Fic: Love (The Many Splendoured Remix) [Babylon 5; Vir, Marcus, Lennier, Ivanova/Talia, OFC/OFC; G]
Title: Love (The Many Splendoured Remix)
Author: leyenn
Summary: It comes in all kinds, and as many different ways.
Fandom: Babylon 5
Pairing: Ivanova/Talia, OFC/OFC
Rating: G
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Spoilers: Divided Loyalties
Original story: Knowing Love by selenak, with a little bit of inspiration from a few stories of my own.
Love (The Many Splendoured Remix)
"A bottle of your best white wine and a jug of mineral water, good lady, if you'd be so kind?"
It's early in her shift, just time for the regulars to start rolling in, but this voice is new and unexpected so it catches her ear. She turns around to the rather dashing figure that seems to own it: a tall, dark and handsome English guy, leaning up against her stretch of the bar with a rakish smile.
She offers him her best Friday-night smile. "Drowning some sorrows? That's a lot for one good-looking guy like you."
He moves his shoulder - nice, fluid movement, the kind she likes noticing - and she raises an eyebrow at the table behind him. She's seen those two before: the two stooges, Mitch calls them. The Blue Nova is a little further upmarket than a lot of middle-of-the-road joints here on B5, and it's not like it's unusual for their clientèle to be a little bit interesting, but this is the only Centauri/Minbari couple she's ever seen drinking together more than once. She's fairly sure they're diplomatic staff, like a lot of the early evening customers she ends up with, but this guy she's never seen before.
"Interesting company," she says, a bit curious. He doesn't look at all like a diplomat.
"Just a drink between friends," he says equally. She reaches under the bar for a pitcher and a pair of glasses.
"Ice and lemon?"
He grins. "Just for the water."
She smiles. This one could brighten up the evening. "House wine and mineral water, coming up. Sit yourself down and I'll bring it over." A familiar flash of red-brown hair catches her eye and she turns round with a smile. "Hey, Stace. Give me a hand with table six?"
She watches Stace take a look over her shoulder and whistle. English Guy chooses that particular moment to sweep his unwieldy-yet-rakish cape around with one arm as he sits down, which makes her just a little bit annoyed and a little bit impressed, the former mainly because Stace looks closer to the latter.
"He's new."
"Eyes forward," she chides quickly, teasing. Stace gives her a fond look and a quick kiss across the bar, even if it is followed by a glance around to make sure the boss isn't watching.
"Why's he drinking with those two?" Stace asks as she picks up the pitcher. "I thought they were attache's or something. He looks like he's escaped from a romance novel."
"I think they are." She dunks the wine into a cooling bucket. "Maybe he's working undercover."
"As a dragon slayer?" Stace quips, grinning. She laughs.
"Commander Ivanova has cushions?" the Minbari's asking as they approach the table. Talk about your non sequitur. She wonders how on Earth that makes it into the conversation on a normal Friday evening.
The sigh that English Guy lets out could probably melt a dozen hearts. "I wouldn't know."
Well, well. English Guy must be something a little out of the ordinary, after all. Commander Ivanova doesn't come down here often, but she's always good for a conversation when she does, and no one's never heard her talk about any guy. Definitely not the way English Guy seems to be talking about her, anyway.
"Love can be a bitch, Vir," he's saying as she sets the wine bucket down and unlinks her fingers from the pair of glasses. "Be glad you don't know it."
"But I do," the Centauri - Vir - starts to say, and she wants to find some reason to hear the rest of that conversation but the moment, as it always is, is all she's getting. She catches Stace's eye; Stace arches both eyebrows and shrugs. She can just hear Stace's voice in the look they share: Hey, they say there's someone for everyone.
Actually she thinks Vir's pretty cute for a Centauri, but that's not something she's getting into with Stace. Besides, it wouldn't really be fair to leave the Minbari out in the cold, and she doesn't think he's the type for anyone else on their shift. Just the thought makes her smile. Maybe I'll suggest that next time Joanna wanders past.
"Evening, Commander," she hears Stace say: turns around quickly and spots another of her customers taking a seat at the bar. She makes a pretence of needing to clean the spotless patch of the bar in front of Ivanova's stool and offers up a smile.
"Good evening, Commander."
