"Yotz!" snarled Rygel.

"Shit, Ryg, watch where you're going!" Crichton yelled in return.

Dominar and human astronaut had nearly collided as they rounded a corner in one of Moya's disused upper tiers from opposite directions. Rygel had been floating on his throne sled at a higher altitude than usual, brooding about the embarrassing disaster with the traitorous Orrhn. Crichton, too, appeared to have had his thoughts elsewhere. They stared eye to eye for a moment, accepting that they'd both been seeking solitude, and then Crichton leaned against the ribbed wall of the corridor and sank to the floor.

Rygel regarded the human for a few more microts, assessing the dejection in his whole posture. He didn't know this Crichton as he had come to know the one aboard Talyn, but he knew he owed him a debt. Where to start? Well there was always the obvious.

Rygel's throne sank to the ground and he cleared his throat. "Since we're both here, er, I wanted to thank you for rescuing me. I know you needn't have, Moya was in no danger with that bitch and the Peacekeeper gone."

Crichton leaned his head against his leather-clad knees and waved his hand vaguely at the Hynerian. "Don't mention it, Sparky. Couldn't let you be kidnapped your first day back...."

"Yes, well, be that as it may," Rygel started, only to be interrupted.

"Do we really need to be having this conversation, Buckwheat?"

Irritated at having his magnanimous overtures rebuffed, Rygel snapped, "Not if you don't want to know some things she can't tell you yet and Crais won't!" He started to turn away, thronesled whirring.

Crichton was on his feet in an instant. "Wait, Rygel. Wait."

They looked at each other again for long microts, Crichton towering over the tiny Hynerian. Rygel could see the conflicting emotions warring within the human. Longing to know what had happened on Talyn, fear that it would hurt too much to hear, a sense that perhaps he didn't have the right to know, that even asking would be invading Aeryn's privacy.... "Listen, you yotz," the Hynerian said gruffly, "she's going on your frelling suicide mission, that should tell you something about how she feels about you."

"Or him," Crichton said.

Frelling human. "All right, Crichton, listen. You're more likely *not* to get some people I've come to care about killed if you're not brooding about what might have happened. So do you want some facts or not? Last chance."

The human looked like he hated himself, but, "Yes," he said. "Yes, Rygel, tell me, whatever it is you want to tell me."

Rygel looked up and down the corridor. He wasn't going to crane his neck to look up at the human during this conversation, but he didn't think it was a good idea to let Crichton sit on the floor out here where someone else might happen on them, either. The most likely person to be wandering about in this normally deserted area was Aeryn, and who knew what she would do if she thought they were discussing her. That third storeroom on the left was promising. It had lots of crates they could sit behind, unless someone had been housecleaning while he had been away on Talyn. He could even escape unseen through an access shaft he happened to know was in the back of the room, if it became necessary. "Come on, then," he said to Crichton, and led him into the room.

Crichton reluctantly settled on the floor in the dimly lit room as Rygel asked, but the limp dejection of a few microts earlier had been replaced by coiled tension. Rygel suspected he was prepared to leap up and run from the room at any time, but the human continued to wait for Rygel to begin the conversation.

"Look," Rygel finally said, "half a cycle is a long time to try to summarize, and I don't know all the details," he admitted. "Is there anything you especially want to know about?"

Crichton screwed up his face and looked at the crate beside him, then looked back at Rygel. "Were they lovers?"

Rygel rolled his eyes. "Don't be a yotz, Crichton. Don't waste my time and yours asking things you already know the answer to." A little more gently he added, "If she was just regretting lost opportunities, she'd be in your bed right now."

Crichton closed his eyes and nodded painfully. "Then, when?"

"Do you mean, did she jump into his bed the moment you were out of sight?" Rygel said. "No. For the first couple of monens, things were just like they always are with you two."

"Frelled," Crichton said with a hint of a grin.

"Frelled," Rygel agreed. "Then I was on a long-range recon with that lunatic Stark, and Crais got Talyn swallowed by a budong." He paused when he saw Crichton react to the mention of the huge creature, but the human made no comment, so he continued. "Something must have happened before we rescued them, because after that you couldn't pry them apart with a crowbar."

Apparently that was a little too graphic for the human, because Crichton closed his eyes again. "Was she happy?" he asked without opening them.

What to say. That he'd never seen anyone so completely happy? That she positively oozed satisfaction? Radiated Joy? She had never seemed so much at peace? "Yes," Rygel said simply.

"That's good," Crichton said absently, running his hands over his knees. When he spoke again, he leaped over a long stretch of time, perhaps not really wanting to think about Aeryn's life with a Crichton who wasn't him. "When he....when he died. Did it take long? Was she there?"

Rygel was heartened to hear some genuine concern for his lost twin in the human's voice, not just self-pity. "Not too long," he said gently. "A few arns. He landed that craft of his, that module, on Talyn. Aeryn thought it would be a safer maneuver for him with the docking web than reentering the atmosphere when he was already ill."

Crichton's head came up. "The copy of my module is on Talyn?"

The Hynerian nodded, but continued with his story. "Aeryn and I arrived shortly after he did, and she took charge of him."

"Was he in pain?" he asked, morbidly curious.

"Stark helped with that. Fahrbot or not, he's good for something, eh?"

"Yes, yes he is," Crichton breathed with relief.

"The rest of us said our good-byes and left them their privacy." Rygel hesitated, not sure how to describe the long wait, after Talyn had told them Crichton was gone, before they finally made the decision to intrude on her grief and found her curled up in the bed alongside his cooling body, face streaked with tearstains. She had held herself together long enough to prepare the body for burial in space, and then she had cried for days. "She was inconsolable," he said finally. "For a long while."

