Fanfiction: Visiting Hour (Babylon 5)
Nov. 19th, 2006 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAuthor: Selena
Title: Visiting Hour
Disclaimer: Characters and situations owned by Babylonian Productions and JMS.
Pairing: Anna/Morden. References to various other pairings.
Rating: G
Thanks to:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kathyh, for beta-reading.
Written for:littlemimm, as part of the Rare Pairing Ficathon. The request was “Anna/Morden, something that’s both fucked up and includes Morden’s family in some way, be it as a comment or a reason for his actions”.
Timeline: Set during season 5’s Day of the Dead, though no actual spoilers beyond s4’s Into the Fire.
Visiting Hour
Lennier had every intention of holding true to his resolution. If he was trapped with what appeared to be the late Morden, emissary of the Shadows, he would ignore him and meditate. There had been worse nights; having to listen to Delenn and Sheridan because custom demanded it certainly counted.
“You know,” Morden said, turning another page of Universe Today, “for someone who wanted to learn from the dead, you are singularly uninquisitive.”
“He probably recognizes a bad teacher when he sees one,” said a new voice, a female voice, and Lennier raised his head, startled. Standing in the entrance, leaning slightly against the frame, was a woman he recognized at once. He had never met her nor spoken a single word to her, but he had studied what footage existed of her extensively once, in the vain hope of helping Delenn by proving she was not who she claimed to be.
Or perhaps he had wanted to prove the opposite. After all, human custom was to marry only one person at a time, and if Sheridan were already bonded, he could not have married Delenn.
Shame burned in him at this thought, and he considered that this might be the reason why she, too, appeared to him now. For Anna Sheridan, like Morden, was quite dead.
Yet here they were, the servants of the Shadows, returned with their unwanted lessons. Though Morden apparantly had not expected Anna, or at least pretended not to have expected her, for the man folded his newspaper, put it aside and looked at her, nonplussed.
“Well,” he said. “This is a night of surprises.”
“Is it?” she asked.
Morden rose. “I hadn’t expected young Lennier here to be entertaining visitors other than myself,” he said courteously, smiling at her. She didn’t return his smile.
“I haven’t come to Lennier.”
“Ah. Well, it’s unfortunate your husband chose to sleep in another part of the station then,” Morden said, charming smile getting deeper. “With his living wife. Otherwise it would have been quite the reunion, I’m sure. In fact, come to think of it, isn’t there yet another former Mrs. Sheridan on the station right now? The man has a regular harem.”
It would have been better to ignore all this as and return to his meditation, yet Lennier found himself listening. It was impossible for him not to. In case this news of living and undead former wives of Sheridan were to hurt Delenn, to guard her, Lennier told himself. Only because of this.
At last, Anna Sheridan moved forward, stepping towards Morden until she was close enough to touch him.
“I came here for a family reunion,” she said softly. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Vir, talking to Lennier in a dark hour, had claimed Mr. Morden had lost his composure on Centauri Prime, quite thoroughly. Based on what he knew of the man, this had been hard to imagine for Lennier, until now. Morden’s smile actually faltered and vanished.
“You see,” Anna continued, stepping sideways and beginning to move in a very tight circle around Morden, ostensibly adressing Lennier, “your visitor did not come on the station simply to bother you, Lennier. In life, he always made it his business to get people what they wanted, and he thought he’d get one of his own demands now. But he should have remembered the way in which he answered requests.”
“What did he ask for?” Lennier asked before he could stop himself.
“His dead family,” Anna said. “Which is what he’s getting.”
“My family...” Morden began, and Anna cut him off.
“They were never your reason for serving the Shadows,” she said. “Maybe they were your excuse at the start, but then you were just happy you had found a cause to believe in. Your family? You gave birth to me. You took all that was Anna and made it an instrument for the Shadows to play, and I didn’t even have human speech anymore, I was just a machine, and then you remade me all over again so I could convince John to come to Z’Ha’Dum. I’m your creature twice over. What is it those telepaths used to say? You’re my mother and my father.”
She stood behind him now, and put both her hands on his shoulders, fingers digging in.
“Who is your family, if not me?”
