Selah: Book One: Sechli Sakarr

By Elsewhere

Classification: Story, Angst, Romance

Keywords: Jeff/Delenn, John/Delenn

Rating: NC-17 (I believe you'll find this contains some elements of [P], [MV], [SS], [GF], [AL] and I don't know, possibly [AC]. I doubt it, though. Oh, and it might be [AT] too, depending on what you thought of the relationship between Sinclair and Delenn. Either way, we'll consider it Alternate Universe for the sake of the sequel series which succeeds it, which is definitely [AT].)

Disclaimer: The characters and original situations in this story are not mine. They belong exclusively to JMS, Babylonian Productions, Warner Brothers, and possibly PTEN, and I'm certainly making no profit other than pure enjoyment out of this. There are several lines of text in this story borrowed directly from the series, most prominently the first season, and those are *definitely* not mine.

The quotes at the beginning of each chapter belong to the Smashing Pumpkins (Billy Corgan and James Iha, more specifically) and their fabulous album `Adore.' I'd appreciate not being sued for their use either. : )

Distribution: If you want this story for any page other than the ones I've sent it to, please ask me first, so I know where it goes.

Spoilers: Direct references up to and including `The Wheel of Fire' but not after. I do make reference to the unfolding plot of the next (last) three episodes, however.

Other Disclaimer: This is an exploration of the feelings of two couples over six years. If either of the couples bothers you, get lost. If consensual (and one situation on the very edge of non- consensual) sexual relations bother you, get lost. And particularly, if mushy stuff bothers you, *get lost.*

In fact, this is basically just one big exploration of feelings in general. If that bugs you...well, you get the picture.

More Disclaimers: There are some sensitive subjects in this story. Abortion, death, life after death, religion...to name a few. Some of them can hardly be helped, considering the position B5 eternally rests at. If you have moral problems with any of the opinions presented in here, please remember that they may or may not be my opinions, but that doesn't matter, because here, in this context, they are the *character's* opinions. So, if it bothers you, by all means, complain to the character, not me.

Timeline notes: In `The Deconstruction of Falling Stars' it is said that at the time that Delenn appears on the hundredth anniversary program, she is right around 140 human years old. If, as has been suggested earlier, Delenn was born in 2200, this isn't possible (besides which I find it unlikely that Delenn is older than Susan's *mother*, for God's sake). So, for the sake of this story (mainly because it makes more sense, concerning the pregnancy at least) I've decided to go with the `Deconstruction' time, which puts her birth right around 2220 (along with John).

I don't accredit whatever wrong I may have done by changing these dates in the course of this story to anyone but myself.

I also played around a bit with the destruction of the first three stations, just so you're aware that I know what JMS has said in the past about their sabotage, and that I basically totally disregarded that.

Before we get started, I'd also like to acknowledge several fan fic authors who notably inspired me---in some cases inspiring me so much that I blatantly used their work as kind of research in writing my own. So, I'll give credit where its due, certainly. I'd like to formally acknowledge Gareth D. Williams, Lara Nicosia, Anonymous (all of them), Annette White, Angela Maria Varese S., Ruth Owen, PJ, Wendy Dale, Kimberley Junius, Diane Piron-Gelman, Brenda Jean Carlson, Laura Marlene Appelbaum, and Flarn. There are some inspirations you'll notice if you've read their work...and I'd just like to say, whoever it was who came up with the idea for the belly as a major erogenous zone for the Minbari, I liked it so much I just had to use it. Consider it flattery---don't sue me! Please! : )

Dedication: I'd like to thank, and dedicate this to, all of the editors who helped me with this monster: Jesse Bee, Darkstryder, Dom Parker, Kali, and Genetix. You guys are the best. : )

Oh, and for those who might have trouble:
<> = thoughts, or, more often, telepathic speech
< ""> = words spoken in a language other than English (in this case Minbari)
** = emphasis (would be italics, if this weren't text)

Summary: Pause and consider...

Less vague and Kosh-like summary: In 2256, events conspired to trap two uneasy souls together on a small moon close to Epsilon 3. In 2259, events conspired to trap two uneasy souls in a web of fire and darkness that no one could have expected. In 2262, the tides are turning. How does it all come together?

"There once was a lady called Delenn,
Who'd lived in a temple since ten.
Then she met someone called John,
With whom she got on,
Because she had good taste in men."
---John's limerick, `The Death Of Flesh, The Death of
Dreams,' by Gareth Williams

Part 1: Fire

*****
The lights came on fast lost in
Motor crash gone in a flash
Unreal
But you knew all along
*****

She watched them rising, the souls of the ones who had gone before. She felt the Council's eyes on her, judging, their accusing gazes worse than the pain in her fingers as the glass cut into her skin.

The heat on her head was strange to her now, after four years of being partially human. She wondered why she was back like this...wondered if there had been some mistake.

Had she been dreaming? Was she merely one of these souls, bottled up in a small glass ball?

She heard crystals rattling in a draft and looked up into blackness, and when she looked back down the souls were gone, her hands were bloodless. She was cold and wet and realized she'd just stepped out of a pool. Her long, dark hair dripped on the ground around her and she watched the patterns the small raindrops formed, smiling.

I am me again, she thought, then wondered. Am I really me?

She looked around at a barren wasteland. Minbar. She saw the last ruins of Tuzanor in the distance, and she recognized the murky waters behind her vaguely, as if in a dream.

Before she could realize the anguish that built within her, she was screaming, a soul-deep scream that tore from her lungs and freed itself, unbound itself from her limiting body and screeched the cry of an unleashed Shadow as it took flight.

She was in the chamber of the Council, and it was empty. The tableau that was set out before her was devoid of all but the stars. No ships. No enemies.

No one.

She found herself crying, but not because she was afraid. Because she was alone. Because everything in the universe shouted to her that she deserved all the loneliness she could get.

Devastation and pain. She recognized Centauri Prime, but not the Centauri Prime she had known, at least not before the attack of the Drazi, Narn, and the others. Fires raged everywhere. Whole buildings crashed into the streets, burying the bodies of screaming citizens who tried to run. The darkness in the sky did not feel like night; it felt like eternity.

She was in a dark chamber, alone, in a corner, crying. One name found her lips, but it was not the name she had expected.

"David," she whispered, over and over. "David."

Who is David? she wondered.

My son, her mind answered. Our son.

She was older, she knew. