Fellip Gopher's Payoff
Aug. 4th, 2005 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feldmanSPOILERS: Peacekeeper Wars
SUMMARY: Sixteen years after PKW. Set during The Break-out Club" (links below).
NOTES: Beta by the fantabulous![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cretkid. jonquil wanted to know what happened when John came back from the beer run.
CHRONOLOGY:
Pretty in Punk (set thirteen years after PKW)
Umpteen Hassels (the drabble we couldn't stop expanding on)
The Break-out Club (the story that the story below is set within)
EMAIL: thassalia @ yahoo.com; mochaphine @ gmail.com
DISCLAIMER HAIKU:
Though we love them so
and they are fun to to play with
we do not own them
by Thea & feldman
Aeryn doesn't open her eyes. She knows it's him by the tread of his boots, by the way he shuts the door, the way his belt scrapes against the doorframe as he leans, his leer nearly audible.
She hangs her arms over the sides of the tub, enjoying the sound of the water dripping to the warm stone flooring. It was so frelling quiet while he was gone, only the minute tinny sounds of the water to keep her company. Even with just the whisper of his breath and his wordless murmur of appreciation, the room sounds completely different.
Her voice bounces low and lazy off the curved tile walls, the heat of the tub a compromise between their bodies but still enough to coat everything in humidity. "Did you get the fellip?"
"Mm-hmm." A glass bottle clinks down on the tile ledge next to her hand. She locates it by sound and wraps her fingers around it, the condensation cooling her skin and she smiles for him, rich and wide and warm.
"If you'd been two hundred more microts," she brings the bottle to her cheek, letting the cold glass soak away some of the flush. "I'd have called down for one of those massages they were advertising, the ones with the scantily clad Sebacean males and the veris oil..."
The whisper of leather through buckle is followed by the thump of one boot and then the other as she draws a long pull from the bottle.
"Scantily-clad, huh?"
"I believe they wear briefs of some kind." Her mouth opens lush as the cool of the bottle soaks into her forehead. "Mostly they just wear the veris oil."
He steps into the bath between her knees, easing down slowly but still sloshing water onto the floor. "Nice to know I'm so easily replaced."
"They're highly trained." She opens her eyes a slit. "Some of the staff are even certified in recreational techniques."
"Well I appreciate your restraint in not ordering a happy ending while I was gone." He chuckles and sidles into her space, palms sliding up the backs of her thighs as he bends forward to kiss her.
"Two hundred more microts and I'd have been reaching for the comms to the front desk." She slips her thighs up along his sides, drawing her knees close as he stretches out as much as he can, body pressed tightly to hers and sending more water to the floor.
She curls her arm around him as they kiss, pressing the fellip bottle to his back and laughing against his mouth as he bucks and yelps.
He moves his mouth to her neck, hands trying to fit around her, slipping over her body in the play of water, and then he withdraws, kneels back and tries to arrange himself to loll at the opposite end of the tub.
The water is half gone, and she pokes him with her toes to turn on the spigot. The hot water is on his side. He grasps her foot, digging his thumb into her arch as he taps the on switch and the tub fills and warms back up.
His big hands wrap and slide around her foot, and she feels liquid and lax, well frelled and well used and preparing to further test their paired endurance. But for now his hands on her foot is enough, her ankle and sole a pleasure zone wired right into the rest of her. It makes up for having to wait so long for the fellip. She smiles at him, at his answering grin and his hands and the bubble foam caught in the hair of his chest, at his warm silky textures and the solid stability of his love.
They've talked about anniversaries for cycles now, have never really had the time or the luxury of celebrating them in the way he's wanted, and frankly she never thought it necessary. Like other things in her life with John, she finds that she's not unhappy to have been proven wrong. Well, half-wrong. This is too good to wait a cycle to repeat.
"Took you awhile," she says, head cocked to the side, entranced by his concentration. "Were they out of fellip at the market next door?"
"Only had the Budweiser variety. I had to go searching. Guy in the shop gave me good directions, though, when I said I had a beautiful woman waiting for me in the bathtub. Still took some searching to find the place, but they also had prea wine, the nice stuff with the bite."
"Why didn't you say so before?" She reaches down to set the fellip bottle on the floor, abandoned at the prospect of good prea. "Go get it!"
"What, am I part of the staff, now?" His smile is a tease, his toes trailing a promise up her thigh. "I put on pants and ventured out into the cold to get it in the first place."
She sinks deeper, sliding her other foot up his chest. "I don't know where you put it."
He sculpts the ragged bubbles left over from the last application of bath-foam. "Fridge."
"So what do I get for volunteering for this duty?"
"You mean, to fetch the wine from the next room?"
"Yes." She trails her foot down, poking his navel in passing.
"That I went out in the big bad world to get in the first place, and had to lug back halfway from the docking port?"
"Yes."
"Well I think you just found something with that other foot, now, didn't you?"
Her toes slip between his inner thigh and his quickening cock, nudging at the delicate flesh of his scrotum as she grins with wicked delight. He hums low in his throat as his balls shrug and nuzzle against her, as she slips the uncallused arch of her foot up the underside of his cock.
"I'm not quite sure what I've discovered here. Perhaps further reconnaissance is called for."
"Recon, huh? Scout through the bush?" He flicks the bath foam at her gently. "Prea?"
"Frellnick."
"Please?"
It's the tone, quiet and true, and she has a hard time denying him anything when he uses that tone. She expects great things from its effects in an arn or two. "Fridge, hmm?"
"Mm-hmm."