"Hi, Joss." She gets a smile in return tonight, and that brightens the night even more than the enigma that is English Guy. There's something magnetic about Susan Ivanova, something about the darkness in her eyes and the mischievous way she smiles that seems to pull everyone in. She's not a regular to the Nova, but she's not a new face either, and she's been in enough that everyone knows Joss serves her when she drops by.
A few people - Stace, for obvious instance - know that Joss didn't meet the Commander for the first time on the other side of a bar. Maybe that's why Ivanova only comes in here when she's on an escapist bender. "The usual?"
"Thanks." Ivanova taps her credit chit on the bar and leaves it there. "How's business tonight?"
She shrugs. "The regulars. Things are slow since the embargo, but that's nothing new to you, I guess."
"Mm." Ivanova studies the cocktail in front of her for a moment. She picks it up; swirls it slowly, and takes a sip. Her smile is approving and Joss pretends she's not a little warmer for it. The Commander is nothing if not discerning about her alcohol, and she'd swear Mitch was actually proud of her the night she first managed to get that smile.
"Haven't seen you in here since the Captain came back," she says experimentally. She picks up a glass and idly starts to clean it.
Ivanova shrugs. "Things have been a little crazy. I haven't had much time to relax."
"I should ask you how business is going," she says. Ivanova snorts, amused.
"I just told you. Crazy."
"And how are you doing?" she asks, daring to be a little quieter. Ivanova looks at her.
She remembers the first time she set eyes on Susan Ivanova - standing beside her in a dive that in no way ranks with the Blue Nova, both of them battling a herd of uncouth idiots for the attention of some dumbass waiter who couldn't tell ass from eye socket on half his clientèle. But the way she smiled back then, the way she laughed and whispered with the stunning blonde on her arm... all of that's been gone for a while and Joss just doesn't have the heart to ask what happened or why.
Tonight it's all there, in the darkness in those eyes. Joss has been around enough to know the details never really matter. Why it's taken this long to show she doesn't know and isn't going to ask, but she won't pretend she can't see it, either.
"I'm sorry," she says sincerely.
Ivanova shrugs. Joss rubs the glass in her hand so hard it squeaks. Ivanova raises an eyebrow over her drink.
She blushes, not for the first time uncomfortable in that stare, and hunts for something to say. "Say, you wouldn't know anything about an English guy-"
"Here?" Before she can reply, Ivanova's looking round, and then groaning under her breath as she sinks back into her seat.
"He was interested in your cushions earlier," Joss says, and grins. Ivanova glares into her drink.
There's a moment, but she doesn't say anything else. Joss watches her, instead.
It's always a fine line between hostess and confidante, one she's made a good living out of spotting before she crosses it, but with Ivanova that line is always a little way toward being blurred. The woman has a pretty damn personal relationship with her alcohol. So it's easier than with most to see the lines of pain that etch themselves across her face at the topic in hand, and to imagine that she might be about to say -
Someone waves for attention and reluctantly, Joss heads down the bar. It's a few minutes until she can make her way back to her little section of the bar, right where Ivanova's still poring over half a ruby-fruit brivari cocktail, the one moment of revelation gone.
"I take it you know him, then?" she says as an opener, trying to grasp it back. The words come out gentler than she expected them to sound, although no less sympathetic. "Friend of yours?"
Ivanova doesn't look up. "A colleague. In a round about sort of way."
"Sounds like there's a little more to it than that."
Ivanova studies her drink for a moment. After that moment ends, she downs it in one shot and nudges the glass across the bar. As Joss is adding a double shot of brivari into the shaker, she lifts her head and runs her fingers roughly through her hair.
"He's got a... he's got this crazy idea that..." She sighs. "Never mind."
Joss finishes the concoction with a cherry and a flourish. "If you're not interested, why not just tell him?"
Ivanova laughs - the same rich sound Joss is a little bit infatuated with, but so tired these days it must ache coming up. "Believe me, I've tried."
"Ah." She's rather proud of that little word, the perfected voice of knowing barmen the galaxy over. "So what's his name, anyway?"
"Hm? Oh. Marcus." Ivanova looks over her shoulder as if he might have heard. Joss follows her gaze: the tables are filling up now as more than the regulars pour in, but she still has a clear view across to the three mismatched heads around table six, all deep in what looks like solemn conversation.
