Fic: Splinters of the Past (2/2)

[cdybedahl]

Go back to part one.

Splinters of the Past (2/2)

Written by Calle Dybedahl

Thirty-six hours to go. Susan paced the still growing lab camp around the Talia tank. She'd tried sleeping, but she'd given it up after the fourth time she woke up from dreaming about Kosh talking to her.

"You are the line," it had told her. "The arrow flies both ways."

Damn cryptic Vorlons. They'd been gone from the galaxy for a decade and change, and they still managed to bug her.

"Yes..."

She spun around, her heart suddenly racing. Kosh's voice had come from right behind her, complete with strange sounds!

"You there!" she barked at a technician who happened to be walking past nearby. "Did you just hear a strange voice?"

He shook his head and walked on, looking at her as if she was crazy.

Maybe he was right. She hadn't been sleeping well for a couple of nights. Lack of sleep could cause auditory and visual hallucinations. She'd experienced that before.

She sighed.

But only after much longer than a couple of days.

The place was getting to her. The creepy surroundings, the constant feeling that the station was looking at her, it was all adding up. Maybe she should call Sheridan and tell him she was unfit for command. That she'd gone nuts. "Sorry sir, can't do this any more, off to the funny farm."

If it hadn't been for her experiences with Kosh's ship, she really would have thought that she was crazy. But lots of people had had the feeling that that ship had whispered to them, so it seemed well within the possible that the station did the same.

The bothersome thing was that nobody else seemed affected. She'd asked, indirectly. As far as she'd been able to tell, she was the only one.

Her pacing led her past the tank again. The space around it was getting crowded with instruments, very few of which she had any idea what they did. All of them trained at her naked ex-lover. Talia would have hated in intensely, had she been conscious. She had been an very private person. Not exactly shy, but hiding her inner self behind many layers of defenses.

Came from growing up in the Corps, most likely. Lots of telepaths, very few of them trustworthy.

Out of the corner of her eye, through the tank, she saw something move. She turned to look.

Kosh. Clear as day, or at least as clear as the liquid in the tank allowed. Just as he'd looked back on Babylon 5, with environment suit and all. She closed her eyes, shook her head and looked again.

Gone.

Ok, that was enough. She brought her communicator to her mouth.

"Executive officer," she told the computer.

"Lieutenant Commander Jones here," Alice's voice said a moment later.

"I'm going to bed," Susan said. "Again. This time, if I come out again before morning, you have permission to knock me over the head with something hard."

"Will do, Colonel. Will do."

In her dream, Susan was back in her old primary school in S:t Petersburg. The old, worn desks that had probably seen the first Russian revolution. Windows that hadn't been cleaned in so long that it always looked like there was a fog outside. The smell of sweaty children and slightly burned sausages. It was all there, every detail. Many of them she'd had no idea still lurked in the lower reaches of her mind.

"Susan Ivanova!"

She jumped at the sudden shout. She was sitting in the desk she'd used to have, third row from the front by the window. If she pressed the side of her face to the glass, she could almost see the sea. She tried it. The glass was cold, and it looked like there was a storm brewing over the harbor. The dream had an almost hallucinatory clarity to it. Plus, she was perfectly aware that she was dreaming. She couldn't remember that ever happening before.

"Susan Ivanova," the voice said again. "Will you listen?"

Susan looked towards the front of the classroom. Mrs Petrovna was standing there. Immeasurably old to nine-year-old Susan, in reality probably no more than sixty. She'd died before the Earth-Minbari War.

"A palimpsest is a manuscript page which has had its writing removed and then been used again," Mrs Petrovna said. "Mostly, it was done to parchment or vellum, since they, being made from animal hides, were far more durable than those made from paper or papyrus. In the early Middle Ages, the manuscripts where washed using milk and oat bran. Later, they were washed with powdered pumice. The earlier process left significant but initially invisible traces of the previous writing. The latter did not, since it much more efficiently abraded the surface. Thus, the earlier palimpsests are those most valuable to us, since it is on them we can retrieve the earlier text. Generally speaking, the dividing line between the older and the newer washing technique can be drawn at the year 2262. Anything newer than that is almost certain to only carry the immediately visible text. Do you understand, Susan?"

