Hearts and Flowers (PG-R)

The third (or fourth, if you count Fifty Shades of Black White and Red), and probably final part of the most enormous story I've ever written. At long last, after over 100K words and 4 fics we finally get to the 'Big Reveal' that I had originally planned when I wrote my outline for this storyline such a long, long time ago. That said, there do now seem to be a few new loose ends flapping about here… (Thanks JJ and Vinegardog , for suggesting hem). Hmm. Seriously though, readers should consider this story as finished. At the moment, I can't see myself taking it further.

Warnings: R for a very brief sex scene, which a concerned parent could easily redact without ruining the story, but mostly PG-13 for occasional sexual references and moderate violence.

Previous instalments:

The Trouble With Normal
All's Well Under The Sun
Fifty Shades of Black White and Red (also R, also not key to the overall plot)

The story so far:

Set about 15 years or thereabouts after Comic #15. John and Aeryn's two teenage children are kidnapped. The Moyans capture some of those responsible and discover that they are from Earth. John and Aeryn travel to Earth and, with the aid of their Peacekeeper allies and sympathetic humans, rescue the children. The Peacekeepers decide they need an ambassador to Earth and ask Aeryn to take on the role. Aeryn accepts, but things do not go smoothly. Some humans seem opposed to them or want to use them to serve their own ends and someone unknown, who seems to know a great deal about Aeryn, starts spreading stories about her. The troublemaker is eventually tracked down and revealed to be Grayza, who, it seems, has made a life for herself on Earth. Aeryn and John confront her, but she blows up the building they are in in an apparent attempt to kill them, killing herself in the process. And now on Farscape…..

Thanks: To JJ, Vinegardog and pdsldl for beta-ing, inputs and just plain encouragement when I'd given up on this seemingly never-ending story.

Word count: About 25,000

Chapter 1:

"…. Repercussions from the death of Maryland business owner Melanie Daniels continue to be felt both in Washington and throughout the country," the bouffant owning TV news anchor intoned with obvious relish. "Whilst neither the government nor the Sebacean embassy have so far commented on conflicting rumours that Daniels was either a deep-cover Sebacean agent or that she was killed by embassy staff, sources have confirmed, off-the-record, that the Sebacean embassy was involved somehow with her and with her death. Gerald Wagnleitner, spokesman for the New-York based Earth-First movement described it as 'A watershed moment in our relationship with the aliens, one of the first times the public has had the chance to see the extraterrestrials for what they really are: a threat to our…'"

Aeryn sighed and rubbed her eyes wearily as she waited the few microts for her laptop to power down, half listening to the story unfolding on the TV in the corner of her office. It was only mid-afternoon but she had just struggled through a stressful and busy couple of days and the combination of the stresses of work, the strains of home and an on-going lack of sleep were starting to tell on her.

If she had been harbouring any thoughts that her workload might have reduced as a consequence of the embassy's relationship with the US government turning colder, such hopes had been well and truly dashed by the reality of what had actually happened in the last fortnight. Not only had the change in the nature of their relationship served to complicate communications with their host country, but other major Earth powers had also immediately tried to increase their interactions with the Peacekeepers. John had suggested that any timidity that those other countries and power blocks might have felt in the previous months had been washed away once they had seen the opportunity to fill the vacuum in US-Peacekeeper relations and advance their own interests more vocally. It seemed a reasonable assessment of what she was now experiencing. Every day brought a new approach from some far-flung opportunist or other. Thank the Goddess for translator microbes!

A few of the more forward human nations, wasting no time, had even suggested that the Peacekeeper embassy should relocate to within their borders. Aeryn had raised the possibility with John and been surprised at the vehemence of his opposition. Indeed, they had had a blazing row about the issue five days ago, with Aeryn accusing John of being too emotionally tied up with his home country to discuss the matter logically and John countering that she should be able to understand how important loyalty to his country of birth was to him. Honour had been satisfied on both sides when Aeryn had announced that she had no intention of moving the embassy anyway: regardless of their short-term disagreements, the US remained the dominant power on Earth and was also host to the United Nations. For as long as the Peacekeepers retained only one embassy on Earth, there was only one logical place for it to be. And with Aeryn's declaration they had both been happy to move on from that particular discussion.

