![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catAs in halfway done, and the happy is yet to come. I'm pretty sure this needs some considerable work, so here it is for anyone who might wish to poke at it and provide feedback. (I know the basic premise is possibly the worst fic idea since 'What if a normal girl from our world fell into Middle-earth?', but I wanted to see if I could write it well anyway, on the grounds that every idea can work if enough thought goes into it. (For a great example of 'Girl falls into Middle-earth' done well, by the way, everyone should read Don't Panic!.))
Post-Objects at Rest (Season 5), in canon for everything up to and including certain unfilmed Crusade scenes. PG. Some things which aren't clear may get clearer later on.
David Sheridan didn’t notice there was anyone watching him. Probably he’d have paid no attention whether he’d noticed or not, when there were always people watching him, even home on Minbar. Sometimes they even stared at him, on human worlds like this (Minbari watched him in half-glances and bows, and aliens mostly didn’t watch him at all). His mother would curl a hand around his shoulder and say nothing, and they would go. But even then, people watching him wasn’t much, so he didn’t notice these ones.
Crowds weren’t much, either. There were always crowds. And crowds were noisy anyway, so he didn’t even hear the sound of all those voices when it happened.
The first thing he noticed, in fact, was the smoke.
Afterwards he’d think of a hundred possibilities about that smoke, about whether he should have looked for a fire or an explosion behind it. Afterwards he’d wake up in the night, a new idea thumping in the heartbeat through his veins - what if it had been poisonous? what if? But at the time, his only thought was oh, a breathless half-syllable into the smoke that curled blank whiteness around him. His parents, somewhere ahead of him, were invisible. The crowds were invisible. The world was invisible, and he didn’t start noticing anything in it until the shouts and panic of the crowd got louder and a hand grabbing his shoulder told him that people had been watching him the whole time.
The smoke had begun to sting his eyes then, and he couldn’t see much through the blur of the tears that welled up in response, or his hands rubbing them away. He assumed the person who half-pushed, half-carried him back through the crowds (people everywhere, pushing and jostling and shouting at each other, sharp elbows and feet standing on his) was a Ranger, and the voice which told him ‘This way, quickly’ in Adronato gave him no reason to doubt it. It wasn’t until they were away from the people, crouched down in the corner of the two walls, that he looked for a Ranger badge and didn’t see one.
“You must stay here.” His companion spoke quietly and fast. “It is – there are bad people, and you must stay here until it is safe.”
“Are you a Ranger?” The crowd’s noise wasn’t so bad here, and he twisted around to listen, half-sure he could hear his parents calling for him.
“I, I was. A long time ago.”
David rubbed at his eyes again, although the air was clearer here and the smoke over the crowd was starting to drift away. “I want my parents.”
“I know.” The half-smile was gone before it could be reassuring. “The Rangers will take you, soon.”
You take me, please, he wanted to say, small and afraid and hating the damp smother of the smoke, but the Minbari was no longer looking at him. David followed his gaze to two robed figures, and chewed at his lip when his companion’s shout brought them running. It was safe if Rangers were here. He climbed to his feet to see them better, but the Minbari was gripping his arms just above the elbows, holding him in place. “David,” he said (and the use of his name he didn’t notice until afterwards, because everyone knew his name). “Tell your mother that – I –” And then he bowed his head as though the smoke was too heavy to breathe. “Nothing,” he said.
Then the Rangers were there, asking if he was hurt, carrying him back to his parents, and when he looked back the Minbari was gone.
~*~
Delenn was no longer pacing, or praying, or staring into nothing with her hands a pale knot of grief in front of her. Now she spoke clearly and sure, her words directed only at her husband. “It was him,” she said, and David folded the corner of his page over and put down the book he hadn’t been reading anyway. “You know this just as I do.”
John Sheridan sighed and shook his head. “We don’t know that.” His voice was tired more than calm. “David couldn’t recognise anyone well enough in all that smoke, and we can’t keep showing him pictures until he pretends he can. Hell, for all we know, that was one of the kidnappers and they were after us the whole time.”