The human's eyes filled with tears. "If he wasn't already dead," he muttered, "I'd kill him myself. Goddamned hero," he said in disgust.

And who just declared war on Scorpius, the Hynerian refrained from saying. The human was nearly as fahrbot as Stark, after all. After a bit of silence, Rygel cleared his throat and asked, "Did anyone tell you on Moya that the retrieval squad chasing Talyn was led by Aeryn's mother?"

That got Crichton's attention. "Her mother? Aeryn's mother?" He looked appalled, but the tears were gone now, as quickly as they had come on. "Pilot said the retrieval squad was destroyed."

"That bitch nearly killed me, and lobotomized Talyn," Rygel said, his voice betraying his anger. "She was going to turn Aeryn over to the Peacekeepers. And that frelling Crais made a deal with her, her life for reporting us dead, and didn't tell us."

Crichton's eyes narrowed, and Rygel could seem him making plans to flay Crais alive, perhaps as a substitute for the dead copy of himself.

Rygel sighed. "He was right to do it, though. If he'd simply killed her, the Peacekeepers would only have sent out a new retrieval squad, and we wouldn't have known where or when they would hit us."

"You're defending Crais?" Crichton said, as if that were the craziest thing he'd ever heard. Well, he hadn't heard his other self leave all of them, including Aeryn, in Crais' care.

"Only his actions," Rygel said with dignity. "Crais used to be a Peacekeeper Captain, he has some understanding of the bigger picture, unlike the rest of you."

Crichton shook his head in an "if that don't beat all" gesture, but didn't comment further.

Rygel observed Crichton closely. This was the most crucial information he wanted to get across to the human. Aeryn's time on that hideous planet Valldon. The man needed to understand how hard-won her current stability was. And he needed to take hope from it.

"We didn't find out that Xhalax was still alive until Stark did a very foolish thing. He encouraged Aeryn to go to a planet called Valldon. A disgusting place, full of frelling mystics and thieves. He told her she might contact Crichton there, the yotz!"

The human looked confused. "Why would he tell her something like that?"

Rygel sighed. "The welnitz was trying to help. She....was very....I suppose you would say she was very depressed. Mourning." He paused, finally deciding there was no way to put a pretty face on it. "If you must know, when we finally found her on Valldon, she was indulging in a drunken wallow in self-pity and grief."

It shouldn't have been surprising that Crichton bristled at the words. "She was in pain!" he snarled.

The frelling human loved her as much as the dead one had, Rygel reminded himself. That was why he'd started this conversation in the first place. "Look, Crichton, you need to understand how she was. She really didn't care if she lived or died."

Crichton blinked at him, vacillating between anger and pain, but apparently waiting for the Hynerian to go on.

"I don't know what she did to Crais and Stark, but they were *not* happy, I can assure you. When I got to her, she was on a window ledge about 300 metras above the ground, with the latest of many bottles of fellip nectar in her hand."

The picture Rygel was painting was upsetting the human tremendously, and the Hynerian strove to get to the point quickly. "Look, John," he said, surprising himself as much as Crichton by putting his hand on the human's arm, "I don't think she truly intended to harm herself, but she didn't give a frell if she died. She was that lost. I talked her back in," which wasn't precisely true, but..."and then her mother got past Crais and Stark and turned up in her room."

Crichton closed his eyes again and leaned his head back against the wall behind him. "And," he prompted.

"I don't know what happened, exactly," Rygel admitted. "When Crais got there the two of them were on the ledge again, and Xhalax had a gun pointed at Aeryn. Frelling Crais pulled the trigger this time, and her mother fell."

John was near tears again, imagining this new loss for Aeryn on top of the death of the man she loved .

Rygel shook his head. "Crichton, whatever happened there between Aeryn and her mother, it made her pull herself together. She found a way to live, even if it meant retreating to her Peacekeeper indoctrination."

Crichton's shoulder's slumped. "It took me three cycles to get her out of that damn shell," he whispered. "And he put her back into it."

This was not what Rygel was aiming for. "Don't be a yotz," he snapped. "How long did it take today for her to start working with you? Would I be here having this fahrbot conversation if she hadn't?" When Crichton acknowledged the point, Rygel continued, "She needs the Peacekeeper façade right now to help her keep going. She'll give it up little by little, as she did today."

Rygel watched the human's face, seeing him think back over the day, accepting the small victories that had appeared as the day had worn on, until the moment she had walked up and stood next to him, supporting his plan. Crichton slowly regained the determined look he had had on his face when he had told them of his plans to attack Scorpius.

"She takes time," Crichton said firmly. "And I am an expert at giving her time."

"Exactly," Rygel told him. "Just concentrate on not getting everyone killed with your fahrbot plan."

Crichton actually laughed. "I don't even have a plan yet, Sparky," he said. "But I will."

Dominar Rygel XVI regarded the human in front of him. It seemed he had satisfied Crichton's immediate need to know what had happened on Talyn. He hoped it was enough until Aeryn was ready to tell Crichton more. He grunted and started to edge his thronesled towards the door.

"Hey, Ryg," Crichton said as he got partway across the room. When Rygel stopped, Crichton said simply, "Thanks."

"Call us even," Rygel said. "And please, don't tell Aeryn we were talking about her," he added as he left through the doorway.

Crichton grinned, and stood up and stretched. Bless Rygel for taking pity on him, and taking some of the mystery away. Even as limited and biased an account as he had just received was better than his imagination. And it helped him understand how much Aeryn had been through. If half of what Rygel had said was true, it was amazing she was functioning at all. "She needs time," he said, vowing to make sure she got it.

Crichton left the storeroom and headed back towards the living quarters to try to get some sleep. They had a long road ahead of them.