The argument with John hadn't been the only domestic issue that Aeryn had had to face: a further familial difficulty had emerged as a consequence of D'Argo and Livvy's enforced break from school. Aeryn had readily agreed with her advisors that the security situation was far too uncertain for the children to continue attending the school. However, they had not thought of everything that could go wrong: For the last two weekens, Livvy had been even more withdrawn than usual, sulking with a depth and persistence which rivalled John at his worst. Finally, three evenings previously, Aeryn had discovered that Livvy was involved in some sort of nascent romantic relationship with one of the boys at school. A lot of Livvy's sulking seemed to be down to her being upset at the idea of no longer being able to continue developing that relationship. The smouldering situation had finally erupted into a conflagration the day before. D'Argo had found out and begun to tease Livvy about it, questioning why she would choose a weak and annoying human when there were plenty of cadets on Moya that she could take her pick from. Naturally, when Aeryn had heard his words, she had exploded. She had then spent the next few arns, time which she could ill-afford, loudly and pointedly explaining to her eldest son the extent to which he was in error, how a weak and annoying human could make a perfectly satisfactory mate and how she would not put up with such an attitude from her own offspring.

It was late evening by the time she had been able to get back to her overflowing desk, and that had stretched into what John would have called the 'small hours' before she had finally made it to bed.

The next day Aeryn had woken in a foul mood after a fitful night's sleep, during which Talyn had gotten them up twice, before John had finally agreed to take the baby off to a separate room for the rest of the night to give Aeryn a chance to salvage some sleep. After a particularly morose family breakfast, with no one speaking civilly to anyone, she had spent the morning wishing heartily for more time to devote to catching up on matters either domestic or ambassadorial. She had found herself longing for the arrival of the additional diplomatic staff, which High Command had promised to send her. The last thing she had needed was another unexpected event to make even more demands on her time. Unfortunately, that was exactly what she got.

She had just been finishing second meal, in her office with only John for company, trying to make up after the stresses of the night before and of breakfast, when she had received an urgent call from Sikozu, up on Moya. Apparently, the Med Tech examining Grayza's corpse had found something, which needed her attention. John, had seen her expression of weary despair at the news and had promptly suggested to Aeryn that she spend the next half arn finishing up anything which absolutely could not wait whilst he packed an overnight bag for them both and arranged 'D'Argo- and Livvy-sitters' for the night: His plan was that once they had dealt with Sikozu's discovery then they could, baby Talyn permitting, spend the night relaxing on Moya amongst old friends and away from the hustle, bustle and demands on Earth.

She was inclined to think it was one of his better plans.

Aeryn closed the lid on the now inert computer. Resisting the urge to check her phone, she picked up the laptop case beside her desk, about to pack the computer away to take with her, but then thought better of the idea, locking it away in her desk drawer instead. There was no point in making an effort to get away from it all and then taking it all with you when you went. There was some technology she couldn't do without, though: She picked up her comms badge and activated it.

"John? John, it's Aeryn. Are you ready to go?" She asked hopefully, allowing herself a slight smile at the thought of an evening back amongst the familiar surroundings of Moya and of a night spent in her own bed, in her own quarters, aboard the ship that had been her only true home.

'~'

"It is a neural control device," Sikozu explained to Aeryn, John and Nybar, whilst holding aloft the small conical implant that chief med tech Jadim had found embedded in Grayza's neck nearly a day before. "Sometimes called a neural harness." John screwed up his face, as though trying to remember where he had heard that term before. "This component is placed in the… victim… allowing their actions to be totally controlled by whoever possesses the rest of the apparatus. It's Scarran, well, Kalish in origin, but used by others." Aeryn arched an eyebrow and John looked as though he was about to launch into some long-winded monologue, so Sikozu pressed on, hoping to cut him off. "Scorpius, for instance."

"You think that Scorpius…!?" John exploded, interrupting. Sikozu mentally kicked herself. She'd started him off now. She should never have mentioned the hybrid.