“No.” She said the word in a way which did not invite questions. “You know what the Rangers said yesterday. How can you think these people would work with Minbari?”
“Okay. Okay, maybe not one of the kidnappers.”
“But not Lennier, either.”
He robbed the back of his hand over his forehead, and David could see his jaw muscles tense. “I didn’t say that. I just don’t think we should jump to any conclusions based on –”
“Based on everything our son has told us and the Rangers have confirmed. To believe that a stranger would both resemble him and act in a way only he would have cause to – is this a more reasonable conclusion to jump to?”
David curled up further in the chair he always thought of as the Earth chair, the one his father’s clan sent as a gift, and rested his chin on folded hands to see better.
“All the evidence we have,” Sheridan said with the careful enunciation of something repeated many times, “says Lennier died three years ago. Every witness, every vid, every inch of that prison we went over. Nobody else survived the explosion.”
“Very well, then, we will assume he is dead.” She raised a hand at the first sounds of his objection. “Therefore, someone we do not know saved our son and returned him to us unhurt, but refused to see us for no given reason despite wanting to tell me something he could not say to David. And you do not wish to know who this person is?”
“It’s not that. Jesus.” He rubbed at his forehead again. “Okay, fine, you win. Whoever it was, we’ll find them.”
Her head bowed, not too low to hide a smile. “Thank you.”
“I just don’t think you should convince yourself it’s Lennier.”
For a moment she paused, her hand halfway to his, and then sank into the chair beside him. “I would not ask him to return.”
“I meant so you wouldn’t be disappointed if it wasn’t.”
“Who is it?” David asked, kicking a foot impatiently until its circulation returned.
A moment hung in the air as though it had physical presence, and then was gone. Sheridan grinned, and Delenn tried without much success to look stern as she asked what he was doing there.
“Reading.” He pointed to the book carefully placed on the floor beside him.
“You should have been in bed long ago.” She lifted him to his feet before he could protest. “Is it my turn to read your story tonight?”
“Yes.” But he was yawning as he said it. She picked him up, still not too heavy to carry, and said “Say goodnight to your father.”
~*~
In the night, Delenn remembered watching her husband sleep. The memory was clearer than it had ever been now; she could recall each line on his face, each movement, each secret. In the past he awoke to fight the Shadows and greet his dead wife, and she left to face the judgement of her own people, but in this memory he was always asleep and she could watch him forever.
So much had passed. There was grey in his hair now, and his true face was turned away from her. She waited until the silence was too much to bear before placing a hand on his arm, cold where the blanket had fallen away, and saying his name.
He jerked awake, letting his head fall back onto the pillow once he registered she was there. “Yeah.”
“I am – concerned. About David.”
The weight of sleep still pulled at him, blurring his words into mumbles. “What’s he said?”
“Nothing, and this is what concerns me.” When he turned to face her, she could lie pressed against the warmth of his body, feeling his breath in his chest. “He must know how much danger he was in, and yet he will not talk of it, and if he did - what could I say to him?”
“What we’ve always said.” She could feel his voice as much as hear it. “That some people might want to hurt him, but we’ll make sure they can’t.”
“He should not have to pay for my decisions.”
“He doesn’t.” His hand rested on the base of her neck, his fingers splayed through her hair, soothing.
There was silence, for a moment. She broke it. “I cannot sleep. I will go and meditate for a time.”
In response, he only lifted his hand away.
~*~
Meditation brought nothing she wished to see. She pinched out the candle-flame between her fingers (too slowly, and it burnt), and stared out into the darkness instead, challenging it to show her something, anything, else. But the memory played in her mind like a lullaby she knew by heart, and this time she did not try to avoid it.
He would not look up. All these years apart, all the time together, and now he was her terrified young aide once again. “Look at me,” she commanded, and tried her best to ignore the realisation that she could no longer read his thoughts in his eyes when he obeyed.
She had seen already that he was older, in the tired new lines on his face, but it was so sudden and present now that she almost wanted him to leave her again. She had imagined a thousand futures for him in the last three years, images of devotion and repentance fragmenting into each other in a chaos of possibility, but in none of them had he changed. “You have been away too long,” she said.