She waves discreetly across the room until Stace wanders up, past their table as if she really had some purpose for it. Stace is a sneak, which is one of the things Joss finds so fun about her. "Hey," she says. "What're they talking about this time?"
"Apparently all true love is unrequited," Stace says solemnly, with a twinkle in her eye. Joss smiles. She's not sure if she's in love with Stace yet, but she knows she will be - dark eyes and darker hair, curves where she never makes time for the gym, a vibrant laugh, who wouldn't fall for that?
She kind of hopes that's not all one-sided. She doesn't think it is, but she hates that wondering. What if he's right? What if this is going to fall apart like all the other times? What if she's always going to be alone?
She looks at Ivanova again, and it suddenly seems so much more likely. Because Ivanova looks at her like she actually believes it, too, and Joss is so far from wanting to think that's true.
One of the rather attractive Indian women at table three catches her eye for refills; it takes her mind off the moment, but only for a moment. Table six is on her way back to the bar and she can't help overhearing voices again as she passes.
"We each have our own definitions." The Minbari guy's talking again. "They cannot truly be shared."
"Maybe so," Marcus says. "Though doesn't that mean we can never truly connect? I mean, what if Susan and I will never define love the same way?"
"Perhaps that is what it means to find the other half of your soul," the Minbari says. Joss wonders if the Commander knows his name. Whoever he is, she thinks, he could probably make a decent living as a poet if he could just keep his head out of his ass and the clouds at roughly the same time.
Marcus makes a distraught face. "What, you mean if there's only one person in the universe who loves in the exact same way you do?"
"Would one person not be enough?"
The two guys at table five pick that moment to down glasses and leave; it turns out one of them's split a goodly amount of their house ale on the fake veneer. She takes their glasses to the bar and comes back with a cloth - and if she's a little slow about making sure it's clean, she's pretty certain Mitch isn't going to care too much.
"I don't know, Lennier," Marcus is saying. The wine is going down and his mood seems to be sinking with it, if his voice is any indication. "What's the point, if you're never going to have that perfect union? Why bother at all? Why does love exist if we're not meant to be happy?"
"Love isn't about being happy," Vir says suddenly - so suddenly that she almost looks at him, his voice is so quiet and fierce and not morose at all, the polar opposite of Marcus and his lovesick wondering. "Love is about - it's about being. Really, really being - being alive, just for a moment. It's about bleeding for someone. It's about loss and pain and even when you want things to go a different way to where they are, you just do it all anyway. For him. Because. That's why."
And then he stands up, and downs his wine in perfect, regal Centauri fashion that makes Joss want to applaud, and he turns and walks out of the bar and although she sees him meet the Commander's eyes on the way out, neither of them say a word.
She moves away from table six before she can hear either Marcus or Lennier say anything else, and she doesn't go back to the bar until Ivanova stands up to leave. Somehow she knows two things: that Vir's voice carried across even the Blue Nova crowd on a Friday night, and that Ivanova understands it all too much to want any company any more.
So she just makes sure she's at the table nearest the door when Ivanova starts to walk out, and that she's close enough to turn around and put a hand on her arm and say, "you know, if you ever want to talk about it, you know where you can find me."
For a moment, she wonders if she's gone too far: the look in those dark eyes could be a punch or a smile, and she'd be entitled to both. But then Ivanova settles back a little, and nods; and Joss smiles back at her as encouragingly as she knows how, even if she doesn't relax until she's watching a stiff back and waves of chestnut hair disappear into Friday night traffic.
After a minute or two, Stace touches her hip. Joss can tell without looking that she's leaning against the table behind, making herself look busy as her fingers creep where they shouldn't. She smiles.
Stace nudges her with a shoulder. "What was that about?"
She turns around and smiles. "Nothing. She could just use a friend sometimes, I think. I tell you I love you today?"
She knows she hasn't. She knows she's never said it, that's why she asks it, and why the sunrise look in Stace's eyes is more than worth Mitch shouting at them across the bar - especially when Stace grins, pushes her into the fake planting and kisses her thoroughly, bodily, from the toes up.
She doesn't notice when Lennier leaves; Marcus is still sitting at that table when she knocks off at one and when she finally leaves at nearly two, with Stace's hand tight in hers.