"No, I do not," she insisted carefully.

"But someone?" Nybar remarked soberly, as always.

"Indeed," Sikozu replied with a nod, placing the device on the table between them. John snatched it up and began to peer at it, causing Sikozu to wonder what the human could possibly hope to divine from such a close visual examination of what was an effectively featureless device. Typically, deficient behaviour, she desperately tried not to think or say out loud.

"So someone was controlling Grayza? Using this device?" Aeryn voiced all of their thoughts. "If so, who and to what end?" Sikozu could no longer entirely control her irritation and snatched the neural control back from John, almost immediately setting it back down on the table with a firm thwacking sound.

There was a short, laden silence. Nybar seemed to be having trouble keeping a straight face.

"That," John replied, his face barely showing any reaction at all to Sikozu's unspoken rebuke. "Is the million dollar question." He looked around him at the trio of stony faces and then winked at Sikozu. She scowled back at him.

'~'

"How long are you staying for this time?" Chiana asked Aeryn as they made their way through Moya's arching, golden corridors towards Pilot's chamber. Chiana had arrived at the medical centre just as John, Aeryn, Sikozu and Nybar were leaving. John had been heading off to his and Aeryn's quarters whilst Sikozu and Nybar, their briefing concluded, had been going back to Command. Chiana, who was not on duty, had seized the opportunity to accompany Aeryn and spend a short time alone with her friend.

"Not long enough!" Aeryn had replied wistfully, running her fingertips over one of Moya's corridor ribs as they turned a corner. "Probably just the one night." She added. They came to a fork in the corridor and turned left towards Pilot's den. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in babysitting Talyn for the night?" Aeryn's voice betrayed such hints of weariness and hope that Chiana couldn't bring herself to decline the request outright, although looking after someone else's narl for a night was far from the top of her list of things she wanted to do. Chiana swallowed, nodded and tried to flash Aeryn a smile, which she hoped, would convey that she would love to do so.

Aeryn nodded in thanks but her mood didn't seem to lift any. Whatever it was that was weighing on her, it must be bad, Chiana surmised.

"Wassamatter?" Chiana enquired, searching Aeryn's face for clues as to how upset she was and why. "Tell aunty Chi," the Nebari joked when no answer was immediately forthcoming. No matter Aeryn's seniority in years and position, she had helped her friend so often with her emotions over the cycles that that particular nickname, which John had first given to her about ten cycles ago, had stuck.

"Humans!" Aeryn sighed, wiggling her eyebrows to show that the species were not all bad. "They're infuriating, frustrating, confusing…"

"Yeah, they're all that," Chiana agreed as they made their way up a level riser to Pilot's tier. "Tell you what, then… How about you get Sikozu to look after the narl and I'll trade you Senior Officer Lonevo for John?" she offered, skipping along beside Aeryn, trying out a variation on her long-running tease about bedding Crichton.

"Is Lonevo your latest recreation partner, then?" Aeryn remarked with a casual ease born of her Peacekeeper upbringing and nurtured during many conversations with Chiana about sex over the cycles that they had known each other. Chiana nodded enthusiastically and licked her lips. "Nice choice." Aeryn continued. "I always thought he looked a bit like Larraq." Aeryn mumbled her approval, blushing as soon as the words came out.

"Larraq, eh?" Chiana teased with a raised eyebrow. "So, is it a deal then?" Chi chuckled. "John for La… I mean Lonevo?" It was no secret to Chiana that Aeryn had found the late Peacekeeper Special Ops Captain attractive, one of many nuggets of information that helped to spice up Chiana's frequent teasing of her.

"No!" Aeryn snorted with some finality. She rolled her eyes as they turned the corner into the last corridor before Pilot's den. "But if you could frell some sense into my son sometime…." She added. "He's turning out to be as annoying as his father…." Chiana hooted with laughter. Aeryn suddenly stopped dead in her tracks and snagged Chiana's arm in her hand, pulling the Nebari round to face her. "You do know that I was just joking right, Chiana?" Aeryn demanded, suddenly serious, fixing Chiana with a witheringly solemn glare. "I mean, John would be furious."

