I don't own farscape, and if I did I wouldn't go with this storyline. This is actually born out of my fears for season three....

When she saw him again, he wasn't in nearly as bad a shape as she thought he would be. He'd been banged around a little bit, that was obvious, but he wasn't drooling and he could stand upright and he was obviously himself. He even looked happy to see her.

"Aeryn! The cavalry arrives! I sure didn't, didn't expect this."

"On Moya, they told me that you-"

"Were a sweaty-toothed madman? Well, that all disa- went away when i killed Scorpius."

"They told me you didn't remember me," she said, shaking her head.

"Of course I remember you. You used to be on Moya, with the others. I have a lot of huge gaps, but i haven't forgotten everything. I was very glad to hear that you survived."

"You knew I was alive?" Aeryn felt a small and distinct snap. Something inside her had broken. She didn't think it was her heart- as far as she knew the heart was a strong and healthy organ providing life to the entire body- this was like a small dry twig breaking.

John just looked at her for a moment, puzzled. "Did you come to get me out of here?"

"Yes. We have to hurry. Crais is keeping "Captain" Braca distracted. He's offering some kind of deal or treaty with him. I hope he remembers that its supposed to be a ruse."

John left the jail cell with Aeryn. She wasn't very pleased when he insisted on making a side trip to the quarters that used to be Crais's, then Scorpy's and now Braca's. When he asked if they were meeting there she informed him that Crais was showing off Talyn's firepower to Braca. It didn't take long for him to find what he was looking for- he darted in and picked up the silver ball on the desk and they left again.

In no time, John found himself and Aeryn on Talyn, the Peacekeeper guests gone, and the three of them starbursting away. He realized that he had just been the object of a well-organized and planned retrieval.

"I don't understand why they didn't just execute you for killing Scorpius," Crais greeted him, sounding as if he wished that they had.

"Maybe they were too thr- too -too happy to be rid of him," John said, grinning. "Or- maybe- it was this," he said, pressing a couple of points on the silver ball and twisting. the ball opened up to reveal a small bottle with a chip with a small amount of grey matter attached to it. Aeryn looked away from it when she saw the contents. "I didn't go after Scorpius just for revenge. I wanted to get the wormhole information so that I could find my way home. You know, I can't understand why I haven't been working harder to find it the last cycle or so. There's nothing to keep me here."

"I think that we could help you with that, isn't that right, Aeryn?" Crais said grandly.

Sometime later John was pleased to see that the information on the chip was readily accessible by Talyn and was even making sense. Aeryn helped him set a course to a likely system and offered to let him use her new ship, since he no longer had the Farscape.

"Aeryn, I do remember that you were very protective of your prowler. Are you sure about this?"

"It was different," she said soberly. "On Moya, it was our only line of defense. Talyn is armed."

John was distracted for a moment by the light shining on her skin. Could he really have spent two cycles with her and not noticed how beautiful she was? She noticed his stare and shifted uncomfortably.

"You l-look different. I don't remember your wearing peacekeeper clothes. And I definitely don't remember that thing in the back of your neck," he said, reaching forward to touch the transponder there. She moved to avoid his touch, but didn't quite make it, his fingers brushing her neck and a spark flying between them. She looked at him with her eyes wide, looking completely vulnerable, and he had a sudden and unaccountable urge to take her in his arms.

"Were we..were we lovers?" he asked very softly, controlling the overwhelming desire to touch her.

"No. No, of course not," she said, and left.

The three inhabitants of Talyn performed an intricate dance over the next few solar days. John found that he spent almost no time alone with Aeryn, the presence of Crais could only be described as 'hovering' around her when ever he was near. For her part, she seemed to barely tolerate being hovered over, but was no more anxious to spend time alone with him than Crais was anxious for her too. On one of the rare occasions that Crais was not around, John told her the story of his chase and revenge on Scorpius.

"Somehow I'm not surprised, that even with half your memory gone and not able to talk,that you could get the better of him, John Crichton," and she almost smiled..

"Come with me," he said suddenly.

"What?"

"When I go to earth. Come with me."

"You probably don't remember why it's a bad idea for me to go to earth, do you?"

"We could make it work," he said, puzzled.

She looked at him very seriously. "When I was revived, I wasn't..myself. Crais took care of me. And he had some information that was very important to me. I know you don't remember enough about me to know why it was important, but I owe him."

"But you aren't happy."

"You never change, do you? No matter what happens, you're still- arrghh!" she pushed herself away from the table.

They were almost to their destination when John happened to overhear a more intimate moment between the two crewmates that he was reluctantly beginning to think of as a couple, seeing them that way because they approached problems together and related to Talyn together. They were standing at the weapons console together, not noticing that he was in the room, deep in conversation about something, when he saw Crais reach over and smooth his hand down her braid. She flinched under his touch. When he continued down her back and tried to put his arm around her waist, she hit him with an elbow to the chest, hard.

"You could at least wait until he's gone before you tried something like that," she hissed.

"He's already gone from you. You've already lost him," he said in a low voice, his arm capturing the one that had just hit him. "We could be frelling on the floor of command right in front of him and he wouldn't care."