By now, Morden had caught himself again. His smile was back, though he didn’t turn around. But he did raise one hand, touching her fingers.
“I prefer to think of us as fellow orphans,” he said benignly. “You miss them terribly, don’t you? They shouldn’t have left us when they went beyond the Rim.”
Lennier didn’t know which idea he found more disturbing; that the dead should miss anything, instead of being reborn as he was always taught they were, or that anyone should miss the Shadows. Presumably Morden was just baiting Anna Sheridan. A taunt, a joke; humans were not easy to read at times.
Against his will, he thought of those other creatures Delenn and he had encountered, the Drakh, and pushed the thought away again.
“No,” Anna replied, not removing her hands yet not responding to his touch, either. “How can I miss anything? The part of me which can miss and long was taken long before I died. You should know. You taught me how to fake it, after all.”
This time, Morden’s other hand rose upwards, covering hers.
“Anyone named Sheridan is so good at lying to themselves, aren’t they, Lennier?” he said, and there was a note of affection in the mockery which Lennier thought had to be as wrong as anything else here tonight. “If there is anything I am an expert in, it is the wanting, Anna. That never died in you.”
“All I wanted was to see John again, and to die, and so I did.”
“That implies there was a you left to want,” Morden said. “Young Lennier here is a student of philosophy, so let us ask him. Lennier, Mrs. Sheridan seems to maintain the position that she stopped being herself and a person when she started to serve our mutual… associates. Now granted, her terms of service were somewhat different from mine, but does she give you the impression of being an automaton? More to the point, she admits to having had wishes and desires before her death. As long as a person wishes for something, they are alive. It is the very cause of life and evolution: wanting. Especially things another does not want.”
He leaned his head back so he could look up at Anna’s face.
“This is why I found them so very congenial,” he told her.
The question of wanting was what had brought Lennier back to this station. He should have known, he should have remembered that this was the Shadows’ question. He wished to see Delenn again, and he wished to learn how to live without her. He wished for her happiness, and he wished for himself to be the cause of that happiness, and he knew this was not what she wanted, and thus he was torn apart. Conflict, indeed. But he doubted it was evolution, not for him.
“Everyone desires,” he said curtly to Morden. “But only a person would know to put another’s desires before their own. It seems to me that neither of you were able to do that, in the end.”
He wanted to add that they still were not, for he did not wish them to be here, but Anna laughed. It was a carefree sound, full of amusement, not malice, familiar to him at once, and suddenly, he wondered whether Sheridan ever heard an echo of it in Delenn’s. For all the great difference of the voices, there was that laughter, nearly identical.
“He has you there,” she said, and her right hand moved away from Morden’s, finding its way from his shoulder to his neck, fingers circling around it.
“I was sorry when they beheaded you,” she added matter-of-factly.
“Were you?”
“We should have all died on Z’Ha’dum,” she said. “It would have been far more fitting.”
“You, me and Sheridan?” Morden asked. “What a romantic you are, Anna. But then again, we did die together. You were just the only one they didn’t bring back. Which I was sorry for, believe it or not.” His liberated hand opened to show an empty palm. “It was all mad Centauri for me after that, and look how that went. Tell me the truth, though. You did not feel a bit of glee when my head was severed from my body? What about righteous satisfaction?”
Her left hand let go as well, and she walked around him, so she faced him. There was a smile on her own lips now, and Lennier shivered.
“I told you. That part that can long for fulfilled wishes is gone. I would have had to fake it. But then, you taught me to fake it exceedingly well.”
She leaned forward, and as her lips touched Morden’s, Lennier wanted to look away and couldn’t. There was a strange mixture of hostility and hunger in it, and only when Morden started to put his arms around her, Lennier finally managed to close his eyes.
Delenn and Sheridan, he reminded himself. That was worse. Remember that. Only thinking of Delenn and Sheridan right now did not help. He should not have come here. Or perhaps he should never have left.
