DISCLAIMER: Farscape is copyright by Sci-Fi Channel/Henson Productions/Hallmark. This is a non-commercial work.

Author's Note: DK is John's childhood friend and work colleague ('Premiere' mostly) and Alex is John's ex-girlfriend ('Rhapsody in Blue'). John had intended to propose to her, but discovered she was going to Stanford.

by Lizardbeth Johnson

The door buzzer sounded harsh, insistently calling him out of clinging dreams.

DK opened his eyes blearily, unable to figure out where he was for a moment. When he tried to move, and slammed a hand into upholstery, he realized he'd fallen asleep on the couch again.

His mouth tasted like pillow stuffing, his head hurt, and his back ached as he stirred to a sitting position, head cradled in his hands. It felt like the middle of the night. Whoever it was had better have a good reason for waking him up.

The buzzer sounded again, and he snapped irritably, "Coming!"

The living room was as dark as a cave, lit only by the light finding its way around the edges of the blinds. It wasn't until he glanced at the clock on the VCR that he realized the hour was the perfectly normal eleven in the morning.

He had to look at the clock again, blinking to make sure it really was that late. He'd slept fifteen hours, and not for any good reason either, like staying awake prepping a new experiment. No, he'd sat around drinking and watching television, broken by long sessions of online DOOM.

He stumbled on the scattered clothes and nearly tipped over the small table which held all his rattling empty cans of Bud.

The buzzer rang again, and it sounded a lot more annoyed now.

"Who is it?" he shouted.

"Alex," he heard the jarring answer and, sure enough, when he looked through the peephole, there she was.

Her light blonde hair brushed her shoulders, and her face was pale in the blue-white light of the hall, but she still looked as he had last seen her. She looked good in her narrow capri pants and v-neck shirt. When he'd first met her he couldn't believe this beach bunny was the same person John had met at the astrophysics conference, but she was able to do math in her head that DK had to use his computer to solve. John had recruited her for the calculations end of their project, since theoretical physics at that level wasn't either John or DK's talent, but really he had fallen for her hard.

Now, looking at her, DK remembered the three of them at the pizza place, celebrating the announcement that Farscape was approved for the shuttle. They had all had too many beers, Alex had been draped on John's lap, scribbling something onto a paper napkin very intently, claiming she had a "revelation" and she could prove the existence of hyperspace. Unfortunately she had promptly spilled beer on it, and they had all thought it was hilarious.

Not long after, she had left, to join the Stanford advanced theoretical astrophysics group which was more her thing than sublight space travel. Everyone had agreed that it was a great opportunity, and she couldn't really turn it down. So she had gone, and John had pretended everything was okay when it wasn't okay at all.

The memories hurt. Seeing her hurt. Because John should've been with her, and he wasn't.

DK glanced down, at his tank top and wrinkled khaki shorts, and ran a hand over his face, grimacing at the days' worth of stubble.

But you couldn't leave a friend in the hall. He opened the door. "Hey, Alex."

"Hey." She just looked at him for a moment and swallowed hard. Then she stepped forward and gave him a hug. "How are you, DK?"

"Okay. It's been what, a few months?"

"Almost eight." She corrected, and he knew they were both thinking of the months since... His mind shied away from remembering the accident. Alex had come back for the service but had left immediately after, and DK hadn't spoken to her since.

"Come on in. Mi casa es su casa and all that. Uh, excuse the mess, it's the maid's year off." He flicked on the hall light so she wouldn't trip.

She moved to the sliding glass doors to the balcony and opened the vertical blinds. The sunlight streamed in and he flinched away, covering his eyes like a vampire.

"Oh, DK," she said softly.

His eyes adjusted and she was looking at him. He knew he had to look awful and he became aware of the piles of empty beer cans, abandoned pizza boxes from the joint down the street, chip bags, and dirty clothes. In the harsh light of day even he couldn't ignore evidence of his inability to cope.

He couldn't meet her eyes. "I was going to clean up," he offered lamely. "Just never got around to it."

She put her backpack purse on the couch. "I'll do it. You go get cleaned up."

"Alex, no, you don't have to--"

"I know." She smiled a little and made little shooing motions with her hands. "Go on, you know I can't stand messy math or messy apartments. Just go."

He took two steps toward the bedroom and then turned back. "Alex, it's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too."

In the bedroom, he hastily picked up for himself, dumping his dirty clothes into the basket and straightening up the crap on his dresser. How had it come to this?

Yet the question that dogged him in the shower was -- what was Alex doing there? He shaved, dressing in his last clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans he was pretty sure he hadn't worn more than once, and went out to find the reason.

