Title: Frame of Mind (The Eye of the Storm Remix)
Author: kangeiko
Summary: After a dig at Syria Planum goes awry, IPX dispatches a team from its New Technologies division to investigate.
Fandom: Babylon 5
Characters: Mr Morden, Mary Kirkish, Anna Sheridan.
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and sexual situations.
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Original story: Before Any Coming Storms by aris_writing.
A/N: This monster was betaed by a great many people, all of whom worked very hard to fix my mistakes. For this, I am very grateful indeed, and if any snaphus sneaked in there anyway, it's entirely my own fault.

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2255


I.

In the old days, before humans had telescopes or satellites or shuttles with which to view the world, when they had no way of seeing that did not involve their naked eyes turned heavenward, they imagined Mars as red, scarred and pock-marked as burnt flesh. A tale has it that this bright, virulent colour came to be because of all the blood spilled across it, staining the sands and running over it like rivers. All this was known and dreamt of, eons before grasping human hands strung together bits of glass and metal and humanity looked up at the sky, at the red planet blazing down. Centuries later, the wandering eyes cast heavenward grew ever more curious about the starry sky as, slowly, the tentative spiders' webs of terraforming stretched across it. The early explorers romanticised it with tales of Martians and of canals; the deep grooves the only remnant of a vast and terrible alien empire. It was, perhaps, an even more fanciful idea than the child sacrifices watering the sands.

Unlike those old dreamers - and unlike the great unwashed, dreaming of gleaming metal domes and jobs for all - Morden thought that Mars was quite possibly the ugliest planet in the entire galaxy. In one thousand cubic feet of space, Mars Spaceport encapsulated all that was wrong with this planet. The air was recycled more per daily cycle than any other place on the planet, and it stank: sour sweat and old urine. It didn't help that it was crowded to the point of a safety hazard. The immigration queue alone stretched for half a mile, winding around itself to form more of an ordered mob than anything else. Above, fans rotated half-heartedly, moving fetid air from one part of the port to the other, trying to ease the impossible strain on the air recyclers. Several children just beyond the Mars/no man's land border were whimpering quietly, too tired to scream.

This place is a giant coffin, Morden thought, no longer sure whether this was a bad thing. He'd been earth-born, like most of the émigrés, and pulled to Mars out of necessity rather than any real curiosity or inclination. Those dreamers flocking to the glittering domes - bright as bits of starlight from Earth's viewing platforms and beloved of so many schoolchildren - were utterly foreign to him; their motivation inexplicable. Even as one of those schoolchildren, he had preferred the things one could find in the dirt beneath his feet than in the cold spaces between the stars. Who would choose to live in sealed domes when fresh air was available a shuttle-ride away? It was beyond him, he'd told Denni in all seriousness. She'd laughed at him. You'll change your tune when it comes to something that really matters to you, she'd said. You're all that matters to me, he'd replied, all reflex. That had been before Sarah had been born, and maybe it had even been true. Certainly, he'd believed it to be the truth, and he remembered being a little hurt when Denni had smiled at him, a little sadly. I'm not dead enough to matter to you.

He closed his eyes against the scrape of the flickering neon lights. She had been right, as usual. Denni had told him that it was why he'd gone into academia in the first place - as if she'd been there, and watched it happen - and why he'd chosen languages. Dead languages, Morden. It makes all the difference. And it had. He hadn't expected it to, but since arriving here… You can't love live things, Denni had said, so certain, with not one iota of blame or anger in her voice - or maybe he couldn't, maybe there was just something about him that couldn't cope with it. Live things grew and changed and ran away from you, or pushed you away. They cut their hair or changed their minds or said, God, you're stifling me, all right? I can't stay this way forever! and expected him to understand.

Sometimes, they expected you to love them back.

A shadow fell across him, and he opened his eyes, blinking. "What are you doing here?"

The light streamed from behind her, casting her face in shadow. He smiled. "Hello, Anna."

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