"Sure, Aeryn," Chiana laughed and winked, defusing the moment. She added a shrug for good measure. "That'd just be too weird."

"Fine," Aeryn let out the breath she had been holding, released Chiana's arm and took a few more steps towards Pilot's den.

"Let me know if you change your mind on that, though," Chiana called after her with a cackle, seeing the opportunity for more teasing as she hurried to catch back up with her friend. "I mean, these last few monens, his eema's been shaping up nicely. Be as good as John's in another six."

'~'

Senior Officer Silom checked the readings on his console to ensure that the Leviathan transport pod that he had piloted through the wormhole to the Sol system was safely back in normal space. His task accomplished, he began to triangulate their position against the nearby navigation beacon. He only had four more arns to go on this flight. Four more arns to put up with being in close confinement with the team of six professional Peacekeeper diplomats he was charged with ferrying to Earth: They weren't his sort of people at all - way too supercilious and slippery. A couple of them wouldn't shut up, a most un-Peacekeeper-like trait. They just kept talking and talking, but all of their talk just seemed to be a means of trying to show who was more intelligent or had had the better or more important experiences. The remainder of the diplomatic team were mostly disconcertingly quiet, sitting watching everything with a slight smile playing across their faces. The quiet ones were the worst, he had decided. They didn't say much, but what they did say was often vicious. He would rather they had remained silent permanently so that he wouldn't have to endure the pithy remarks that they would drop from time to time.

Silom really wasn't happy with this whole assignment. He was a Marauder pilot and could have done with being in something a bit more heavily armed than a Leviathan transport pod. But he knew well enough that it was just not safe to risk taking a Marauder into a wormhole. Who wanted to chance being turned into soup, after all? Not that he liked flying through wormholes under any circumstances or in any vessel. There was something about them that was just not right. The tension inherent in going through the wormhole had almost been the last straw in an assignment that was unpleasant in almost every conceivable way. Still, he reminded himself, only four arns to Moya and a good, solid meal and a glass of fellip nectar amongst his own sort of people in the Peacekeeper officers' mess.

He was still inwardly smiling at that comforting thought when, without any warning, a weapons blast tore through the pod, depressurizing it within a microt and killing all aboard.

'~'

A kaleidoscope of moonbeams danced outside of Moya's observation deck. The beautiful display would have held Aeryn's full attention if it were not for the presence of John. They lay, spooned, enveloped in a pile of furs and revelling in a post-coital glow. Now that the candles had burnt down, the only other light was that spilling in through the giant window. Aeryn chuckled as his lips nuzzled at her neck, in symphony with his manhood nuzzling ever more insistently between her thighs.

"You are insatiable," she chided happily, her breath catching as he caught her wrists in his hands and rolled atop her, pinning her now on her back as his strangely stubbly face worried at her shoulder and neck. She could have sworn that John had shaved earlier that day. She ran her hands through his dark hair, taking his face in her hands and encouraging his head upwards in order that his beautiful blue eyes would look into her own. He complied, his unexpectedly dark eyes smiled roguishly down at her surprised features as he steadily eased himself inside her.

"Officer Sun," he growled triumphantly. "Show me how you handle big again."

"Larraq!?" Aeryn gasped back, in a mix of surprise and delight.

"Ambassador Sun!" An insistent voice hissing from Aeryn's communicator badge pulled her abruptly awake. As she opened her eyes, rubbing away the bleariness of sleep, her familiar quarters aboard Moya came into focus. John lay asleep beside her, blissfully oblivious to her or to her racy dream. The human had always been a much heavier sleeper than she regarded as being healthy, but tonight, she was grateful for his obliviousness.

"Ambassador!?" The voice came again from her comms. The speaker was unfamiliar to her, and a little nervous, as well they might be when calling the most senior officer on the ship in the middle of the sleep cycle.

"Give me a microt," Aeryn whispered into the comms badge as she gently edged her way out of bed, trying not to wake John.

