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eye_of_a_catAs promised, with a BSG ficlet still to come.
Title: Missing
Rating: Um. PG?
Spoilers: up to and including Objects at Rest (S5).
"Wait," she said.
Snow was beginning to fall again, fading their footsteps into white. She held up a hand to feel the cold wind twining through her fingers.
This place was not hers, but she knew it all the same. There was a fountain with steps half-hidden under drifts. There were trees, splintering black branches against the sky. There were buildings carved from crystal and curving paths, and beneath her feet the square would be paved with white, just as Lennier had described it. This was a calm place, a peaceful place. It would be a good place to come during Ranger training, to reflect, and pray, and rest.
John had stopped a few steps ahead of her. Winter in Tuzanor was hard for him, and he pulled his scarf up against the cold and rubbed gloved hands together. He said nothing, and he waited until the last of the light began to fade before taking her arm to leave.
~
The life she had not been able to imagine was not a difficult one. The Alliance struggled and faded and then grew again, each time stronger than before. The new Grey Council led wisely and well. In Tuzanor she was Entil'Zha, and Warriors bowed to her as respectfully as Religious. There was no one to call her Satai, although sometimes she imagined she could hear it all the same, spoken in Lennier's devotion or Neroon's contempt.
Her son was born the year they arrived on Minbar, growing healthy and strong despite the predictions of both his worlds. He met everything he saw with the same calm blue gaze, and laughed the first time she showed him the stars.
There was no word from Lennier. Without him, she watched Minbar heal and the galaxy stumble towards peace. The memory of Shadows and Vorlons, of shattered worlds and manacles around her wrists, grew distant, and sometimes it was difficult to imagine any other life than this.
~
Lennier's family elder watched her in silence for a long time. "We were concerned," she said.
"I understand." Rain was hammering at the windows, and the room where they sat was half in darkness.
"You were the first Satai to be expelled from the Council in three hundred years," the elder went on. "We did not wish Lennier to be dishonoured or brought to harm through following you." Her voice was iron, but her fingers tapped an uneven staccato on the table. "Was he?" she said.
"Never." The same answer every time she asked this question herself. "He brought you more honour than I can say. Twice he risked his own life to save others, and once to bring comfort to the dying. He helped me to defeat the Shadows and bring our world to peace. He could see the path ahead even when I could not, and he never doubted. Without him I would have been lost."
The elder nodded, considering this. Finally, she said "You speak very well of one who failed you."
"He never failed me." And then, "Have you spoken to him?"
"Once. He told us that he had betrayed you and the Rangers, and that he was not returning to Minbar. You would know why, of course?"
"An accident on board our ship. He blamed himself for being unable to protect us." She had told the Rangers on board the same thing. It should have been true. "If he contacts you again, will you tell him that I would very much like to see him?"
"As you ask." The elder got to her feet quick and sure, and ended whatever had begun with a bow. "We are glad he served well, Delenn. Thank you for coming here."
"The thanks should be mine," she said. "I owe you more than I could ever repay for sending him to me, and for never ordering him to return."
"We did," the elder said.
There were children playing in the rain outside as she left. They stopped as one to watch her, and none of them spoke a word.
~
That night she held close to John, face pressed against his neck and hands moulded to his back. "He never meant you harm," she said.
"He meant it that time."
Three years of silence, of the weight of that one moment hanging unspoken between them. Three years of remembering him in fragments. She never spoke his name where David could hear, and rarely even to John, letting his absence sound louder than both their memories. She never imagined he would be gone this long.
"One moment," she said, and the twist of discomfort in John's neck might just as easily have been her own. "If it can mean so much, surely a lifetime of service can mean more?"
"Service to you." There was no more anger in his voice, and that was worse.
"To me," she said. "To the causes we fought for. And to you. He lost those from his own family on the Black Star, and still he was willing to trade his clan's honour for yours."
"I know that. I know." His breath came ragged and torn. "What he did - it's done, okay? Nothing's going to undo it. Nothing's going to cancel it out. If he comes back, we'll talk, but this isn't getting us anywhere."
