B5 Ficlet: Not Himself
Title: Not Himself
Fandom: Babylon 5
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: John Sheridan, Michael Garibaldi.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: The first half of Season Four.
Summary: Sheridan is struggling to understand what has happened to his Chief of Security, a man who, until now, he’d thought he could trust completely.
Word Count: 728
Written For: Prompt 102 - Mirror Universe at fandomweekly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Babylon 5, or the characters. They belong to J. Michael Straczynski.
This was crazy! Sheridan didn’t get it. What the hell was wrong with Mr Garibaldi? Sure, he’d always been suspicious to the point of paranoia, it was part of what made him so damn good at his job, but this, whatever it was, went way beyond the realms of what was considered normal for Babylon 5’s Chief of Security. He was like a different person.
Outwardly Garibaldi still looked pretty much the same, less hair than Sheridan remembered but so what? None of them were getting any younger. Heck, Stephen was going grey, and Sheridan felt sure he was heading in that direction too. Hardly surprising, with all the stress the command staff had been under the last year or two. But looks aside, Garibaldi just wasn’t himself, and hadn’t been ever since he came back from… wherever.
He claimed he still didn’t remember what happened to him during the time he was missing, where he was, what he did, and Stephen had giving him an extensive medical examination before certifying him fit for duty, but still... Sheridan was beginning to wonder if this really was the same Michael Garibaldi who’d gone missing while he himself was at Za’Ha’Dum.
Could he be an impostor of some kind, or a doppelganger? Perhaps a version of himself from a parallel universe where people were mostly the same but subtly different? Sheridan had wondered the same about Anna; his wife had been so much as he’d remembered and yet there’d been something missing. In ways he hadn’t been able to explain even to himself, she hadn’t been the woman he’d loved. That had been the Shadows’ doing though. Garibaldi had been checked for Shadow implants and there hadn’t been any. Still, that didn’t necessarily mean the Shadows didn’t have some method of switching people with their alternate selves.
There had to be something to account for Garibaldi’s peculiar behaviour. Before he’d let Anna take him to the Shadows’ home world, Sheridan had thought he and Michael had built up a pretty good working relationship, even a friendship, based on mutual respect and trust. Now suddenly Garibaldi was treating him as the enemy, accusing him of having a Messiah complex. Having him quit as Chief of Security had been bad enough, although Zack was doing an excellent job in his place, but the verbal attacks and the way Garibaldi was undermining him at every turn, talking to that damned ISN reporter Randall, giving earth’s propaganda machine more ammunition to use against Babylon 5…
Okay, Sheridan was willing to admit that maybe he had changed in some ways since going to Za’Ha’Dum. Dying, being physically dead, even for a brief time, would do that to a man. Learning the full truth about the Shadows and the Vorlons had affected him too; how could it not? But he was still fully committed to defeating the Shadows and doing what was best for earth, still determined to force Clark to step down from the Presidency and return earth to the hands of its people. Everything he was trying to do was for the greater good. How could Garibaldi not see that?
In some respects it would be a relief to know, for sure and certain, that the man who just knocked him on his ass wasn’t the real Garibaldi, but some agent of the Shadows sent to disrupt everything Sheridan was trying to achieve. At least that would make some kind of logical sense, because the only other alternative Sheridan could come up with was that someone who’d had access to all of the station’s top secret strategy sessions had suddenly cracked up, lost his mind, or worse, turned traitor, and that was something he didn’t want to believe. Who knew what sensitive information Michael might have passed on to the enemy, either deliberately or without realising he was doing it?
There was one other alternative Sheridan could think of, and again it was something he didn’t even want to consider, but maybe he was the one in the wrong place, not Garibaldi. Maybe when Lorien had brought him back from death he’d returned him to a universe that was almost identical, but not the one he’d left.
He shook his head, refusing to think of it. That way lay madness, and he had enough on his plate without starting to doubt his own sanity.
The End
Fandom: Babylon 5
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: John Sheridan, Michael Garibaldi.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: The first half of Season Four.
Summary: Sheridan is struggling to understand what has happened to his Chief of Security, a man who, until now, he’d thought he could trust completely.
Word Count: 728
Written For: Prompt 102 - Mirror Universe at fandomweekly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Babylon 5, or the characters. They belong to J. Michael Straczynski.
This was crazy! Sheridan didn’t get it. What the hell was wrong with Mr Garibaldi? Sure, he’d always been suspicious to the point of paranoia, it was part of what made him so damn good at his job, but this, whatever it was, went way beyond the realms of what was considered normal for Babylon 5’s Chief of Security. He was like a different person.
Outwardly Garibaldi still looked pretty much the same, less hair than Sheridan remembered but so what? None of them were getting any younger. Heck, Stephen was going grey, and Sheridan felt sure he was heading in that direction too. Hardly surprising, with all the stress the command staff had been under the last year or two. But looks aside, Garibaldi just wasn’t himself, and hadn’t been ever since he came back from… wherever.
He claimed he still didn’t remember what happened to him during the time he was missing, where he was, what he did, and Stephen had giving him an extensive medical examination before certifying him fit for duty, but still... Sheridan was beginning to wonder if this really was the same Michael Garibaldi who’d gone missing while he himself was at Za’Ha’Dum.
Could he be an impostor of some kind, or a doppelganger? Perhaps a version of himself from a parallel universe where people were mostly the same but subtly different? Sheridan had wondered the same about Anna; his wife had been so much as he’d remembered and yet there’d been something missing. In ways he hadn’t been able to explain even to himself, she hadn’t been the woman he’d loved. That had been the Shadows’ doing though. Garibaldi had been checked for Shadow implants and there hadn’t been any. Still, that didn’t necessarily mean the Shadows didn’t have some method of switching people with their alternate selves.
There had to be something to account for Garibaldi’s peculiar behaviour. Before he’d let Anna take him to the Shadows’ home world, Sheridan had thought he and Michael had built up a pretty good working relationship, even a friendship, based on mutual respect and trust. Now suddenly Garibaldi was treating him as the enemy, accusing him of having a Messiah complex. Having him quit as Chief of Security had been bad enough, although Zack was doing an excellent job in his place, but the verbal attacks and the way Garibaldi was undermining him at every turn, talking to that damned ISN reporter Randall, giving earth’s propaganda machine more ammunition to use against Babylon 5…
Okay, Sheridan was willing to admit that maybe he had changed in some ways since going to Za’Ha’Dum. Dying, being physically dead, even for a brief time, would do that to a man. Learning the full truth about the Shadows and the Vorlons had affected him too; how could it not? But he was still fully committed to defeating the Shadows and doing what was best for earth, still determined to force Clark to step down from the Presidency and return earth to the hands of its people. Everything he was trying to do was for the greater good. How could Garibaldi not see that?
In some respects it would be a relief to know, for sure and certain, that the man who just knocked him on his ass wasn’t the real Garibaldi, but some agent of the Shadows sent to disrupt everything Sheridan was trying to achieve. At least that would make some kind of logical sense, because the only other alternative Sheridan could come up with was that someone who’d had access to all of the station’s top secret strategy sessions had suddenly cracked up, lost his mind, or worse, turned traitor, and that was something he didn’t want to believe. Who knew what sensitive information Michael might have passed on to the enemy, either deliberately or without realising he was doing it?
There was one other alternative Sheridan could think of, and again it was something he didn’t even want to consider, but maybe he was the one in the wrong place, not Garibaldi. Maybe when Lorien had brought him back from death he’d returned him to a universe that was almost identical, but not the one he’d left.
He shook his head, refusing to think of it. That way lay madness, and he had enough on his plate without starting to doubt his own sanity.
The End