The Nova doesn't have many one-shot customers, but she never sees him come in again.
*
Author: leyenn
Summary: It comes in all kinds, and as many different ways.
Fandom: Babylon 5
Pairing: Ivanova/Talia, OFC/OFC
Rating: G
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Spoilers: Divided Loyalties
Original story: Knowing Love by selenak, with a little bit of inspiration from a few stories of my own.
Love (The Many Splendoured Remix)
"A bottle of your best white wine and a jug of mineral water, good lady, if you'd be so kind?"
It's early in her shift, just time for the regulars to start rolling in, but this voice is new and unexpected so it catches her ear. She turns around to the rather dashing figure that seems to own it: a tall, dark and handsome English guy, leaning up against her stretch of the bar with a rakish smile.
She offers him her best Friday-night smile. "Drowning some sorrows? That's a lot for one good-looking guy like you."
He moves his shoulder - nice, fluid movement, the kind she likes noticing - and she raises an eyebrow at the table behind him. She's seen those two before: the two stooges, Mitch calls them. The Blue Nova is a little further upmarket than a lot of middle-of-the-road joints here on B5, and it's not like it's unusual for their clientèle to be a little bit interesting, but this is the only Centauri/Minbari couple she's ever seen drinking together more than once. She's fairly sure they're diplomatic staff, like a lot of the early evening customers she ends up with, but this guy she's never seen before.
"Interesting company," she says, a bit curious. He doesn't look at all like a diplomat.
"Just a drink between friends," he says equally. She reaches under the bar for a pitcher and a pair of glasses.
"Ice and lemon?"
He grins. "Just for the water."
She smiles. This one could brighten up the evening. "House wine and mineral water, coming up. Sit yourself down and I'll bring it over." A familiar flash of red-brown hair catches her eye and she turns round with a smile. "Hey, Stace. Give me a hand with table six?"
She watches Stace take a look over her shoulder and whistle. English Guy chooses that particular moment to sweep his unwieldy-yet-rakish cape around with one arm as he sits down, which makes her just a little bit annoyed and a little bit impressed, the former mainly because Stace looks closer to the latter.
"He's new."
"Eyes forward," she chides quickly, teasing. Stace gives her a fond look and a quick kiss across the bar, even if it is followed by a glance around to make sure the boss isn't watching.
"Why's he drinking with those two?" Stace asks as she picks up the pitcher. "I thought they were attache's or something. He looks like he's escaped from a romance novel."
"I think they are." She dunks the wine into a cooling bucket. "Maybe he's working undercover."
"As a dragon slayer?" Stace quips, grinning. She laughs.
"Commander Ivanova has cushions?" the Minbari's asking as they approach the table. Talk about your non sequitur. She wonders how on Earth that makes it into the conversation on a normal Friday evening.
The sigh that English Guy lets out could probably melt a dozen hearts. "I wouldn't know."
Well, well. English Guy must be something a little out of the ordinary, after all. Commander Ivanova doesn't come down here often, but she's always good for a conversation when she does, and no one's never heard her talk about any guy. Definitely not the way English Guy seems to be talking about her, anyway.
"Love can be a bitch, Vir," he's saying as she sets the wine bucket down and unlinks her fingers from the pair of glasses. "Be glad you don't know it."
"But I do," the Centauri - Vir - starts to say, and she wants to find some reason to hear the rest of that conversation but the moment, as it always is, is all she's getting. She catches Stace's eye; Stace arches both eyebrows and shrugs. She can just hear Stace's voice in the look they share: Hey, they say there's someone for everyone.
Actually she thinks Vir's pretty cute for a Centauri, but that's not something she's getting into with Stace. Besides, it wouldn't really be fair to leave the Minbari out in the cold, and she doesn't think he's the type for anyone else on their shift. Just the thought makes her smile. Maybe I'll suggest that next time Joanna wanders past.
"Evening, Commander," she hears Stace say: turns around quickly and spots another of her customers taking a seat at the bar. She makes a pretence of needing to clean the spotless patch of the bar in front of Ivanova's stool and offers up a smile.
"Good evening, Commander."
