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Dec. 1st, 2005 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catTechnically, cheating, since the rules for the meme say comment-and-request. The reason is this particular fic. It came out mostly the way I wanted it to, and I’m happy enough with the writing; it’s also got a whole lot of ideas that I’d really wanted to get into a fic somehow. So I should be pleased with it. Except there’s something about it on some level that bothers me more than anything else I’ve written.
The fic is ‘Valen’s Children’, which is here and here (two parts).
~*~
When Delenn sent for me, I did not ask why. Perhaps I knew her answer would make no difference. I was there before the next day was over, waiting for her where the grinding cogs of war seemed to slow and still, and it was only then that I thought to wonder. Not that I asked; not that I needed to.
Originally this was all in third-person, but after writing - and scrapping - the same few paragraphs about eighteen times, I gave up and tried it this way. It was always going to be a Branmer fic, though. Characters who sound that interesting shouldn’t be introduced for one episode after they die and then never be heard of again, right?
She greeted me as formally as was appropriate for one in her position and one in mine, and waited until we were alone before pressing her hands into my own. Later on, someone mutters about Branmer not being a fair representative of the warrior caste because he’ll just do whatever Delenn wants, so I suppose it’s possible here that she doesn’t want to seem too close to him. Still, this line comes across a a bit too much omg-illicit-affair to me, and that’s not the way I wanted it to sound; I just don’t think she’d care enough about what anyone muttered. “You came,” she breathed, and her eyes held mine before trailing away to all the things that displeased her: the raised line of a scar on my neck, the rougher, darker cloth of clothes made for fighting.
In Legacies, Branmer’s conversion troubled her enough that she came close to starting a war over trying to undo it. (She does tell Sinclair she did it because of Branmer’s wishes, but her argument with Neroon comes down to who’s got more right to claim him.) And she’s uncharacteristically careless about it, too - letting Neroon believe that Branmer’s body got stolen on a space station run by humans wasn’t ever going to work out well.
Minbari conversion also seems to work at a more fundamental level than Delenn wants to acknowledge. It's not deciding you want to belong to X caste, but realising that your heart already belongs to X caste. If I wrote this now, I'd probably have included some of Branmer's later memories of arguing with Delenn about why he couldn't just convert back again when the war was over; here, I wanted to suggest that she didn't like it even before she regretted starting the war, since in a sense she's lost him already. It also fits in nicely with losing Lennier to the Rangers, who are basically the Warrior caste with better PR.
“Of course,” I said. There was little use in either of us pretending this was unexpected.
“You know I have always valued your opinion.” Her hands were light on my sleeves. “I have - found something, and I wish to know your thoughts on it.”
There was a time when half of everything we said was code, the easy abbreviations of thought we all fall into in the company of those who know us well enough to complete them. This did not sound like that. “Where?” I asked her, choosing my question carefully.
“I will show you,” she said. And although I should have stood firm and learned enough to prepare myself for whatever would come, I followed.
Branmer's a lot more serious here than in anything else I've written. Which fits the story, I suppose, but feels a little like when BSG wants to tell you it's A Very Dark Show Indeed: I love it dearly, and I get that when it literally is the end of the world there's every reason to be unremittingly bleak, but I keep expecting it to fade-to-black on a Radiohead song.
Um, anyway. I like Branmer better when I can see him smiling sometimes.
The room was dark, illuminated only by a bright circle on the floor before our feet and the splinters of light that followed us, for a moment, through the open door. It is impossible to tell space in a place like this. I looked at Delenn, who stood closer to the light than I did, and watched the shadows cast in her headbone magnify each tiny movement. “There is nothing here,” I said, waiting for her to prove me wrong.
I heard it before it was there to see, clicks and hisses of what I assumed was breath, although no living thing should breathe like that. Well, Vorlons are creepy. “Who are you?” it asked me, in a voice too like my own.
“I am Shai Alyt Branmer, of the Star Riders,” I said, feeling Delenn’s disapproval burn into my back. “What are you?”
“The sword has no need to claim it is sharp.” This came from another direction, and before long two of them stood there, alien shapes in dull armour. That line would be why I don't write Vorlon speech very often. Although I do quite like the way they come off as siding with Delenn here: "Warrior caste, you say?"
Delenn’s hand touched mine. “They are Vorlons,” she said.
In all the time I knew her, Delenn told me few things more difficult to believe than this. I had always been able to challenge her when others were shamed into silence, but what could I say now? I shook my head.
She was looking past me, at the first one. “Show him,” she said. “Show him what you showed me.”
It split open, and light spilled from the cracks in its shell, flooding around us, bright enough to blind. I could not breathe as its wings began to beat, and it rose above me. I could only watch, frozen, and I saw Delenn’s face bathed in its light, and she was smiling, like a child who has seen the stars for the first time.
~*~
When I was Religious caste, I taught my students to chant the stories of Valen and those he brought with him. If you're Minbari, then Valen was the important one; the Vorlons were there to help him. Each of them learnt this from childhood, and each of them would have known that what I saw was a Vorlon and that for love of my people I should heed its words. But they did not see it, and of the two of us who did, one had been leading chants herself since she was barely old enough to be learning them.
We were sitting in her rooms, where the food she prepared lay cold and untouched on plates before us. “Dukhat told me once,” she said, “that if I ever doubted my actions I would only need to look into the face of a Vorlon.” You, doubt? was what I would have said, under other circumstances, and it was what she heard; the corners of her mouth quirked into a smile. “Dukhat also believed in our responsibility to question ourselves when others will not,” she said. “But what if it is the Vorlons we doubt?”
“You do not believe they are Vorlons?”
“Of course they are.” It was not the question she had been expecting me to ask. “I do not believe they must always guide us.”
“They spoke with Valen.”
“But they are not Valen.”
Even now, I envied her the easy confidence in her voice. Those called to greatness as children do not see the world as we do. Branmer's happy enough to disagree with her, but he never challenges this. “You did not bring me here to ignore Vorlons for you,” I said, far from sure.
There are times when we can afford to be young; there are times when the universe reminds us with a thousand voices that we have too much else to be. Delenn lay down at my side and rested her head in my lap, and said “Tell me of the humans.” When I did not answer, she asked again, twisting to look at me. “Tell me how they die.”
It's possible here that Kosh already showed her Dukhat's message about the humans, but I don't think so. The Vorlon reluctance to get seriously involved in the Earth/Minbari war is something that's never really explained - their best hope against the Shadows lies with an alliance of two worlds currently trying to destroy each other, and yet they're content to watch and wait? As with Delenn, I don't believe that they couldn't have stopped it a lot sooner had they been trying to. My guess is that Vorlons don't see the significance of wars (except possibly theirs against the Shadows) as lying in who's hurt or who wins, but in their potential usefulness at getting people to answer the "Who are you?" question, individually or as a world. If that's true, then what they said to Delenn here was something that made her question how different the Minbari were to the humans.
Also, it could be that they didn't have an Earth-Minbari alliance in mind to defeat the Shadows; instead, this was something they chose because of the war. (And because of the time travel thing, anyone Delenn picked at the Battle of the Line would have been Valen.)
I could feel her breath rise and fall beneath my hand. This was how it had always been, she asking me questions no others would ask and I giving her answers no others would hear. It was ridiculous to think she needed protecting from this of all things, Delenn who spoke to us with Dukhat’s voice, who led us into war with the wisdom and strength of Valen himself. Already they spoke of her legacy. And yet, I could not find in myself the cruel obedience to tell her of any of the lives I had ended. “Quickly,” I said. “They are not strong.” And this was true.
“Do they have souls?”
“All sentient things have souls.”
“Animals do not,” she said. “Are they more than animals?”
“Little more, perhaps. But little enough.”
“Then perhaps their souls are little more than animals.”
“The universe is never lessened when it divides itself,” I said. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because you never agreed with me.” Her hand found mine without looking, and she pressed it below her throat, her fingers warm even though my glove. “Tell me I am wrong.”
“Will you believe it?”
“No. Tell me anyway.”
Delenn's so good at arguing that we don't see her lose in canon, and I like the idea of someone who'll not only disagree with her but be able to hold their ground. (Sheridan is rather endearingly pathetic at it, which doesn't say great things about his future career in politics). I think she would, too.
It was not possible I had forgotten anything about her, not the dusk-grey in her headbone or the clear, cold mirrors of her eyes. It was not possible I would ever be anything that was not her vision of me, or that I would want to be. “There are no Minbari souls,” I said, “or alien souls, or Vorlon souls. There is only the universe in all its aspects, and it is only our arrogance and pride which stops us from seeing this.” I didn't want Branmer to turn against the war because he found out that humans have Minbari souls; it seemed important to have a Minbari character have doubts about genocide just because it's genocide. Also, there should be a lot of ways to look at the idea of souls.
“Then is it not as great a crime to kill these humans as it would be to kill a Minbari?”
