Title: The Little Dreams We Dream (Are All We Can Really Do)
Series Information: This is a sequel to "Closet Idealism," which can be found via my profile.
Timeline/Spoilers: This is significantly less canon-adherent than its predecessor--I compressed and reordered a few events to suit my needs, and completely changed others--but still spoils all of season four and one or two things about the first few episodes of season five.
Notes: One scene in particular, and a few scattered lines of narration, owe a debt of gratitude to mylittleredgirl's " Dead Souls," which you should totally go read at her LiveJournal, because it's amazing.
* * *
In the middle of the night
We keep sending little kites
Until a little light gets through.
-- "Kite Song," Patty Griffin
* * *
It has been seventeen days since her life took the express transport to hell. Seventeen days since John Sheridan followed his dead wife into a trap; twelve since Michael Garibaldi was abducted by the Shadows; five since she, Delenn, and Lyta went to Z'ha'dum and came back empty-handed. And now, it has been twenty-one hours since she and Marcus Cole set out on a fool's errand to beg more First Ones for help in a war they almost certainly cannot win.
Susan does not think this is an auspicious start to the new year.
Four hours ago, Marcus all but shoved her off the bridge, claiming her pacing was making the Minbari crew too nervous to perform their jobs. (When she resisted, he'd threatened to relieve her of duty. She'd reminded him that technically they weren't part of the same command structure; he'd noted that he was more than willing to withhold translation services until she slept. She had sulked all the way to the dormitory.)
She has spent the past three hours and fifty-eight minutes tossing and turning on the slanted Minbari bed. With everything that has gone wrong, who the hell could sleep now?
A vision of the bottle of vodka in her quarters taunts her in between the Vorlons jumping over fences she tries to count.
Just as she's about to march back onto the bridge and dare Marcus to relieve her of duty again, the man himself comes into the room. "It's your watch," he says, touching her shoulder.
"Thanks." She sits up, yawning. "I wasn't getting any sleep anyway," she says. "You should've let me stay on the bridge."
He sits on the bed next to hers, looking pensive. "You're worried about Michael, aren't you?"
She huffs a derisive breath. "Of course I'm worried about Garibaldi. I'm worried about him, about the captain, about half the damn galaxy."
He looks at her from under those impossibly long lashes, apparently considering his words carefully. "I mean...in a more personal sense."
"What the hell are you talking about?" she demands, seething at the insinuation. She's barely admitted to herself that Michael is more than a friend with whom she occasionally has sex; what right has Marcus to figure it out when he's not even involved?
"I saw him coming out of your quarters early one morning with his shirt on inside out. I put two and two together; got four." He smiles a little, albeit lopsidedly.
She closes her eyes and prays for the willpower necessary to prevent herself from hitting him.
"Is it serious?" he asks.
She sighs, briefly glancing at the ceiling. "I don't know. It wasn't supposed to be." She would like to say that it still isn't, but she would be lying if she did. The wolf at her door every night has his face more often than not. "But sometimes things happen without you expecting them to."
His mouth twists momentarily before he smoothes it straight again. "I suppose they do."
She knows she is watching his dreams shatter, but there is nothing she can do. She didn't ask for his adoration. It's his own damn fault for pinning whatever ridiculous hopes he had on someone like her.
The kindest thing she can do is pretend not to notice, and so she does, standing up and telling him she'll wake him for the next watch. She heads for the bridge, feeling a renewed need to pace.
* * *
Several days later and entirely too much wiser, they return to B5. One of the first things she hears is that Michael is back.
She might have been surprised by how desperately she wants to go see him in MedLab. But she doesn't have time to go see him, so of course it would be the one thing she wants most to do. That's how life works.
She doesn't have time because the Vorlons have gone goddamned crazy, and she has to find Lyta now, find out what she knows, see if this can possibly be stopped.
She doesn't hold out much hope of that.
* * *
In the middle of Lyta confirming her suspicions, John Sheridan returns from the dead.