His half-smile was there and gone in an instant, and he did not speak.
“Have you brought me only silence after all these years, Lennier of the Third Fane of Chu’Domo?”
This time he answered her, his eyes dropping to the floor tiles once again. “Anything else would be – inadequate,” he said softly, and for a moment he had never been gone.
His face beneath her palms was warm as the breath on her skin. “No,” she said. “I have missed you so much, my friend.”
He did not try to break her gaze this time. “A friend who tried to kill your husband,” he said. “You should not have missed me.”
“You would not have let him die. It was only one moment, and I know this – I know this even if you do not – and John understands, and it does not matter, Lennier, not any more.”
“Then you should not have found me.”
Her fingertips traced over his face, absently noting each new line and scar (superficial, meaningless, only a shell), and still he was Lennier. The velvet-soft skin beneath the lower edge of his headbone felt the same. She did not notice when she began to knead it with her knuckles in the way he once liked, not until his breath shuddered and he froze in her arms, and then she did not much care. “You are here. I have been without you so long – and my son, you have never even seen David – but at last you are here.”
He was beginning to relax, his muscles fluid under her touch and her head pressed back against his hand, but his voice was still rough. “I have no right to be any part of your life now.”
“Do not say that. Never say that. I am not myself with you gone.”
“I have not found –”
“How can you find forgiveness alone? How can you find anything? Your place is here, as it has always been. It is here.” So close, she could not see his face.
He did not reply. They stood together in silence for a minute that was forever, until she asked “You will stay?”
“Yes,” he said, and nothing else mattered.
But he had not. He had never seen David, and she had barely had the chance to tell John he was back – words cut too short, a promise to discuss it later. The Rangers brought word that Lyta Alexander was being moved to a Psi Corps prison on Earth, not far away from them, and Lennier could be there without being recognised. It was only supposed to take a day.
Something went wrong, they said afterwards. And We don’t know what happened, there was an explosion, we’re still not sure. And We’re sorry. And John trying to hold her, as she fell to her knees and screamed.
There were times she did not believe he was dead. He was hers, and he had no right to be gone; his life was hers, and she had never given up her right to it. There were other times when she knew beyond doubt he was, and could think of nothing but her own failure, of everything he should have been lost and gone. It was cruel that the universe would punish him so, and perhaps she deserved cruelty, but he never had. When John brought her food - here, look, I made you flarn, it doesn’t look great but won’t you just taste it to see if I got the salt right? - she told him.
He did not understand. Rituals and their absence meant nothing to him, an inconvenience rather than the structure and foundation she should never have denied Lennier. But he understood betrayal, which this also was; he understood lies; he did not know what she had done to Lennier, but he knew what she had done to him, and he buried his face in his hands and said he didn’t know what to say.
Daylight was beginning to glow through the half-opaque windows.
She tried not to wake him when she went back to bed, but his eyes were already open. When she reached out her hand, he took it without speaking.
~*~
The bar reminded him, as everything had a tendency to do, of Babylon 5. A crowd of aliens avoided each other’s eyes, settled into their own patterns of drinking and repeating the same conversations over and over again. The barman swabbed ineffectually at an ingrained layer of dirt on the bar, and metal embossed above the dusty glass bottles was thick and dull with grime. He was not surprised to find this place more crowded than it had been four days ago, now that the transport blocks imposed after the attempted kidnap of David Sheridan had been lifted. In truth, he was glad for a crowd that would not look too closely at one more hooded figure.
Perhaps they were looking for him, now. Perhaps she was looking for him. Her son must have told her enough to guess, even without any message - he was so sure he would have known what to say to her, but the words had died on his tongue, leaving him fumbling between cliches and silence. And if she did not know, she would no doubt guess soon, and he could not stay. Besides, several of the bar’s more permanent patrons were beginning to look at him a little too closely, and he did not even want to be recognised as Minbari in a place like this. He put down the glass he had been holding for the sake of appearances, and was almost at the door before a hand grabbed his wrist.