She withdraws her foot, earning her a groan as she stands up in the bath, water and bubbles sliding off her body. She takes her time, gathering her buzzed balance, stretching out the moments before stepping out of the tub onto the wet stone floor and padding naked into the next room, soaking footprints into the carpet.
She takes her careful time, not interested in falling on her eema and getting friction burns from the carpet. The ones on John's back are bad enough and those were at least fun.
Snagging the wine out of the fridge, she searches among the detritus on the nightstand for the opener. Mostly she finds coins and credit chips, various receipts and the ragtag bundle of dren that John seems to collect whenever they go out. Man can't resist a flyer or a free sample. His comm is on top and she picks it up, fingering the curved edge. She could have sworn that they'd knocked it under the bed earlier.
She shrugs, her body drying and her skin prickling from the chill of the room.
She unseals the wine, forgoing glasses, and returns to the tub, stepping into it and sinking down onto John's lap as his hands slip over her arse to rest on the planes of her back.
"Heya, baby," he says, eyes dark and wanting.
She sips and then hands off the bottle, savoring the dry fruity bite of the wine as she watches him drink. "You were checking up on them, weren't you?"
He licks his lips, "Yeah, I did. It's the first time we've left them for so long--I know, I know, it was my idea in the first place, the point is they're fine."
There's an odd catch to the tone, and when he offers her the bottle back she turns her head slightly, eyeing him. "What did they break?"
"Nothing." He jabs his elbow backward to hit the switch and open the hot water tap. Over the splash he adds in a murmur, "That I know of."
Aeryn grabs the bottle and takes a series of long sips, breathing the tang of the prea out through her nose. Her buzz is coming back strong but she focuses past it. "Either you tell me, or Pilot will."
"Pilot doesn't know."
"How can Pilot not know?" She sets the wine on the tile next to her with a scraping clink. "They *are* onboard, aren't they?"
John checks the back of his wet wrist in a gesture she'd only recently figured out referred to chronometers, bubble foam sliding off to reveal a scatter of freckles and a faint purple bruise from her thumb. "I'd say so, yeah."
She leans forward, breasts pressing against his chest, weight settling in his lap as the water sloshes around. She fumbles backwards and shuts of the hot water and rests her elbow on his shoulder, looking at him from very close up.
His eyes are bright blue, the tiny freckle on the lid showcased in stark relief like a targeting mark.
He runs his hand over her waist and her back, stroking, tantalizing, gliding over the skin that he has serious prior knowledge of and she makes a sound in her throat, arching her back, feeling him stir underneath her.
She brushes her lips over his throat and along his stubbled jaw, caressing the velvet rim of his ear with the edge of her thumb, the angle odd and awkward.
He shivers a little, moves to kiss her shoulder, and palms her breast with a wet soapy hand and she grabs his ear, tugs hard and whispers fiercely, "What the frell do you mean, 'they should be'?"
He yelps and wiggles and she holds tight.
She's got a handful of ear and hair, her other thumb pressed into a spot on his shoulder that will make him go blind with pain if she leans in just a little harder, and her heels dig into the sides of his hips as if she's wearing spurs.
He palms her ass for purchase as much as pleasure. "Careful, there. You know, most fatal household accidents occur in the bathtub."
"And deliberate fatalities?"
He shifts her weight on his lap and grunts at the corresponding tug on his ear. Her eyebrows rise in synchronicity with his cock, but it's not the random fluctuation of response that's caught her attention. She slides her hand up from his shoulder and delicately touches the curve of his cheekbone, catching something in the groove of her fingerprint.
Glitter.
She lets go of his ear, draws her body in. She can feel the buzz riding along in her veins, can feel the low burn of anger that's running up to meet it. In the distance, there's a trace of hurt, a trace of fear but she ignores that. "Were you planning on telling me, or just keeping it to yourself?"
"Telling you what?"
He just can't help himself, has to play dumb, has to be a frellnick even though she's pressed to his cock, has him at a serious disadvantage if she wanted to hurt him. She doesn't exactly. At least she's pretty sure she doesn't.
"You either had a run in with a Verlian trelk, or you saw Peace. Unless glitter is a new fashion statement you'd like to make."
"Baby," his tone is soothing, and his eyes serious. "This is our vacation. Everything's fine, there's nothing to worry about."
She sits back on her heels, eema resting on his knees.
"Then why were you gone so long? And why were they here?" She feels her teeth clench as she says it, and she puts her hand on the ledge of the tub, getting ready to leverage herself up and out, to go call and find out just what the frell is going on.
He curls a hand around one of her ankles, a caress and a slight restraint. He breathes in deep and looks at the water for a moment before blinking up at her. "Chiana's home for a visit. She took them planetside. They're fine, they just had some dinner and did some shopping and they're probably already back on Moya."
"And she couldn't let us know? Or did you know about this already?"
"I don't think it occurred to her to clear it with us--"
"That girl--"
"Nerri's dead."
In her silence he reaches past her for the wine bottle.
Aeryn wipes her face with wet hands, eyelashes clumped and trickles of bathwater slipping down her cheeks like tears. "Is she okay?"
He nods, takes a swig of the wine. "I think she just needed some brother and sister time, especially once she found out about Punk."
"So she never got the messages."
"Nothing since we saw her last."
Aeryn considers, then takes the bottle when John offers it. "Imagine meeting Punk for the first time and then taking her planetside."
"At least we've had a few years to work up to that challenge."
She shrugs, ready to puddle back into the warm bath. "As long as everyone's home in one piece, she can't have done too badly, then."