“Souls do not determine worth.” And my mind swam with images of the dead and dying, of Minbari tortured past sanity at alien hands, of blood mingling with the rain on distant worlds. I wanted to push her away and go back to my ship, and pretend we had never spoken. “Do you want me to bring you one to kill yourself?”
She frowned, puzzled rather than angry. The cold metal of understanding had always been malleable to her, twisted as easily into an ornament as a weapon under her diamond-hard gaze.
“What did the Vorlons tell you?” I said. But she would not answer, and I never asked why.
~*~
The war went on. Our enemies were not strong, but they were numerous, scattered across the galaxy like a handful of seeds that grow twisted and dark from wherever they fall. They clung to the bare rock of dead moons, they tunnelled into sand and snow, they hid among other aliens with no shame or pride in themselves. Which is a big thing, if you're Minbari. Sometimes they fought us, flinging their primitive ships at our cruisers one after another; sometimes they ran, or tried to. There was no way of predicting which. A dozen of them would stand to face us even when we outnumbered them in the hundreds, after their own warships had turned tail and fled.
Canon says that Branmer supported the war, and writing him as though he'd been against the idea all along would've felt like cheating. I didn't want to have him change his mind based on any realisation about why humans are important/special/technically-Minbari, either. In this version of history, Delenn was fine with the war itself but changed her mind once her idea of the war changed from 'killing aliens' to 'killing fellow Minbari'; Branmer's the other way around, in that it's only the act of fighting itself which changes his mind about the idea.
Even light-years distant, Delenn’s image was as bright on my ship as it was on Minbar. “They have no conviction,” she said, and we listened. “They have no cause. They only strike out blindly, destroying whatever they can reach.”
I led warriors who had not seen aliens before, who had never fought outside the training circle, who reminded me too much of my acolytes. I led warriors who were fighting when I was barely more than an acolyte myself, and surprised most of them by making the only one who spoke his disdain aloud my alyt. This is Neroon, of course - I couldn't see him being all that happy about a general who'd spent most of his life being Warrior caste. (That scene is in my fic Parallel.) They all believed, and they all fought, and I felt each death as I would grieve my own family, for a life given willingly is a greater loss even than one taken by force.
Delenn praised the warrior caste, the faithful soldiers of Valen, who fought and died in Minbar’s name against an enemy that would never honour them. Our sacrifice would not be forgotten, she said. And for a moment, I could hear her calling me by my warrior title as well as my name.
There was a time when we believed a colony world was abandoned, the aliens fled before our warships arrived. There was no reason to think otherwise; I know this, as I knew it then. But still I blame myself for sending some of the younger warriors to search the ruins, as I will all my life. When we found them, half were dead and the rest only a mockery of living, blinded and crippled and mutilated in a hundred ways, barely even shadows of their souls remaining. The humans who did this chose to attack rather than hide, giving away their own lives for this chance to torture and kill.
“We are not them,” Delenn said, and by now none of us doubted she was Dukhat’s successor as well as his voice. “We will never be them, and we will not allow the universe to be contaminated by their presence. When their world is ashes and their name only a curse, we will remember this.”
The old clan rivalries were laid aside, Fire Wings serving alongside Wind Swords with neither question nor argument, and Moon Shields giving away their own ships to those who had lost the most. On Minbar, three castes spoke with one voice; our children’s songs about hands that must fight and sculpt and pray had never been heard so often, nor meant so much. We were one people, one soul, and the strength of our faith would be enough to cast light even where the universe itself grew dark.
“We are better now than we have ever been,” Delenn said. “You must not doubt.”
~*~
I began to measure time in deaths. When Delenn next sent for me, so many had passed that it seemed the universe would soon be empty of anything but our fury and their hate. I saw the Grey Council ship surrounded by its guards, and I wondered what the humans had thought before they killed Dukhat, and what they would think if they walked with me now.
She was arguing with two others when I arrived. Beneath a bow I could not see their faces, but I heard the accusations of cowardice and slaughter, barbed with words not usually spoken aloud: Shadows, Rangers, Z’ha’dum.
When she saw me, she ordered the Warrior Satai at her side to leave. His objection, directed more to the other than her, was dismissed almost before it passed his lips. “I said get out, Coplann,” she fired. “Branmer will speak for the Warrior caste.”
“He will speak for you,” the third one said. The controlled syllables of defiance reminded me of my alyt.