2262? What the Hell? And why was Mrs Petrovna lecturing on history at all? She'd taught Susan's favourite subjects, mathematics and physics!

Mrs Petrovna's mouth moved, but only a series of musical sounds came out.

"Do you understand, Susan Ivanova?" a male voice said after Mrs Petrovna had closed her mouth. And then came another series of musical sounds.

And suddenly, without transition, she was sitting up in her own bunk in her own quarters on the Orpheus.

That had been a Vorlon voice, but not Kosh's voice.

"We've had to revise the schedule," Rodriguez said. "Our current guess is that the subject will wake up in about eighteen hours."

The meeting was, if possible, even better attended than the day before. If that trend kept up, Susan would have to institute limits.

"Could you clarify 'about'?" someone she couldn't even remember seeing before asked.

Rodriguez sighed.

"Yes," he said. "Plus or minus six hours. If the pace doesn't change again."

"That doesn't sound very certain."

"That's because it's not."

Susan managed to keep her own sigh contained.

"All right," she said. "So we're not sure when she's going to wake up. We'll deal. Doctor, do you have any results from the neural scans I gave you yesterday?"

Rodriguez shuffled his papers.

"Yes," he said. "Although I'm not sure what, if anything, it tells us. There certainly are similarities. In some sense, there seems to be a progression. Some aspects of the scans are pretty fuzzy in the male, pretty clear in the female and almost sharp in the present subject. That may be important, totally irrelevant or a scan artifact. We just don't know."

He frowned.

"That said," he said, "I'd bet a fair amount of money on the current subject also being a P-13. Which leads to the question of what we do when she wakes up. Colonel, can you say anything about what the scanned P-13s were capable of doing?"

Well, Jason Ironheart totally obliterated a squadron of Black Omega Starfuries. Lyta Alexander took on the Psi Corps and won, mostly. If Talia woke up in the same class as either of them or even stronger...

"No, I can't say anything about that," Susan said. "But believe me when I say that you'll sleep better for not knowing."

She stood up.

"The estimate is that she'll wake up in twelve to twenty-four hours," she said. "I want everyone off the station and on board their respective ships in nine hours. The ships will move away to a distance of three hundred lightseconds. On the station will remain any equipment you can rig up to be monitored or controlled via tachyon relay before the nine hours are up."

She looked around the room, meeting as many eyes as possible.

"That equipment," she said. "And I."

They protested, of course. Just about everyone from Alice down to the janitors. Or, well, at least the various expedition group heads. She explained that it was much too dangerous to have the ships close to the station when Talia woke up. Susan knew her and might be able to talk to her, and if that went well the ships could return. If it didn't go well, then Lieutenant Commander Jones could take them all home to ponder what data they had collected so far. Which was a good deal better than the previous expedition, which they still hadn't found a single trace of.

And if they had a problem with that, she still commanded the expedition, and anyone who didn't like her orders could try to figure out how to breathe vacuum while they were swimming home.

They'd ended up making love that night Talia came to her quarters. She'd claimed she'd come to talk, and they sure enough did that. Talia had a lot she needed to let out. Listening to her that night, Susan for the first time understood that the phrase "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father" wasn't just propaganda. To Talia, and probably all other telepaths who grew up in the Corps, it was plain truth. The Corps was the nearest thing to a parent they'd ever known.

And now Talia had suddenly found out that they'd lied to her. Used her. That they did horrible things in the name of a cause she found abhorrent. Her parents had, in a real enough way, betrayed her. No wonder she turned to Susan, who had shown herself from the first time they met as an enemy of the Corps but a friend of Talia. Or, well, almost the first time they met. She'd been cold enough at first. But it had soon changed. Subtly, at first, so that Susan herself hadn't realised that her feelings for the telepath were more than just an animal attraction to a pretty blond.

She did after the Ironheart incident. After she'd seen Talia be as much a victim of Bester and Kelsey as any of them, if not more. After she'd seen her actually go behind the Psi Cops' back in order to help someone she loved and do what she thought was right.

After that, there was almost a year of increasing tension between them. A very different, much more pleasant and considerably more frustrating tension than that of enmity. Susan had spent more than one meeting following every curve of Talia's severe dress with her eyes, both hoping and fearing that the telepath would pick up her desire. But Talia never did, and the game of is she isn't she will she won't she kept going month after month.

