FICS (B5 & Indiana Jones)
Stuff I owe people.
Title: Five Sins You Never Meant
Fandom: Babylon 5
Summary: Marcus finds out about John/Susan. For leyenn.
*
You're reasonably certain that jealousy is one of those emotions you're supposed to have given up. Mastered, rather; your teachers had been quite specific on the futility of the elimination of even the basest of feelings. It had been strange back then, sitting lotus-style and listening to Master Theronn discourse on lust and envy and jealousy and all those other inappropriate feelings, hot and wet and angry in your belly.
The Minbari have a word for 'covet' that covers a multitude of sins. It's a darkner, thicker word in Andronato, coarse on the tongue, and one of their oldest. By a peculiarity of language - chance or design, it did not seem appropriate to ask - it has only one grammatical case, not terribly easy to translate into Standard. The nearest you have managed is, you covet. Only it means a lot more than that, of course.
The first stratum is the jealousy aspect. You covet another man's wife. The Old testament booms across the training room, god's judgement in an alien tongue. You want what rightfully belongs to another. Don't deny this; you do. You want her to touch you, to look at you like that, with perfect trust. You want from her what is freely offered to you by others, but is rejected out of hand. Because they are not her. Isn't love grand?
The second stratum is resentment. You feel him unworthy of her. Let's add to that disloyalty, and bearing false witness, shall we? We live for the One, we die for the One is one among many oaths you have sworn, and if you do not believe him worthy of that, what are you doing here?
How can you give up your life for another if you feel a greater claim to life than they? Master Theronn made everyone meditate at length on this. He did not use the example of The One - great and bright and shining - but of a poor beggar, poor and diseased. Surely, he said, you could give more to the universe if you were to survive. Surely your skills and training need to be preserved. Surely you need to live, more than the wretched, helpless they.
And if you cannot give up your life for another, alone and unsung in the dark - if you judge another unworthy because you feel your claim on love should be honoured, not theirs -
Tell me, Anla'Shok, what are you doing here?
The third stratum is more insidious still. The thing that you covet has no choice; no will of its own. There is no word for it in the old rules, but it is there on each one, in each religion's call to compassion. cast not to stone those dear to your heart, the Andronato version goes, more or less. You like to think yourself enlightened - thoughtful on occasion, even - and would be mortified, surely, if accused of objectifying those around you. But how else to explain it, this sour taste in your mouth, dry and rasping as if your own body rebels against you. Cast not to stone - lest you be cast in turn, and moved like pawns across a chessboard. (And where the pieces fall, who shall know?)
The fourth stratum is the hurt pride you are currently nursing. It will pass.
The fifth stratum is maybe the worst. It's what springs first to mind and mouth, after all, when you see them together. Oh, and they are together, there is no denying it. Maybe it won't last - you've heard rumours of a prophecy, true enough - but that's not terribly important right now, is it? Right now, his hand is on her waist, holding her gently as he kisses her. Right now, she's reaching up to stroke his cheek, his neck, his hair, and follow her touch with her lips, mapping him as if in darkness.
Right now, you need to realise that neither one of them realises that this room is used as a meeting point, and so is monitored. Right now, you need to turn off the screen, and stop, stop now.
Right now, your heart is not the issue at all.
*
fin
***
Title: What We Leave Behind
Fandom: Indiana Jones
Summary: Marion/Indy, post-Last Crusade (featuring possibly immortal Indy, and also gardening). For bluerosefairy. 100fandoms #11 'old'.
*
She’s taken to gardening. Doctor’s orders, of course; it’s not something she would have chosen by herself, not given the rate at which every green thing she plants shrivels in the ground. You’d think that she’d intended for them to die, or sat there thinking malevolent thoughts at the wretched things all day long. She’d told her doctor that she’d done her best but, honestly, she just sat there while David did all the work. And what’s the point of calling it ‘gardening’ when she’s wrapped up in three layers of blankets and sipping her camomile tea while her grandson ineptly digs up her plants, slicing through the roots willy nilly and then looking shocked - shocked, I tell you - when the bastard things fall over and shrivel. Honestly. Much more of this and she’d brain him with her designer teacup.
Alma is suitably horrified when she tells her this. Bah, that girl never did learn to keep any sense in her head. Not that there’s anyone she can blame for it, mind you; it’s not like she can claim the girl isn’t hers. Just… that her brains got forgotten somewhere, possibly falling out on the flight out of Mongolia.
Well, it’s not like she’d be able to stay there with a fat belly, now, is it?
“Gamma, would you like some more tea?”
