Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

By my reckoning I have two hours in the next two days when I won't be at work or asleep, and the total time of tidying the house plus packing to go home plus obligatory frantic search for keys/wallet/camera/phone/shoes usually adds up to at least three. Little time left for messing about with LJ, anyway. So I'll just post this early.

deborah_judge, you wanted Delenn/Lennier?

Title: Sunlight
Disclaimer: Babylon 5, and everything on it, belongs to JMS
Rating: R
Note: Takes place during The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari, with apologies if I've messed up the chronology - my Season 5 videos have long since been lost to grainy static and a failure to write "DO NOT TAPE OVER THIS" clearly enough on the label.

( Sunlight )

Sinclair's Five Things That Never Happened To..., which grey_bard was interested in seeing. And will quite possibly be horribly disappointed in, now I've re-read this. It's... patchy.

PG-13. Sub-chapter-titles are Tennyson quotes, poem in Thing 1 is A. E. Housman (you can have too much Tennyson), things 3 and 4 go together. Should be fairly easy to work out which alternate bit goes where. And if Thing 1 seems a little confusing in light of the Sinclair/Valen thing, I tried getting about five different explanations in, but it felt really clunky, so feel free to think up your own. (Ditto with certain Delenn stuff.)

( I wasn't kidding about the 'patchy' thing. Really. )

Started life as the fifth-season sequel to Elements of Consolation, that I said I'd work on ages ago. I've been working on this for a while (and then deleting it, and then working on it again, and then getting angry with it and upset with it and scrapping the whole thing, and then working on it again, and...) for a while now, and more recently I've been using it as angst overspill for the AU WIP I'm working on (one of the reasons for the title).

Deborah, I'm afraid it's not brilliant as a birthday present, especially if you've not been having a great time of things. But here it is anyway, in super-sparkly wrapping paper to try to cancel out Minbari angst.

Title: Aside
Pairing: D/L. (Oh, pretend to look surprised.)
Rating: R. I think R. However, while it's not as graphic as it could be (still pretty graphic, though), it's squicky on about eighteen different levels. 'Angst' does not cover this. Just so you're warned.
Disclaimer: JMS owns all - except the poem, which is A. E. Housman's. I'm just borrowing and will put them back in one piece.
Notes:
1. This exists in the same universe as my fic 'Elements of Consolation', although I don't want to call it a sequel. (A possible sequel, maybe.) It takes place somewhere after 'Atonement' but before the end of Season 4.
2. I know, I know, the only Minbari prophecy we hear about comes from Valen, and he was very particular about time and place. But there had to be Minbari prophecy before that, and I wanted to make it different from Valen's, just because it would be nice if the Minbari had something of their own that the Vorlons hadn't messed with yet. (Because it's not like Minbar degenerated into messy civil war after the Vorlons left, or anything...) (Oh, hey, look - 'Valen' and 'Vorlon' are very similar words, aren't they? How did I never notice that before?)

( Aside )

(None-too-cheerful song lyrics in title don't have anything to do with the rest of the post, although I am getting fed up with still being wide awake at sunrise (about half-past four) every day. Yay for a combination of noisy neighbours, noisy wildlife and being miserable about stuff I should have got over a long time ago.)

Sample sentence from the book I'm reading at the moment, which has made me feel immensely better about my writing style:

"So much of Derrida's writing depends upon multiple reading heads, and although he has not, on the face of it, engaged in co-authorship, narrowly conceived, if we think in broader terms, in terms of interviews, dialogues, translations, examples, citations, iterability, double bands like those in Glas, or 'Living On/Borderlines', the heat-seeking missives of The Post Card, or simply in terms of the medley of styles that he adopts, not to mention his constant openness to the other, then we can say that Derrida only ever co-authors."

I can only assume he was being paid by the comma.

And I've been writing stuff, too, which is good. I actually kept to a self-imposed deadline, for the first time in - well, ever - and it's not a great piece of work, but at least now it's being mediocre on my supervisor's desk rather than mine. Fic is also going somewhere. Writing non-Minbari scenes is tricky, though; hopefully that's just Sheridan, because otherwise it's pretty pathetic that I can't even write my own species.