He looked down into a human face, into something that was not quite surprise and not quite hate.
“You don’t get to run away again,” John Sheridan said.
Post-Objects at Rest (Season 5), in canon for everything up to and including certain unfilmed Crusade scenes. PG. Some things which aren't clear may get clearer later on.
David Sheridan didn’t notice there was anyone watching him. Probably he’d have paid no attention whether he’d noticed or not, when there were always people watching him, even home on Minbar. Sometimes they even stared at him, on human worlds like this (Minbari watched him in half-glances and bows, and aliens mostly didn’t watch him at all). His mother would curl a hand around his shoulder and say nothing, and they would go. But even then, people watching him wasn’t much, so he didn’t notice these ones.
Crowds weren’t much, either. There were always crowds. And crowds were noisy anyway, so he didn’t even hear the sound of all those voices when it happened.
The first thing he noticed, in fact, was the smoke.
Afterwards he’d think of a hundred possibilities about that smoke, about whether he should have looked for a fire or an explosion behind it. Afterwards he’d wake up in the night, a new idea thumping in the heartbeat through his veins - what if it had been poisonous? what if? But at the time, his only thought was oh, a breathless half-syllable into the smoke that curled blank whiteness around him. His parents, somewhere ahead of him, were invisible. The crowds were invisible. The world was invisible, and he didn’t start noticing anything in it until the shouts and panic of the crowd got louder and a hand grabbing his shoulder told him that people had been watching him the whole time.
The smoke had begun to sting his eyes then, and he couldn’t see much through the blur of the tears that welled up in response, or his hands rubbing them away. He assumed the person who half-pushed, half-carried him back through the crowds (people everywhere, pushing and jostling and shouting at each other, sharp elbows and feet standing on his) was a Ranger, and the voice which told him ‘This way, quickly’ in Adronato gave him no reason to doubt it. It wasn’t until they were away from the people, crouched down in the corner of the two walls, that he looked for a Ranger badge and didn’t see one.
“You must stay here.” His companion spoke quietly and fast. “It is – there are bad people, and you must stay here until it is safe.”
“Are you a Ranger?” The crowd’s noise wasn’t so bad here, and he twisted around to listen, half-sure he could hear his parents calling for him.
“I, I was. A long time ago.”
David rubbed at his eyes again, although the air was clearer here and the smoke over the crowd was starting to drift away. “I want my parents.”
“I know.” The half-smile was gone before it could be reassuring. “The Rangers will take you, soon.”
You take me, please, he wanted to say, small and afraid and hating the damp smother of the smoke, but the Minbari was no longer looking at him. David followed his gaze to two robed figures, and chewed at his lip when his companion’s shout brought them running. It was safe if Rangers were here. He climbed to his feet to see them better, but the Minbari was gripping his arms just above the elbows, holding him in place. “David,” he said (and the use of his name he didn’t notice until afterwards, because everyone knew his name). “Tell your mother that – I –” And then he bowed his head as though the smoke was too heavy to breathe. “Nothing,” he said.
Then the Rangers were there, asking if he was hurt, carrying him back to his parents, and when he looked back the Minbari was gone.
Delenn was no longer pacing, or praying, or staring into nothing with her hands a pale knot of grief in front of her. Now she spoke clearly and sure, her words directed only at her husband. “It was him,” she said, and David folded the corner of his page over and put down the book he hadn’t been reading anyway. “You know this just as I do.”
John Sheridan sighed and shook his head. “We don’t know that.” His voice was tired more than calm. “David couldn’t recognise anyone well enough in all that smoke, and we can’t keep showing him pictures until he pretends he can. Hell, for all we know, that was one of the kidnappers and they were after us the whole time.”
“No.” She said the word in a way which did not invite questions. “You know what the Rangers said yesterday. How can you think these people would work with Minbari?”
“Okay. Okay, maybe not one of the kidnappers.”
“But not Lennier, either.”
