Susan Ivanova/Talia Winters (Babylon 5)
Title: I Was Made to Love You
Author: T.W. Lewis
Spoilers: through end of third season, movies.
Email: gardendoor at hotmail.com
Personal Website: The Gardendoor Fanfiction Archive
Talia: It's hard to believe it's taken us so long to get to this point. Two years!
Ivanova: Well, you didn't exactly make it easy!
Talia: Me? How about you?
Ivanova: I'll have you know I've been nothing but compassionate and understanding. I mean, all you had to do was admit that you were wrong and I was right and everything would've been fine!
Talia: You are the most stubborn...
--Divided Loyalties
Two women move in the background in soft focus, eclipsed by the emblem of the organization that divides them. In another stolen moment, Talia makes an excuse to sleep over with Susan and the two women spend the night together in matching satin pajamas. When Talia wakes up in the night, she reaches for the space Susan has vacated beside her. And after a brutal betrayal, Susan quietly confesses, "I think I loved Talia." Two years before Ellen made her famous announcement, Babylon 5 was already making TV history, suggesting a sexual relationship between two characters the sponsors wouldn't even allow to kiss on screen. Four years later, Joss Whedon was still fighting that battle when Willow made beautiful magic with Tara for the first time. On both practical and dramatic levels, the relationship between Talia and Ivanova was risky, difficult, and fraught from the beginning.
Ivanova: They caught up with my mother on her thirty-fifth birthday. She didn't want to join the Corps, didn't want to go to prison, so they gave her the treatment. For ten years, a man in a grey suit came to the door every week, and he gave her the injections. They were strong - terribly strong. Every day, we just watched her drift further and further away from us. The light in her eyes just went out, bit by bit. And when we thought she could go no further, she took her own life.
--Midnight on the Firing Line
Susan Ivanova is a really rare character in SF television: a woman who isn't needy, whiny, Marysue-ish or ballbusting. She doesn't run around in a leather bra and she isn't there to coddle the hero's ego. She's tough, awkward, compassionate and funny, not hung up on how she compares to the boys, just busy being herself and being part of the team. Throughout the series, she's stymied by the unresolved losses of her entire family: the father she never really reconciled with, the mother who sent her off to the neighbors and killed herself without saying goodbye, the brother who went off to war and died before she could fight by his side. Of these, the hardest for her to come to terms with is her mother, a late-blooming telepath who was drugged beyond all recognition by Psi Corps, who taught Susan one important lesson: "Tell no one what you are, or they'll do to you what they did to me." Psi Corps murdered Susan's mother, and one day they will come for her.
Ivanova: What happened back then is not your fault. But it's part of what you are. And yet, you're as much of a victim as my mother.
Talia: I don't feel like a victim.
Ivanova: No. And so far, I cannot tell if that is good or bad.
--Midnight on the Firing Line
Susan takes this lesson and these losses so much to heart that she rarely lets anyone past her guard. Her boss and coworkers have to find out from a third party that her father has died and force her to take time off to mourn. When her old lover is accused of being a racist murderer, she volunteers to deceive him and help take him down. And finally, when she is thought to be a telepathic mole spying on her friends, she refuses point blank to have her name cleared, preferring to live with the fear that she's the betrayer rather than tell anyone who she is or let anyone inside her mind. But through this terrifying ordeal, the one person she trusts, the person she clings to, is Talia. It's never clear whether Ivanova sees Talia as the mother she never said goodbye to, the organization that killed her, or some shifting combination of the two, but she constantly locks horns with Talia, trying to suss her out. She never loses her hatred and fear of Psi Corps, but over time, she comes to see Talia not as a Psi Corps drone but as a person, a friend, a lover.
Talia: Do you know what it's like when telepaths make love? You drop every defense and it's all mirrors reflecting each other's feelings. Deeper and deeper until somewhere along the line, your souls mix and it's a feeling so profound it makes you hurt. It's the only moment in a telepath's life you no longer hear the voices.
--Mind War
Talia Winters is a sleek blonde telepath with a smoky voice and cool sensuality straight out of film noir. She's very supportive of and enthusiastic about Psi Corps. They raised her from childhood. Everything she values about herself -- her status, her job, her identity -- is bound up in the Corps. All her lovers, all her friends, were assigned to her by the Corps: Jason Ironheart, Matt Stoner, her first sponsor. Then, slowly, Talia begins seeing the cracks in the system: the gestapo taking people away in the night, forced rape to breed better telepaths, human experimentation. When they first meet, Talia tries to win Susan over, to show her how the Corps provides the communal support telepaths need. In one of their first arguments, Talia insists that Alisa, an emerging telepath, will have a wonderful life with the Corps. By the end of her tenure on Babylon 5, Talia is helping the underground railroad smuggle telepaths away from the Corps. When her hated ex-husband comes to the station, offering to take away her telepathic abilities if she'll agree to marry him again, she very nearly takes him up on his offer. But in the end she tells him, knowing that he can read the truth of her feelings, "If you take away my talents, I don't know what would be left." After "A Race Through Dark Places," she's drowning, desperate, looking to Susan as someone who is outside the circle of her assigned lovers and friends, who understands her fears, who values her as something more than a P5, who can help her make sense of her crumbling world.