In the living room he found all the trash was gone, his work papers and magazines were piled on the tables neatly, and the clothes had all been piled outside the small closet that hid his washer/dryer unit, which was already grumbling with a load.

Alex had moved to the kitchen, stacking dishes into the dishwasher.

"That's enough," he called. "If you do anymore, I'll have to pay you."

She turned her head and nodded in approval at his appearance. "Much better. You look human again."

"Whereas you've been possessed by a cleanliness demon," he joked. She opened the compactor to shove more trash down it and he winced. She really was going to finish cleaning his kitchen at this rate. "I know it's not tidy, and I know you're a neat freak, but if you don't stop, I'll have to remove you by force."

She gave a look at the kitchen and her lips twisted ruefully. "All right. Do I dare look in the fridge?"

"I went shopping only day before yesterday," he protested. "There's more than beer."

"That wasn't exactly my question," she teased and took out the orange juice carton, pouring two glasses. He watched her and couldn't resist a smile. A year later and it felt the same. For someone who generally had her mind on esoteric theories that DK only vaguely understood, Alex was also very focused on the present.

He recovered his manners, well trained by the elder Crichton. "How's Stanford?"

She froze briefly. "Fine." Then she looked at him and her mouth tightened. "Horrible," she admitted more honestly and her gaze slid away. "Lonely. I hate it."

He wanted to be sympathetic, but he was still a little mad at her for leaving in the first place.

She handed him a glass. "To John," she murmured.

His throat tightened and he had to swallow to clear it. "Yeah."

They clinked glasses and drank.

Moving to the living room, she curled up on one end of the couch, facing him on the other end. "You miss him, too."

"What was your first clue?" he snapped, suddenly angry. How could she come here, and not know what memories she was bringing back? "Did Jack call you? Did he tell you I'm absolutely useless at work? That I haven't done anything in so long I can't remember? The project is going to lose its grant and you know what, I don't care!"

It felt good to get it into the open after all these months. What the hell did the project matter anymore, when John wasn't there?

"Personally," she answered after a moment of silence, mild and meditative. "All I've done is work. Days, weeks, in the lab running sims, writing equations. Living in my head." She snagged her purse and opened it. "I've been working on this. It'll be in APJ next month."

She took out a clipped stack of paper, about fifty pages long. He realized right away that it was galley proofs of a scientific paper, and the Astrophysics Journal was the most prestigious in their field so it was quite a coup to get a paper in it. The next thing he noticed was the list of authors: Alex first, then DK then John.

"What's this?" he thumbed through it, seeing pages and pages of equations in the middle. He knew he hadn't written any of it.

"I started to analyze the data," she rose and went to the sliding door, opening it to allow the sea breeze to brush through her hair. "I wanted to know what had happened. So I gathered all the data, from the weather people, from the telescopes, from the shuttle sensors, even the telemetry from Farscape One as much as we had. I did calculations of everything I could think of and there's only one thing that explains what happened." She turned around to face him. "The module was sucked into a wormhole."

He stared at her and let the pages slip off the couch to the floor. "That's absurd, Alex. The module was destroyed when it collided with the EM wave."

She shook her head, folding her arms. "That's what we thought, I know. But it's not true. Not any data point has an energy spike, which would have happened if the engines and fuel tanks had exploded."

"The wave absorbed the excess energy," he objected stubbornly.

"Possibly, but we saw nothing against background radiation. So I don't think so. Instead we got a particle flux completely off the scale in a hemispherical shape, encircling Farscape One. A wormhole."

He shook his head and jumped to his feet, too restless to remain seated. "You're grasping at straws, Alex."

"The math works," she countered quietly. "I had it proofed. And APJ reviewed it. John opened the first wormhole ever discovered. He wasn't killed in an explosion."

He whirled to face her accusingly. "So you're saying he could still be alive?"

"I don't know. I assume -- I hope -- he is. The probability is high that the wormhole opened up somewhere, but I have no idea if the module could have passed safely through it."

God. John could still be alive. Waiting for rescue. "We could duplicate the experiment --" he began excitedly, already planning his proposal.

But she wasn't excited at all and was already shaking her head before he started to speak. "It won't work," she murmured. "There's no way to know where he went, if he went anywhere at all. Even if we managed to match conditions perfectly -- and that's a huge if with so many variables we don't even know -- and assuming we could beat the odds and another wormhole opened to the exact same place, think about it. It's been almost a year. If John's still alive he couldn't be there anymore. He'd have to search for water if nothing else. There was only three months worth aboard, even if he didn't separate it back into the fuel tanks."