He robbed the back of his hand over his forehead, and David could see his jaw muscles tense. “I didn’t say that. I just don’t think we should jump to any conclusions based on –”
“Based on everything our son has told us and the Rangers have confirmed. To believe that a stranger would both resemble him and act in a way only he would have cause to – is this a more reasonable conclusion to jump to?”
David curled up further in the chair he always thought of as the Earth chair, the one his father’s clan sent as a gift, and rested his chin on folded hands to see better.
“All the evidence we have,” Sheridan said with the careful enunciation of something repeated many times, “says Lennier died three years ago. Every witness, every vid, every inch of that prison we went over. Nobody else survived the explosion.”
“Very well, then, we will assume he is dead.” She raised a hand at the first sounds of his objection. “Therefore, someone we do not know saved our son and returned him to us unhurt, but refused to see us for no given reason despite wanting to tell me something he could not say to David. And you do not wish to know who this person is?”
“It’s not that. Jesus.” He rubbed at his forehead again. “Okay, fine, you win. Whoever it was, we’ll find them.”
Her head bowed, not too low to hide a smile. “Thank you.”
“I just don’t think you should convince yourself it’s Lennier.”
For a moment she paused, her hand halfway to his, and then sank into the chair beside him. “I would not ask him to return.”
“I meant so you wouldn’t be disappointed if it wasn’t.”
“Who is it?” David asked, kicking a foot impatiently until its circulation returned.
A moment hung in the air as though it had physical presence, and then was gone. Sheridan grinned, and Delenn tried without much success to look stern as she asked what he was doing there.
“Reading.” He pointed to the book carefully placed on the floor beside him.
“You should have been in bed long ago.” She lifted him to his feet before he could protest. “Is it my turn to read your story tonight?”
“Yes.” But he was yawning as he said it. She picked him up, still not too heavy to carry, and said “Say goodnight to your father.”
In the night, Delenn remembered watching her husband sleep. The memory was clearer than it had ever been now; she could recall each line on his face, each movement, each secret. In the past he awoke to fight the Shadows and greet his dead wife, and she left to face the judgement of her own people, but in this memory he was always asleep and she could watch him forever.
So much had passed. There was grey in his hair now, and his true face was turned away from her. She waited until the silence was too much to bear before placing a hand on his arm, cold where the blanket had fallen away, and saying his name.
He jerked awake, letting his head fall back onto the pillow once he registered she was there. “Yeah.”
“I am – concerned. About David.”
The weight of sleep still pulled at him, blurring his words into mumbles. “What’s he said?”
“Nothing, and this is what concerns me.” When he turned to face her, she could lie pressed against the warmth of his body, feeling his breath in his chest. “He must know how much danger he was in, and yet he will not talk of it, and if he did - what could I say to him?”
“What we’ve always said.” She could feel his voice as much as hear it. “That some people might want to hurt him, but we’ll make sure they can’t.”
“He should not have to pay for my decisions.”
“He doesn’t.” His hand rested on the base of her neck, his fingers splayed through her hair, soothing.
There was silence, for a moment. She broke it. “I cannot sleep. I will go and meditate for a time.”
In response, he only lifted his hand away.
Meditation brought nothing she wished to see. She pinched out the candle-flame between her fingers (too slowly, and it burnt), and stared out into the darkness instead, challenging it to show her something, anything, else. But the memory played in her mind like a lullaby she knew by heart, and this time she did not try to avoid it.
He would not look up. All these years apart, all the time together, and now he was her terrified young aide once again. “Look at me,” she commanded, and tried her best to ignore the realisation that she could no longer read his thoughts in his eyes when he obeyed.
She had seen already that he was older, in the tired new lines on his face, but it was so sudden and present now that she almost wanted him to leave her again. She had imagined a thousand futures for him in the last three years, images of devotion and repentance fragmenting into each other in a chaos of possibility, but in none of them had he changed. “You have been away too long,” she said.
His half-smile was there and gone in an instant, and he did not speak.
“Have you brought me only silence after all these years, Lennier of the Third Fane of Chu’Domo?”
This time he answered her, his eyes dropping to the floor tiles once again. “Anything else would be – inadequate,” he said softly, and for a moment he had never been gone.
