sab

for what it's worth, I wrote a little Aeryn. It's got holes in it, but for now. Set post-"The Choice."

TITLE: Hard/Work
AUTHOR: Makiko
ARCHIVE: Anywhere, drop a line.
RATING: NC-17
SPOILERS: Set somewhere between "The Choice" and "Fractures"
SUMMARY: Twenty-minute relationships, and he'd never let her down.
SOUNDTRACK: Annie Lennox, "Whiter Shade of Pale"
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Punk found an arc and Pene sailed along it and I'd be lost without my symmetrical girls. And then Luna did her voodoo, but I still owe the title to SR.

She hates her frelling body and there isn't enough pain in the world.

Fock. Like Crichton used to say. Fock you. Fuck me, you fucking fuck. She hates her fucking body. Her muscles ache just enough that she can feel them: white, flabby. Loose ropes in her skinny arms.

She's in training and she meant to keep herself in condition all along but it turns out she hasn't been. So now she sweats early. Has to catch her breath. She's on the edge of her bed, pushing small weights straight up, twisting her arms on the elbow and keeping her lower back off the mattress. Sits up on her tailbone and crunches her abdominals, bringing her knees in close to her ears. Fifteen. Twenty. And this time when she rolls back it feels like she's too exposed, cunt-forward and she imagines him entering her. Hooks her heels up around his invisible shoulders. Arches her back. Thirty. Thirty-five. Forty. Weights in the air and her arms shudder like gelatin. Fifty. She collapses on the bed. She meant to do two hundred.

She made a few calls from Valldon, a few more after they left. They all tell her Aeryn Sun will never be a Peacekeeper again, but she refuses to believe it. People she'd once called friends now pretend not to know her. Cadets she'd hazed and tortured are now too busy to come to the comms, and even their deputies refuse to take messages. At first she took steps to mask the calls from Crais and Talyn, but now she doesn't care. The PKs will take her back, and Crais and Talyn will hear about it soon enough.

She stands up, peels off her sweaty underpiece and lets her hair fall against her bare back, her bare breasts. She's pocked and red where the elastic dug into her skin, and her face is blotchy in the mirror. She squeezes her breasts with two hands, remembers Crichton's thick paws, tosses the undershirt to the floor.

"Crais?" she slaps her comms.

"Yes, Aeryn?"

"I'm going to take a shower." She's not sure why she tells him that. He pauses.

"All right," he says. "I'll make sure Talyn knows to route the warm water through your quarters." He gives her an excuse, and she smiles.

"Thank you," she says. "And thank Talyn."

"Talyn says you are very welcome," Crais says, and she can hear his smile. She steps out of her shorts and pulls on a bathrobe.

It's the grey one, the one Crichton liked to wear when they'd stay in her quarters. He had that strange human difficulty with nudity, and even after they'd made love and licked and bitten and swallowed and stared, he'd still hide himself when he stood up, would wrap the robe around his shoulders before ducking into the wasteroom. Aeryn smells the sleeve and it smells like semen and soap. Nutty. Yeasty. She presses the wide cloth to her nose and mouth and inhales and it smells like sex and Crichton.

She hasn't admitted it for longer than it takes to think and forget, but the sex is part of the reason she wants her old life back.

That old life where her body hurt in different ways, and she wants it back. Wants the ache between her thighs from a dozen different men; wants to have to learn and shift and readjust to each new size and shape, penises and orgasms, not names. Last night she was in command and it was just that easy to slip her arm around Crais' waist from behind, rest her chin on his shoulder. She's gotten used to bodies and she's not sure where the shape of hers stops, alone. Part of the reason she hates this body. Part of the reason she's gone back into training to become a Peacekeeper again.

"Crais," she says to her comms.

"Yes?"

"Could you come up here a moment?"

He hesitates again. "Is there something wrong with the water reclamation system?"

She lets the robe drop from her shoulders and she looks sweaty and bruised. "No," she says. "Come here."

Hands against Talyn's curved wall, fingers splayed like binthes. She tips her head down and moans and Crais drives into her from behind, slippery and slick and panting under the water. He's too eager. He comes too quickly, and she takes his hand and slips it between her legs, making sure he knows she has to finish too. He bites her shoulder. Tweaks a nipple, grabs both breasts and squeezes. Trails his fingertips along her neck. She plucks his hand free and pushes it back between her legs again. "This," she says. "Now, Crais." She hears him sigh and she doesn't care. She leans into him and his fingers slide inside her, hooked around her knobby hipbone. She grabs his wrist. He pushes harder. She leans her forehead against the wall, locks her knees. Shudders. Release.

After they shut the water off she tosses him Crichton's robe and he blinks at it and sets it down on a chair. They sit on Aeryn's bed, two Sebaceans, naked and wet. She squeezes her hair out with a towel and Crais plays with his testicles and looks at the floor.

"You ever tried contacting the Peacekeepers again?" she asks, casually.

"Talyn's told me you've been making calls," Crais says. "I have a feeling I'd have even worse luck than you're having."

"I don't know about that," she chuckles. "Even the techs won't take my calls."

"You should tell them you're running from me," Crais says. "After all, I was the one who deemed you irreversibly contaminated. Now that I'm out of favor it should be a simple matter to get reinstated. Tell them I'm insane. It shouldn't be too hard to get them to believe that."