Ivanova: Damn it Talia, I don't know who I can trust anymore.
Talia: That's funny; I've felt the same way lately. So I have come to the decision that there's only one person on this station I can trust implicitly ... you.
--Divided Loyalties
They push and pull, they wear masks, they fall apart and beg each other to help them put the pieces back together. And throughout this interplay, they're each hiding something important, secrets that would completely destroy the growing trust between them. Ivanova never tells Talia she's a telepath, only that her mother was one. She doesn't trust Talia not to betray her to the Corps. Talia's secrets are much darker. Jason Ironheart changed her in some way she doesn't fully understand, and unbeknownst to her, she is a sleeper agent, driven by her programming to seduce Ivanova or one of the other members of the senior staff and use that to tap their secrets. How much of her love is real, and how much is part of a larger power play?
Talia/Control: Always the romantic! The program is complete. The Talia you knew no longer exists. There's just me. You don't know what it's like living only in the shadows of her mind, watching, laughing at all of you out here! Foolish, petty, stupid! There I was, trapped inside, able to come out only at night when she was asleep. Her invisible sister. And you believed everything she said to you! All the things you wanted to hear. All the words I whispered in her thoughts while she lay sleeping. The words that would get her closer to you, and to what you knew. You should see the look on your face, my good and dear friend, Susan.
Susan: You're right. The Talia I knew is dead.
--Divided Loyalties
Fic Recs:
It's really hard to write fic that has real intimacy when you know one character is going to betray the other irrevocably down the line. The first Talia/Ivanova fic I ever read, part one of I Think I Loved, is one of the few pre-Control fics I've found. Most T/I fic is post-"Divided Loyalties" and tries to imagine ways Ivanova can retrieve Talia from the Psi Corps after her transformation. Much of it is quite good:
http://www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/calr/isaw.htm
http://www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/rebeccahall/OrpheusJourney.htm
http://www.a-girlstudio.com/ivanova/2262STORIES.html
http://snow.prohosting.com/4blaze/fanfic/renewal.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/9933/index2.html
http://dzcrasher.withangeleyes.com/babylon5/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~abie1/b5/ivanova/NIGHT.html
http://www.syntheticsoul.com/morpheus/fanfic.html
http://www.angelfire.com/sc/Ivanova/
Author: T.W. Lewis
Spoilers: through end of third season, movies.
Email: gardendoor at hotmail.com
Personal Website: The Gardendoor Fanfiction Archive
Talia: It's hard to believe it's taken us so long to get to this point. Two years!
Ivanova: Well, you didn't exactly make it easy!
Talia: Me? How about you?
Ivanova: I'll have you know I've been nothing but compassionate and understanding. I mean, all you had to do was admit that you were wrong and I was right and everything would've been fine!
Talia: You are the most stubborn...
--Divided Loyalties
Two women move in the background in soft focus, eclipsed by the emblem of the organization that divides them. In another stolen moment, Talia makes an excuse to sleep over with Susan and the two women spend the night together in matching satin pajamas. When Talia wakes up in the night, she reaches for the space Susan has vacated beside her. And after a brutal betrayal, Susan quietly confesses, "I think I loved Talia." Two years before Ellen made her famous announcement, Babylon 5 was already making TV history, suggesting a sexual relationship between two characters the sponsors wouldn't even allow to kiss on screen. Four years later, Joss Whedon was still fighting that battle when Willow made beautiful magic with Tara for the first time. On both practical and dramatic levels, the relationship between Talia and Ivanova was risky, difficult, and fraught from the beginning.
Ivanova: They caught up with my mother on her thirty-fifth birthday. She didn't want to join the Corps, didn't want to go to prison, so they gave her the treatment. For ten years, a man in a grey suit came to the door every week, and he gave her the injections. They were strong - terribly strong. Every day, we just watched her drift further and further away from us. The light in her eyes just went out, bit by bit. And when we thought she could go no further, she took her own life.
--Midnight on the Firing Line
Susan Ivanova is a really rare character in SF television: a woman who isn't needy, whiny, Marysue-ish or ballbusting. She doesn't run around in a leather bra and she isn't there to coddle the hero's ego. She's tough, awkward, compassionate and funny, not hung up on how she compares to the boys, just busy being herself and being part of the team. Throughout the series, she's stymied by the unresolved losses of her entire family: the father she never really reconciled with, the mother who sent her off to the neighbors and killed herself without saying goodbye, the brother who went off to war and died before she could fight by his side. Of these, the hardest for her to come to terms with is her mother, a late-blooming telepath who was drugged beyond all recognition by Psi Corps, who taught Susan one important lesson: "Tell no one what you are, or they'll do to you what they did to me." Psi Corps murdered Susan's mother, and one day they will come for her.