This time he waits until she's tipped the bottle up for another drink. "More or less undamaged, yeah."
She inhales sharply and the wine clogs her throat, starts off a fit of coughing and John grabs the bottle from her as she coughs, eyes tearing.
He keeps his fingers on her skin, ready to offer assistance but she waves him off, regains her breath and her composure. "What the frell does that mean? More or less?"
"Means don't ask, don't tell."
She narrows her eyes, puts a hand on his chest and pins him to the back of the tub. "I'm asking, and you'd better be telling."
He takes her hand, brings it to his mouth, slipping her thumb between his lips, tongue sweeping over the pad of flesh there and she feels the spark of want mixing back up with her anger.
"I saw," her thumb slips out of his mouth, and his teeth graze the join of thumb to palm, "two kids," his teeth nip her flesh and she moans, "whole, and relatively healthy. The boy's got a black eye, but looked fine otherwise, and Punk was covered in glitter and some sort of fluorescent marker. I decided, under the circumstances, that I didn't want to know."
His mouth moves up her wrist, to the crook of her arm as he tugs her back towards him, nipping at the soft skin.
"Black eye?"
"He's fine, baby. Shaken up even before I scared the crap out of him, but he's fine. They're all fine, and I think Chi's trying to figure out how to put full body restraints on Punk for the next excursion, either that or rent her out as an agent of chaos."
Her sinuses burn from the wine, her voice rough. "Wonder where she gets that from, exactly?"
"Luckily she has your knack for avoiding injury. The boy's not so graceful, apparently."
She shakes her head, rueful and loving, never one to pull a punch if it's the truth. "Doesn't have his sister's reflexes."
John pulls her around to lean back against him, and she sighs deep as she settles in. He passes her the wine, half the bottle gone. "He's starting to outgrow us."
"We've talked about this." The finality of her tone is undermined by the slack in the words, as boneless as her body in his arms.
"And we're talking about it again. He needs that program."
"He needs to be safe."
"And he will be. But even more than that, he needs to be out in the world to learn about it."
She peels the soaked edge of the label from the bottle, not disagreeing, but not agreeing either.
"I, uh...I already promised him he could go."
She breathes in and out, the hard fist in her gut feeling like those first moments of labor, those first moments of grief. In with calm, out with anger, ride it, don't let it ride you. Scared, yes, desperate to keep her son safe, her family safe, and John wraps an arm around her belly, puts his mouth to her neck.
He says her name low in her ear and it isn't a seduction, it's a decision. They've danced the topic, argued it, thrown it at each other and butted into the same conclusion. He's too young, too vulnerable, too much their child. "He's not a boy anymore."
"Yes, he is," she whispers fiercely. "And even if he were old enough, this school can't keep him safe, can't keep anyone away who'd want to harm him."
He kisses her jaw, soothing her, voice low and heavy. "If someone wanted to harm him that badly, even you and I couldn't stop them."
"But we'd die trying," she hisses, fierce and hot, tears of anger pricking at the corners of her eyes. He traces her cheek with a damp finger.
"I told him that," John says, and shifts to further envelop her.
"You had no right to tell him..." she starts to say, hearing the petulance in her own voice, the last desperate attempt at keeping this thing from being real. But she's wrong, and she swallows her own fears.
"You never warned me," she says quiet and fierce, feeling a little drunk and a lot lost, "that I'd be like this, that I'd be more scared for him than anything I've done, we've done. That I'd be ridiculous and afraid to let him go. You should have warned me."
When he speaks his voice is a rumble of breath behind her. "I'd only been on the other side of it before; I didn't know what it felt like myself."
She cups his knee, stroking the hollow beside the cap. "When we left Earth."
"Whenever we said goodbye; school, orbit, Earth. That last time, that call..." His voice is marred, emotion like the static of patching a pod's comm system into human phone network. "I'll be a happy man if I never have to take a call like that from D', but I need to let him grow up, grow out. Become who he needs to be. If nothing else, than to practice for when we have to say goodbye to Peace."
She laces her fingers through his, bringing their hands under the water and against her stomach. "We don't say goodbyes."
He draws a deep breath, ribs flexing against her back. "No, we don't." He plunks his toe on the surface of the water, a plopping backbeat as his quiet voice reverberates in the humidity. "So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, good night..."
She wipes her cheeks and turns to give him a rueful, playful glare. "Anything else I should know about?"
"Me? I'm clean."
"Well," she sighs, fingertips stroking under his knee which he press up and into her thigh. "We have a lot to do, to get him ready. Perhaps we should go back to Moya early..."
Her voice trails off as his fingers slip over her belly. "We're doing the whole cake and gifts thing for him tomorrow. Morning's soon enough. 'Sides, I think Chi might be staying a while and I have a feeling that she and Punk are going to create quite a stir."
"Chaos," she mutters.
"Total destruction," he murmurs into her ear. "We've got one more night of quiet. Let's enjoy it."
She rests against him for a few microts, searching out her missing equilibrium, then slowly pushes up and away from him, standing in the tub. Water runs down her body and he watches her with this look on his face, not just longing, but something richer, full and familiar and proud.
The frelling man is proud of her. She grins back at him, and leans over to snatch back the prea, finishing the wine in a long drink. The alcohol rushes to her head and she sways a little, glares down at him.
"I think," she says, low and rough, "that I'm done with the bath."
She steps out of the tub, toweling off as he drains the water and when he steps out onto the stone tile with her she runs the toweling over his chest, down his legs and over his arms. She moves to wrap it around his back and he stops her, pulls her flush to his body and holds on tight. His warm hands splay over her back, their complementary planes and textures slotting together as she presses her face to the curve of his neck.