He's joking, but she looks away because she's tried that already. She even offered to kill Crais for them. She hadn't stopped to wonder what she'd do if they said yes. "Yes," she says, nodding. "You'd think it would be easy."

He stands up and begins to get dressed, facing her. Men have always been men to her, but now all she can think is that he doesn't look like Crichton. Where Crais is compact, swarthy, squat and hairy, Crichton was pale and smooth. Crais has broad flat chest muscles; Crichton's strength centered in his triceps, across his waistline and his back. Crichton's penis was long and thin, like a snake; Crais is short and wide, like a plug, like most of the other Sebaceans Aeryn has recreated with. She once commented to Crichton about his size and shape, but he shushed her, saying his people didn't talk about things like that. "It's like 'does this dress make me look fat?'" he had said. "It's the unspoken deal. We say no, you say we're the biggest one you've seen." With a dip of the chin, Crais zips up his pants and leaves the room.

Crais is a little bit in love with her, she knows, and he has been for a long while, since back when she was serving under him. But she knows he's smart enough not to think that recreation is the same as love, and she knows it's clear what he's done for her, what they've done for each other. They're both former Peacekeepers and adults, and he's smarter than that.

Crichton wasn't. The dumb human who equated sex with love, and it was enough, somehow, to trick her into believing it too. "God, I love you, Aeryn," he'd growl, and even after he explained who god was she couldn't process the confession. Crais, instead, said intelligent things like "here" and "faster" and "good." Monosyllabic promises she could fulfill. And "that good?" and she'd say "yes" and he'd live up to his promise too. Twenty-minute relationships, and he'd never let her down.

Crais wouldn't die on her. No self-respecting Peacekeeper would.

It's past suppertime, but she's not eating now because she's in training. Crais brings her food cubes and she eats them every second day, fasting in between to purge her body of toxins and Crichton.

The Peacekeepers won't take her if she stinks of him, and they'll check her eyes and her throat and between her legs to make sure she's healthy before they give her an assignment. Now she hates her scrawny, hollow body, but she's healthier than she's ever been.

"Talyn," she says. "Patch me in to the main communications system." Get me an outside line, she remembers Crichton saying. "Hail the nearest Peacekeeper base."

"Belay that for a moment, Talyn." Crais cuts in, his voice smooth and low over the comms. "Aeryn. Have you heard of the ex-Peacekeeper units that patrol along the Argellian rim?"

She slips into her vest and buckles her weapon to her hip. "Mmm," she says. "Traitors."

Crais laughs. "No more than you or I," he says. "They're counterterrorism groups. They work for the Peacekeepers, indirectly. So that their superiors have...deniability."

In the quiet of her room she imagines his face, all squat and bearded and trying so hard for composure. All she gets when she checks her memory is Crichton's smile. "Aeryn, come here." Nod of his head toward the window and that baby boy grin. She blinks and he disappears. "I am what I was bred to be," she says.

"No, you're not," Crais says, and she'd forgotten the comms was open. "You can't be anymore."

"They'll take me back," she says. "I am a Peacekeeper."

"No, we're not," he says, more firmly. "You're more than that now."

Because she let Crichton love her, she thinks. Because she loved him back, and men aren't just men, and bodies aren't just bodies anymore.

"So what is there for me?" she asks, alone in her room.

"Talk to these people," Crais says. "The counterterrorist cells on the rim. I've watched you training, Aeryn. You want to work again. You need a pulse pistol in your hand. You should go."

"They're assassins," Aeryn murmurs. She kicks on her boots.

"Sometimes," Crais says. "But Aeryn-"

She steels herself for an argument. But his voice is softer when he speaks again.

"They think like us," he says. "They're fighting for the right things, Aeryn. I think this might be-"

She takes a breath, picks up Crichton's bathrobe and shoves it in her footlocker. "This might be the closest I can get," she says.

"Yes," he says. "If it weren't for Talyn I'd go with you."

She smiles when he says that, because a year ago she didn't trust him with this incredible red beast that she named, and now she knows they were made for each other. That they're family. "Do you have a contact?"

"Yes," he says. "Her name is Eska Kaarn, but I'm not sure if she goes by that now. I'll look her up when we get back to Moya."

"How far are we?"

"Another twenty arns, maybe," Crais says. "Maybe less."

She starts to head up to command but she pauses in the doorway and runs her knuckles along Talyn's smooth interior. She knows in some animal part of her brain that there's a creature on Moya who looks like John, and she trembles to think that in twenty arns she'll see his face. She knows in that same animal part of her brain that there's a war beginning, and that this John will find himself in the middle of it, just like her John did. She touches her gun. It's not his war, but he'll fight it with the same idiocy and boyish grace, and she'll back him up, but she won't look at his face. She promises herself. There's war in the air and she's a soldier, so at the very least, she'll get to fight. And with Crais' contact she'll find a place for herself where she can do her job and be away from all her memories of the Crichton who died in her arms.

"Crais-" she says, talking too loud on the comms, taking long steps toward Talyn's command center.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

She can hear him smile, that great brick of a face cracking around a hairy grin. "We've spent too long looking for something worth dying for," he says. "You as much as I."

As much as Crichton, she thinks. And she knows it was worth it for him, and she knows that, in the absence of his memory, it's the least she can do.

*