Author's Note: This chapter takes place in and around "Illusion of Truth". Usual disclaimer—the Babylon 5 characters and universe are JMS's, but the gapfiller scenes are my own.
Part 50—Devices and Deceptions
John met me in the docking bay when I returned, kissing me as if I had been gone for a month rather than a mere ten days. "I missed you," he murmured in my ear when we finally came up for air. He cupped my face in his hands, with a smile that didn't quite hide the question in his eyes. "So how did it go?"
"All is well." I smoothed a lock of hair off his forehead. The sight of him was intoxicating; this giddy sense of floating in a world delightfully unsteady must be how humans felt when drunk. "The Elder accepted your gift, and you, on behalf of my clan." I traced his lips with a finger. "Which means…"
"What?" he murmured, his breath warm against my palm.
I gave a low laugh. "I will tell you when all is ready."
He rolled his eyes. "I hate it when you do that," he said, but his grin belied his words.
I laughed at him. "No, you don't. You pretend to. It is a game we play."
"Caught," he said, and kissed me again. Despite his undeniable enthusiasm, there was a subtle tension in him that had nothing to do with desire. I pulled back slightly, my palms still curved around the back of his neck.
"Something troubles you," I said softly. "What is it?"
He glanced away with a quiet sigh. "I was hoping you wouldn't notice. I didn't want to spoil your homecoming."
"John." I kept my scolding gentle. "Tell me."
"It's my folks. I'm worried about them. Last time I talked to my dad, he said there were strangers hanging around the farm, asking questions. I told them to get out, but…" He shrugged. "There's been no chance for a word since then. I don't know if they've left the farm, or they're still there and just fine, or what."
"Perhaps we can find out. We do have contacts in the Resistance, as well as the Rangers to draw on."
"Maybe." He chewed his lip, and then with visible effort set his worry aside, slipped an arm through mine, and turned us both toward the exit. "Enough fretting for now. Come on. I've got dinner for us in my quarters. I thought you might like to put your feet up."
"Not while I am eating, surely." I gave him a sideways glance and continued in my most innocent tone: "Do I dare ask if you made flarn?"
He laughed at that. "Heaven forbid. I hope I'm wise enough to know my limits."
ooOoo
The following day, it was hard to concentrate on the usual diplomatic business with half my mind dreamily lost in contemplating preparations for the next ritual John and I would undergo. Fortunately, only Lennier noticed my distraction. He forbore to comment, merely made subtle efforts to rescue me from myself when my woolgathering threatened to become obvious. By the time we managed a midday meal and Lennier took himself off to write up an abstract for an upcoming stage of treaty negotiations with the Vrik, my thoughts were so consumed with John that it seemed I had conjured him when he turned up at my door.
"I know you're busy, and I'm sorry to interrupt," he said as he walked into the room. His smile, though warm, was not entirely easy. "There's something I need to talk to you about."
"I am never too busy for that." I closed my data reader and moved over on the couch to make room for him. "Is it something to with do with your parents?"
"No." He sat, steepling his fingers and gazing outward as if gathering his thoughts. After a moment, he said, "An investigative reporter from ISN turned up on the station a few hours ago. Fellow named Dan Randall, and a three-person news crew. They want to do a live report on 'independent Babylon Five.' "
ISN? My heart gave an unsettling flip in my chest. "You told them no, of course."
"Actually…" He met my gaze. "I said yes."
For a second or two my heartbeat stilled. Then: "No. No, John. You can't—why in Valen's name would you want them to—?" Are you mad was on the tip of my tongue. Only the wish not to shame him by so obvious a lack of faith in his judgment kept me from saying it.
"I thought you might react like that. And you have good reason. I know there's a danger to this. Believe me, I know. But I think we can get around it. Will you hear me out?"
"You have considered this at length, then," I said, troubled at the thought.
He took my hands. "I have. But if we play this right, we can beat them at their own damned game…with the truth." He gave a crooked grin. "How's that for irony?"
I took a steadying breath. "I'm listening."