Until, finally, Talia sat almost crying in Susan's quarters, gloves laid aside and Psi Corps insignia removed. Susan couldn't stand seeing her like that. She sat down on the armrest of Talia's chair, and pulled her into a comforting hug.

It hadn't even occurred to her that, given the mechanics of the situation, this put Talia's head right between her breasts. Breasts that were only covered by a thin silk nightgown.

At first, that didn't matter. Talia needed comfort. Needed the warmth and presence of someone kind and understanding. Susan gave it to her, to the best of her ability. Maybe there was even then some telepathic contact between them, below the level of the conscious. Talia relaxed. Was comforted.

And at some point, the need for comfort dropped below the level of accumulated attraction. Suddenly, without a single movement, the situation changed drastically.

"I should probably move," Talia said, not doing the slightest to put her words into action.

Her breath warmed and teased Susan's nipple.

"Away or closer?" Susan asked.

Talia turned her face up. Their eyes and minds met. Strong emotion was always the hardest for a telepath to keep out, and at the moment what was between them was strong enough even for Susan's rudimentary powers.

Together, they moved Talia's arm and pulled Susan's head down into a kiss.

"Colonel Ivanova?"

Lieutenant Commander Jones' face flickered into existence on a screen nearby. Susan was sitting on an unopened crate of something technical, absent-mindedly staring at Talia's sleeping body.

"Yes?" she said.

"The expedition is holding at three hundred lightseconds' distance," Alice said. "And Rodriguez has revised his estimate again. He's now thinking that she may wake up in less than an hour."

"Were you ever close to a Vorlon, Alice?" Susan asked.

"Er, no," Alice said. "I got into the service long after they'd left the galaxy."

"I was," Susan said. "For almost three years, we had Kosh around."

"I know, Colonel," Alice said.

"Even after he'd been murdered by the Shadows, he kept helping us. And from the day he came to the station, there was talk about his ship whispering to dock workers. It got to the point where we had to give his ship a docking bay of its own, because we couldn't get people to go near it."

"That's all in the records, Colonel."

Susan sighed.

"Yes," she said. "The records... I don't think you can give those things the proper credence if you've only read about them. The Vorlons didn't have at all the same concept of identity that we do. They could split off parts of themselves, and their ships were, as far as I understood it, equal parts machines, pets and body parts."

"That's kind of creepy, sir."

Susan snorted.

"'Creepy' doesn't even begin to describe it," she said. "But what bothers me right now, is that after Kosh died, the Vorlons clearly considered him dead and gone -- but parts of him were still around and active. After Coriana, the Vorlons left the galaxy with the rest of the last of the First Ones. But what did they leave behind that they didn't consider sentient but which we would?"

By now Alice was looking worried.

"Do you have a point, Colonel?"

"I'm pretty sure this station is alive, Alice," Susan said. "And while the Vorlons may have considered it to be just a large machine, it's almost certainly smarter than we are. And..."

She paused to swallow.

"...and I think it's been trying to talk to me," she said. "Telepathically."

"None of the... other telepaths have sensed anything, Colonel," Alice said.

"Say what you mean, girl," Susan said. "You mean none of the real telepaths have sensed anything."

"Well,..." Alice said. "Yes."

Susan drew a deep breath.

"I have no idea why that is," she said. "And I'd be happy to consider it just the imagination of a skittish old woman. If it wasn't for what's in that tank."

She stood up and turned to face the communicator Alice was looking through.

"Why is it Talia, Alice?" she said. "We know there were thousands of telepaths experimented on or just plain vanished by the Psi Corps. Any one of them could be here now. Maybe they are, we haven't seen even a fraction of what's in this station yet. But it's not them. It's her. It's my long-dead lover in there, and I can't help but suspect that this is not a coincidence. This was deliberately set up."

Alice looked taken aback by the outburst.

"That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it, sir?" she said. "There's no way they could've known that you would be leading this expedition."

"Except that the first expedition didn't find Talia here," Susan said. "As far as we know, anyway. We did. Plus, I was hand-picked to lead this expedition by President Sheridan, who used to have Kosh living in his head. My way here was hardly untouched by Vorlon immaterial appendage."