“You can look again,” Morden’s voice said, and there was the usual mockery in it, along with a trace of disappointment which did indeed compel Lennier to open his eyes. Morden was the only one standing in the room, and after a moment, the human shrugged and picked up his newspaper again, sitting down once more. His face was utterly and completely hidden behind Universe Today when he said, sounding far too casual to be believed:
“Of course, I knew all the time she would vanish as soon as I made that gesture. Some people just can’t commit. What can I tell you, Lennier? Looking back, I think all I wanted was to make people happy. And who can bear a grudge over that?”
Title: Visiting Hour
Disclaimer: Characters and situations owned by Babylonian Productions and JMS.
Pairing: Anna/Morden. References to various other pairings.
Rating: G
Thanks to:
kathyh, for beta-reading.Written for:
littlemimm, as part of the Rare Pairing Ficathon. The request was “Anna/Morden, something that’s both fucked up and includes Morden’s family in some way, be it as a comment or a reason for his actions”. Timeline: Set during season 5’s Day of the Dead, though no actual spoilers beyond s4’s Into the Fire.
Visiting Hour
Lennier had every intention of holding true to his resolution. If he was trapped with what appeared to be the late Morden, emissary of the Shadows, he would ignore him and meditate. There had been worse nights; having to listen to Delenn and Sheridan because custom demanded it certainly counted.
“You know,” Morden said, turning another page of Universe Today, “for someone who wanted to learn from the dead, you are singularly uninquisitive.”
“He probably recognizes a bad teacher when he sees one,” said a new voice, a female voice, and Lennier raised his head, startled. Standing in the entrance, leaning slightly against the frame, was a woman he recognized at once. He had never met her nor spoken a single word to her, but he had studied what footage existed of her extensively once, in the vain hope of helping Delenn by proving she was not who she claimed to be.
Or perhaps he had wanted to prove the opposite. After all, human custom was to marry only one person at a time, and if Sheridan were already bonded, he could not have married Delenn.
Shame burned in him at this thought, and he considered that this might be the reason why she, too, appeared to him now. For Anna Sheridan, like Morden, was quite dead.
Yet here they were, the servants of the Shadows, returned with their unwanted lessons. Though Morden apparantly had not expected Anna, or at least pretended not to have expected her, for the man folded his newspaper, put it aside and looked at her, nonplussed.
“Well,” he said. “This is a night of surprises.”
“Is it?” she asked.
Morden rose. “I hadn’t expected young Lennier here to be entertaining visitors other than myself,” he said courteously, smiling at her. She didn’t return his smile.
“I haven’t come to Lennier.”
“Ah. Well, it’s unfortunate your husband chose to sleep in another part of the station then,” Morden said, charming smile getting deeper. “With his living wife. Otherwise it would have been quite the reunion, I’m sure. In fact, come to think of it, isn’t there yet another former Mrs. Sheridan on the station right now? The man has a regular harem.”
It would have been better to ignore all this as and return to his meditation, yet Lennier found himself listening. It was impossible for him not to. In case this news of living and undead former wives of Sheridan were to hurt Delenn, to guard her, Lennier told himself. Only because of this.
At last, Anna Sheridan moved forward, stepping towards Morden until she was close enough to touch him.
“I came here for a family reunion,” she said softly. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Vir, talking to Lennier in a dark hour, had claimed Mr. Morden had lost his composure on Centauri Prime, quite thoroughly. Based on what he knew of the man, this had been hard to imagine for Lennier, until now. Morden’s smile actually faltered and vanished.
“You see,” Anna continued, stepping sideways and beginning to move in a very tight circle around Morden, ostensibly adressing Lennier, “your visitor did not come on the station simply to bother you, Lennier. In life, he always made it his business to get people what they wanted, and he thought he’d get one of his own demands now. But he should have remembered the way in which he answered requests.”
“What did he ask for?” Lennier asked before he could stop himself.
“His dead family,” Anna said. “Which is what he’s getting.”
“My family...” Morden began, and Anna cut him off.
“They were never your reason for serving the Shadows,” she said. “Maybe they were your excuse at the start, but then you were just happy you had found a cause to believe in. Your family? You gave birth to me. You took all that was Anna and made it an instrument for the Shadows to play, and I didn’t even have human speech anymore, I was just a machine, and then you remade me all over again so I could convince John to come to Z’Ha’Dum. I’m your creature twice over. What is it those telepaths used to say? You’re my mother and my father.”