If he came back. Wherever John imagined him would no doubt be better than the place he was, hidden alone and ashamed where he could believe he was not forgiven. He seemed more distant now than he ever had. If he came back, he would be out of place in a world that could close so smoothly over his absence; what need in Tuzanor now for anyone from the time of Shadows and war, let alone an aide who loved her? And yet, what troubled her most about that if was the realisation that she could think the same. He would never have stopped searching for her.
"I wanted more for him than this," she said.
"It wasn't your fault." John's heart beating beneath the palm of her hand, alive, alive, alive.
~
In the fourth year she went back to Babylon 5. The dull metal walls, the noise, even the crowds that pressed around her in the docking bay, were the same as she remembered. She had missed this place more than she knew; it was her home, as much as Tuzanor would ever be, and for a strange moment she regretted leaving John and David behind.
Vir greeted her with a bow and a sudden, hastily apologised-for hug. Without either suggesting it, they walked together to the gardens. "I meant to visit last year," he said, "but we had that Drazi thing, and the reconstruction, and, well, Londo, and there's just so much..." He waved one hand in the direction Centauri Prime might have been. "Just so much."
She had heard, of course. The damage done to the Centauri could never be erased completely, but Vir had never turned away from all that could be mended and rebuilt. She remembered the first time she had seen him, stumbling over words as Londo barked a reprimand, a world away from this certain and confident diplomat.
And Lennier, who had been his friend. For a moment it seemed so clear, but when she asked Vir shook his head. Not one message, not one word, not in all these years.
The garden was less comfort to her now, and the ripples that spread from one stone in perfect, widening circles no longer brought her peace. On the day before leaving she went back to Downbelow. The dark, musty bar was just the same as it had been five years before, and she sat for a long time in the metal caves of abandoned ductwork, remembering.
~
In the fifth year she travelled further than she had ever been, eight days in hyperspace to reach a small, half-empty handful of words clustered near the Rim. This was the last world the Shadows had reached. If Lennier had fled as far as he could go, his journey would have ended here.
The Vorlons had left the largest world intact, destroying only one of its colony moons. She could not tell whether they had planned more; half the planet's surface was blackened and charred, but people still lived there all the same. They watched her from a distance as she passed.
"There have been Rangers here before," she said to the only leader who would see her. "Were any of them Minbari?"
Impossible to tell anything from the flick of black membrane over mirrored eyes, the cold, modulated voice of the translator. "No Minbari. Not here. After what they have done."
She frowned. "The Minbari never harmed your world."
"Minbari. Vorlons." It tipped its head to one side as it looked at her. "You were their knives for a thousand years. We remember."
"We would -" she began, and stopped. Even the ground at her feet was burnt.
~
In the sixth year, she sent the Rangers to search for him. They found nothing.
~
She stayed unrecognised on the Brakiri homeworld. Cloaked, hooded and silent, she was only one more outline in an endless crowd of pilgrims, and no-one saw her leave the path before reaching the city.
Night came slowly, the sun sinking into a sea of fire over the hills. Summer and still warm as day as she knelt in grass scattered with white flowers, waiting. The comet was barely visible at first, then a brighter smudge in the darkening sky, then a blaze of light between the stars, brighter than any she had ever seen.
A hand on her shoulder. A voice from a time long gone, saying her name.
She knew, of course. She would have known before seeing his face, even before he spoke. But she could not make herself believe it was true, and a whispered "Are you real?" was all the words she could gather.
Dukhat smiled. "I imagine so. Either I am real or you are hallucinating, and I would be very concerned if you had developed a habit of speaking to your hallucinations."
"No." But if she moved, if she reached for him, she might be dreaming all the same. "How can you be here?"
"Are you truly interested in the mechanics? I would disappoint you, at any rate. I understand them no better than you do."
He was the same as she remembered, if remembering could ever keep more than echoes, and an old grief came back with all the fire she had used to forge it. Half-choked with tears, she no longer cared whether this was happening or how much she imagined; if this was Minbar, if they were in her rooms on the Grey Council's ship, if she could will away thirty years in the span of a breath, it was a small enough price to pay.