It seemed Alice couldn't find an objection to that.

"So what do think it means?" she said.

Susan shook her head.

"If I knew that I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed," she said.

"Colonel?" Alice said. Something in her voice made Susan turn to look at her. She was looking past Susan, at something behind her.

"The tank is moving," Alice said.

Susan turned around.

The tank was changing position. The liquid-filled cylinder was tipping over, and the plinth it was resting on had flowed around it as if to hold on to it. As she watched, the tank assumed a horizontal position, with the plinth having formed a band around it. Inside it, the liquid was draining.

"I think she's about to wake up," Alice said.

Her face faded from the monitor as all the equipment the expedition had brought in suddenly stopped working.

A late night long ago, Sheridan had tried to tell her what it felt like when he was on Z'ha'dum. Alone, unimaginably far away from friends and allies, surrounded by forces he could hardly comprehend doing things he had only a vague understanding of.

Standing alone in the silence on a Vorlon space station, Susan finally understood what he had been trying to say.

"It is time."

By now, the Vorlon voice hardly even surprised her.

"Kosh?" she said out loud. "Is that you?"

"We were all Kosh," the voice said. She couldn't tell were it was coming from.

"Right," she said. "Of course."

The tank looked like it had finished draining its liquid. Some of it had hardened instead of draining, it looked like, and Talia was now lying on a transparent gold-colored bed. The upper half of the tank had vanished at some point. Susan could see a strand of Talia's hair move in a near-undetectable air current.

"She's been in a tank of liquid for over a decade and she comes out with her hair dry?" was the first thought that came into Susan's mind. The second was "Damn, but she's pretty."

Talia's eyelids flickered. Susan's heart jumped into her throat. She suddenly wished she'd had the wits to bring something for Talia to cover herself with, even if only a blanket.

Stiffly, Talia sat up, then opened her eyes. She looked around.

"Where am I?" she said. Hearing that voice again brought tears to Susan's eyes.

"We are on a Vorlon space station," she said. "It was abandoned ten years ago. The year is 2272."

"Seventy-two?" Talia said. "Well, I guess that explains your gray hairs, Commander Ivanova."

Susan's insides froze solid, then shattered into a million pieces. Talia would not have called her that. Control, though, certainly would have.

"Control," she said.

"Yes," Talia said. "Were you perhaps expecting someone else?"

Susan didn't say anything. Slowly, she moved her hand to her sidearm.

"Winters is dead, Commander," Talia said. "Her brain was erased and written over with me. Accept that fact."

Susan frowned. Written over...?

"Oh," Talia said. "And we don't want you using that thing, do we?"

Susan's PPG was torn out of her hand by a force far too strong for Susan to resist. It flew a few meters away, then disintegrated into a cloud of dust.

"Well, that's a nice surprise," Talia said. "I don't remember being able to do that before. Someone's been upgrading me, it seems."

She climbed down from the tank turned bed. Susan stood as frozen, her thoughts racing at a million miles a minute. Mostly in circles, unfortunately. "...a manuscript page that has had its writing removed and then been used again," was what a vorlon had said through the voice of Mrs Petrovna in her dream. That and the year 2262. It must have been referring to Control, who had taken over Talia's body in 2259.

"Let's see what's happened since I was last awake," Talia said. "Those aren't Commander's insignia you're wearing, are they? You should be well enough informed. Not that I seem to have anyone else to chose from at the moment..."

She looked intently at Susan for a few moments, then frowned.

"You're blocking me!" she said. "How can you be blocking me? You're nowhere near that strong."

Susan did her best not to let on that this was as much a surprise to her as to Control.

"Do you seriously think I'd even be here if you were a threat?" she said.

"Hurry," a Vorlon voice said from nowhere. "We are holding you. But not for long. Act soon."

There was no reaction from Talia. Apparently the voice was only for Susan. And, also apparently, it seemed to be helping her block out Talia's mind probes. But what on Earth could she do that the station couldn't do just as well or better?

The answer struck her like lightning from a clear sky. What she could do better than a leftover piece of intelligent equipment from a super-technological eons-old civilisation was to be herself. To be Susan Ivanova. To be Talia Winters' beloved.