How sweet and solicitous David’s turned out. Alma’s been tearing her hair out over his antics - he stole out a few nights previous and went rock climbing with friends of his, the middle of the night, he could have died! - but he’s a good boy, really. Always cleaned up after any fights he got into. “No, David, that’s all right. You go on out, now. Have some fun.”
He stooped to kiss her on the cheek - square-jawed, blue-eyed and the sun in his hair - and tucked the blanket around her more securely. “I’ll stop by after school tomorrow, all right?”
That boy should spend more time with his friends and less time with his old grandmother, she thinks, perversely pleased that this isn’t so. Who would help her raise her plants otherwise?
Still. Today is something of a special day, and she isn’t in the mood for company. Today, she wants to be wicked, and laugh over the shock her prim daughter would receive to see her frail old mother drinking bourbon and laughing with imaginary old friends. “Ah, Alma, dear. I’ve no idea who you’ve taken after,” she murmured, and pulled the tiny old flask from the loose folds of her summer dress, sliding the cap open and pouring a generous amount in her empty teacup.
There was a rustle behind her; cloth over cloth. “My father, of course. She’s just as prim and prissy as the old man ever was.”
“She was born prim and prissy; you’d think that being raised by me would knock at least a little of that out of her,” she replied, amused. She couldn’t quite manage the same volume in her voice as she once had, but she imagined that she sounded much the same all the same.
“Well, at least David’s turning out well.”
“No thanks to you.” She turned a little, catching movement out of the corner of her eye. He was still standing by the window, blocking the light, moving restlessly from foot to foot. Not like him at all; of course, she could make him more skittish than a cat in a room full of chairs, or however that went. “Are you going to sit down?”
“Sweetheart, it’s just a flying visit -“
“Of course it is. You’re after the Girdle of Catherine the Great -“
“The last triumph of Augustus Caesar,” he corrected, amused.
“- and can’t stay.” She stared at the plaid blanket; the lost tartan of whozit whatsit - some lost Scottish clan - that had somehow been miraculously discovered these few years past; the pattern sent to a museum by a mysterious benefactor. Not that she cares, of course, but David insisted. And so, here she is, wrapped in her own history, sipping bourbon from a teacup.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I can’t.”
Of course he can’t. His visits have been sporadic for years, now, growing shorter and shorter each time until, finally, it became an annual event. (And how often had he come by before, anyhow? This isn’t something she can claim as hers, she knows.)
She raised the teacup to her mouth, taking a careful sip and willing her hand to stop shaking. It was difficult, now. Even a year ago things had been easier - movement, greater strength, her memory as sharp as ever - and she’s finding the resentment difficult to swallow. Sitting in any one position for any great period of time is difficult, now; she’s finding it more and more difficult to last the hour and a half of David’s gardening. Doctor’s orders, though - sit there and breathe great big health-ridden breaths. As if proximity to plants would cure old age.
He knelt by her side, his hands on the blanket. “I missed you,” he said softly. “I wanted to see you.”
“Liar,” she said pleasantly, looking down at his hands. Rough, weathered hands, but still strong and supple: a young man’s hands, full of life. There is a ring on one finger; a pale thin slice of gold across the tanned expanse. Not hers, of course. (He was never hers that way.) “You had a stop-over here.”
“Yes, because Tuscany is on the way to Ostia,” he said, the familiar snap in his voice. “Anyway. Aren’t you going to say you’re happy to see me?”
She stared at his hands some more. “Did you say hello to David?” She asked instead.
She could hear the grimace. “I don’t think that would have gone very well.”
No, perhaps not. Still. It would have given him something to do, besides coming to talk to her. “You probably have a plane to catch,” she said in a small voice.
A silence. He sighed. “Yeah. I just - I wanted to wish you a happy birthday. You know, for tomorrow.” He leaned in, quickly but firmly, and pressed a kiss to her cheek, his hands in her hair. Soft, soft, soft, with the scrape of stubble against her paper-like cheek, and the smell of gunpowder in his kiss. “I’ll see you next year, Marion,” he whispered.
He stood, and turned, and walked away again, leaving the living room door ajar. It stuck, sometimes, and she’d been having trouble with it for the last couple of years. David would have known, of course, and Alma. And now, Indy, his hands gentle on her hair as he smoothed down the fine strands curling around her head, thin as duckling down. In a year or two she thinks that she might waste away entirely, becoming one of those cartoon ghosts David had used to love as a child.
Just another year, she thinks, and takes another shaky sip from the cup. Another birthday and another kiss, and his young man’s arms around her, like the world had stopped back then. For both of them, this time, instead of just the one.