She shrugged his arm loose and snarled. "Well, that wasn't part of the deal so keep your hands off me!"

There was no doubt in John's mind that he was the "he" that they were talking about. He searched his mind for one clue- one intimate moment that he might have shared with her but there was nothing. It occurred to him that it was a huge and conspicuous nothing, obvious in what it left out. Most of the rest of his memories since he had come through the rabbit hole were with Aeryn- all of the dangers had encountered and the new things he had learned were all tied up with memories of her. He remembered that they had been stuck in the flax together but not how they got out. He remembered not wanting her to leave with Crais and Talyn before but not actually watching her go. As he ruminated on this he felt the little cloth packet that he carried in his pocket and was wont to touch when he was feeling stressed, and suddenly realized that he had been a complete frelling idiot.

John carefully unwrapped the folded cloth and laid it on the table between the two of them. Aeryn stared dumbly at the lock of raven hair curled in the folds of the cloth. She slowly reached up and undid her braid, wavy hair tumbling over her shoulders, the shorn piece, now a little grown out, still immediately obvious.

"Tell me."

She shrugged. "I didn't know. You must have done it when-"

"No. Tell me about us."

Her eyes narrowed and became wary. "What do you want me to say? That I thought you loved me? That you told me so once but it wasn't really you and you didn't remember it anyway?"

John remained silent for a moment. She refused to meet his eyes, but reached out and touched the lock of hair tentatively.

"Did you love me?"

She jerked back as quickly as if he had struck at her, her eyes filling with tears.

"I'm not asking you to hurt you," he said quickly. "I..need to know. I need to know if we could get back what we had, whatever it was.

"No. It's too late," she said very softly. "I can't do it again. It was too hard the first time."

"I have to tell you- I'm sorry. I must have chosen to forget you. I remember the doctor asking about memories that he triggered, whether I wanted to keep them or not. It must have hurt too much."

For a moment he thought she was going to lose it- that she was going to cry right then and there- or hit him, or do something. But then she stood up, and faced away from him for a second, and when she looked back her face was carefully neutral.

"You made the right choice," she said, and walked off.

Her resounding refusal to talk about them made him even more surprised when she showed up in his room that night. She sat on the edge of his bed and, even in the dim light, he could see that she was taking off her leather jacket.

"Does this mean that you've changed your mind about coming with me tomorrow?"

"No. It means I'm saying goodbye."

When she slipped under the covers with him, he tried to ask her if she was sure, if this was really what she really wanted to do, but she said, "no talking," and kissed him and pulled him over onto her and soon all he could think about was how much she wanted him.

He only had a moment afterwards to savor the feeling of oneness and belonging before she got out of the bed and got dressed.

"I told Crais I would stay on Talyn if he helped me rescue you," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed again.

"Pacts with the devil aren't legally binding."

She arched an eyebrow at him.

"I mean..what I'm trying to say..is that you can't be held to a promise you made under duress."

"Our past is in the past and our futures are not together," she said, picking up his hand that was lying across her arm and placing it firmly on the bed, and getting up to leave. He watched her, trying desperately to think of something to get her to stay, but he found himself unable to speak.

Aeryn was gazing at the perfect and stable wormhole John had just created. Once again, she marveled at the beauty of something that she hated so much. Crais came up beside her, having avoided her until John left.

"You went to him last night, didn't you?" he hissed, jealousy written all over his swarthy face. "Didn't it occur to you that i would know? Did you think about the fact that Talyn, and I with him, would feel what ..you did, through the transponder."

"I knew that," she said, her voice ice cold.

Crais was about to continue in the same nasty vein, until he noticed what Aeryn was staring at. The prowler had swung away from the wormhole and was returning to Talyn. Crais started to tell Talyn not to let it back on board until he saw the dangerous look on Aeryn's face.

Within microts John was back on Talyn.

"You missed it." Aeryn said, bewildered.

"Nah," he shrugged. "It worked once, it'll work again."

"Aeryn. I made a huge mistake when I asked them to remove the memories of my feelings for you. Not just because it was wrong, and cowardly, but because it was stupid. The memories are gone, but the feelings aren't. I have felt so much guilt, and rage and desire for revenge, and sorrow and loss but I didnŐt have anything to connect it to until now. I know I loved you, love you, will love you, and I am not going anywhere until I get you back."

Aeryn just stood there, her mask crumbling and what John thought of as the face of the real Aeryn emerging.

"And besides, I couldn't frell up another prowler of yours."

Aeryn smiled.

John was too busy looking for what he was hoping to see in Aeryn's eyes...hope? love? forgiveness? that he didn't see the expression on Crais's face.

"If you are going to be with him, you can get the frell off my ship!" he thundered.

The bridge went crazy with flashing lights and beeping sounds.

Her eyes still locked with John's, Aeryn said calmly, "I think Talyn would have something to say about that."

"Here, Moya, Earth, some Godforsaken rock in some unknown solar system. I don't care, as long as its with you." John reached out and took her hand carefully. "We have some decisions to make," he said tentatively.

Aeryn closed the gap between them and slipped her other hand in his. "Yes. Yes, we do."