Acting on pure instinct, she took a couple of quick steps forward, put her hand behind Talia's head and not particularly gently pulled her into a deep kiss.

Strong emotion was hard for a telepath to keep out, she knew that. Inside, she let all her restraints go. All her control. She let it all out to play, from the memory of finally finding someone who understood and needed her, over the grief of her death, via the grief of others being less than Talia and still dying, by way of year after year of loneliness and longing, to the hope of a miraculous gift in an alien space station. She let it all overwhelm herself, and as a cherry on top of it all she had the pure animal joy of once again holding Talia's naked body to her own. Her own uniform-clad one, but that was a minor detail.

All that, in a kiss.

Talia staggered backwards, until she hit the edge of the tank-turned-bed. Her eyes opened and closed repeatedly. Muscles in her face spasmed. It looked and sounded like she was trying to say something, but didn't have full control of her mouth or breathing. Susan looked on, astonished. She hadn't really expected anything to happen.

"Susan," Talia gasped. "Help!"

She covered the distance to the tank at a speed that would've made an Olympic sprinter proud. She took Talia's hands in her own.

"I'm here," she said. "Lean on me."

Even as the words left her mouth she felt Talia's presence in her mind. Without the slightest hesitation, she let her in, let them join into the loving unity she had missed so terribly all those years. Outside, slightly distantly, she felt the Control personality scream and rail and fight and, amazingly, growing weaker and fainter.

She felt hands undoing her uniform jacket and shirt, reach inside and touch her skin. They kissed again, and again, and over again. Her hands followed the never quite forgotten forms of Talia's back. Soon, Susan was no longer sure if they were helping each other fight or just making love.

In the end, she didn't even notice when the Control personality finally dwindled into nothingness and disappeared.

"My Susan," Talia said.

They sat on the tank-turned-bed. Both naked, both constantly touching the other.

"You look older," Talia said.

"I am older," Susan said. "It's been almost thirteen years since you last saw me. Although it seems you kind of skipped those, because you don't look a day older than you did then."

Talia smiled.

"Thank the Vorlons," she said. "They did this."

"How do you know that?" Susan said. "I thought you were dead at the time."

"I was," Talia said. "But the traces of the events are still echoing through the cosmos."

A sinking feeling appeared at the edge of Susan's mind.

"The what?" she said.

"Everything is connected," Talia said. "And I can see it all."

"So you can give me next month's lottery numbers?"

The joke sounded weak even to Susan.

"I'm sorry," Talia said. "But I can't stay. It is not yet the time for those like me."

There was a white glow around her. Soft, barely visible, but definitely there.

"You're leaving me again," Susan said. The euphoria of a few moments ago was fast turning into numbness.

"Yes," Talia said. "I'll follow Jason. I'm afraid I can't explain where that is. The concepts..."

Her voice trailed off and she looked frustrated for a moment.

Susan felt tears on her face.

"Do you have to go now?" she said. "Can't you wait just a few days? Or hours?"

Talia reached out and wiped tears from Susan's cheek.

"I could stay for a little while," she said. "Less than an hour. To give you a gift. The only gift I have to give."

Susan tried to bring herself under control.

"Good," she said. "I've always liked gifts."

Talia smiled and pulled her into an embrace.

Outside the window of the conference room the plants of Geneva were in the full bloom of summer. The sun was shining, and Susan could see plenty of people out enjoying it. Quite a few of them were also obviously romantically enjoying each others' company. She turned away from the window, back into the room. Sheridan put down his communicator, whatever business had interrupted the meeting apparently finished for the moment.

"So that's it?" he said. "You find a great big space station and a long-dead telepath. The telepath wakes up, tells you that this is the final warning and further expeditions will not be tolerated. She and the entire station then vanishes in a huge flash of light that, somehow, doesn't damage anything."

"Yes, sir," she said. "That's it."

Arranged around the table were lots of important people, both from EarthGov and from the Interstellar Alliance. None of them looked particularly pleased.

"What about the first expedition?" someone she thought she'd seen on the news a couple of times asked. "Did she mention them?"

"She said they will return home," Susan said. "Eventually."

"And how long might that be?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, sir."

She'd said all this before, of course. Repeatedly. The debriefings of the entire expedition had gone on for over a month by now.