Ivanova: What happened back then is not your fault. But it's part of what you are. And yet, you're as much of a victim as my mother.
Talia: I don't feel like a victim.
Ivanova: No. And so far, I cannot tell if that is good or bad.
--Midnight on the Firing Line
Susan takes this lesson and these losses so much to heart that she rarely lets anyone past her guard. Her boss and coworkers have to find out from a third party that her father has died and force her to take time off to mourn. When her old lover is accused of being a racist murderer, she volunteers to deceive him and help take him down. And finally, when she is thought to be a telepathic mole spying on her friends, she refuses point blank to have her name cleared, preferring to live with the fear that she's the betrayer rather than tell anyone who she is or let anyone inside her mind. But through this terrifying ordeal, the one person she trusts, the person she clings to, is Talia. It's never clear whether Ivanova sees Talia as the mother she never said goodbye to, the organization that killed her, or some shifting combination of the two, but she constantly locks horns with Talia, trying to suss her out. She never loses her hatred and fear of Psi Corps, but over time, she comes to see Talia not as a Psi Corps drone but as a person, a friend, a lover.
Talia: Do you know what it's like when telepaths make love? You drop every defense and it's all mirrors reflecting each other's feelings. Deeper and deeper until somewhere along the line, your souls mix and it's a feeling so profound it makes you hurt. It's the only moment in a telepath's life you no longer hear the voices.
--Mind War
Talia Winters is a sleek blonde telepath with a smoky voice and cool sensuality straight out of film noir. She's very supportive of and enthusiastic about Psi Corps. They raised her from childhood. Everything she values about herself -- her status, her job, her identity -- is bound up in the Corps. All her lovers, all her friends, were assigned to her by the Corps: Jason Ironheart, Matt Stoner, her first sponsor. Then, slowly, Talia begins seeing the cracks in the system: the gestapo taking people away in the night, forced rape to breed better telepaths, human experimentation. When they first meet, Talia tries to win Susan over, to show her how the Corps provides the communal support telepaths need. In one of their first arguments, Talia insists that Alisa, an emerging telepath, will have a wonderful life with the Corps. By the end of her tenure on Babylon 5, Talia is helping the underground railroad smuggle telepaths away from the Corps. When her hated ex-husband comes to the station, offering to take away her telepathic abilities if she'll agree to marry him again, she very nearly takes him up on his offer. But in the end she tells him, knowing that he can read the truth of her feelings, "If you take away my talents, I don't know what would be left." After "A Race Through Dark Places," she's drowning, desperate, looking to Susan as someone who is outside the circle of her assigned lovers and friends, who understands her fears, who values her as something more than a P5, who can help her make sense of her crumbling world.
Ivanova: Damn it Talia, I don't know who I can trust anymore.
Talia: That's funny; I've felt the same way lately. So I have come to the decision that there's only one person on this station I can trust implicitly ... you.
--Divided Loyalties
They push and pull, they wear masks, they fall apart and beg each other to help them put the pieces back together. And throughout this interplay, they're each hiding something important, secrets that would completely destroy the growing trust between them. Ivanova never tells Talia she's a telepath, only that her mother was one. She doesn't trust Talia not to betray her to the Corps. Talia's secrets are much darker. Jason Ironheart changed her in some way she doesn't fully understand, and unbeknownst to her, she is a sleeper agent, driven by her programming to seduce Ivanova or one of the other members of the senior staff and use that to tap their secrets. How much of her love is real, and how much is part of a larger power play?
Talia/Control: Always the romantic! The program is complete. The Talia you knew no longer exists. There's just me. You don't know what it's like living only in the shadows of her mind, watching, laughing at all of you out here! Foolish, petty, stupid! There I was, trapped inside, able to come out only at night when she was asleep. Her invisible sister. And you believed everything she said to you! All the things you wanted to hear. All the words I whispered in her thoughts while she lay sleeping. The words that would get her closer to you, and to what you knew. You should see the look on your face, my good and dear friend, Susan.
Susan: You're right. The Talia I knew is dead.
--Divided Loyalties
Fic Recs:
It's really hard to write fic that has real intimacy when you know one character is going to betray the other irrevocably down the line. The first Talia/Ivanova fic I ever read, part one of I Think I Loved, is one of the few pre-Control fics I've found. Most T/I fic is post-"Divided Loyalties" and tries to imagine ways Ivanova can retrieve Talia from the Psi Corps after her transformation. Much of it is quite good:
http://www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/calr/isaw.htm
http://www.altfic.com/subtextfic/Babylon5/rebeccahall/OrpheusJourney.htm
http://www.a-girlstudio.com/ivanova/2262STORIES.html
http://snow.prohosting.com/4blaze/fanfic/renewal.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/9933/index2.html
http://dzcrasher.withangeleyes.com/babylon5/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~abie1/b5/ivanova/NIGHT.html
http://www.syntheticsoul.com/morpheus/fanfic.html
http://www.angelfire.com/sc/Ivanova/