B5 Quadruple Drabble: Too Great A Risk
Title: Too Great A Risk
Fandom: Babylon 5
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Thomas ‘Jinxo’ Jordan.
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Setting: Grail.
Summary: Thomas Jordan can’t help feeling responsible for the loss of the first four Babylon stations.
Written For: Challenge 441: Amnesty 73 at fan_flashworks, using Challenge 170: Station.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Babylon 5, or the characters. They belong to J. Michael Straczynski.
A/N: Quadruple drabble.
Newcomers to Babylon 5 often find the space station daunting. It’s so vast, five miles long, home away from home for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. People hear that and they can’t wrap their heads around the sheer size of the place.
For Thomas Jordan, better known as Jinxo, it’s different. He helped build it. Hell, he helped build all five of the Babylon stations. That’s why he’s still here, years after the rest of the construction crew went back to earth or moved on to other projects. He can’t leave, because every time he did in the past, something terrible happened.
The first station was sabotaged during construction; the moment Thomas went on leave, it just… collapsed.
Something similar happened with the second station, again when he went on leave. Sabotaged, destroyed, and once again construction had to start over.
Then the third station blew up, and that was when everyone started calling him Jinxo. He’d had nothing to do with the sabotage, he’d taken pride in his work, had felt honored to be working on such a momentous project. Standards had been necessarily high because of what the stations were to be used for, and space construction was a highly skilled profession anyway. As far as Thomas knew, no one had given less than their best.
Still, with three stations destroyed before they could be completed, he’d been determined to see the job through. He hadn’t taken leave, not once, had remained aboard the entire time, only leaving when Babylon 4 had been completed, ready to go into operation. But as he’d left aboard the shuttle, he’d looked back, seen some sort of weird distortion wrap around the station, and then it simply… vanished.
He can’t take the chance of anything happening to this one though. It’s the last, and the biggest, and once again he remained onboard throughout construction, but this time, when it was completed, he stayed. There’s no work here for someone trained in space construction; he takes odd jobs when he can get them, just to afford food, but it’s okay because as long as he’s here, Babylon 5 will be safe, and that’s all he cares about.
He won’t be responsible for the deaths of all the people who live here, and if that means spending the rest of his life here, then he will. Leaving’s too great a risk.
The End
Fandom: Babylon 5
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Thomas ‘Jinxo’ Jordan.
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Setting: Grail.
Summary: Thomas Jordan can’t help feeling responsible for the loss of the first four Babylon stations.
Written For: Challenge 441: Amnesty 73 at fan_flashworks, using Challenge 170: Station.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Babylon 5, or the characters. They belong to J. Michael Straczynski.
A/N: Quadruple drabble.
Newcomers to Babylon 5 often find the space station daunting. It’s so vast, five miles long, home away from home for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. People hear that and they can’t wrap their heads around the sheer size of the place.
For Thomas Jordan, better known as Jinxo, it’s different. He helped build it. Hell, he helped build all five of the Babylon stations. That’s why he’s still here, years after the rest of the construction crew went back to earth or moved on to other projects. He can’t leave, because every time he did in the past, something terrible happened.
The first station was sabotaged during construction; the moment Thomas went on leave, it just… collapsed.
Something similar happened with the second station, again when he went on leave. Sabotaged, destroyed, and once again construction had to start over.
Then the third station blew up, and that was when everyone started calling him Jinxo. He’d had nothing to do with the sabotage, he’d taken pride in his work, had felt honored to be working on such a momentous project. Standards had been necessarily high because of what the stations were to be used for, and space construction was a highly skilled profession anyway. As far as Thomas knew, no one had given less than their best.
Still, with three stations destroyed before they could be completed, he’d been determined to see the job through. He hadn’t taken leave, not once, had remained aboard the entire time, only leaving when Babylon 4 had been completed, ready to go into operation. But as he’d left aboard the shuttle, he’d looked back, seen some sort of weird distortion wrap around the station, and then it simply… vanished.
He can’t take the chance of anything happening to this one though. It’s the last, and the biggest, and once again he remained onboard throughout construction, but this time, when it was completed, he stayed. There’s no work here for someone trained in space construction; he takes odd jobs when he can get them, just to afford food, but it’s okay because as long as he’s here, Babylon 5 will be safe, and that’s all he cares about.
He won’t be responsible for the deaths of all the people who live here, and if that means spending the rest of his life here, then he will. Leaving’s too great a risk.
The End