She heaved a sigh that shook her whole body and her voice dwindled away. "Look, he'd know we couldn't come after him anyway. I know it was a wormhole, DK -- but I don't know why it formed there, or how to open another. I could study it for years and not figure it out."

He stayed still for a long time, looking blindly at the sunlight sparkling on the ocean and the beach just a few steps away. The thought kept running through his head of the old phrase how the number of stars in the sky was the same as grains of sand on the beach. "So with one hand you give me hope and take it away again with the other. Thanks. Thanks a lot."

"Isn't a little hope better than none?" she asked softly. "He's going to try to make it back." She put a hand on his arm, meant to comfort.

He whirled and grabbed her shoulders. "He may never get home, Alex!"

"I know that!" she jerked free and her eyes were bright. "God, don't you think I know that? I keep hearing his voice, all those little wisecracks that used to drive me crazy. I wake up at night and he's not there! I was going to come back and tell him I was wrong, and say I was sorry, and I missed him and -- and now -- he'll never know!"

Her voice cracked, and he wrapped his arms around her just in time, as she collapsed into his chest, her slender body shaking.

She had lost, too. He had lost his best friend, but so had she. And she wasn't the type to deal with it in any way but burying herself in work. He had sunk into depression, while she had used her fine brain to torture herself with the knowledge that John wasn't dead, but had gone so far away he might as well be, for those left behind.

John could come back tomorrow. Or never.

How long had she been dealing with that uncertainty, trying to pretend she had it together?

"It's okay, Alex," he murmured into her hair. "Let it go. Just... let it go."

After a bit, the flow of tears stopped and she sniffled. "I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about," he patted her shoulder, feeling a bit awkward since she wasn't moving away.

He'd never been in such close contact for such a long time with her. She had always been John's girl, and even after DK had gotten over his resentment of her for being the first to really come between their friendship, he'd always kept her carefully as his friend.

But now, he was realizing suddenly, that she felt very nice pressed against him. Very ... nice. He was about to pull away, ashamed of his thoughts, when she turned her head, and he heard her say very softly against his neck, "You smell good."

She straightened slowly, still very close to him, eye to eye. "Alex..." But even he didn't know if he meant it in denial or plea.

He could feel her breath softly on his face as she searched his gaze for something. She didn't find it, or maybe she did, because their lips came together. A wave of desire came over him, so strong it left him breathless. He tightened his grasp, holding her against him with desperation that she might disappear. He needed her, and he wanted her. They needed each other.

Clothing seemed to melt away. They clung together on the carpet, moving together in haste, touching, kissing, stroking, reaching for consummation. "Oh god, oh god," she whispered, their bodies melting together. He buried himself inside her, as she twined her limbs around him, holding him deep. Her body arched and she threw her head back, shouting, "John!"

He followed her over the edge.

Lying together, sweat evaporating and chilling them both, he murmured, "You called his name."

"Sorry," she snuggled closer, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

He kissed her hair, and ran his hand down the long curve of her back. "It's okay. Heat of the moment, that's all."

"Is that was this was?" she asked, lifting her head to look down at his face. She was smiling, teasing him. "I thought it was because you've always been hot for me."

Her free hand traced idle patterns on his chest and stomach.

"That too," he agreed complacently, since he'd never argue with a woman who was that close to his sensitive areas. And it was probably true anyway.

"We're not going to abandon the project, are we?" she asked softly, but it wasn't much of a question. "We're going to continue his work, aren't we?"

"Yes, we are."

"And I'm going to find a way to open another wormhole," she vowed quietly. "I'm going to find what makes them work, and you're going to finish the Farscape 2 so we can prove that John was right."

"I will."

"Because that's what he would want. He wouldn't want our lives to stop, just because he's not here."

"That's true." And he discovered, to his surprise, that she was right. The pain he'd been hoarding for the last year loosened and he knew it would be bearable now. Life had to go on.

Her hand moved farther and he twitched. "Hey! Alex, what are you --!" Her hand caressed him and he lost his train of thought, as pleasure tingled all the way to his toes. "Oooh... Do that again."

"Once was for John," she murmured and moved to straddle his hips, her hair glinting golden in the sunlight streaming in from the deck. "So his ghost wouldn't always be there. The rest are for us."

"The rest?" He couldn't resist her mischievous smile and reached for her, sitting up to kiss her again, with less feverish intensity.

This time, he made sure that she cried his name, not John's.

They would survive, bound together by the loss of the person they had both loved most in the world.

Maybe, someday, John Crichton would come home, to find his solar system colonized through the Crichton method. And maybe, DK thought sleepily but at peace for the first time in months, just maybe, Earth would open wormholes to the far reaches of space and bring her lost son home.