Susan wonders if she should start believing in miracles. The Hanukkah candles she lights every year notwithstanding, she generally has subscribed to the premise that all unexplained events are simply caused by sufficiently advanced technology. But seeing Sheridan in his office, very much alive, is pretty damned miraculous. Coming on the heels of Garibaldi's return...well. Maybe those ancient writers of scripture were on to something.
She flies across his office to hug him, this man who is not only her CO but who also, somewhere along the way, became her quasi-big brother--a sort of balm, if not a replacement, for the one she lost.
He thanks her for going after him to Z'ha'dum. He chastises her for the foolhardiness of the act, too, but his puppyish grin belies any sting the words might have carried. He says he's called a meeting in the war room, and is obviously bubbling over with some kind of good news he plans on telling everyone. Presumably it has to do with the alien sitting quietly in the corner.
She hates to be the one to break it to him that whatever it is, it cannot possibly counteract her discovery. But she does it anyway, summing up the Vorlon situation in a few sentences, and watches his face fall, just as she expected.
She really, really hates this war.
* * *
When they walk into the war room, she sees Michael sitting at the table. Her stride falters. For an instant, she wants to run over to him, clasp him in her arms, and never let go.
Luckily, sense reasserts itself, and she continues walking, claiming the seat beside him when she reaches the chair.
Under the table, she takes his hand, curling her fingers around his larger ones, and squeezes so hard she feels on the verge of breaking bones. He squeezes back, just as tightly. Their eyes meet, briefly, before darting away again, and they finally let go of each other's hands.
The meeting gets off to a bad start when Michael demands to know who the alien John brought with him is. John is obviously less than pleased at Garibaldi's suspicion, and it takes Delenn, with her usual grace, to defuse the situation. Things only get worse when Susan and Marcus explain what they found, and Lyta what she knows because of her contact with the Vorlons.
They reach one conclusion at this meeting, and it is that with the Vorlons and the Shadows waging their war by destroying everyone else in the galaxy, they are all pretty well fucked.
* * *
Like everyone else, she and Michael leave the room somberly, the full weight of the situation resting as much on their shoulders as it does on the others'. They head for his quarters, since it is late, although they are more shocked than tired.
Despite all the bad news weighing it down, as she walks beside him, closer than she might have a year ago, the relief she initially felt when she heard he was alive rises back up inside her. Along with it comes the inevitable question of just why she feels so much of it. It's one she isn't sure she wants to know the answer to, but as soon as the door to his quarters hisses shut behind them, she pulls him into a kiss that stands in for both I was worried sick and I was never supposed to care this much.
It is a long time before they part, and even then, it's not entirely; their arms still around each other, they touch their foreheads together, still desperate for contact. She closes her eyes and wishes they weren't all going to die very soon.
He asks if she's had dinner yet, and when she says no, he offers her his leftover takeout. A few minutes later, they are sitting on the couch, her with a plate of rice and sweet and sour vegetables on her lap. He steals the occasional carrot or mushroom from her plate as she eats, and they talk about the war. She thinks that she used to have conversations about other things before this campaign, but at the moment she has no idea what they were.
She asks him if he remembers anything about what happened to him while he was away. He already told them he doesn't, but she can't help the impulse. She doesn't like unsolved mysteries, at least not when they could potentially come back to bite someone in the ass.
His voice is a little sharp as he replies. "Nothing."
She supposes he has a right to be irritated; everyone from Stephen to Captain Sheridan has been asking him where he was and what he was doing--or was done to him.
In the silence that follows, she looks down at her plate, wondering if she should apologize. When she looks up again, ready to spit out a tentative "sorry," some perversity probably born of spending too much time around him inspires her to say instead, "Well, at least if you don't remember anything, you don't have to write it all out in five hundred different reports."
For a moment she thinks her joke might fall flat, but then he grins. "You're right. Although by the time I'm done writing 'I don't remember' to five hundred different versions of the question, I might be tempted to make something up."