"Hi, Joss." She gets a smile in return tonight, and that brightens the night even more than the enigma that is English Guy. There's something magnetic about Susan Ivanova, something about the darkness in her eyes and the mischievous way she smiles that seems to pull everyone in. She's not a regular to the Nova, but she's not a new face either, and she's been in enough that everyone knows Joss serves her when she drops by.
A few people - Stace, for obvious instance - know that Joss didn't meet the Commander for the first time on the other side of a bar. Maybe that's why Ivanova only comes in here when she's on an escapist bender. "The usual?"
"Thanks." Ivanova taps her credit chit on the bar and leaves it there. "How's business tonight?"
She shrugs. "The regulars. Things are slow since the embargo, but that's nothing new to you, I guess."
"Mm." Ivanova studies the cocktail in front of her for a moment. She picks it up; swirls it slowly, and takes a sip. Her smile is approving and Joss pretends she's not a little warmer for it. The Commander is nothing if not discerning about her alcohol, and she'd swear Mitch was actually proud of her the night she first managed to get that smile.
"Haven't seen you in here since the Captain came back," she says experimentally. She picks up a glass and idly starts to clean it.
Ivanova shrugs. "Things have been a little crazy. I haven't had much time to relax."
"I should ask you how business is going," she says. Ivanova snorts, amused.
"I just told you. Crazy."
"And how are you doing?" she asks, daring to be a little quieter. Ivanova looks at her.
She remembers the first time she set eyes on Susan Ivanova - standing beside her in a dive that in no way ranks with the Blue Nova, both of them battling a herd of uncouth idiots for the attention of some dumbass waiter who couldn't tell ass from eye socket on half his clientèle. But the way she smiled back then, the way she laughed and whispered with the stunning blonde on her arm... all of that's been gone for a while and Joss just doesn't have the heart to ask what happened or why.
Tonight it's all there, in the darkness in those eyes. Joss has been around enough to know the details never really matter. Why it's taken this long to show she doesn't know and isn't going to ask, but she won't pretend she can't see it, either.
"I'm sorry," she says sincerely.
Ivanova shrugs. Joss rubs the glass in her hand so hard it squeaks. Ivanova raises an eyebrow over her drink.
She blushes, not for the first time uncomfortable in that stare, and hunts for something to say. "Say, you wouldn't know anything about an English guy-"
"Here?" Before she can reply, Ivanova's looking round, and then groaning under her breath as she sinks back into her seat.
"He was interested in your cushions earlier," Joss says, and grins. Ivanova glares into her drink.
There's a moment, but she doesn't say anything else. Joss watches her, instead.
It's always a fine line between hostess and confidante, one she's made a good living out of spotting before she crosses it, but with Ivanova that line is always a little way toward being blurred. The woman has a pretty damn personal relationship with her alcohol. So it's easier than with most to see the lines of pain that etch themselves across her face at the topic in hand, and to imagine that she might be about to say -
Someone waves for attention and reluctantly, Joss heads down the bar. It's a few minutes until she can make her way back to her little section of the bar, right where Ivanova's still poring over half a ruby-fruit brivari cocktail, the one moment of revelation gone.
"I take it you know him, then?" she says as an opener, trying to grasp it back. The words come out gentler than she expected them to sound, although no less sympathetic. "Friend of yours?"
Ivanova doesn't look up. "A colleague. In a round about sort of way."
"Sounds like there's a little more to it than that."
Ivanova studies her drink for a moment. After that moment ends, she downs it in one shot and nudges the glass across the bar. As Joss is adding a double shot of brivari into the shaker, she lifts her head and runs her fingers roughly through her hair.
"He's got a... he's got this crazy idea that..." She sighs. "Never mind."
Joss finishes the concoction with a cherry and a flourish. "If you're not interested, why not just tell him?"
Ivanova laughs - the same rich sound Joss is a little bit infatuated with, but so tired these days it must ache coming up. "Believe me, I've tried."
"Ah." She's rather proud of that little word, the perfected voice of knowing barmen the galaxy over. "So what's his name, anyway?"
"Hm? Oh. Marcus." Ivanova looks over her shoulder as if he might have heard. Joss follows her gaze: the tables are filling up now as more than the regulars pour in, but she still has a clear view across to the three mismatched heads around table six, all deep in what looks like solemn conversation.