"Delenn." His hand, warm as her own, touched her hair and came to rest on her changed face. "What is this?"
"Prophecy. We fought the Shadows, as you said."
"Tell me."
She closed her eyes. "It was difficult to learn that the humans shared our souls. At first we lost time, and they grew to hate and fear us. Kosh showed me the truth. I have given up my place among the Nine and heard the others call me outcast, and I have spoken with Valen and sent away the Shadows. We were broken and united, and we are no longer the people you knew. The Shadows and Vorlons have gone beyond the Rim; our prophecies are completed, and Valen's work is done."
"And mine, then." He watched her, curious, searching. She had never tried to keep anything from him. "Yet you come here to talk to the dead."
They were half in darkness now, the night growing colder. She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his breath warm against her face. "One," she said. "I have been searching for him. But if he is not here, then he is still alive."
"You can't be so sure of that."
"You never knew him. He would find me."
"Then why must you find him?"
There was not enough time until sunrise, not enough even if they could talk for days beyond that, to explain everything Lennier had been and everything he should have become. He was barely more than a child when Dukhat died, his life and work shaped by a war whose influence she could never describe in words. "Because he was our hope," she said. "And I failed him."
Dukhat was a long time in answering. His voice when it came was quieter, a thought more than a question. "Did I fail you?"
"No," she said, glad that he could not see her tears. The wind sighed through tall grasses, carrying the distant shouts and laughter from the valley below, and this was enough.
"You always believed in the prophecies," he said. "You could see where all others were blind. This was your gift. Now you search for what you cannot see, and tell me the past is done."
Done, but not finished. "You told me once that searching is a holy thing," she said. "You told me that a people with no true seekers would lose their way. I will search as long as I am able, and if I never find him, perhaps I will have learned enough to deserve a place by his side in another life."
In the circle of Dukhat's arm, she could rest and look up at the stars. A thousand points of light, a myriad of worlds where he might be, and between them all nothing but shadows.
Title: Missing
Rating: Um. PG?
Spoilers: up to and including Objects at Rest (S5).
"Wait," she said.
Snow was beginning to fall again, fading their footsteps into white. She held up a hand to feel the cold wind twining through her fingers.
This place was not hers, but she knew it all the same. There was a fountain with steps half-hidden under drifts. There were trees, splintering black branches against the sky. There were buildings carved from crystal and curving paths, and beneath her feet the square would be paved with white, just as Lennier had described it. This was a calm place, a peaceful place. It would be a good place to come during Ranger training, to reflect, and pray, and rest.
John had stopped a few steps ahead of her. Winter in Tuzanor was hard for him, and he pulled his scarf up against the cold and rubbed gloved hands together. He said nothing, and he waited until the last of the light began to fade before taking her arm to leave.
The life she had not been able to imagine was not a difficult one. The Alliance struggled and faded and then grew again, each time stronger than before. The new Grey Council led wisely and well. In Tuzanor she was Entil'Zha, and Warriors bowed to her as respectfully as Religious. There was no one to call her Satai, although sometimes she imagined she could hear it all the same, spoken in Lennier's devotion or Neroon's contempt.
Her son was born the year they arrived on Minbar, growing healthy and strong despite the predictions of both his worlds. He met everything he saw with the same calm blue gaze, and laughed the first time she showed him the stars.
There was no word from Lennier. Without him, she watched Minbar heal and the galaxy stumble towards peace. The memory of Shadows and Vorlons, of shattered worlds and manacles around her wrists, grew distant, and sometimes it was difficult to imagine any other life than this.
Lennier's family elder watched her in silence for a long time. "We were concerned," she said.
"I understand." Rain was hammering at the windows, and the room where they sat was half in darkness.
"You were the first Satai to be expelled from the Council in three hundred years," the elder went on. "We did not wish Lennier to be dishonoured or brought to harm through following you." Her voice was iron, but her fingers tapped an uneven staccato on the table. "Was he?" she said.