"We find it rather suspicious," Admiral Weng said, "that most of this took place while the recording equipment was conveniently not functioning."

"The station itself disabled it," Susan said. "Forensics came to the same conclusion, I believe."

"Ok, ladies and gentlemen," Sheridan said. "We seem to have ran out of new questions to ask. If any appear in the future, I'm sure Colonel Ivanova will be happy to answer them then."

He stood up.

"This meeting is adjourned," he said. "Susan, if you'd stay for a moment."

She got more than a few less than pleased looks as the various VIPs filed out of the room. When only the two of them were left, Sheridan turned off the official recording device.

"So," he said. "Have you told the full story?"

"Pretty much," she said. "There were a few personal things between me and Talia that I didn't think were for the consumption of bureaucrats."

"Really?" he said.

She glared at him.

"Really," she said. "I thought that if they really need to know about that, they can go out and buy their own damn pornography."

"Ah," Sheridan said. "That kind of stuff."

She kept glaring.

"I think we can let that slide," he said.

He put his feet up on the table.

"So what are you going to do now?" he said.

"Take some time off," Susan said. "I've got almost a year of leave coming. Thought I'd go home to S:t Petersburg and see if I can get some order into my father's old garden."

Sheridan's eyebrows just about hit the ceiling.

"You?" he said. "Gardening?"

"Hey, don't act all surprised," she said. "You were more than happy to drink the coffee from the plants I grew on Babylon 5, as I remember it."

He broke out into his by now fairly famous grin.

"Yeah," he said. "Forgot about those. That was good coffee. Send me some if you grow more, will you?"

Susan smiled.

"It just doesn't get the same taste when you haven't roasted the beans in the exhaust from a Starfury engine," she said. "But I will."

They both got up and walked out of the conference room. The top floor of the building was spacious and well-lit, with plenty of plants and even a couple of aquariums.

"You'll have to come visit us on Minbar," Sheridan said while they waited for the elevator. "Delenn keeps asking about you."

"We'll see," Susan said. "But to be honest, I think that'll have to wait until after my leave. I really want to get away from it all for a year."

They got into the elevator. Sheridan pushed the button for a couple of floors down, Susan for the entrance level.

"Take care, Susan," he said. "And try to be happy."

"I will," she said as they shook hands. "I really will."

He got out. The elevator doors closed. It started moving downwards again.

She leaned against the back wall and let out a sigh. In the end, she hadn't told him. She hadn't known when she went into the meeting if she would or not. In the end, it had just felt to personal.

Half-consciously, her hands went to her lower abdomen. The only gift I have to give. At the time, she'd thought Talia meant the pleasure of their lovemaking. It wasn't until almost two months later she realised that that was not at all it. When she, standing in her cabin on the EAS Orpheus, kept cursing at tests that in the face of all possibility insisted on turning out positive.

As she stepped out of the elevator and into the Geneva summer, she smiled and wondered how long it would be before she could actually feel the little life growing in her womb.

Comments

[deifire]

"Really," she said. "I thought that if they really need to know about that, they can go out and buy their own damn pornography."

This has got to be my favorite line. I can just hear Ivanova saying it.

I'd forgotten how much I missed this show and this pairing.

[netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com]

Love, love, love this.

Thank you so much!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it!

[shaych-03.livejournal.com]

good stuff. quite enjoyable and filled with the lovely flavor of B5 :) this was a joy to read :) thank you.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

Long, plotty, plausible, post-series Susan/Talia: I didn't think it was possible! Great Susan voice, and just an all-around enjoyable story.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[zulu]

What a great read. I don't know the show, but I love science fiction, so you hooked me and kept me reading. I like the promise for the future, and the way you used the palimpsests as a plot device.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

You should try watching the series if you like SF television. It starts out kind of clunky, but overall it's really good. It was also the one of first shows that dared use really long plot arcs. The first four seasons are one single story. There's one slightly infamous instance where we're shown something in episode 8 that doesn't get explained until episode 75. Also, the Susan/Talia relationship was intended to become canon, and it only didn't happen because the actress playing Talia left the show. Still, enough was shown to make Susan Ivanova one of extremely few canonically bisexual TV characters.

And thanks for the nice feedback!

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

There's one slightly infamous instance where we're shown something in episode 8 that doesn't get explained until episode 75.