Delenn ignored him. Coplann bowed to her and left, and it was not until he had gone that she introduced me to the other - Lenonn, anla’shok na. “But do not speak of Shadows,” she said. “Nowhere but here, and no time but now.”
“Then what should we speak of?”
“Nothing,” Lenonn said, watching Delenn with guarded eyes. “We must listen.”
And we did. We listened in silence and doubt, hearing Dukhat’s words say the same, terrible thing again and again and again: the humans are needed, the humans must be our allies.
“He didn’t know,” Delenn said, later. “He couldn’t know. That they should be worse than animals, worse than murderers - he would never have thought any creatures to be this terrible.”
“No doubt they would say the same of us,” Lenonn muttered.
I said nothing to either of them. I looked down at my hands, in the black warrior gloves that had once seemed so alien, and thought of Dukhat. The child born with his soul would grow up in a universe where humans were nothing more than a memory.
Lenonn wanted to arrange one meeting with them, offering peace. Delenn argued that they would not understand, and appealed to me to tell him what they did to prisoners, but he would not be dissuaded. “Dukhat told us to do this,” he said, his voice steady against the force of her anger. I doubt she would ever have relented if I had not offered to arrange this meeting myself. As it was, she was caught enough off balance by shock or anger to let him win.
“What if they kill you?” she demanded as he was leaving.
“Then do not avenge my death.” He did not look back.
~*~
They did kill him. Delenn’s anger turned quiet and cold, although she let his murderers go. It barely mattered - soon they would be dead anyway, and the rest of their people with them. I stood at her side as she discussed war strategies, and in the last hours before I returned to my ship, alone in her quarters, I cradled her head against my chest and gave her what answers I could. We had seen no Shadows with the humans, no sign of them, and if they had become this way through Shadow influence, then we must clean the universe from their presence as the Vorlons had taught us to do a thousand years before.
“The Vorlons no longer speak to me,” she said.
And in this moment, even that did not seem to matter.
~*~
Many more warriors died before it was ended. The humans fought us with all they could, with a strength fuelled by hatred and minds blind to any greater cause. It took many more dead worlds and burning ships before I began to understand why the Vorlons had chosen these as our allies, and even then I thought the Shadows could find better use for them.
My warriors never faltered in their bravery or their devotion. I watched the young ones grow older, far older than they should, each new death a line on their face, and still they fought with as much strength as they had before. They knew as much about the humans as I did, now; each battle was routine, each new victory was another heavy step closer to the end none of us questioned would come. Years had passed since Dukhat’s death, and we were not the people he had known.
Delenn still spoke to Minbar, and we still heard her. She reminded us of Valen, and the wars of our past ; she no longer needed to tell us we should not doubt.
Workers built ships to replace those we had lost, so fast and so many that our enemies would never see us falter. Religious led us in conviction that our actions were not ours alone, that the universe must work through us to create and understand itself. And we warriors fought the enemy until they died in their thousands before they could strike a single one of us down. Every Minbari fought, in their own place; even our children learnt chants of justice and purity.
And so it continued, until we reached Earth.
~*~
We were still one people and one voice when the surrender order came. We obeyed as one, even though we could hear the sounds of a whole beginning to shatter into its parts as the warriors laid down their arms. The Nine gave no reason, and I went to find Delenn, determined for the first time to ask her why.
She was kneeling on the floor of Dukhat’s sanctum, crying. All my words were gone. I think it took her some time to notice me - time did not seem to matter, then, and I paid no attention. I sat beside her and touched her face, feeling her tears against my skin.
She took my hands between hers. “You are Religious again,” she said, turning my palms upwards as though the gloves had hidden them all my life.
I shook my head. “I am asking this for the Warrior caste.”
Her sobs had almost stilled now, her breath steadying. “I will not tell the Warrior caste,” she said. “But I will tell you. The Vorlons were right, all those years past. The humans share our souls. In destroying them, we destroy ourselves.”
I let her words sound in my mind over and over again, until emptiness showed itself to be certainty. “That is true whether they share our souls or not,” I said.
She did not disagree with me. We stayed together in the moment that Minbar began to tear apart, in the only peaceful place our madness had left, and she told me of the Vorlons, and prophecy, and a role she could no longer fulfil.
“After what you have done,” I said. “After what we have done. If the Shadows win -”
“Yes.” I had never heard her speak so quietly. “But I doubted, and I cannot lead us now. Even the most terrible thing I did would not stop me from doing what I am required to do, if I was certain. But I doubted. How can I forget this? And how can I continue, remembering?”