*
fin
Title: Five Sins You Never Meant
Fandom: Babylon 5
Summary: Marcus finds out about John/Susan. For leyenn.
*
You're reasonably certain that jealousy is one of those emotions you're supposed to have given up. Mastered, rather; your teachers had been quite specific on the futility of the elimination of even the basest of feelings. It had been strange back then, sitting lotus-style and listening to Master Theronn discourse on lust and envy and jealousy and all those other inappropriate feelings, hot and wet and angry in your belly.
The Minbari have a word for 'covet' that covers a multitude of sins. It's a darkner, thicker word in Andronato, coarse on the tongue, and one of their oldest. By a peculiarity of language - chance or design, it did not seem appropriate to ask - it has only one grammatical case, not terribly easy to translate into Standard. The nearest you have managed is, you covet. Only it means a lot more than that, of course.
The first stratum is the jealousy aspect. You covet another man's wife. The Old testament booms across the training room, god's judgement in an alien tongue. You want what rightfully belongs to another. Don't deny this; you do. You want her to touch you, to look at you like that, with perfect trust. You want from her what is freely offered to you by others, but is rejected out of hand. Because they are not her. Isn't love grand?
The second stratum is resentment. You feel him unworthy of her. Let's add to that disloyalty, and bearing false witness, shall we? We live for the One, we die for the One is one among many oaths you have sworn, and if you do not believe him worthy of that, what are you doing here?
How can you give up your life for another if you feel a greater claim to life than they? Master Theronn made everyone meditate at length on this. He did not use the example of The One - great and bright and shining - but of a poor beggar, poor and diseased. Surely, he said, you could give more to the universe if you were to survive. Surely your skills and training need to be preserved. Surely you need to live, more than the wretched, helpless they.
And if you cannot give up your life for another, alone and unsung in the dark - if you judge another unworthy because you feel your claim on love should be honoured, not theirs -
Tell me, Anla'Shok, what are you doing here?
The third stratum is more insidious still. The thing that you covet has no choice; no will of its own. There is no word for it in the old rules, but it is there on each one, in each religion's call to compassion. cast not to stone those dear to your heart, the Andronato version goes, more or less. You like to think yourself enlightened - thoughtful on occasion, even - and would be mortified, surely, if accused of objectifying those around you. But how else to explain it, this sour taste in your mouth, dry and rasping as if your own body rebels against you. Cast not to stone - lest you be cast in turn, and moved like pawns across a chessboard. (And where the pieces fall, who shall know?)
The fourth stratum is the hurt pride you are currently nursing. It will pass.
The fifth stratum is maybe the worst. It's what springs first to mind and mouth, after all, when you see them together. Oh, and they are together, there is no denying it. Maybe it won't last - you've heard rumours of a prophecy, true enough - but that's not terribly important right now, is it? Right now, his hand is on her waist, holding her gently as he kisses her. Right now, she's reaching up to stroke his cheek, his neck, his hair, and follow her touch with her lips, mapping him as if in darkness.
Right now, you need to realise that neither one of them realises that this room is used as a meeting point, and so is monitored. Right now, you need to turn off the screen, and stop, stop now.
Right now, your heart is not the issue at all.
*
fin
***
Title: What We Leave Behind
Fandom: Indiana Jones
Summary: Marion/Indy, post-Last Crusade (featuring possibly immortal Indy, and also gardening). For bluerosefairy. 100fandoms #11 'old'.
*
She’s taken to gardening. Doctor’s orders, of course; it’s not something she would have chosen by herself, not given the rate at which every green thing she plants shrivels in the ground. You’d think that she’d intended for them to die, or sat there thinking malevolent thoughts at the wretched things all day long. She’d told her doctor that she’d done her best but, honestly, she just sat there while David did all the work. And what’s the point of calling it ‘gardening’ when she’s wrapped up in three layers of blankets and sipping her camomile tea while her grandson ineptly digs up her plants, slicing through the roots willy nilly and then looking shocked - shocked, I tell you - when the bastard things fall over and shrivel. Honestly. Much more of this and she’d brain him with her designer teacup.
Alma is suitably horrified when she tells her this. Bah, that girl never did learn to keep any sense in her head. Not that there’s anyone she can blame for it, mind you; it’s not like she can claim the girl isn’t hers. Just… that her brains got forgotten somewhere, possibly falling out on the flight out of Mongolia.
Well, it’s not like she’d be able to stay there with a fat belly, now, is it?
“Gamma, would you like some more tea?”