"Okay." He let go of one hand and ran his own through his hair, a familiar gesture when thinking. "Randall told me they'll do the story anyway, whether we cooperate or not. ISN's been killing us back home, running propaganda passing for news, or talk-show hatchet jobs where they gather a clutch of pro-regime talking heads in front of the cameras and everybody bloviates about all the things we're allegedly doing up here. Everything from terrorist plots against EarthGov to 'alien invasion' to making slaves of all the humans aboard B-Five who don't toe the anti-Clark line. Ivanova heard the other day that we're harvesting organs from human lurkers and implanting them in clones. No reason why—we're just doing it. What gives all this nonsense its power is that no one knows what the truth is. The propaganda artists don't come here, so none of what's real aboard Babylon Five ever makes it through their tri-vid cams to where average humans can see it. We're a big blank canvas, and ISN and Clark have been painting on it whatever ugly picture they damned please."
"Not a completely blank canvas," I reminded him. "There is the Voice of the Resistance."
"Which reaches a fraction of folks in the Earth Alliance, most of whom are more than half on our side before they start listening. To the rest? We're traitors, enemies, potential terrorists just waiting for the chance to strike." His voice turned bitter on the last words. I felt for him—it was tearing him in two, that his homeworld and people whom he loved so dearly should see him as bent on their harm. "What if we can change that dynamic? What if we can force ISN to show at least some of the real situation aboard B-Five… the people who live here, the officers and enlisted personnel just doing our jobs every day trying to keep this station a decent place to live? Trying to keep the peace, not tear it down. ISN has a long reach. If we cooperate with Randall, give him and his crew free access for a couple of days, we can use them to show the majority of Alliance citizens what we're really about. To some extent, anyway."
My own experience with ISN—and that in the days before Clark took power, when the network had some pretense of honesty—made me skeptical. "They will twist things. You know they will. Whatever they record here, they will use to make… what was it you said, an ugly picture?... of their own devising. Can we risk that?"
He let out a breath. "I know they'll try. It'll be our job to make that as hard for them as possible. And even if they do manage to twist some things, part of the truth will still get out. That has to be better than the total slant job they'll do otherwise. They can't twist everything, if we're honest and above-board." He flashed me a quick grin. "Call it the Minbari maneuver—tell the truth and shame the Devil, as my grandmother used to say."
I kept my gaze on the light-mobile that hung a few feet away, seeking calm in its gently winking lavenders and blues. I did not believe John's idea would work, and the prospect of spending time under ISN's baleful eye disturbed me on a personal level as well. "The last time they were here," I said slowly, "I tried to show them who I was. Who I had become, and why. What I wished to accomplish." My stomach knotted with the memory of that two-years-gone fiasco. "They took that from me in seconds. Do you know what it meant that I broke down as I did, in the full view of strangers I neither knew nor trusted? I have not done such a thing since adolescence. A Minbari child would have had more self-control. I tried to tell the truth, and they shamed me. And that was before. Now they are Clark's creatures, with every motive to do it again. To me, to you, to all of us. What guarantee do we have that this 'independent news report' won't blacken our names even further?"
He took both my hands again. "The thing is," he said, "they can do that whether we help them out or not. They are doing it. At least if we give them access, they're on our turf, on our terms. That gives us some measure of control. It'll be up to us to use it effectively."
I stared down at his jacket clasps, unable to look him in the face, knowing that if I did, I would beg him not to do this. But that was my fear talking. A realistic fear, granted—but fear nonetheless. Did I not have the courage to face them down? And he was right that they were already telling ugly tales aplenty about Babylon Five. Refusing to grant them access wouldn't stop that. If anything, it would add fuel to the fire, let them claim all the more convincingly that we were hiding something. Something monstrous, if ISN were left to tell its own tale.
"I know what I'm asking," John said. "We'll keep you away from them us much as we can without looking shifty. I have no intention of throwing you to those wolves." Gently, he tucked stray hair behind my ear. "Hell—if I could keep you out of it completely, I would. But they know you're a power player up here, and that we've worked closely together. If you're not part of this, they'll make a dog's breakfast out of that."
"I know." Another deep breath, and then I could look at him. "Do you truly think we can do what you propose—beat them at their own game and force them to show the truth?"
"If I didn't think so, I wouldn't suggest it."
He spoke with the ring of conviction. Nervous as I was, in that moment I could not disbelieve him.
Reluctantly, I nodded. "Then let us tell the truth, and let the Devil in."
ooOoo
In the end, ISN's report was not as bad as I had feared.