I twined my fingers through hers, kissed the faint mark of the triluminary on her forehead. “I will remember for you,” I said.
And when she returned to her place among the Nine, and began once again to see the universe and all its past and present as she once had, looking to me as often as to the Vorlons to give strength to her vision, I did.
~*~
The fic is ‘Valen’s Children’, which is here and here (two parts).
When Delenn sent for me, I did not ask why. Perhaps I knew her answer would make no difference. I was there before the next day was over, waiting for her where the grinding cogs of war seemed to slow and still, and it was only then that I thought to wonder. Not that I asked; not that I needed to.
Originally this was all in third-person, but after writing - and scrapping - the same few paragraphs about eighteen times, I gave up and tried it this way. It was always going to be a Branmer fic, though. Characters who sound that interesting shouldn’t be introduced for one episode after they die and then never be heard of again, right?
She greeted me as formally as was appropriate for one in her position and one in mine, and waited until we were alone before pressing her hands into my own. Later on, someone mutters about Branmer not being a fair representative of the warrior caste because he’ll just do whatever Delenn wants, so I suppose it’s possible here that she doesn’t want to seem too close to him. Still, this line comes across a a bit too much omg-illicit-affair to me, and that’s not the way I wanted it to sound; I just don’t think she’d care enough about what anyone muttered. “You came,” she breathed, and her eyes held mine before trailing away to all the things that displeased her: the raised line of a scar on my neck, the rougher, darker cloth of clothes made for fighting.
In Legacies, Branmer’s conversion troubled her enough that she came close to starting a war over trying to undo it. (She does tell Sinclair she did it because of Branmer’s wishes, but her argument with Neroon comes down to who’s got more right to claim him.) And she’s uncharacteristically careless about it, too - letting Neroon believe that Branmer’s body got stolen on a space station run by humans wasn’t ever going to work out well.
Minbari conversion also seems to work at a more fundamental level than Delenn wants to acknowledge. It's not deciding you want to belong to X caste, but realising that your heart already belongs to X caste. If I wrote this now, I'd probably have included some of Branmer's later memories of arguing with Delenn about why he couldn't just convert back again when the war was over; here, I wanted to suggest that she didn't like it even before she regretted starting the war, since in a sense she's lost him already. It also fits in nicely with losing Lennier to the Rangers, who are basically the Warrior caste with better PR.
“Of course,” I said. There was little use in either of us pretending this was unexpected.
“You know I have always valued your opinion.” Her hands were light on my sleeves. “I have - found something, and I wish to know your thoughts on it.”
There was a time when half of everything we said was code, the easy abbreviations of thought we all fall into in the company of those who know us well enough to complete them. This did not sound like that. “Where?” I asked her, choosing my question carefully.
“I will show you,” she said. And although I should have stood firm and learned enough to prepare myself for whatever would come, I followed.
Branmer's a lot more serious here than in anything else I've written. Which fits the story, I suppose, but feels a little like when BSG wants to tell you it's A Very Dark Show Indeed: I love it dearly, and I get that when it literally is the end of the world there's every reason to be unremittingly bleak, but I keep expecting it to fade-to-black on a Radiohead song.
Um, anyway. I like Branmer better when I can see him smiling sometimes.
The room was dark, illuminated only by a bright circle on the floor before our feet and the splinters of light that followed us, for a moment, through the open door. It is impossible to tell space in a place like this. I looked at Delenn, who stood closer to the light than I did, and watched the shadows cast in her headbone magnify each tiny movement. “There is nothing here,” I said, waiting for her to prove me wrong.
I heard it before it was there to see, clicks and hisses of what I assumed was breath, although no living thing should breathe like that. Well, Vorlons are creepy. “Who are you?” it asked me, in a voice too like my own.
“I am Shai Alyt Branmer, of the Star Riders,” I said, feeling Delenn’s disapproval burn into my back. “What are you?”
“The sword has no need to claim it is sharp.” This came from another direction, and before long two of them stood there, alien shapes in dull armour. That line would be why I don't write Vorlon speech very often. Although I do quite like the way they come off as siding with Delenn here: "Warrior caste, you say?"
Delenn’s hand touched mine. “They are Vorlons,” she said.
In all the time I knew her, Delenn told me few things more difficult to believe than this. I had always been able to challenge her when others were shamed into silence, but what could I say now? I shook my head.
She was looking past me, at the first one. “Show him,” she said. “Show him what you showed me.”