"Never." The same answer every time she asked this question herself. "He brought you more honour than I can say. Twice he risked his own life to save others, and once to bring comfort to the dying. He helped me to defeat the Shadows and bring our world to peace. He could see the path ahead even when I could not, and he never doubted. Without him I would have been lost."
The elder nodded, considering this. Finally, she said "You speak very well of one who failed you."
"He never failed me." And then, "Have you spoken to him?"
"Once. He told us that he had betrayed you and the Rangers, and that he was not returning to Minbar. You would know why, of course?"
"An accident on board our ship. He blamed himself for being unable to protect us." She had told the Rangers on board the same thing. It should have been true. "If he contacts you again, will you tell him that I would very much like to see him?"
"As you ask." The elder got to her feet quick and sure, and ended whatever had begun with a bow. "We are glad he served well, Delenn. Thank you for coming here."
"The thanks should be mine," she said. "I owe you more than I could ever repay for sending him to me, and for never ordering him to return."
"We did," the elder said.
There were children playing in the rain outside as she left. They stopped as one to watch her, and none of them spoke a word.
That night she held close to John, face pressed against his neck and hands moulded to his back. "He never meant you harm," she said.
"He meant it that time."
Three years of silence, of the weight of that one moment hanging unspoken between them. Three years of remembering him in fragments. She never spoke his name where David could hear, and rarely even to John, letting his absence sound louder than both their memories. She never imagined he would be gone this long.
"One moment," she said, and the twist of discomfort in John's neck might just as easily have been her own. "If it can mean so much, surely a lifetime of service can mean more?"
"Service to you." There was no more anger in his voice, and that was worse.
"To me," she said. "To the causes we fought for. And to you. He lost those from his own family on the Black Star, and still he was willing to trade his clan's honour for yours."
"I know that. I know." His breath came ragged and torn. "What he did - it's done, okay? Nothing's going to undo it. Nothing's going to cancel it out. If he comes back, we'll talk, but this isn't getting us anywhere."
If he came back. Wherever John imagined him would no doubt be better than the place he was, hidden alone and ashamed where he could believe he was not forgiven. He seemed more distant now than he ever had. If he came back, he would be out of place in a world that could close so smoothly over his absence; what need in Tuzanor now for anyone from the time of Shadows and war, let alone an aide who loved her? And yet, what troubled her most about that if was the realisation that she could think the same. He would never have stopped searching for her.
"I wanted more for him than this," she said.
"It wasn't your fault." John's heart beating beneath the palm of her hand, alive, alive, alive.
In the fourth year she went back to Babylon 5. The dull metal walls, the noise, even the crowds that pressed around her in the docking bay, were the same as she remembered. She had missed this place more than she knew; it was her home, as much as Tuzanor would ever be, and for a strange moment she regretted leaving John and David behind.
Vir greeted her with a bow and a sudden, hastily apologised-for hug. Without either suggesting it, they walked together to the gardens. "I meant to visit last year," he said, "but we had that Drazi thing, and the reconstruction, and, well, Londo, and there's just so much..." He waved one hand in the direction Centauri Prime might have been. "Just so much."
She had heard, of course. The damage done to the Centauri could never be erased completely, but Vir had never turned away from all that could be mended and rebuilt. She remembered the first time she had seen him, stumbling over words as Londo barked a reprimand, a world away from this certain and confident diplomat.
And Lennier, who had been his friend. For a moment it seemed so clear, but when she asked Vir shook his head. Not one message, not one word, not in all these years.
The garden was less comfort to her now, and the ripples that spread from one stone in perfect, widening circles no longer brought her peace. On the day before leaving she went back to Downbelow. The dark, musty bar was just the same as it had been five years before, and she sat for a long time in the metal caves of abandoned ductwork, remembering.
In the fifth year she travelled further than she had ever been, eight days in hyperspace to reach a small, half-empty handful of words clustered near the Rim. This was the last world the Shadows had reached. If Lennier had fled as far as he could go, his journey would have ended here.
The Vorlons had left the largest world intact, destroying only one of its colony moons. She could not tell whether they had planned more; half the planet's surface was blackened and charred, but people still lived there all the same. They watched her from a distance as she passed.