His face beneath her palms was warm as the breath on her skin. “No,” she said. “I have missed you so much, my friend.”
He did not try to break her gaze this time. “A friend who tried to kill your husband,” he said. “You should not have missed me.”
“You would not have let him die. It was only one moment, and I know this – I know this even if you do not – and John understands, and it does not matter, Lennier, not any more.”
“Then you should not have found me.”
Her fingertips traced over his face, absently noting each new line and scar (superficial, meaningless, only a shell), and still he was Lennier. The velvet-soft skin beneath the lower edge of his headbone felt the same. She did not notice when she began to knead it with her knuckles in the way he once liked, not until his breath shuddered and he froze in her arms, and then she did not much care. “You are here. I have been without you so long – and my son, you have never even seen David – but at last you are here.”
He was beginning to relax, his muscles fluid under her touch and her head pressed back against his hand, but his voice was still rough. “I have no right to be any part of your life now.”
“Do not say that. Never say that. I am not myself with you gone.”
“I have not found –”
“How can you find forgiveness alone? How can you find anything? Your place is here, as it has always been. It is here.” So close, she could not see his face.
He did not reply. They stood together in silence for a minute that was forever, until she asked “You will stay?”
“Yes,” he said, and nothing else mattered.
But he had not. He had never seen David, and she had barely had the chance to tell John he was back – words cut too short, a promise to discuss it later. The Rangers brought word that Lyta Alexander was being moved to a Psi Corps prison on Earth, not far away from them, and Lennier could be there without being recognised. It was only supposed to take a day.
Something went wrong, they said afterwards. And We don’t know what happened, there was an explosion, we’re still not sure. And We’re sorry. And John trying to hold her, as she fell to her knees and screamed.
There were times she did not believe he was dead. He was hers, and he had no right to be gone; his life was hers, and she had never given up her right to it. There were other times when she knew beyond doubt he was, and could think of nothing but her own failure, of everything he should have been lost and gone. It was cruel that the universe would punish him so, and perhaps she deserved cruelty, but he never had. When John brought her food - here, look, I made you flarn, it doesn’t look great but won’t you just taste it to see if I got the salt right? - she told him.
He did not understand. Rituals and their absence meant nothing to him, an inconvenience rather than the structure and foundation she should never have denied Lennier. But he understood betrayal, which this also was; he understood lies; he did not know what she had done to Lennier, but he knew what she had done to him, and he buried his face in his hands and said he didn’t know what to say.
Daylight was beginning to glow through the half-opaque windows.
She tried not to wake him when she went back to bed, but his eyes were already open. When she reached out her hand, he took it without speaking.
The bar reminded him, as everything had a tendency to do, of Babylon 5. A crowd of aliens avoided each other’s eyes, settled into their own patterns of drinking and repeating the same conversations over and over again. The barman swabbed ineffectually at an ingrained layer of dirt on the bar, and metal embossed above the dusty glass bottles was thick and dull with grime. He was not surprised to find this place more crowded than it had been four days ago, now that the transport blocks imposed after the attempted kidnap of David Sheridan had been lifted. In truth, he was glad for a crowd that would not look too closely at one more hooded figure.
Perhaps they were looking for him, now. Perhaps she was looking for him. Her son must have told her enough to guess, even without any message - he was so sure he would have known what to say to her, but the words had died on his tongue, leaving him fumbling between cliches and silence. And if she did not know, she would no doubt guess soon, and he could not stay. Besides, several of the bar’s more permanent patrons were beginning to look at him a little too closely, and he did not even want to be recognised as Minbari in a place like this. He put down the glass he had been holding for the sake of appearances, and was almost at the door before a hand grabbed his wrist.
He looked down into a human face, into something that was not quite surprise and not quite hate.
“You don’t get to run away again,” John Sheridan said.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-22 12:57 pm (UTC)I like Lennier appearing in a puff of smoke. It's very appropriate, and on many levels (warning symbols, magic, and his troubled relationship with oxygen, for example). Also, David's instinctual trusting of Lennier is a nice touch.