It split open, and light spilled from the cracks in its shell, flooding around us, bright enough to blind. I could not breathe as its wings began to beat, and it rose above me. I could only watch, frozen, and I saw Delenn’s face bathed in its light, and she was smiling, like a child who has seen the stars for the first time.
When I was Religious caste, I taught my students to chant the stories of Valen and those he brought with him. If you're Minbari, then Valen was the important one; the Vorlons were there to help him. Each of them learnt this from childhood, and each of them would have known that what I saw was a Vorlon and that for love of my people I should heed its words. But they did not see it, and of the two of us who did, one had been leading chants herself since she was barely old enough to be learning them.
We were sitting in her rooms, where the food she prepared lay cold and untouched on plates before us. “Dukhat told me once,” she said, “that if I ever doubted my actions I would only need to look into the face of a Vorlon.” You, doubt? was what I would have said, under other circumstances, and it was what she heard; the corners of her mouth quirked into a smile. “Dukhat also believed in our responsibility to question ourselves when others will not,” she said. “But what if it is the Vorlons we doubt?”
“You do not believe they are Vorlons?”
“Of course they are.” It was not the question she had been expecting me to ask. “I do not believe they must always guide us.”
“They spoke with Valen.”
“But they are not Valen.”
Even now, I envied her the easy confidence in her voice. Those called to greatness as children do not see the world as we do. Branmer's happy enough to disagree with her, but he never challenges this. “You did not bring me here to ignore Vorlons for you,” I said, far from sure.
There are times when we can afford to be young; there are times when the universe reminds us with a thousand voices that we have too much else to be. Delenn lay down at my side and rested her head in my lap, and said “Tell me of the humans.” When I did not answer, she asked again, twisting to look at me. “Tell me how they die.”
It's possible here that Kosh already showed her Dukhat's message about the humans, but I don't think so. The Vorlon reluctance to get seriously involved in the Earth/Minbari war is something that's never really explained - their best hope against the Shadows lies with an alliance of two worlds currently trying to destroy each other, and yet they're content to watch and wait? As with Delenn, I don't believe that they couldn't have stopped it a lot sooner had they been trying to. My guess is that Vorlons don't see the significance of wars (except possibly theirs against the Shadows) as lying in who's hurt or who wins, but in their potential usefulness at getting people to answer the "Who are you?" question, individually or as a world. If that's true, then what they said to Delenn here was something that made her question how different the Minbari were to the humans.
Also, it could be that they didn't have an Earth-Minbari alliance in mind to defeat the Shadows; instead, this was something they chose because of the war. (And because of the time travel thing, anyone Delenn picked at the Battle of the Line would have been Valen.)
I could feel her breath rise and fall beneath my hand. This was how it had always been, she asking me questions no others would ask and I giving her answers no others would hear. It was ridiculous to think she needed protecting from this of all things, Delenn who spoke to us with Dukhat’s voice, who led us into war with the wisdom and strength of Valen himself. Already they spoke of her legacy. And yet, I could not find in myself the cruel obedience to tell her of any of the lives I had ended. “Quickly,” I said. “They are not strong.” And this was true.
“Do they have souls?”
“All sentient things have souls.”
“Animals do not,” she said. “Are they more than animals?”
“Little more, perhaps. But little enough.”
“Then perhaps their souls are little more than animals.”
“The universe is never lessened when it divides itself,” I said. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because you never agreed with me.” Her hand found mine without looking, and she pressed it below her throat, her fingers warm even though my glove. “Tell me I am wrong.”
“Will you believe it?”
“No. Tell me anyway.”
Delenn's so good at arguing that we don't see her lose in canon, and I like the idea of someone who'll not only disagree with her but be able to hold their ground. (Sheridan is rather endearingly pathetic at it, which doesn't say great things about his future career in politics). I think she would, too.
It was not possible I had forgotten anything about her, not the dusk-grey in her headbone or the clear, cold mirrors of her eyes. It was not possible I would ever be anything that was not her vision of me, or that I would want to be. “There are no Minbari souls,” I said, “or alien souls, or Vorlon souls. There is only the universe in all its aspects, and it is only our arrogance and pride which stops us from seeing this.” I didn't want Branmer to turn against the war because he found out that humans have Minbari souls; it seemed important to have a Minbari character have doubts about genocide just because it's genocide. Also, there should be a lot of ways to look at the idea of souls.
“Then is it not as great a crime to kill these humans as it would be to kill a Minbari?”
“Souls do not determine worth.” And my mind swam with images of the dead and dying, of Minbari tortured past sanity at alien hands, of blood mingling with the rain on distant worlds. I wanted to push her away and go back to my ship, and pretend we had never spoken. “Do you want me to bring you one to kill yourself?”