Frell Chiana and her frelling dirty mind - her teasing that evening was doubtless the root cause of Aeryn's dream. Not that she could really blame it all on the Nebari. Pushing aside her vestigial and illogical guilt and embarrassment over her dream, she pulled on a robe and swiftly made her way to the next room, so that her husband could sleep on whilst she talked to whoever had called her.

"Yes, what is it?" Aeryn asked once she was outside the sleeping chamber.

"Officer Callok, officer of the watch. The ship carrying the diplomatic team is three arns overdue." The man relayed to Aeryn, presumably from Moya's command.

"Have you tried to contact them?" Aeryn snapped back. She knew she shouldn't really be so hard on the young officer. She remembered his face now that he had given his name: he was a baby-faced recent transfer from Zobrek's carrier. The young man had had to weigh the difficult decision of whether it was worse to wake his commanding officer during the sleep cycle against how long to do nothing once the transport pod was overdue. It would have been a hard choice for one in his position. How things had changed from the days when she knew everyone aboard Moya and there had been no chain of command to worry about.

"Yes ma'am. We are unable to raise them on any channel." He replied. That didn't sound good to Aeryn. That the shuttle should be both overdue and had and lost contact constituted a worrying combination.

"Do you have their last position?"

"Yes, ma'am. The transport's pilot used the navigation beacon to relay their successful passage through the wormhole, after that we have nothing."

"Then plot a course and take us there." Aeryn ordered. She paused as she marshalled her thoughts. "I want you to prepare a briefing to give to the senior officers in one arn in the central chamber. And Officer Callok?"

"Y... yes ma'am?" he replied, clearly nervous, likely anticipating some sort of punishment.

"You did the right thing waking me up. Well done." The sound of John tossing and rolling over in bed reached her from the next room, reminding her of her recently interrupted dream. The right thing in more ways than you could possibly know, she added to herself.

'~'

The remains of the transport pod were easy to find. Although the damage to the ship had been extensive, most of the debris was still located close to the navigation beacon and was soon snagged in the docking web and brought aboard Moya. As John approached the door to the docking bay he noted that a number of the senior Peacekeeper officers, as well as Sikozu and Chiana, had convened in the corridor, ready to survey the wreckage. The door to the chamber swung open and the small group made their way inside.

"So, no point in asking about survivors…" Chiana remarked dryly to John. He nodded perfunctorily, steeling himself with a deep breath before venturing deeper into the bay. The pod looked almost as though it had been grabbed by a giant infant and pulled apart.

"Doesn't look quite right… for structural failure," John commented as he got closer and began to pick his way through the lighter remains in order to approach the largest piece of wreckage.

"Looks like a pulse cannon." Nybar tapped at one particularly heavily burnt section.

"Anyone recognize anything familiar, other than the obvious?" Aeryn demanded. A series of negative grunts and headshakes answered her.

"One scorch mark looks much like the same as another," Sikozu muttered.

"Well, it's not the humans." Nybar remarked. "They don't have much left which is capable of an attack like this, and what they have got we have been keeping track of."

"Unless you missed something?" John pointed out.

"Not possible." Nybar shook his head. John shrugged: Experience had taught him that there was little point in arguing against a stiff-necked Peacekeeper like Nybar. Better to raise it later, amongst minds more open to considering what they might not know.

"Well, in that case, that would mean," Aeryn said, laying a hand on a large fragment that looked as though it came from the front of the pod. "That there is someone else on this side of the wormhole, someone with the means and the will to do this."

John watched Aeryn considering her next move for a few microts. She briefly met his eyes before, to his slight surprise, turning to address Nybar.

"Set a course back to Earth. Prepare me a Marauder. As soon as we are half an arn from the planet, let me know, then hail the US administration, the priority channel. Tell them that the Peacekeeper ambassador needs to speak with them urgently. With the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defence. Don't let them fob you off with a flunky – and tell them that I am already on my way down." And with that, she touched John on the shoulder, motioned for him to follow and strode from the docking bay,

"Ma'am," Nybar nodded in the affirmative at the already departing back of his captain. John shrugged and pulled a face at the lieutenant, to show that he wasn't sure exactly what his wife had in mind either, before hurrying after her.

'~'

TBC