He's no longer hard, no longer teasing and playing, sex and laughter still echoing between them but faded. Their balance has shifted and even though she still plans to take him to bed, frell him senseless once more and then deal with this new thing in the morning, she can feel he's just as shaken as she is.
Over cycles they've adjusted to each other, bodies and minds drawn together by necessity and emotion. The day they started this family they made a live or die decision, based in part on the infant in her arms and in his hands. Now, they're preparing to let him go, let him lead his own life and make his own mistakes.
He's their son. Some sort of mistake or disaster is inevitable.
They have to figure out how to watch and not be able to protect.
It's the same process as when he was small and learned to do anything, walk, swim, fly, but writ large in the life and death stakes of that first day.
She steps a few microdenches back but his hand stays on her hip, never breaking contact as she murmurs, "I thought it would get easier."
He strokes her waist and brushes his fingers along the underside of her breast, the gesture soothing and familiar instead of simply erotic. Her body...but in a way his as well. She doesn't know when they became so entrenched in each other, when she started to feel that the notch on his hipbone belonged to her as much as it did to him, when the swell of her breast became community property, when she forgot that that mole on the hip was his and not hers.
They've always done partnership very, very well. And they will weather this new thing together. That is not a small comfort. She draws a deep breath. "There's still some food left."
He turns her gently, marching her toward the bed. "My turn to fetch, you straighten the covers."
She snaps out the coverlet and sprawls across the wide expanse of the bed. He crawls in next to her, body pressed tight to hers as they pick through the remnants of the gift basket that came with the room. He leans in to kiss her as she's swallowing some Tyrailean cheese and he laughs against her mouth, and pulls her closer.
She kisses him, lush and full, relishing his hands on her body before she stops him. There's one more thing she needs to know. She leans her cheek on one hand, propped on her elbows. She isn't angry any more, but she still wants an answer.
He peels a nilqit fruit, fingers deft if wrinkly from the bath.
"Why," she takes a breath, keeps herself calm, "Why didn't you tell me, earlier? That you'd seen the children, that you'd--"
"I--when I saw them with Chiana..." His mouth sets and he tosses the uneaten half of the nilqit back into the basket. "When I saw that they'd gone out and had some kind of adventure that we weren't a part of I was pissed off at first, ready to ground his ass, and then," he shrugs, shoulder moving against hers as he talks out his rationale. "They were fine, babe...relatively speaking. They'd clearly been up to something, but there weren't any police after them, no critters or crazies. D' had sustained some damage but he didn't look too worse for wear, and Punk was all sparkles and hugs. I talked to Chi, and she'd clearly needed something from her visit back here, and I think she got some of that tonight. Point is, they're all fine. And they're all gonna be fine, eventually. And he's ready to go."
She doesn't have anything to say to that. She understands, but it still aches, burning like a flesh wound, and her understanding is giving way to a less...kind...impulse. She presses, "Why didn't you want to tell me?"
"Made him a promise," he murmurs. "Gave him a moment that was just between us. Felt good, in a way, that I got to tell him what he wanted to hear, after he'd just been dealing with something obviously complicated and disastrous. Probably a girl," he nudges her with his hip. "Crichton men tend to have a melodramatic streak when it comes to women."
"Really?"
"Hard to believe, I know."
It isn't the fact that he took that moment for himself that grates, well not really, it’s that he made the decision on his own. But as she opens her mouth to protest, it occurs to her that he wouldn't have done it if he didn't think he could convince her, hadn't already known that her defenses against the idea could be breached. Still.
"In the future," she says, letting her voice harden just enough, "it would be nice to be consulted about major life decisions having to do with our children."
He nods solemn and slow, then turns his head to fasten her with the corner of his blue stare. His lashes sweep down as he looks at her mouth, then flick back up as he meets her eyes again. "Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"
She sets her jaw and peers up at the folds of fabric draped around the bed. Odds are that if she were going to kill him, she would have already. Still, she keeps her options open.
"It was a window of opportunity. Not just for him, but for me. I'm not..." He swallows, and when he takes her hand she laces her fingers with his and lifts them up between them to move her hip against his. They stare into the depths of the bed decoration together. "I'm not entirely sure that I could have told him he could go in any other circumstances. Don't know how I would have worked myself up to letting him stay planetside, otherwise. This was like ripping off a band-aid."
She's tended enough skinned joints to recognize the truth of it, to ruefully understand the necessity. She turns and pushes, rolling him onto his back, stretching her body across him, looking down into his eyes, her ribs breathing in counterpoint to his. She considers him, the prea wearing off enough for her to take a mental step back to assess the situation from his perspective.
He's not man who lets go easily. John's instinct has always been to pull his loved ones close, to fight desperately to keep them safe no matter the consequences, to keep them near no matter how difficult it was for them to breathe under those confines. That he's the one to decide that their child needs freedom, that he's the one to convince her, is nothing she'd have expected cycles ago.
She kisses him, tongue stroking, hands fisted against his chest and he responds, arms tight around her, thigh slipping up between hers to make her moan.
In the morning they will deal with all of it, a good friend in mourning, a jubilant son, their own fear and their bright spark of pigtailed chaos.
For the rest of this night they can enjoy a stolen respite of quiet before the battle ahead, breath and love between them like a savored last kiss. At times this life is still a startling gift, an astonishing pleasure, one never taken for granted, and certainly never surrendered lightly.