Ease of a concern she didn't even know she was carrying washes over her. Whatever he's been through, whatever the Shadows did to him, he's still Michael.
When she's done with her meal, they peel off their uniforms and crawl into bed together. He pulls her close, holding her tightly in the darkness. She buries her head in his shoulder. Eventually, they fall asleep.
* * *
They catch as much time together as they can over the next three weeks. Given how busy they are, this translates to the odd meal in the mess hall and the occasional evening tucked away in one or the other's quarters working.
From the couch or table on one of these evenings it is an easy journey to the bed. And when their schedules are wildly different, she will sometimes go to sleep only to wake up a couple hours later to him slipping under the covers, an arm coming to rest lightly over her waist, and his voice murmuring at her to go back to sleep.
Sometimes, she finds her way to his quarters after a long shift and does the same.
It's not something they talk about. They've each figured out the other's lock code, and have made a tacit agreement not to change them until they dredge up the courage to actually authorize each other's keycards. She hasn't made a guess as to when that will be. If she's entirely honest, she's pretty sure the coming confrontation with the Shadows and the Vorlons will make the question moot very soon.
Amusingly, Sheridan has stopped placing separate calls to their quarters when he rouses them in the middle of the night for an emergency meeting. He just finds one of them and asks that he or she bring the other along. Beyond that, he doesn't inquire--undoubtedly this is Delenn's doing--and makes no mention of their overlapping nocturnal locations. Susan, who has never liked being the subject of gossip, is grateful for this.
Most nights, she and Michael are too tired or have too much on their minds to do anything but sleep like the dead for a few hours before getting up and going back to work. Other nights--and, on two memorable occasions, days--when she feels as if she's coiled so tightly she's going to break any moment, sex loosens the spring her body has become to a point where, for a while at least, she isn't afraid of snapping in half from the strain.
Talia's silvery laugh echoes in the back of her mind when she remembers how sure she'd been that her relationship with Michael could be compartmentalized into "just friends" and "just sex." She hasn't been as careful with her heart as she should've been, and the way she misses him if their paths still haven't crossed by the end of a day is proof of that. She often wonders if being in regular communication with her heart again is an asset or a liability.
There's still no hope against the dual forces of the Shadows and the Vorlons, but as Londo might say, humans are good at manufacturing hope from despair. Thus, she, Sheridan, Delenn, and everyone else in the Army of Light goes on building the biggest combined fleet the galaxy has ever seen.
* * *
Right before she leaves to go hunting First Ones with Lorien, they steal a moment alone in the docking bay.
He looks warily at the shuttle she's about to board that will take her to the waiting White Star. "I still don't trust that guy."
Since the alien brought John back from the dead, Susan is inclined to trust him with her life, but she knows Michael, knows his paranoid streak, and she mostly understands. "I'll be careful," she promises.
He kisses her, quick but hard, and at the same time presses something into her palm, closing her fingers over the small, metallic object. "Just come back in one piece," he says, caressing her cheek before stepping back to let her board the shuttle.
She nods, the lump that has suddenly risen in her throat making it impossible to speak. Before she can embarrass herself, she turns and disappears into the shuttle.
Once she's in the pilot's seat, she opens her hand. Inside, she finds a tiny bell. It jingles faintly when she shakes it.
"What is that?" Lorien asks, peering at the bell from the seat beside her.
"I'm not sure," she says, putting it in her pocket and strapping herself into the seat. "Are you ready? We should get moving."
"Of course."
She links in to C&C to request permission to depart, and they leave for the White Star.
* * *
During their brief stopover back at B5, she looks up bells in the station databanks, and finds that they were once common good luck charms in Italy.
It takes up permanent residence in her pocket. Given what they're about to face at Corianna 6, she's likely to need all the good luck she can get.
She doesn't seek him out before she and Lorien leave to join the rest of the fleet. The romantic in her, the one that even Psi Corps's destruction of Talia couldn't kill, can't face saying goodbye for what she knows deep in her soul will be the last time.