"There have been Rangers here before," she said to the only leader who would see her. "Were any of them Minbari?"
Impossible to tell anything from the flick of black membrane over mirrored eyes, the cold, modulated voice of the translator. "No Minbari. Not here. After what they have done."
She frowned. "The Minbari never harmed your world."
"Minbari. Vorlons." It tipped its head to one side as it looked at her. "You were their knives for a thousand years. We remember."
"We would -" she began, and stopped. Even the ground at her feet was burnt.
In the sixth year, she sent the Rangers to search for him. They found nothing.
She stayed unrecognised on the Brakiri homeworld. Cloaked, hooded and silent, she was only one more outline in an endless crowd of pilgrims, and no-one saw her leave the path before reaching the city.
Night came slowly, the sun sinking into a sea of fire over the hills. Summer and still warm as day as she knelt in grass scattered with white flowers, waiting. The comet was barely visible at first, then a brighter smudge in the darkening sky, then a blaze of light between the stars, brighter than any she had ever seen.
A hand on her shoulder. A voice from a time long gone, saying her name.
She knew, of course. She would have known before seeing his face, even before he spoke. But she could not make herself believe it was true, and a whispered "Are you real?" was all the words she could gather.
Dukhat smiled. "I imagine so. Either I am real or you are hallucinating, and I would be very concerned if you had developed a habit of speaking to your hallucinations."
"No." But if she moved, if she reached for him, she might be dreaming all the same. "How can you be here?"
"Are you truly interested in the mechanics? I would disappoint you, at any rate. I understand them no better than you do."
He was the same as she remembered, if remembering could ever keep more than echoes, and an old grief came back with all the fire she had used to forge it. Half-choked with tears, she no longer cared whether this was happening or how much she imagined; if this was Minbar, if they were in her rooms on the Grey Council's ship, if she could will away thirty years in the span of a breath, it was a small enough price to pay.
"Delenn." His hand, warm as her own, touched her hair and came to rest on her changed face. "What is this?"
"Prophecy. We fought the Shadows, as you said."
"Tell me."
She closed her eyes. "It was difficult to learn that the humans shared our souls. At first we lost time, and they grew to hate and fear us. Kosh showed me the truth. I have given up my place among the Nine and heard the others call me outcast, and I have spoken with Valen and sent away the Shadows. We were broken and united, and we are no longer the people you knew. The Shadows and Vorlons have gone beyond the Rim; our prophecies are completed, and Valen's work is done."
"And mine, then." He watched her, curious, searching. She had never tried to keep anything from him. "Yet you come here to talk to the dead."
They were half in darkness now, the night growing colder. She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his breath warm against her face. "One," she said. "I have been searching for him. But if he is not here, then he is still alive."
"You can't be so sure of that."
"You never knew him. He would find me."
"Then why must you find him?"
There was not enough time until sunrise, not enough even if they could talk for days beyond that, to explain everything Lennier had been and everything he should have become. He was barely more than a child when Dukhat died, his life and work shaped by a war whose influence she could never describe in words. "Because he was our hope," she said. "And I failed him."
Dukhat was a long time in answering. His voice when it came was quieter, a thought more than a question. "Did I fail you?"
"No," she said, glad that he could not see her tears. The wind sighed through tall grasses, carrying the distant shouts and laughter from the valley below, and this was enough.
"You always believed in the prophecies," he said. "You could see where all others were blind. This was your gift. Now you search for what you cannot see, and tell me the past is done."
Done, but not finished. "You told me once that searching is a holy thing," she said. "You told me that a people with no true seekers would lose their way. I will search as long as I am able, and if I never find him, perhaps I will have learned enough to deserve a place by his side in another life."
In the circle of Dukhat's arm, she could rest and look up at the stars. A thousand points of light, a myriad of worlds where he might be, and between them all nothing but shadows.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 02:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 05:05 pm (UTC)I'm not really a Delenn/Lennier shipper...but the concept intrigues me. Sometimes I just like to read about an alternate universe where Lennier gets the girl, so to speak. :o)
Keep up the great work!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 07:53 pm (UTC)