~*~
SUMMARY: Sixteen years after PKW. Set during The Break-out Club" (links below).
NOTES: Beta by the fantabulous
cretkid. jonquil wanted to know what happened when John came back from the beer run.CHRONOLOGY:
Pretty in Punk (set thirteen years after PKW)
Umpteen Hassels (the drabble we couldn't stop expanding on)
The Break-out Club (the story that the story below is set within)
EMAIL: thassalia @ yahoo.com; mochaphine @ gmail.com
DISCLAIMER HAIKU:
Though we love them so
and they are fun to to play with
we do not own them
Fellip Gopher's Payoff
by Thea & feldman
Aeryn doesn't open her eyes. She knows it's him by the tread of his boots, by the way he shuts the door, the way his belt scrapes against the doorframe as he leans, his leer nearly audible.
She hangs her arms over the sides of the tub, enjoying the sound of the water dripping to the warm stone flooring. It was so frelling quiet while he was gone, only the minute tinny sounds of the water to keep her company. Even with just the whisper of his breath and his wordless murmur of appreciation, the room sounds completely different.
Her voice bounces low and lazy off the curved tile walls, the heat of the tub a compromise between their bodies but still enough to coat everything in humidity. "Did you get the fellip?"
"Mm-hmm." A glass bottle clinks down on the tile ledge next to her hand. She locates it by sound and wraps her fingers around it, the condensation cooling her skin and she smiles for him, rich and wide and warm.
"If you'd been two hundred more microts," she brings the bottle to her cheek, letting the cold glass soak away some of the flush. "I'd have called down for one of those massages they were advertising, the ones with the scantily clad Sebacean males and the veris oil..."
The whisper of leather through buckle is followed by the thump of one boot and then the other as she draws a long pull from the bottle.
"Scantily-clad, huh?"
"I believe they wear briefs of some kind." Her mouth opens lush as the cool of the bottle soaks into her forehead. "Mostly they just wear the veris oil."
He steps into the bath between her knees, easing down slowly but still sloshing water onto the floor. "Nice to know I'm so easily replaced."
"They're highly trained." She opens her eyes a slit. "Some of the staff are even certified in recreational techniques."
"Well I appreciate your restraint in not ordering a happy ending while I was gone." He chuckles and sidles into her space, palms sliding up the backs of her thighs as he bends forward to kiss her.
"Two hundred more microts and I'd have been reaching for the comms to the front desk." She slips her thighs up along his sides, drawing her knees close as he stretches out as much as he can, body pressed tightly to hers and sending more water to the floor.
She curls her arm around him as they kiss, pressing the fellip bottle to his back and laughing against his mouth as he bucks and yelps.
He moves his mouth to her neck, hands trying to fit around her, slipping over her body in the play of water, and then he withdraws, kneels back and tries to arrange himself to loll at the opposite end of the tub.
The water is half gone, and she pokes him with her toes to turn on the spigot. The hot water is on his side. He grasps her foot, digging his thumb into her arch as he taps the on switch and the tub fills and warms back up.
His big hands wrap and slide around her foot, and she feels liquid and lax, well frelled and well used and preparing to further test their paired endurance. But for now his hands on her foot is enough, her ankle and sole a pleasure zone wired right into the rest of her. It makes up for having to wait so long for the fellip. She smiles at him, at his answering grin and his hands and the bubble foam caught in the hair of his chest, at his warm silky textures and the solid stability of his love.
They've talked about anniversaries for cycles now, have never really had the time or the luxury of celebrating them in the way he's wanted, and frankly she never thought it necessary. Like other things in her life with John, she finds that she's not unhappy to have been proven wrong. Well, half-wrong. This is too good to wait a cycle to repeat.
"Took you awhile," she says, head cocked to the side, entranced by his concentration. "Were they out of fellip at the market next door?"
"Only had the Budweiser variety. I had to go searching. Guy in the shop gave me good directions, though, when I said I had a beautiful woman waiting for me in the bathtub. Still took some searching to find the place, but they also had prea wine, the nice stuff with the bite."
"Why didn't you say so before?" She reaches down to set the fellip bottle on the floor, abandoned at the prospect of good prea. "Go get it!"
"What, am I part of the staff, now?" His smile is a tease, his toes trailing a promise up her thigh. "I put on pants and ventured out into the cold to get it in the first place."
She sinks deeper, sliding her other foot up his chest. "I don't know where you put it."
He sculpts the ragged bubbles left over from the last application of bath-foam. "Fridge."
"So what do I get for volunteering for this duty?"
"You mean, to fetch the wine from the next room?"
"Yes." She trails her foot down, poking his navel in passing.
"That I went out in the big bad world to get in the first place, and had to lug back halfway from the docking port?"
"Yes."
"Well I think you just found something with that other foot, now, didn't you?"
Her toes slip between his inner thigh and his quickening cock, nudging at the delicate flesh of his scrotum as she grins with wicked delight. He hums low in his throat as his balls shrug and nuzzle against her, as she slips the uncallused arch of her foot up the underside of his cock.
"I'm not quite sure what I've discovered here. Perhaps further reconnaissance is called for."
"Recon, huh? Scout through the bush?" He flicks the bath foam at her gently. "Prea?"
"Frellnick."
"Please?"
It's the tone, quiet and true, and she has a hard time denying him anything when he uses that tone. She expects great things from its effects in an arn or two. "Fridge, hmm?"
"Mm-hmm."
