Title: A Bridge of Flames
Author: Third Charm
Fandom: Babylon 5
Pairings: Marcus/Neroon, Susan/OC
Story Type: Drama, Romance
Current Rating: M
Disclaimer: Babylon 5 and all subsequent major characters, plots, and ideas are the property of J. Michael Straczynski, Babylonian Inc., and Warner Bros. The following story was written only for the purposes of entertainment. No income had been made.
Warnings: AU and AT and going for broke! Combat, profanity, slash, dark themes, mentions sexual assault.
Spoilers: All though this story is set before "Grey Seventeen is Missing", there will still be too many to count.
Summary: After "the mission from hell", Marcus and Susan change the course of history and find a way to rekindle hope and love in the most surprising of places.
Acknowledgments: I must thank ckl for taking the time to beta read this story.
Author's Note: One Earth year equals 0.74 Minbari cycles. The Minbari words and phrases were found at the "JumpNow" website in John Hightower's Minbari dictionary. Though, not all are direct translations.
A Bridge of Flames
Prologue
Ranger Marcus Cole awoke grudgingly. He had never been a morning person, and after the last several weeks, he believed he would NEVER become one. Marcus was still in pain and exhausted. Actually, he felt past exhausted. He felt as if he was mostly dead. He wanted to go back to sleep and not wake up for the next week. Hell, he wanted not to have to wake up ever again, but that bloody, incessant beeping wouldn't allow it. Marcus sighed as he thought back to the last three weeks of unadulterated hell. This mission had been The War, Hell, and Arisia combined for him. Everything that could have gone wrong had.
The sensor arrays on the White Star had been damaged before they had even arrived at the contact point, leaving them flying half-blind. The contact ship had been followed and the Shadows had found them. Their contact had been destroyed before the information they had had could have been relayed to their White Star. Their jump engines were damaged early on in the ambush by the Shadows. Then the almost hopeless nightmare of a running battle with the Shadow ships had started. Oh, God! Their ship, their crew! Marcus moaned. How many had died because of their combined miscalculations? How many more would die because that vital piece of information had been lost? He moaned again, knowing that the task of finding what was left of the survivors was now upon them. If nothing else went wrong, that is.
This mission had been a total failure; it also had been grueling and painful, as well as mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting. The only good thing to come of it had been finally coming to an understanding with Susan. After the destruction of their White Star and the emergency landing of their damaged life pod on that hell's excuse for a planet, the Commander and her XO had come to truly understand each other as they fought to survive until a rescue team could find them. They had pulled each other through deadly situations and tended each other's wounds on that hellish world. They had forced each other to hold on, to fight to stay alive. When one wanted to give up, or to sacrifice themselves so that the other had a better chance of survival, the other would do everything, including the use of physical violence, to get their crewmate to go on. They had been forced to stay inside a space the size of a regulation brig cell with each other for days at a time and learned how not to drive each other insane. They had also lost any and all personal modesty towards each other. They had alternatively been frozen and burned by the unforgiving environments that the life pod had been in. They had also slowly bled, starved, suffocated, and thirsted together.
In those weeks of waking nightmare upon waking nightmare, Marcus and Susan had forged a bond no one would ever be able to break. Marcus had always thought that his love for the indomitable Russian woman had been of a romantic nature. He had been so very wrong. It was a love of a familial nature, a bond of siblings of the heart. In their isolated time together, not knowing when or if they would ever be rescued, or even if they would survive, they had been both taught much about the other and also learned just as much about themselves. The Ranger and the Commander also came to understand what they truly felt for each other.
And then came one particularly horrible night. It was a night only Dante and all the demons of his Circles of Hell could ever have imagined. It was a night that the volcanoes around the valley their pod had limped to a landing in were spewing ash and poisonous gas in volumes that would classify as and E.L.E. on Earth. It was the night that Marcus and Susan's relationship had changed permanently. Knowing that the eruptions surrounding them would most likely bury them and therefore end their lives, they had set all the available power left in the pod's batteries to the shields. They sealed the pod as well as it could be, donned their survival suites, plugged into their emergency O2 tanks and prayed. Then, when the night was at it's worst, when they silence inside the sealed and shielded pod had almost driven him to the point of insanity, Marcus began to talk. The Ranger talked until he was hoarse. He talked of everything in his life. He talked of his faith and of losing it. He talked of his anger towards whatever Creator was out there. He talked of his childhood and his family. He talked of Hasina, the War, EFI and Arisia. He talked of losing Arisia, losing his family, losing William and losing Hasina. He talked of the Rangers, of Jeff and of losing him. And finally, he talked of how he felt about Susan.
When Marcus was done; well, when he was too hoarse to talk anymore, Susan took over. The Commander spoke of Russia, of Judaism, of EarthForce and of Babylon 5. She spoke of her life. She spoke of the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. She spoke of the well publicized and the deepest held secrets. She too spoke of Jeff and of losing him. She spoke of her older brother and of losing him in the Earth-Minbari War. She spoke of past lovers, and of past betrayal. She spoke of the worst betrayal a man can commit against a woman. And, if that revelation of hell wasn't enough, she spoke of PsiCorps, her mother and Talia. She spoke of the relationship with Talia that almost was and how the loss of that promise had hurt more than all the injuries that had come before. Then she did something she almost never did, the Iron Maiden of Babylon 5 cried. She cried for her loses and for all the loses Marcus had faced. And Marcus finally cried with her. He cried for his dead and for hers. He cried for her pain and for his.
After the emotional let out, and trying to get cleaned up without suffocating since they had to take their helmets off to do so, the two Warriors of the Light spoke of the love Marcus held for Susan. They spoke of his wariness of relationships, and his fear of loss, of being hurt again. They spoke of her fear of love, of being hurt again, of her fear of loss. They spoke of his chastity and of her prolonged celibacy. They joked about how to end their respective dry spells and of "going out with a bang" and then simply held each other in a comforting embrace through that Dante's night. And in the morning's murky light, in that ash filled dawn, they each knew the other better than they did themselves. They also knew that their connection was one of siblings, not that of potential lovers. As they both had no family left, they decided that actually having an "adopted" sibling was better than a love affair that may very well end badly.
That had been when a static filled and broken message answered their distress call. A Minbari Sharlin (War Cruiser) by the name of "Ingata" had picked up the distress call and had come to investigate. Susan had groaned aloud and muttered about now being beholden to "that self righteous bastard Neroon" when she'd heard the name of the Sharlin. Because of this, Marcus had handled the communications as a shuttle was sent down to pick them up. In between the communications from the Minbari shuttle's crew, Susan had filled Marcus in on why she didn't get along with the Ingata's Alyt (Captain). Marcus reciprocated the information by telling her all the problems that Jeff and the Rangers had had with the Star Rider.
They stopped gossiping as soon as the shuttle was in place. The Minbari crew had blasted a path from the damaged pod to the shuttle clean. Then the time for the dangerous trek to the shuttle had come. The two Humans had simply looked at each other and known that their respective numbers weren't up yet. With a final embrace, they opened the hatch and then scrambled, crawled, limped, and carried each other to the shuttle through the poison that passed for atmosphere and the still burning ash. After the hair-raising transfer from the practically buried life pod to the shuttle, the two injured, exhausted, malnourished, dehydrated, and slightly poisoned Humans were flown to the Ingata where they were met by a team of Minbari Healers. The two Humans had both then promptly passed out. That was how Marcus found himself waking to an evil, incessant beeping in the Medlab of the Ingata.