She frowned, puzzled rather than angry. The cold metal of understanding had always been malleable to her, twisted as easily into an ornament as a weapon under her diamond-hard gaze.
“What did the Vorlons tell you?” I said. But she would not answer, and I never asked why.
The war went on. Our enemies were not strong, but they were numerous, scattered across the galaxy like a handful of seeds that grow twisted and dark from wherever they fall. They clung to the bare rock of dead moons, they tunnelled into sand and snow, they hid among other aliens with no shame or pride in themselves. Which is a big thing, if you're Minbari. Sometimes they fought us, flinging their primitive ships at our cruisers one after another; sometimes they ran, or tried to. There was no way of predicting which. A dozen of them would stand to face us even when we outnumbered them in the hundreds, after their own warships had turned tail and fled.
Canon says that Branmer supported the war, and writing him as though he'd been against the idea all along would've felt like cheating. I didn't want to have him change his mind based on any realisation about why humans are important/special/technically-Minbari, either. In this version of history, Delenn was fine with the war itself but changed her mind once her idea of the war changed from 'killing aliens' to 'killing fellow Minbari'; Branmer's the other way around, in that it's only the act of fighting itself which changes his mind about the idea.
Even light-years distant, Delenn’s image was as bright on my ship as it was on Minbar. “They have no conviction,” she said, and we listened. “They have no cause. They only strike out blindly, destroying whatever they can reach.”
I led warriors who had not seen aliens before, who had never fought outside the training circle, who reminded me too much of my acolytes. I led warriors who were fighting when I was barely more than an acolyte myself, and surprised most of them by making the only one who spoke his disdain aloud my alyt. This is Neroon, of course - I couldn't see him being all that happy about a general who'd spent most of his life being Warrior caste. (That scene is in my fic Parallel.) They all believed, and they all fought, and I felt each death as I would grieve my own family, for a life given willingly is a greater loss even than one taken by force.
Delenn praised the warrior caste, the faithful soldiers of Valen, who fought and died in Minbar’s name against an enemy that would never honour them. Our sacrifice would not be forgotten, she said. And for a moment, I could hear her calling me by my warrior title as well as my name.
There was a time when we believed a colony world was abandoned, the aliens fled before our warships arrived. There was no reason to think otherwise; I know this, as I knew it then. But still I blame myself for sending some of the younger warriors to search the ruins, as I will all my life. When we found them, half were dead and the rest only a mockery of living, blinded and crippled and mutilated in a hundred ways, barely even shadows of their souls remaining. The humans who did this chose to attack rather than hide, giving away their own lives for this chance to torture and kill.
“We are not them,” Delenn said, and by now none of us doubted she was Dukhat’s successor as well as his voice. “We will never be them, and we will not allow the universe to be contaminated by their presence. When their world is ashes and their name only a curse, we will remember this.”
The old clan rivalries were laid aside, Fire Wings serving alongside Wind Swords with neither question nor argument, and Moon Shields giving away their own ships to those who had lost the most. On Minbar, three castes spoke with one voice; our children’s songs about hands that must fight and sculpt and pray had never been heard so often, nor meant so much. We were one people, one soul, and the strength of our faith would be enough to cast light even where the universe itself grew dark.
“We are better now than we have ever been,” Delenn said. “You must not doubt.”
I began to measure time in deaths. When Delenn next sent for me, so many had passed that it seemed the universe would soon be empty of anything but our fury and their hate. I saw the Grey Council ship surrounded by its guards, and I wondered what the humans had thought before they killed Dukhat, and what they would think if they walked with me now.
She was arguing with two others when I arrived. Beneath a bow I could not see their faces, but I heard the accusations of cowardice and slaughter, barbed with words not usually spoken aloud: Shadows, Rangers, Z’ha’dum.
When she saw me, she ordered the Warrior Satai at her side to leave. His objection, directed more to the other than her, was dismissed almost before it passed his lips. “I said get out, Coplann,” she fired. “Branmer will speak for the Warrior caste.”
“He will speak for you,” the third one said. The controlled syllables of defiance reminded me of my alyt.
Delenn ignored him. Coplann bowed to her and left, and it was not until he had gone that she introduced me to the other - Lenonn, anla’shok na. “But do not speak of Shadows,” she said. “Nowhere but here, and no time but now.”
“Then what should we speak of?”