She withdraws her foot, earning her a groan as she stands up in the bath, water and bubbles sliding off her body. She takes her time, gathering her buzzed balance, stretching out the moments before stepping out of the tub onto the wet stone floor and padding naked into the next room, soaking footprints into the carpet.
She takes her careful time, not interested in falling on her eema and getting friction burns from the carpet. The ones on John's back are bad enough and those were at least fun.
Snagging the wine out of the fridge, she searches among the detritus on the nightstand for the opener. Mostly she finds coins and credit chips, various receipts and the ragtag bundle of dren that John seems to collect whenever they go out. Man can't resist a flyer or a free sample. His comm is on top and she picks it up, fingering the curved edge. She could have sworn that they'd knocked it under the bed earlier.
She shrugs, her body drying and her skin prickling from the chill of the room.
She unseals the wine, forgoing glasses, and returns to the tub, stepping into it and sinking down onto John's lap as his hands slip over her arse to rest on the planes of her back.
"Heya, baby," he says, eyes dark and wanting.
She sips and then hands off the bottle, savoring the dry fruity bite of the wine as she watches him drink. "You were checking up on them, weren't you?"
He licks his lips, "Yeah, I did. It's the first time we've left them for so long--I know, I know, it was my idea in the first place, the point is they're fine."
There's an odd catch to the tone, and when he offers her the bottle back she turns her head slightly, eyeing him. "What did they break?"
"Nothing." He jabs his elbow backward to hit the switch and open the hot water tap. Over the splash he adds in a murmur, "That I know of."
Aeryn grabs the bottle and takes a series of long sips, breathing the tang of the prea out through her nose. Her buzz is coming back strong but she focuses past it. "Either you tell me, or Pilot will."
"Pilot doesn't know."
"How can Pilot not know?" She sets the wine on the tile next to her with a scraping clink. "They *are* onboard, aren't they?"
John checks the back of his wet wrist in a gesture she'd only recently figured out referred to chronometers, bubble foam sliding off to reveal a scatter of freckles and a faint purple bruise from her thumb. "I'd say so, yeah."
She leans forward, breasts pressing against his chest, weight settling in his lap as the water sloshes around. She fumbles backwards and shuts of the hot water and rests her elbow on his shoulder, looking at him from very close up.
His eyes are bright blue, the tiny freckle on the lid showcased in stark relief like a targeting mark.
He runs his hand over her waist and her back, stroking, tantalizing, gliding over the skin that he has serious prior knowledge of and she makes a sound in her throat, arching her back, feeling him stir underneath her.
She brushes her lips over his throat and along his stubbled jaw, caressing the velvet rim of his ear with the edge of her thumb, the angle odd and awkward.
He shivers a little, moves to kiss her shoulder, and palms her breast with a wet soapy hand and she grabs his ear, tugs hard and whispers fiercely, "What the frell do you mean, 'they should be'?"
He yelps and wiggles and she holds tight.
She's got a handful of ear and hair, her other thumb pressed into a spot on his shoulder that will make him go blind with pain if she leans in just a little harder, and her heels dig into the sides of his hips as if she's wearing spurs.
He palms her ass for purchase as much as pleasure. "Careful, there. You know, most fatal household accidents occur in the bathtub."
"And deliberate fatalities?"
He shifts her weight on his lap and grunts at the corresponding tug on his ear. Her eyebrows rise in synchronicity with his cock, but it's not the random fluctuation of response that's caught her attention. She slides her hand up from his shoulder and delicately touches the curve of his cheekbone, catching something in the groove of her fingerprint.
Glitter.
She lets go of his ear, draws her body in. She can feel the buzz riding along in her veins, can feel the low burn of anger that's running up to meet it. In the distance, there's a trace of hurt, a trace of fear but she ignores that. "Were you planning on telling me, or just keeping it to yourself?"
"Telling you what?"
He just can't help himself, has to play dumb, has to be a frellnick even though she's pressed to his cock, has him at a serious disadvantage if she wanted to hurt him. She doesn't exactly. At least she's pretty sure she doesn't.
"You either had a run in with a Verlian trelk, or you saw Peace. Unless glitter is a new fashion statement you'd like to make."
"Baby," his tone is soothing, and his eyes serious. "This is our vacation. Everything's fine, there's nothing to worry about."
She sits back on her heels, eema resting on his knees.
"Then why were you gone so long? And why were they here?" She feels her teeth clench as she says it, and she puts her hand on the ledge of the tub, getting ready to leverage herself up and out, to go call and find out just what the frell is going on.
He curls a hand around one of her ankles, a caress and a slight restraint. He breathes in deep and looks at the water for a moment before blinking up at her. "Chiana's home for a visit. She took them planetside. They're fine, they just had some dinner and did some shopping and they're probably already back on Moya."
"And she couldn't let us know? Or did you know about this already?"
"I don't think it occurred to her to clear it with us--"
"That girl--"
"Nerri's dead."
In her silence he reaches past her for the wine bottle.
Aeryn wipes her face with wet hands, eyelashes clumped and trickles of bathwater slipping down her cheeks like tears. "Is she okay?"
He nods, takes a swig of the wine. "I think she just needed some brother and sister time, especially once she found out about Punk."
"So she never got the messages."
"Nothing since we saw her last."
Aeryn considers, then takes the bottle when John offers it. "Imagine meeting Punk for the first time and then taking her planetside."
"At least we've had a few years to work up to that challenge."
She shrugs, ready to puddle back into the warm bath. "As long as everyone's home in one piece, she can't have done too badly, then."
This time he waits until she's tipped the bottle up for another drink. "More or less undamaged, yeah."
