It was odd to Avon to have a window in medical. Neither the liberator, nor the Scorpio had had one. In fact, he couldn't recall ever being on a ship that had allowed for actual star gazing. In the last month, he had spent more time in this tiny part of the ship than almost any other. It was quiet here, and he could count, for the most part, on being undisturbed. His eyes drifted down to the figure in the bed across the room. Unmistakably a female form, breathing slowly, body a bridge for the traffic of seeping liquids.

Avon shifted. His hip had been healed, the movement returned to his hand. The scars under his clothes he had kept, for reasons that possibly he didn't even understand. He had stood before the mirror for hours, memorizing this new self, considering this idea of a physical clean slate. In the end, he just couldn't do it. The thought made him nauseous.

Meanwhile, his kinetic therapy was going well, and the limp he retained now was so slight as to be almost non-existent.

He listened to the sounds of the ship at night, and found that he had reacclimated to trusting the ships chronometers to tell him when he should be up and when down, as there was no other reference in the black space around him. There was something comforting in the endless, weightless, timeless drift. It was a cold womb, but he was used to it.

He heard the familiar footsteps in the hall and shifted slightly, turning his face fulling to the viewing window. Aza entered and stopped just inside the door, taking in the scene.

"How is she doing?" she asked, for some reason keeping her voice low, perhaps in deference to the figure in the bed.

"It's not a she. You can't think of mutoids as people."

"She was one, once. She might be again if my re-programing ideas work. We won't know unless she wakes up, of course."

Avon turned towards the room to give her the full benefit of his disapproving frown. "The moment she wakes up she'll do everything in her power to kill us all and steer this ship right back into Servalan's waiting arms."

Aza advance to the silent figure of the female mutoid. The only Federation survivor of their mutiny on board the ship. "You never told me why she changed her name to Sleer."

Avon was confused for a moment by the wild veer in topic, but he leaned back for as moment to consider it before saying "because I don't know." He gave her his toothsome smile. "We never discussed it."

They watched each other a moment longer, and Avon was angry to discover that he still found her terribly attractive. Disappointed as well, in himself, with his weak aging body that longed for comfort, was susceptible to exhaustion and despondency and lust. Especially lust it seemed, spurring him on to remembrances of her soft and welcoming body. He shook himself out of his reverie with a question. "Do you know where she got the name Chevron?" he asked.

"No."

"I gave it to her. I must have. It was the name I used the first time I met Tarrant. The minutia you can get out of someone during torture is amazing. With her tasteful sense of humour, the temptation must have been too much to bear."

Aza felt her heart go out to him. If not for the fact that he would have bitten it off, she would have extended her hand to him as well. Instead she checked the monitors, quietly ticking off the life-signs of their charge. The male mutoid had died a few moments after his Commanding officer, no blaster bolts needed. His life ebbed away as his arms gave out and his entrails slithered to the ground. The clean-up had been traumatizing to several of the new crew. White had spent that day and many after hiding in the engine room, learning the ropes, and Tagg was still not talking to Avon. His surliness didn't seem to extend to the rest of the crew, though, and Avon guessed that the sight of a man shot full in the face with no provocation had put the last nail in the coffin of he and the red-head's rocky acquaintance.

A fact that Avon greeted predominantly with relief.

Aza turned to the computer tech, examining him quietly in the calm light. Although they had done all the physical restoration possible in the well equipped medical facilities of their new ship, they had been unable to replace her eye. She wore a patch over the void now, and only a few stray scars wound around that side of her face. They were light, but obvious.

She touched the patch now, as if aware of his thoughts.

"It bothers you, doesn't it?"

"No. Long ago I made a vow to always have at least one person in my life with an eye patch." He rolled his eyes and turned back to his stargazing. Undaunted, Aza sat down on the bed beside him. "As soon as we make planetfall somewhere I can have a new one cloned."

"If you wish."

She glanced at him out of the corner of her remaining eye. She disliked the distance he had put between them, but understood. The last time they had truly had a conversation, he had been another man. And she had done her best to die for him. Not something she quite knew how to navigate her way around tactfully in conversation.

"You've been very quiet recently," she tried.

He looked at her like an idiot child. "Perhaps because I don't want to be here."

"But there's nowhere else for you to go. You might as well stay here and be useful."

"Useful?" He laughed, and although it was covered with the same dogged self-protecting sneer, there was very real pain in it. A sound being torn from his chest. It took a long time to subside. She kept him under her steady gaze. "I'm sorry," he sighed "I'm just realizing I was very much wrong about something."

"And what was that?"

"Regret. It's impossible to keep it a small part of life. It seems now that it's the only part of life."

