Early in her training she learned that there are a million ways to die, but only a few kinds of dead soldier. Aeryn is one specific kind. She's a soldier who ignored the unknown until it proved itself dangerous.

She stands with her thumb hooked in her belt and her elbow braced against the doorway, looking through the gate at the Crichtons. They sit across from each other, hands folded under their noses. They've blinked maybe twice in the time she's been watching.

In the beginning she dismissed him as just another civilian with a spanner, scrawling formulas on the floor and babbling to himself. By the time she realized her mistake, he had already flown in under her sensor threshold. He sabotaged years of training, and killed the soldier she'd been made to be, simply by questioning every assumption she'd been raised with.

He's reconfigured her more drastically than he has that moronically happy-looking module.

Two of them could erase her entirely.

"Well I'm not going to wet my knees like some raw conscript." She squares her shoulders and chin, pulls in her stomach to brace her spine.

Chiana laces her fingers through the gate and joins Aeryn in watching the Crichtons. "Wet your knees?"

"To urinate in fright, or to curl up and sob like a child."

Chiana huffs. "Leave it to Peacekeepers to confuse a perfectly normal reaction with incontinence. Look on the dayside. I'm sure there might be some advantage to having a spare. You could be snug as a pouchling between..." Her voice peters out as she takes in the cold hollow stare reverberating in the space between the Crichtons.

"I doubt he would even notice me." Aeryn hears herself using the singular instead of the plural. "I wonder what they're thinking."

She purposefully leaves it open for Chiana, as she used to do with Zhaan. She wants to hear something cheerful, something derogatory and sweet like 'Only the Goddess knows. Even she might not understand, but she knows.'

Chiana's voice is small and dry. "He's wondering whether it'd be homicide or suicide."

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