She waves discreetly across the room until Stace wanders up, past their table as if she really had some purpose for it. Stace is a sneak, which is one of the things Joss finds so fun about her. "Hey," she says. "What're they talking about this time?"
"Apparently all true love is unrequited," Stace says solemnly, with a twinkle in her eye. Joss smiles. She's not sure if she's in love with Stace yet, but she knows she will be - dark eyes and darker hair, curves where she never makes time for the gym, a vibrant laugh, who wouldn't fall for that?
She kind of hopes that's not all one-sided. She doesn't think it is, but she hates that wondering. What if he's right? What if this is going to fall apart like all the other times? What if she's always going to be alone?
She looks at Ivanova again, and it suddenly seems so much more likely. Because Ivanova looks at her like she actually believes it, too, and Joss is so far from wanting to think that's true.
One of the rather attractive Indian women at table three catches her eye for refills; it takes her mind off the moment, but only for a moment. Table six is on her way back to the bar and she can't help overhearing voices again as she passes.
"We each have our own definitions." The Minbari guy's talking again. "They cannot truly be shared."
"Maybe so," Marcus says. "Though doesn't that mean we can never truly connect? I mean, what if Susan and I will never define love the same way?"
"Perhaps that is what it means to find the other half of your soul," the Minbari says. Joss wonders if the Commander knows his name. Whoever he is, she thinks, he could probably make a decent living as a poet if he could just keep his head out of his ass and the clouds at roughly the same time.
Marcus makes a distraught face. "What, you mean if there's only one person in the universe who loves in the exact same way you do?"
"Would one person not be enough?"
The two guys at table five pick that moment to down glasses and leave; it turns out one of them's split a goodly amount of their house ale on the fake veneer. She takes their glasses to the bar and comes back with a cloth - and if she's a little slow about making sure it's clean, she's pretty certain Mitch isn't going to care too much.
"I don't know, Lennier," Marcus is saying. The wine is going down and his mood seems to be sinking with it, if his voice is any indication. "What's the point, if you're never going to have that perfect union? Why bother at all? Why does love exist if we're not meant to be happy?"
"Love isn't about being happy," Vir says suddenly - so suddenly that she almost looks at him, his voice is so quiet and fierce and not morose at all, the polar opposite of Marcus and his lovesick wondering. "Love is about - it's about being. Really, really being - being alive, just for a moment. It's about bleeding for someone. It's about loss and pain and even when you want things to go a different way to where they are, you just do it all anyway. For him. Because. That's why."
And then he stands up, and downs his wine in perfect, regal Centauri fashion that makes Joss want to applaud, and he turns and walks out of the bar and although she sees him meet the Commander's eyes on the way out, neither of them say a word.
She moves away from table six before she can hear either Marcus or Lennier say anything else, and she doesn't go back to the bar until Ivanova stands up to leave. Somehow she knows two things: that Vir's voice carried across even the Blue Nova crowd on a Friday night, and that Ivanova understands it all too much to want any company any more.
So she just makes sure she's at the table nearest the door when Ivanova starts to walk out, and that she's close enough to turn around and put a hand on her arm and say, "you know, if you ever want to talk about it, you know where you can find me."
For a moment, she wonders if she's gone too far: the look in those dark eyes could be a punch or a smile, and she'd be entitled to both. But then Ivanova settles back a little, and nods; and Joss smiles back at her as encouragingly as she knows how, even if she doesn't relax until she's watching a stiff back and waves of chestnut hair disappear into Friday night traffic.
After a minute or two, Stace touches her hip. Joss can tell without looking that she's leaning against the table behind, making herself look busy as her fingers creep where they shouldn't. She smiles.
Stace nudges her with a shoulder. "What was that about?"
She turns around and smiles. "Nothing. She could just use a friend sometimes, I think. I tell you I love you today?"
She knows she hasn't. She knows she's never said it, that's why she asks it, and why the sunrise look in Stace's eyes is more than worth Mitch shouting at them across the bar - especially when Stace grins, pushes her into the fake planting and kisses her thoroughly, bodily, from the toes up.
She doesn't notice when Lennier leaves; Marcus is still sitting at that table when she knocks off at one and when she finally leaves at nearly two, with Stace's hand tight in hers.
The Nova doesn't have many one-shot customers, but she never sees him come in again.
*