The aging is good to have, and important. He seems to physically grow older rather suddenly in the show, and here the sudden inability to treat him as a child or an adolescent with a crush not only applies to Delenn but the reader.
And grr. What a cliffhanger. I do look forward to seeing how you treat the Sheridan-Lennier element ("not quite hate" can mean so many things, most of them awful, some of them more positive, and I can't tell which you're going for yet).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-22 01:16 pm (UTC)Sheridan demanded a bigger role in this story on the grounds that he didn't want to play an extra in his own marriage, and that's difficult to argue with. I'm not quite sure how it'll play out in the rest of the story, though. He's definitely not going to act the way Delenn did in the return-that-wasn't, but this may well not be a bad thing.
The aging is good to have, and important.
Yay, I hoped that would work! It seemed out of character for him to outright argue with Delenn that she couldn't just dismiss everything and go back to the way things had been, so I needed some way to have him changed and Delenn ignoring it.
What did you think about the J/D stuff? (And there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.) It's important for the later stuff that their relationship is in a particular place here, and I'm a little concerned I haven't got the balance between Not Happy Families and how much they need each other quite right.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-22 04:10 pm (UTC)It seemed good to me, although you know I'm not the best person to ask. ;) But I think you got the balance right.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-22 11:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-23 11:47 pm (UTC)He's trying, see! He's not so bad! (I feel kind of guilty about writing him into the background, so hopefully I've compensated enough for not liking the character here.) But yeah, he needs to be involved. I get the feeling Delenn and Lennier could carry on with this angsty tormented not-quite-relationship forever without Sheridan's Somebody-Do-Something attitude.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-22 04:08 pm (UTC)well, we didn't see a body, and therefore...
Date: 2004-09-23 11:49 pm (UTC)And there will be a happy ending whether certain characters like it or not...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-18 01:01 pm (UTC)He was hers, and he had no right to be gone; his life was hers, and she had never given up her right to it.
That is so absolutely Delenn, and even years later the arrogance of that thought utterly escapes her. She's insisting on having everything, and on not paying any of the price for it, and on not noticing how much the men in her life are paying on her behalf. And Sheridan is paying as well, even if he doesn't know it. I do feel for him here.
But, I just don't care. I'll forgive her, and let her go on lying and cheating and 'forgetting' to mention the most important facts of her life to the people who have the most right to know them as long as it means that Lennier can be alive and that he can keep his vow to her. And I can't think of any other character in any fandom that I'd let mistreat his or her partner like this, but Lennier just consents to it so absolutely that it feels right.
Sigh. I miss this 'ship.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-18 11:21 pm (UTC)Erk. Firefly? I've only ever seen bits and pieces (partly because I'm still sulking from another sci-fi show that got cancelled after one season many fandoms ago), but I know the pain. *offers completely uninformed sympathies*
That is so absolutely Delenn, and even years later the arrogance of that thought utterly escapes her.
Yep. I'd rewatched Legacies before writing this, and I think that's what she does with Branmer as well - her grief condenses into this cold "that's mine!" attitude about him. It's one of the things I still find most disturbing about her character, that there isn't really any line drawn between her faith in how the universe should be and her reliance on all the people she loves being exactly what she needs them to be.
I'll forgive her, and let her go on lying and cheating and 'forgetting' to mention the most important facts of her life to the people who have the most right to know them as long as it means that Lennier can be alive and that he can keep his vow to her.
Lennier would really approve. (Well, first he'd challenge you to denn'sha for saying bad things about Delenn, but *afterwards* he'd approve ;) I can't think of any other character I'd accept this from, either, and it still baffles me that this pairing doesn't squick me beyond belief. (And that I can write the equivalent of "she does bad things because she ordered genocide in the past, so it's okay!") She's far more deceived about the reality of the situation than he ever is, and I think it would bother me a whole lot more if that was the other way round. (Although maybe not, since it doesn't here with Sheridan.) Maybe because what she needs from Lennier is so simple in a way - to be Minbari and to love her. Not that any of this would stop me finding this squicky as hell if it was any characters other than them.