Oh, now I'm curious, because I don't remember that! What was it?

(Um, hello! I just watched the whole series on DVD last year, and just read your story now, and loved it, and am about to write you a proper feedback comment below!)

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

In ep 8 ("And the Sky Full of Stars") we see a Minbari holding up a little triangle in front of the captured Sinclair, and it starts glowing, freaking the Minbari hard enough to stop the war then and there. It's not until ep 75 ("Atonement", IIRC) that we find out that the triangle ("Triluminary") is reacting to the presence of Valen's DNA.

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

Ah, of course! I remember it now.

What's Minbari for "thanks heaps"?

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Well THAT worked better than expected.

Somehow, Googling with brave optimism the phrase, "well-written erotica," I stumbled onto femslash08, and then here.

"Well-written" doesn't even begin to describe it. Everything's spot-on, there's echoes of minute details from the show, I can hear the characters' voices, you've world-built the future by extrapolation from canon, you've got Vorlon and Ivanova zingers, you've got strong women and original characters, and you've got sensuality that's more than mere smut.

I think that about covers my wish list for a Susan fic (apart from butt-kicking, but that belongs in another sort of story, and come to think of it you had a Lyta-is-frickin'-scary flashback which does the job just as well.)

To think I was merely looking for bedtime reading material of the smut variety. I was far more engrossed with this story.

A few parts I particularly liked:

-- The schoolroom was as smoothly done as a standard B5 "hey, it's greyscale now, so it must be a dream or flashback" vision sequence. I liked the fact that it was a typical Vorlon means of communicating but not quite the same: a teacher, not parents, which may reflect Susan's less ambivalent feelings of respect towards a a favorite mentor than towards her parents.
-- The atmosphere and culture of Susan's ship. Something that seldom gets remarked on in fandom is the way the commanding officer's style pervades an entire ship and crew. This worked very well with Susan.
--You have Susan older and wiser, more patient and controlled and professional (if that's possible) in a personally difficult situation.
-- The ship's name. Yes indeedy, B5 hits you over the head with the symbolism-mallet when it comes to ship names.
-- The little details of what's been going on in the last ten years, like the stupid movie and Susan's fan club, and Sheridan not being above using propaganda.
-- The coffee beans in the Star Fury exhaust.
-- The way you draw out the process of discovery/awakening and insist the reader spend time sorting through the ramifications along with Susan, instead of rushing to "Talia is rescued, yay!"
-- The ending is wonderful wish-fulfillment without being sappy or maudlin.
-- It's intelligent and has self-integrity as a story. I don't quite know what I mean by that, except that a lot of fanfiction tends to lean a little too much on existing canon and not do anything too original or build too much on top of the foundation.

Compulsive editor syndrome noticed one small typo/dropped word:
""So what do think it means?"
^^ [you]

Re: What's Minbari for "thanks heaps"?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for the nice comment! A typo fix has been checked into my revision control system and will be pushed to the web site eventually.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Very B5. And excellent Ivanova.

Bravo!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[shadowscast.livejournal.com]

That was wonderful!

If you're wondering how I found your story, I was having a conversation about B5 a little while ago with an LJ friend, and it came around to me saying:

"Speaking of Ivanova, one of my regrets about her is that her feelings for Talia never got explored further. (There must be an epic fanfic out there somewhere exploring that extremely fraught relationship, but I have no idea where to start looking.)"

and her replying:

"Ask and ye shall receive!"

and linking me here.

I watched all of B5 on DVD just a year or so ago (late to the party, I know). I was sad and angry when the Psi Corps personality-killed Talia; it seemed to me that within the show, Ivanova didn't really get a chance to grieve. There was never really closure for the two of them, either.

So basically your story fixed everything!

This was so well-written, such a believable slice of the B5-verse. Ivanova's voice was spot on ( "I thought that if they really need to know about that, they can go out and buy their own damn pornography"—hee! ).

There were so many little touches to love. The Ivanova fan club (that so happened, I have absolutely no doubt!), the coffee beans roasted in Starfury exhaust, the metaphor of the palimpsest—wonderful.

So, thank you for writing, and for sharing!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the nice feedback, and it's even nicer to hear that my fic got recommended by someone else.