She inhales sharply and the wine clogs her throat, starts off a fit of coughing and John grabs the bottle from her as she coughs, eyes tearing.
He keeps his fingers on her skin, ready to offer assistance but she waves him off, regains her breath and her composure. "What the frell does that mean? More or less?"
"Means don't ask, don't tell."
She narrows her eyes, puts a hand on his chest and pins him to the back of the tub. "I'm asking, and you'd better be telling."
He takes her hand, brings it to his mouth, slipping her thumb between his lips, tongue sweeping over the pad of flesh there and she feels the spark of want mixing back up with her anger.
"I saw," her thumb slips out of his mouth, and his teeth graze the join of thumb to palm, "two kids," his teeth nip her flesh and she moans, "whole, and relatively healthy. The boy's got a black eye, but looked fine otherwise, and Punk was covered in glitter and some sort of fluorescent marker. I decided, under the circumstances, that I didn't want to know."
His mouth moves up her wrist, to the crook of her arm as he tugs her back towards him, nipping at the soft skin.
"Black eye?"
"He's fine, baby. Shaken up even before I scared the crap out of him, but he's fine. They're all fine, and I think Chi's trying to figure out how to put full body restraints on Punk for the next excursion, either that or rent her out as an agent of chaos."
Her sinuses burn from the wine, her voice rough. "Wonder where she gets that from, exactly?"
"Luckily she has your knack for avoiding injury. The boy's not so graceful, apparently."
She shakes her head, rueful and loving, never one to pull a punch if it's the truth. "Doesn't have his sister's reflexes."
John pulls her around to lean back against him, and she sighs deep as she settles in. He passes her the wine, half the bottle gone. "He's starting to outgrow us."
"We've talked about this." The finality of her tone is undermined by the slack in the words, as boneless as her body in his arms.
"And we're talking about it again. He needs that program."
"He needs to be safe."
"And he will be. But even more than that, he needs to be out in the world to learn about it."
She peels the soaked edge of the label from the bottle, not disagreeing, but not agreeing either.
"I, uh...I already promised him he could go."
She breathes in and out, the hard fist in her gut feeling like those first moments of labor, those first moments of grief. In with calm, out with anger, ride it, don't let it ride you. Scared, yes, desperate to keep her son safe, her family safe, and John wraps an arm around her belly, puts his mouth to her neck.
He says her name low in her ear and it isn't a seduction, it's a decision. They've danced the topic, argued it, thrown it at each other and butted into the same conclusion. He's too young, too vulnerable, too much their child. "He's not a boy anymore."
"Yes, he is," she whispers fiercely. "And even if he were old enough, this school can't keep him safe, can't keep anyone away who'd want to harm him."
He kisses her jaw, soothing her, voice low and heavy. "If someone wanted to harm him that badly, even you and I couldn't stop them."
"But we'd die trying," she hisses, fierce and hot, tears of anger pricking at the corners of her eyes. He traces her cheek with a damp finger.
"I told him that," John says, and shifts to further envelop her.
"You had no right to tell him..." she starts to say, hearing the petulance in her own voice, the last desperate attempt at keeping this thing from being real. But she's wrong, and she swallows her own fears.
"You never warned me," she says quiet and fierce, feeling a little drunk and a lot lost, "that I'd be like this, that I'd be more scared for him than anything I've done, we've done. That I'd be ridiculous and afraid to let him go. You should have warned me."
When he speaks his voice is a rumble of breath behind her. "I'd only been on the other side of it before; I didn't know what it felt like myself."
She cups his knee, stroking the hollow beside the cap. "When we left Earth."
"Whenever we said goodbye; school, orbit, Earth. That last time, that call..." His voice is marred, emotion like the static of patching a pod's comm system into human phone network. "I'll be a happy man if I never have to take a call like that from D', but I need to let him grow up, grow out. Become who he needs to be. If nothing else, than to practice for when we have to say goodbye to Peace."
She laces her fingers through his, bringing their hands under the water and against her stomach. "We don't say goodbyes."
He draws a deep breath, ribs flexing against her back. "No, we don't." He plunks his toe on the surface of the water, a plopping backbeat as his quiet voice reverberates in the humidity. "So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, good night..."
She wipes her cheeks and turns to give him a rueful, playful glare. "Anything else I should know about?"
"Me? I'm clean."
"Well," she sighs, fingertips stroking under his knee which he press up and into her thigh. "We have a lot to do, to get him ready. Perhaps we should go back to Moya early..."
Her voice trails off as his fingers slip over her belly. "We're doing the whole cake and gifts thing for him tomorrow. Morning's soon enough. 'Sides, I think Chi might be staying a while and I have a feeling that she and Punk are going to create quite a stir."
"Chaos," she mutters.
"Total destruction," he murmurs into her ear. "We've got one more night of quiet. Let's enjoy it."
She rests against him for a few microts, searching out her missing equilibrium, then slowly pushes up and away from him, standing in the tub. Water runs down her body and he watches her with this look on his face, not just longing, but something richer, full and familiar and proud.
The frelling man is proud of her. She grins back at him, and leans over to snatch back the prea, finishing the wine in a long drink. The alcohol rushes to her head and she sways a little, glares down at him.
"I think," she says, low and rough, "that I'm done with the bath."
She steps out of the tub, toweling off as he drains the water and when he steps out onto the stone tile with her she runs the toweling over his chest, down his legs and over his arms. She moves to wrap it around his back and he stops her, pulls her flush to his body and holds on tight. His warm hands splay over her back, their complementary planes and textures slotting together as she presses her face to the curve of his neck.
