it isn't easy."
She clings to him for a very long time.
That night - or, because they’re back on Moya, the next time they sleep - he wakes her. She mumbles something in her sleep and tries to roll away from him, but he persists and she sits up suddenly, curses, then says: “What’s wrong?”
She’s already reaching for her weapon.
He stills her hand. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Then why did you frelling wake me - oh.” Aeryn answers her own question in her head. “You know that what I said earlier was not an invitation for you to crawl into my bed whenever you felt some basal urge.”
“Are you telling me to leave?”
It’s dark, but not dark enough that she cannot see his smile, which is equal parts smug and imploring. She considers hitting him for the former.
Still, she thinks for a moment before answering truthfully. “No.”
He kisses her, but pulls away when she tries to deepen it. She leans up into him until her head is free of the pillow, but still, he evades her. She slumps backward, bemused, and pushes him off her, into the wall her bed is up against.
“You’re confusing me Crichton. You insinuate yourself into bed with me wanting sex, now you don’t want it. I don’t understand you.” She frowns. “Why did you come here?”
“I want to sleep with you.”
“That’s not a euphemism is it?”
“No.”
He suddenly looks incredibly nervous, which she would think was ridiculous, given the things they’ve faced together and how obvious it has been for nearly a cycle now that she cares for him, but she understands. Somehow this is more terrifying than their enemies, their many brushes with death.
Dregon’s words come back to her again: you’re not trained to deal with emotions. But she suspects no amount of training can make this kind of vulnerability, the potential for the emotional pain he described in the barren lands, easier.
He continues: “I know you told me it’s not something that you do, Peacekeepers I mean. And I’m sorry if it’s one of those cultural differences we always seem to come up against. But you said you’re learning, or un-learning, and I think -”
“You don’t have to explain what you want. I do understand.” She frowns. “If I do this now, you can’t expect it all the time Crichton.”
“Humour me this once. You do what you did to me last night Aeryn, it gives a guy ideas.”
“Should I be offended that this is the idea it gives you? To sleep with me, instead of doing it again?”
“Hang on one microt, let’s not take doing it again off the table. I never said that. Just, not now.”
“Okay then.”
She nods once, settles into the mattress and rolls away from him
“Now I’m confused.”
She twists back to look over her shoulder. “You want to sleep together, so sleep.” She turns away from him again, and hesitates before she says it. “Come closer though, if you’re going to sleep here it has to be -” she reaches for his hand, tugs his arm until it’s wrapped around her, their fingers entwined and pressed against her chest. “Like this.”
He smiles and noses into her hair. “Okay. This is good.”
“Are you ever going to shut up?”
He ignores her. “You know, we call this spooning.”
She makes a face. “You come anywhere near me with an eating implement Crichton and this is never happening again.”
“No.” He laughs. “Because we’re like spoons, when they’re stacked. We fit into one another.”
She smirks. “Yes, we do. This is not the best way.”
He tightens his hold on her. “Oh, I don’t know. This is pretty good.”
Aeryn doesn’t reply, she lets him think she’s asleep, but privately, she agrees.
-
Title from the Gregory Orr poem:
The life I live,
The one I hoped
To live-
How seldom
They coincide.
Sometimes, briefly,
They do;
Sometimes, in the city.