She stood behind him now, and put both her hands on his shoulders, fingers digging in.
“Who is your family, if not me?”
By now, Morden had caught himself again. His smile was back, though he didn’t turn around. But he did raise one hand, touching her fingers.
“I prefer to think of us as fellow orphans,” he said benignly. “You miss them terribly, don’t you? They shouldn’t have left us when they went beyond the Rim.”
Lennier didn’t know which idea he found more disturbing; that the dead should miss anything, instead of being reborn as he was always taught they were, or that anyone should miss the Shadows. Presumably Morden was just baiting Anna Sheridan. A taunt, a joke; humans were not easy to read at times.
Against his will, he thought of those other creatures Delenn and he had encountered, the Drakh, and pushed the thought away again.
“No,” Anna replied, not removing her hands yet not responding to his touch, either. “How can I miss anything? The part of me which can miss and long was taken long before I died. You should know. You taught me how to fake it, after all.”
This time, Morden’s other hand rose upwards, covering hers.
“Anyone named Sheridan is so good at lying to themselves, aren’t they, Lennier?” he said, and there was a note of affection in the mockery which Lennier thought had to be as wrong as anything else here tonight. “If there is anything I am an expert in, it is the wanting, Anna. That never died in you.”
“All I wanted was to see John again, and to die, and so I did.”
“That implies there was a you left to want,” Morden said. “Young Lennier here is a student of philosophy, so let us ask him. Lennier, Mrs. Sheridan seems to maintain the position that she stopped being herself and a person when she started to serve our mutual… associates. Now granted, her terms of service were somewhat different from mine, but does she give you the impression of being an automaton? More to the point, she admits to having had wishes and desires before her death. As long as a person wishes for something, they are alive. It is the very cause of life and evolution: wanting. Especially things another does not want.”
He leaned his head back so he could look up at Anna’s face.
“This is why I found them so very congenial,” he told her.
The question of wanting was what had brought Lennier back to this station. He should have known, he should have remembered that this was the Shadows’ question. He wished to see Delenn again, and he wished to learn how to live without her. He wished for her happiness, and he wished for himself to be the cause of that happiness, and he knew this was not what she wanted, and thus he was torn apart. Conflict, indeed. But he doubted it was evolution, not for him.
“Everyone desires,” he said curtly to Morden. “But only a person would know to put another’s desires before their own. It seems to me that neither of you were able to do that, in the end.”
He wanted to add that they still were not, for he did not wish them to be here, but Anna laughed. It was a carefree sound, full of amusement, not malice, familiar to him at once, and suddenly, he wondered whether Sheridan ever heard an echo of it in Delenn’s. For all the great difference of the voices, there was that laughter, nearly identical.
“He has you there,” she said, and her right hand moved away from Morden’s, finding its way from his shoulder to his neck, fingers circling around it.
“I was sorry when they beheaded you,” she added matter-of-factly.
“Were you?”
“We should have all died on Z’Ha’dum,” she said. “It would have been far more fitting.”
“You, me and Sheridan?” Morden asked. “What a romantic you are, Anna. But then again, we did die together. You were just the only one they didn’t bring back. Which I was sorry for, believe it or not.” His liberated hand opened to show an empty palm. “It was all mad Centauri for me after that, and look how that went. Tell me the truth, though. You did not feel a bit of glee when my head was severed from my body? What about righteous satisfaction?”
Her left hand let go as well, and she walked around him, so she faced him. There was a smile on her own lips now, and Lennier shivered.
“I told you. That part that can long for fulfilled wishes is gone. I would have had to fake it. But then, you taught me to fake it exceedingly well.”
She leaned forward, and as her lips touched Morden’s, Lennier wanted to look away and couldn’t. There was a strange mixture of hostility and hunger in it, and only when Morden started to put his arms around her, Lennier finally managed to close his eyes.
Delenn and Sheridan, he reminded himself. That was worse. Remember that. Only thinking of Delenn and Sheridan right now did not help. He should not have come here. Or perhaps he should never have left.