So, I think I'm going to write a three-part thing for the Branmer fic - the one I've already written, the one I'm currently working on with Delenn and Branmer after the surrender order, and then hopefully one during Legacies with Delenn and Neroon talking a few things over. I'm pretty clear on how the second one's going to go, but the third... well, it has Neroon, it'll be fun to write if nothing else.

I'm also really, really tempted to write Lennier fic about That Diary, and just what it was in there that Delenn read as 'He thinks our relationship is a mistake'. As soon as I can get past the frankly stupid, JMS, what were you thinking? rather weird idea of Lennier having a diary, that is. What would it look like? "Private!!!!! Keep out EVERYONE - this means YOU!!!!!" written on the front? Little White Stars doodled in the margins? "Wednesday, eleventy-first of April. Ranger training - 87% complete. Number of times have received nasty scars on face due to fighting-pike-related issues - 0, v.g. Minutes spent muttering about Sheridan - 27."

Er. Maybe I can't write it seriously, after all.

One seven-hour bus journey later, I'm back in Scotland and very very tired. (It started pouring with rain the second we drove past the 'Welcome to Scotland!' sign on the motorway. Funny, Scottish weather, very funny.) I did write fic on the bus, though. I'm a little concerned about this one. It's only half a page so far, and already I think it's going to need a thirteen-paragraph author's note disclaiming pretty much everything. I doubt it'll be necessary - it's not like anyone's going to yell at me for mentioning the less-than-pretty side of the Earth/Minbari war, is it? - but given the subject matter, and given that Branmer's already getting a little emotional about it, I'll feel more comfortable with some sort of note there. For lack of a better word, this feels odd.

Speaking of fics which might need long, detailed and defensive notes, I'm going to take a look at the other ficathon story and see if I'm as happy with it as I was when I looked at it last. I think, with this one, I'm going to end up hitting 'Submit Post' with a hand over my eyes and then running away from the computer.

I was looking for the Lurkers' Guide page for Legacies, because... um... er... well... Because I have this new plotbunny for a Delenn/Neroon fic set pre-Earth/Minbari war, and it will not leave me alone. There, I've said it.

I know that has the potential to be the worst fic idea in history, or at least the worst one since my 'What if my parents weren't my real parents, and I was secretly Elrond's other daughter, sent here for my own protection?' idea after reading LOTR for the first time. (I know, hanging head in shame. But I was very very young, okay? And it wasn't a cliche pre-ff.net. So ha.) Still, a plotbunny's a plotbunny, and I'm determined to make this work.

In Legacies, when Neroon and Delenn are arguing over Bramner, Neroon says 'He was warrior caste by right of his father!' Delenn replies with 'And religious caste by right of his mother. You know which takes precedence.' The first time I saw that, as far as I can remember, I understood it to mean that the mother's caste takes precedence. The Lurkers' Guide page, on the other hand, says:

"Membership in the religious caste takes precedence if one parent is in the religious caste and the other is a warrior. (This is ambiguous; Delenn's statement on the matter could be interpreted to mean that the mother's caste takes precedence over the father's.)"

It is ambiguous, now I've read that. But beforehand, I honestly didn't even think there was a possibility of the first interpretation. All the fic I've read which deals with Minbari and castes takes it the same way I did - if your parents come from different castes, then you're automatically in your mother's unless you choose otherwise. I'm still convinced that's what she meant, too.

But. Well. What if I only thought that because of the fanfiction? I know it's a really bad idea to take your ideas about canon from fic, because that way lies writing stories about Elrond's Other Other Other Daughter being an Elemental Elf who's half-dragon and rides a unicorn, and wondering why all those angry Tolkien purists are gathering at the gates with heavy sticks. I get angry when I see authors do this, and maybe I've been doing it myself without even realising. If I didn't even notice the different interpretations of Delenn's statement there, how many other things might I have taken purely from fanfic and assumed were canon?

Eeek.

I still don't dare post this to thefiringline just yet, because although I think it's fine now, I'm bound to find some nitpicky problem with it soon which stops me wanting to show it to anyone. But what better opportunity to get used to the idea of actually posting something?

It's unlike anything else I've ever written. It's 491 words, it's not shippy or angsty or epic in any way, and it's a character that I've never written before. So, currently, I'm justifying my uncharacteristic actions (finishing fic! Posting fic!) by pretending it wasn't me who wrote it.

The story itself is very reluctant to leave the nest, though.

( Get out there, you baby. *prods with toe* )