It was worse.
I had expected deception. I had expected manipulation. I had expected, despite John's promise, to be a prime target. I had not expected to be cast as a monster. An insidious, implacable foe of humanity, using torture, oppression, and nightmarish experiments to conquer the human race through stealth by altering their very physical essence. And using John—once their hero from the Earth-Minbari War, now a psychological cripple utterly in my thrall—to enact my diabolical master plan, in a twisted scenario of revenge. For my people's surrender at the Battle of the Line, for the loss of the Valen'tha that started it all, for the sole sake of hatred… it scarcely mattered. I was the enemy, my people were the enemy, and after us all the other alien races, while John and everyone else who opposed the Clark regime were mere pawns in our evil game.
There came a point when I could no longer watch the stellarcast. I closed my eyes, but it did no good. I could still hear every word, including those they added or altered to make us say things we had neither said nor meant. There came a point sometime after that when watching the 'cast brought a strange sort of relief—because the only other thing in my line of sight was John, his back and shoulders growing ever more taut with the effort to contain his rage and shame. Near the end of the 'cast, when Randall spoke of John's home and family—the Sheridan farm burned to the ground, his father missing—John stood abruptly and stalked to the window that overlooked the station gardens. I wanted to follow, but felt powerless to move. The stellarcast held me like a sorcerer's spell, compelling me to witness every painful moment. Know your enemy, I thought. We certainly did now.
The final on-screen syllable had scarcely left Randall's mouth when Susan shut off the Babcom unit with a muttered oath and stalked out of John's office. With the Babcom screen dark and silent, I finally found the will to stir from my chair. I went to John, who was still staring fixedly out at the gardens. He said not a word, nor seemed aware of my presence.
I murmured his name, touched his arm. He did not respond. Rigid as a statue, he scarcely seemed to breathe, and in his eyes I saw the sheen of tears.
"John." I felt for him so, my bones ached with it. "It will be all right. Faith will manage somehow." I scarcely knew what I was saying—only that I must say something, anything, to try to allay the stark pain in his face.
I may as well have spoken to a stone. My throat caught, and for a wild moment I wanted to grab him and shake him—look at me, talk to me, let me help! All the outrage and shock and grief that I had held back for the past hour, while the ISN stellarcast wove its vicious web, welled up in me then, and before I knew it I had turned and was half-running out of the room. I had no destination in mind, except away. Away from the Babcom screen and its damning lies; away from John and his pain that he would not let me assuage. Away most of all from the knowledge of how utterly we had failed.
I managed to reach the first cross-corridor, out of earshot of John's office, before sagging against the wall and giving way. Choking sobs like a child's wracked me, the sound of them in my ears yet another shame. Would I never be free of the Earth-Minbari War, of my terrible error that had launched it? Was there no atonement I could make that those I had wronged would accept? In that moment, I was beyond remembering John and Susan and the rest on Babylon Five who had grown so dear to me, or the countless others I dealt with every day who treated me with courtesy, or the thousands more who had never met me but at least knew I was not their enemy. All I could think of were the billions throughout the Earth Alliance who had seen that stellarcast and believed it. Everything I had done, everything I had risked and suffered for the past two years and more—all had been undone in the space of sixty minutes.
So lost in grief was I, it startled me when an arm slid around my shoulders. "Come on," Susan murmured in my ear as she pulled me gently away from the wall. "We're going to Earhart's. I'm buying."
ooOoo
"Virgin lemonade and a Stoli," Susan called out as we entered the officers' club. I had brought my tears under control, but still felt lost and alone. I followed her to a table a few yards from the door, then sat staring at its polished black top as she collected our drinks and brought them back. The lemonade fizzed in its frosted glass. I could smell Susan's vodka across the table—an unpleasant odor, sharp as a knife tip in the nose. She grabbed her glass and drained it, and the odor mercifully vanished.
"That's a start," she said, and signaled to the bartender for another. "I could kill those ISN bastards. Lucky for them they're off-station now, or I would, and damn the consequences."
The rim of the lemonade glass blurred before my eyes. "Dammit," Susan murmured, and gently gripped my hand.