"Something you told someone?"

"Yes. What a snide pompous bastard. And more than a little mad. So, basically I'm restored to normal."

Aza nodded, but her mind was firmly lodged elsewhere. "You can't leave us, Kerr. You know that, right?"

He looked at her sharply. "Don't call me that."

"What? Kerr? Oh, no, I refuse to be in a last-name only relationship with you."

"I was in a last name only relationship with my parents."

"Yes, but I'm hoping the sex was a lot better with me."

He managed not to smile at her, but it was a near thing. "How about this," he countered, "we agree to disagree, and you put me down on the next planet with a functioning casino."

"Money and anonymity? You bungled that long before I got to you. I mean, it might work, but you'd have to get surgery."

"Change my face? Might be a good idea."

"It's too bad really. I quite like your face."

"Not trying to start all that up again, are you?"

"All that? I'm not sure I've ever heard the prospect of going to bed with me described in just exactly that way, but yes, I would consider it."

"It wouldn't be him, you know. Chevron. It wouldn't be with someone who cared about you at all."

"Charming."

"Don't."

"Don't what? It's the truth."

"Aza, I have killed, personally or through consequence, every single woman I have ever cared about. I'm not exactly sure why it is you are so keen to be on that list."

"I'm different."

"You are exactly the same. Just the next blood-thirsty Blake in a distressingly long and boring line. I don't like you. I certainly don't care about you, and I will not mourn you when you invariably die. The only thing of value you've ever done for me was quick, messy, and probably a whole let better for you. Think about that before you make any more of your disgustingly obvious offers."

Aza stared at him for a moment, but not with the hatred Avon so eagerly expected. Instead she seemed to size him up, and finally slid off the bed to her feet, taking his now good right hand in her own. "Alright, Avon, but remember, you brought this on yourself." She tugged at his hand until he stood opposite her, looking down into those fiery green eyes, a full head lower than his own.

"O my dear Guide," she said, "who more than seven times hast rendered me security, and drawn me from imminent peril that before me stood."

Avon was not impressed with the quote, and was about to tell her so when the next line came so unerringly to his mind that he had to tell her, in a voice for once not snide or angry: "Do not desert me, said I, thus undone; and if the going farther be denied us, let us retrace our steps together swiftly."

She said back to him: "And that Lord, who had led me thitherward, said unto me: "Fear not, because our passage none can take from us, it by Such is given."

Avon's eyes narrowed accusingly. "How do you know what's in my mind?"

"Because I put it there. You would have gone insane, Kerr, really and completely. I had taken everything you knew away from you. I wanted to leave something for you to think about. To focus on. It can make things…a little easier."

"And all these classical references I keep spewing like a bloody Edith Hamilton compilation on the fritz…"

"Dante's inferno. One of my favorites. I couldn't smuggle any of my own programing into the Department of Alterations, but I could access my reading list at any time – I wanted to give you…"

"A world of words to escape with," he finished for her, remembering Madam Scurry's odd words. "A poetic decent into hell."

She nodded at him. "See? Definitely as good for you as it was for me."

Avon had his arms around her instantly, crushing her against him as he had wanted to do for ages and ages, closing his eyes so there was no way to see even a hint of triumph on her face.

He wouldn't stay. He couldn't. But maybe he could convince her to let this madness go, to choose her life over this foolish adventure. He didn't think so, but this was a split-second for dreaming, and it was all he would allow himself.

Perhaps he would take her up on her offer. He wanted to badly. Perhaps he would seek out a soft place to hide from his nightmares in her quarters, under a shared cover. Perhaps he would consider it, some other time, when she was not so close. Her nearness and warmth were making it hard to focus. He needed time, space to think.

For now, he did have a debt to pay, and he wanted to keep their slates even for some reason. Let the rest of the universe go and hang. If Aza was his to warm himself by, then it was in his best interest to try a little harder to postpone her inevitable death.

"Then I'll do you one better," he said, sliding his right hand through her hair, tracing through it as if it were a flowing river. Let her hair be the Lethe, meandering onwards towards the Gates of Ivory, the Gates of Horn. In his mind he made of her limbs the branches of the elm from which false dreams cling, her sure stare the plain of judgement between them.

"I can give you Blake back."

Her gaze sharpened, expression warring between hope and disbelief. He gripped her arms, so tight it must have hurt, but she welcomed him still, in all his ugly glory. "And then," he said "you'll set me free."

The End y'all. Thanks so much for your continued patience, if anyone out there is still in fact reading this strange thing. Please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought. There's more, of course, in my addled brain, but life is busy and hits on this one are a little low, so I may shuffle off to other fandom pastures.