He's no longer hard, no longer teasing and playing, sex and laughter still echoing between them but faded. Their balance has shifted and even though she still plans to take him to bed, frell him senseless once more and then deal with this new thing in the morning, she can feel he's just as shaken as she is.
Over cycles they've adjusted to each other, bodies and minds drawn together by necessity and emotion. The day they started this family they made a live or die decision, based in part on the infant in her arms and in his hands. Now, they're preparing to let him go, let him lead his own life and make his own mistakes.
He's their son. Some sort of mistake or disaster is inevitable.
They have to figure out how to watch and not be able to protect.
It's the same process as when he was small and learned to do anything, walk, swim, fly, but writ large in the life and death stakes of that first day.
She steps a few microdenches back but his hand stays on her hip, never breaking contact as she murmurs, "I thought it would get easier."
He strokes her waist and brushes his fingers along the underside of her breast, the gesture soothing and familiar instead of simply erotic. Her body...but in a way his as well. She doesn't know when they became so entrenched in each other, when she started to feel that the notch on his hipbone belonged to her as much as it did to him, when the swell of her breast became community property, when she forgot that that mole on the hip was his and not hers.
They've always done partnership very, very well. And they will weather this new thing together. That is not a small comfort. She draws a deep breath. "There's still some food left."
He turns her gently, marching her toward the bed. "My turn to fetch, you straighten the covers."
She snaps out the coverlet and sprawls across the wide expanse of the bed. He crawls in next to her, body pressed tight to hers as they pick through the remnants of the gift basket that came with the room. He leans in to kiss her as she's swallowing some Tyrailean cheese and he laughs against her mouth, and pulls her closer.
She kisses him, lush and full, relishing his hands on her body before she stops him. There's one more thing she needs to know. She leans her cheek on one hand, propped on her elbows. She isn't angry any more, but she still wants an answer.
He peels a nilqit fruit, fingers deft if wrinkly from the bath.
"Why," she takes a breath, keeps herself calm, "Why didn't you tell me, earlier? That you'd seen the children, that you'd--"
"I--when I saw them with Chiana..." His mouth sets and he tosses the uneaten half of the nilqit back into the basket. "When I saw that they'd gone out and had some kind of adventure that we weren't a part of I was pissed off at first, ready to ground his ass, and then," he shrugs, shoulder moving against hers as he talks out his rationale. "They were fine, babe...relatively speaking. They'd clearly been up to something, but there weren't any police after them, no critters or crazies. D' had sustained some damage but he didn't look too worse for wear, and Punk was all sparkles and hugs. I talked to Chi, and she'd clearly needed something from her visit back here, and I think she got some of that tonight. Point is, they're all fine. And they're all gonna be fine, eventually. And he's ready to go."
She doesn't have anything to say to that. She understands, but it still aches, burning like a flesh wound, and her understanding is giving way to a less...kind...impulse. She presses, "Why didn't you want to tell me?"
"Made him a promise," he murmurs. "Gave him a moment that was just between us. Felt good, in a way, that I got to tell him what he wanted to hear, after he'd just been dealing with something obviously complicated and disastrous. Probably a girl," he nudges her with his hip. "Crichton men tend to have a melodramatic streak when it comes to women."
"Really?"
"Hard to believe, I know."
It isn't the fact that he took that moment for himself that grates, well not really, it’s that he made the decision on his own. But as she opens her mouth to protest, it occurs to her that he wouldn't have done it if he didn't think he could convince her, hadn't already known that her defenses against the idea could be breached. Still.
"In the future," she says, letting her voice harden just enough, "it would be nice to be consulted about major life decisions having to do with our children."
He nods solemn and slow, then turns his head to fasten her with the corner of his blue stare. His lashes sweep down as he looks at her mouth, then flick back up as he meets her eyes again. "Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"
She sets her jaw and peers up at the folds of fabric draped around the bed. Odds are that if she were going to kill him, she would have already. Still, she keeps her options open.
"It was a window of opportunity. Not just for him, but for me. I'm not..." He swallows, and when he takes her hand she laces her fingers with his and lifts them up between them to move her hip against his. They stare into the depths of the bed decoration together. "I'm not entirely sure that I could have told him he could go in any other circumstances. Don't know how I would have worked myself up to letting him stay planetside, otherwise. This was like ripping off a band-aid."
She's tended enough skinned joints to recognize the truth of it, to ruefully understand the necessity. She turns and pushes, rolling him onto his back, stretching her body across him, looking down into his eyes, her ribs breathing in counterpoint to his. She considers him, the prea wearing off enough for her to take a mental step back to assess the situation from his perspective.
He's not man who lets go easily. John's instinct has always been to pull his loved ones close, to fight desperately to keep them safe no matter the consequences, to keep them near no matter how difficult it was for them to breathe under those confines. That he's the one to decide that their child needs freedom, that he's the one to convince her, is nothing she'd have expected cycles ago.
She kisses him, tongue stroking, hands fisted against his chest and he responds, arms tight around her, thigh slipping up between hers to make her moan.
In the morning they will deal with all of it, a good friend in mourning, a jubilant son, their own fear and their bright spark of pigtailed chaos.
For the rest of this night they can enjoy a stolen respite of quiet before the battle ahead, breath and love between them like a savored last kiss. At times this life is still a startling gift, an astonishing pleasure, one never taken for granted, and certainly never surrendered lightly.
~*~
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Date: 2005-08-05 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 09:50 pm (UTC):::happy farscape sigh:::