“Nothing,” Lenonn said, watching Delenn with guarded eyes. “We must listen.”
And we did. We listened in silence and doubt, hearing Dukhat’s words say the same, terrible thing again and again and again: the humans are needed, the humans must be our allies.
“He didn’t know,” Delenn said, later. “He couldn’t know. That they should be worse than animals, worse than murderers - he would never have thought any creatures to be this terrible.”
“No doubt they would say the same of us,” Lenonn muttered.
I said nothing to either of them. I looked down at my hands, in the black warrior gloves that had once seemed so alien, and thought of Dukhat. The child born with his soul would grow up in a universe where humans were nothing more than a memory.
Lenonn wanted to arrange one meeting with them, offering peace. Delenn argued that they would not understand, and appealed to me to tell him what they did to prisoners, but he would not be dissuaded. “Dukhat told us to do this,” he said, his voice steady against the force of her anger. I doubt she would ever have relented if I had not offered to arrange this meeting myself. As it was, she was caught enough off balance by shock or anger to let him win.
“What if they kill you?” she demanded as he was leaving.
“Then do not avenge my death.” He did not look back.
They did kill him. Delenn’s anger turned quiet and cold, although she let his murderers go. It barely mattered - soon they would be dead anyway, and the rest of their people with them. I stood at her side as she discussed war strategies, and in the last hours before I returned to my ship, alone in her quarters, I cradled her head against my chest and gave her what answers I could. We had seen no Shadows with the humans, no sign of them, and if they had become this way through Shadow influence, then we must clean the universe from their presence as the Vorlons had taught us to do a thousand years before.
“The Vorlons no longer speak to me,” she said.
And in this moment, even that did not seem to matter.
Many more warriors died before it was ended. The humans fought us with all they could, with a strength fuelled by hatred and minds blind to any greater cause. It took many more dead worlds and burning ships before I began to understand why the Vorlons had chosen these as our allies, and even then I thought the Shadows could find better use for them.
My warriors never faltered in their bravery or their devotion. I watched the young ones grow older, far older than they should, each new death a line on their face, and still they fought with as much strength as they had before. They knew as much about the humans as I did, now; each battle was routine, each new victory was another heavy step closer to the end none of us questioned would come. Years had passed since Dukhat’s death, and we were not the people he had known.
Delenn still spoke to Minbar, and we still heard her. She reminded us of Valen, and the wars of our past ; she no longer needed to tell us we should not doubt.
Workers built ships to replace those we had lost, so fast and so many that our enemies would never see us falter. Religious led us in conviction that our actions were not ours alone, that the universe must work through us to create and understand itself. And we warriors fought the enemy until they died in their thousands before they could strike a single one of us down. Every Minbari fought, in their own place; even our children learnt chants of justice and purity.
And so it continued, until we reached Earth.
We were still one people and one voice when the surrender order came. We obeyed as one, even though we could hear the sounds of a whole beginning to shatter into its parts as the warriors laid down their arms. The Nine gave no reason, and I went to find Delenn, determined for the first time to ask her why.
She was kneeling on the floor of Dukhat’s sanctum, crying. All my words were gone. I think it took her some time to notice me - time did not seem to matter, then, and I paid no attention. I sat beside her and touched her face, feeling her tears against my skin.
She took my hands between hers. “You are Religious again,” she said, turning my palms upwards as though the gloves had hidden them all my life.
I shook my head. “I am asking this for the Warrior caste.”
Her sobs had almost stilled now, her breath steadying. “I will not tell the Warrior caste,” she said. “But I will tell you. The Vorlons were right, all those years past. The humans share our souls. In destroying them, we destroy ourselves.”
I let her words sound in my mind over and over again, until emptiness showed itself to be certainty. “That is true whether they share our souls or not,” I said.
She did not disagree with me. We stayed together in the moment that Minbar began to tear apart, in the only peaceful place our madness had left, and she told me of the Vorlons, and prophecy, and a role she could no longer fulfil.
“After what you have done,” I said. “After what we have done. If the Shadows win -”
“Yes.” I had never heard her speak so quietly. “But I doubted, and I cannot lead us now. Even the most terrible thing I did would not stop me from doing what I am required to do, if I was certain. But I doubted. How can I forget this? And how can I continue, remembering?”
I twined my fingers through hers, kissed the faint mark of the triluminary on her forehead. “I will remember for you,” I said.
And when she returned to her place among the Nine, and began once again to see the universe and all its past and present as she once had, looking to me as often as to the Vorlons to give strength to her vision, I did.