"He wouldn't let me help him." The words spilled out, the first of so many things causing me pain that I could no longer contain it. Of all of them, this was the only one I could do anything about. "I went to him, and he didn't say a word, didn't even look at me…and he was hurting so, Susan, I could see it, feel it as if we shared the same skin…And I couldn't do anything, he wouldn't let me, he just…shut me out, and I don't understand why…"
I must have been crushing her fingers, but her face showed nothing of it—only sadness for me, and compassion. "Because he let you down," she said quietly. "Those jackals made you Public Enemy Number One in the Earth Alliance, and he thinks it's his fault."
"No." I shook my head. "They are the ones who did that. They lied, they—they changed things, altered what was said, and when, and how… John did all he could to keep them away from me, he promised he would keep me out of it as much as possible…"
She nodded as I trailed off. "He talked you into doing that interview, didn't he? Into agreeing to let them do this at all?"
"Well…" I floundered. "Well, yes, but—"
"There you go, then." Her second vodka had arrived; she gulped half of it, then pushed the tiny glass to one side. "He persuaded you to participate in this fiasco. That gave Randall the opening to make you the evil alien bitch, using your feminine wiles on a damaged war hero to destroy the whole human race. In John's mind, he set you up for that. He's blaming himself so hard right now, he can't take comfort from anyone—you least of all."
I pulled my glass a fraction closer, though the thought of drinking anything make my throat close up. "If I could just tell him… if he would listen…"
"Give him time," she said. "A few hours on his own. He loves you; he won't shut you out for long."
I caught her gaze and held it. "You don't think this… travesty is his fault, do you?"
She shook her head. "I don't blame him. Except maybe for being a little naive. He knew things could turn nasty; we just never thought they'd go as far as they did." With a sharp sigh, she picked up her glass and tossed back what was left in it. And then she froze, her gaze on something beyond me.
With exaggerated care, she set her glass down. She was glaring past me, toward the entrance to the club. "Don't you dare," she growled. "Don't you come a goddamned step closer."
I turned toward the entryway. Garibaldi was standing just inside it, some ten feet away from the table where we sat. He looked haggard, and fixed imploring eyes on me. "Delenn," he said. "I saw you come in here, and I just… I wanted to—"
"You have nothing to say to her." Susan's chair scraped against the floor as she abruptly stood and moved toward him. "What in the hell did you think you were doing, spilling your guts to Dan-fucking-ISN-Randall like that? Making John out to be a nutcase, with Delenn in control of him like Rasputin? Or maybe all the non-humans in control of him, with her first in line. 'Sheridan has a God complex. He listens to Delenn.' You had to know what they'd do with that. Especially to her. And you said it anyway. Are you still fighting the Earth-Minbari War, or what?"
He glanced at her, jaw clenched, then turned back to me. "Please, hear me out. Let me—"
Susan advanced on him. "Get out of here. Just go."
He backed off a step, still looking at me. No words this time, only the pleading in his face for even one word of mercy.
My heart was too sore, my pain too raw. I said nothing and turned away.
ooOoo
Later that evening, I went to the Zen garden and found John there, seated in my usual spot near the little waterfall. Our eyes met as I hovered in the entryway, and a moment later I was in his arms. He held me close, his face buried in my hair. I felt his heart beating, its rhythm twinned with mine. We stayed like that for a long time, until finally I moved away just enough to look him in the face.
"They have done their worst," I murmured. "And we are still standing."
His slow smile, even tinged with regret as it was, set my heart singing. "I don't deserve you," he said, his fingertips resting on my cheekbone.
I covered his hand with my own. "You let me be the judge of that."
He kissed me then, gently at first, then harder and deeper. All fear and sorrow temporarily forgotten, we were lost in each other, the only place in the universe I wished to be.
ooOoo
I should have remembered that misfortunes rarely come singly. I returned to my quarters that night, John's kisses still warm on my lips, to find the Babcom light blinking. A transmission had come from Minbar. From Elder Callenn. An impossible message, stiff and formal words I could not believe even as I heard them from his own lips. "Upon reflection, I have reconsidered and hereby revoke my consent in the shan'diya. What you ask is unheard of in the history of our people, and cannot be agreed to by the Elder alone. I have therefore called a Gathering, to take place nine days hence. Expect me at Babylon Five on the third day from this one. We will journey home together, where you will face all the elders of Mir and explain yourself."