How sweet and solicitous David’s turned out. Alma’s been tearing her hair out over his antics - he stole out a few nights previous and went rock climbing with friends of his, the middle of the night, he could have died! - but he’s a good boy, really. Always cleaned up after any fights he got into. “No, David, that’s all right. You go on out, now. Have some fun.”
He stooped to kiss her on the cheek - square-jawed, blue-eyed and the sun in his hair - and tucked the blanket around her more securely. “I’ll stop by after school tomorrow, all right?”
That boy should spend more time with his friends and less time with his old grandmother, she thinks, perversely pleased that this isn’t so. Who would help her raise her plants otherwise?
Still. Today is something of a special day, and she isn’t in the mood for company. Today, she wants to be wicked, and laugh over the shock her prim daughter would receive to see her frail old mother drinking bourbon and laughing with imaginary old friends. “Ah, Alma, dear. I’ve no idea who you’ve taken after,” she murmured, and pulled the tiny old flask from the loose folds of her summer dress, sliding the cap open and pouring a generous amount in her empty teacup.
There was a rustle behind her; cloth over cloth. “My father, of course. She’s just as prim and prissy as the old man ever was.”
“She was born prim and prissy; you’d think that being raised by me would knock at least a little of that out of her,” she replied, amused. She couldn’t quite manage the same volume in her voice as she once had, but she imagined that she sounded much the same all the same.
“Well, at least David’s turning out well.”
“No thanks to you.” She turned a little, catching movement out of the corner of her eye. He was still standing by the window, blocking the light, moving restlessly from foot to foot. Not like him at all; of course, she could make him more skittish than a cat in a room full of chairs, or however that went. “Are you going to sit down?”
“Sweetheart, it’s just a flying visit -“
“Of course it is. You’re after the Girdle of Catherine the Great -“
“The last triumph of Augustus Caesar,” he corrected, amused.
“- and can’t stay.” She stared at the plaid blanket; the lost tartan of whozit whatsit - some lost Scottish clan - that had somehow been miraculously discovered these few years past; the pattern sent to a museum by a mysterious benefactor. Not that she cares, of course, but David insisted. And so, here she is, wrapped in her own history, sipping bourbon from a teacup.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I can’t.”
Of course he can’t. His visits have been sporadic for years, now, growing shorter and shorter each time until, finally, it became an annual event. (And how often had he come by before, anyhow? This isn’t something she can claim as hers, she knows.)
She raised the teacup to her mouth, taking a careful sip and willing her hand to stop shaking. It was difficult, now. Even a year ago things had been easier - movement, greater strength, her memory as sharp as ever - and she’s finding the resentment difficult to swallow. Sitting in any one position for any great period of time is difficult, now; she’s finding it more and more difficult to last the hour and a half of David’s gardening. Doctor’s orders, though - sit there and breathe great big health-ridden breaths. As if proximity to plants would cure old age.
He knelt by her side, his hands on the blanket. “I missed you,” he said softly. “I wanted to see you.”
“Liar,” she said pleasantly, looking down at his hands. Rough, weathered hands, but still strong and supple: a young man’s hands, full of life. There is a ring on one finger; a pale thin slice of gold across the tanned expanse. Not hers, of course. (He was never hers that way.) “You had a stop-over here.”
“Yes, because Tuscany is on the way to Ostia,” he said, the familiar snap in his voice. “Anyway. Aren’t you going to say you’re happy to see me?”
She stared at his hands some more. “Did you say hello to David?” She asked instead.
She could hear the grimace. “I don’t think that would have gone very well.”
No, perhaps not. Still. It would have given him something to do, besides coming to talk to her. “You probably have a plane to catch,” she said in a small voice.
A silence. He sighed. “Yeah. I just - I wanted to wish you a happy birthday. You know, for tomorrow.” He leaned in, quickly but firmly, and pressed a kiss to her cheek, his hands in her hair. Soft, soft, soft, with the scrape of stubble against her paper-like cheek, and the smell of gunpowder in his kiss. “I’ll see you next year, Marion,” he whispered.
He stood, and turned, and walked away again, leaving the living room door ajar. It stuck, sometimes, and she’d been having trouble with it for the last couple of years. David would have known, of course, and Alma. And now, Indy, his hands gentle on her hair as he smoothed down the fine strands curling around her head, thin as duckling down. In a year or two she thinks that she might waste away entirely, becoming one of those cartoon ghosts David had used to love as a child.
Just another year, she thinks, and takes another shaky sip from the cup. Another birthday and another kiss, and his young man’s arms around her, like the world had stopped back then. For both of them, this time, instead of just the one.
*
fin