“You can look again,” Morden’s voice said, and there was the usual mockery in it, along with a trace of disappointment which did indeed compel Lennier to open his eyes. Morden was the only one standing in the room, and after a moment, the human shrugged and picked up his newspaper again, sitting down once more. His face was utterly and completely hidden behind Universe Today when he said, sounding far too casual to be believed:
“Of course, I knew all the time she would vanish as soon as I made that gesture. Some people just can’t commit. What can I tell you, Lennier? Looking back, I think all I wanted was to make people happy. And who can bear a grudge over that?”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 04:05 pm (UTC)I loved the way you used the ghost story here, and Lennier as an observer is inspired -- a great take on all ove the characters involved, including the ones that aren't there.
Of course, I haven't gotten to season 5 yet -- is this the Gaiman episode?
*is totally late on my fic. knows what I need to write but is kind of staring at the computer and the other 20 million things I have to do today. is not good at deadlines in November and ought to remember that*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 04:10 pm (UTC)Re: woobie Morden - "I was just trying to make people happy" is the only line I stole from the episode - he actually says that to Lennier. *veg*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 05:32 pm (UTC)Loved this ghost story, too.
Poor Morden, just trying to make the universe a happier place...
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 06:50 pm (UTC)(Also, it inspired
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 04:19 pm (UTC)“All I wanted was to see John again, and to die, and so I did.”
Anna Sheridan breaks my heart - she's IMO the most tragic of all the B5 stories. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 06:54 pm (UTC)Twistedness was what I was going for - thank you!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 07:11 pm (UTC)I think Anna was further gone than Carolyn, but yeah, I feel that there was probably something of her still in there that remembered - like a dream that you have. The one fic that I would write if I could write fic, the one that I want to find, is the story of John and Anna on the trip to Z'ha'dum (because IMO it probably wasn't an instantaneous journey, no matter that JMS handwaves that stuff all the time). There would be the love and guilt and regret and fear that he would feel and from the part of her that still remembers the horror and guilt and love. In my head, it would be so painful and I love it.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 07:20 pm (UTC)Anyway, glad you like it. I feel about The Shadow Within as you do, so I chewed quite a bit on how to accomodate the request and still make sense of my own character impressions, so I'm glad I pulled it off....
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 06:18 am (UTC)Creepy and twisted was what I was going for. *g*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 02:27 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for picking this request and making it into something as lovely as this. As evil as the characters often seem, I like them both and find them really rather tragic. Their fates could've been so different, but something went wrong and they both had to suffer. So in that sense they seem like the perfect couple, even when they probably aren't.
Also, yay for using the Day of the Dead episode (one of my favourites from S5), and Lennier (whom I adore) and his doomed relationship with Delenn (I always wanted them to get together). It's just the right amount of twisted and sad. Oh, and it also seems to fit the image I've got of Morden and Anna from reading The Shadow Within, so that's also another plus. Can you tell I really loved this? :D Because I did.
Thank you so much for the fic.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 02:37 pm (UTC)I really love the way you juggle the Shadow Within Morden backstory with his canon personality; I wouldn't have ever have thought those two could even overlap,but this really works. And it makes great sense for Anna to be the one to call him on that. His new family... that's wonderfully creepy.
Poor Lennier, and poor, poor Anna. She's really difficult to get a handle on as entirely-brainwiped-automaton (I wrote an Anna fic once from the opposite perspective, but I'm not sure that works any better), so this strange middle ground she's in here is just right - and of course, to the Shadows, wanting would be what made you a person.
After all, human custom was to marry only one person at a time
*waves small Minbari-polygamy-as-fanon flag*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 03:42 pm (UTC)When I saw the request, I started to think hard, and then this line came to me and made it possible.
to the Shadows, wanting would be what made you a person.
One thing I'll always be grateful for: that JMS didn't simply make the Shadows the legions of Sauron, part II. I know some people were disappointed by the Shadow/Vorlon struggle turning out to be ideological instead of evil/good, but I always found that more interesting. Not that I agree with either side, but it's a point of view.
*waves small Minbari-polygamy-as-fanon flag*
He. I was thinking of you and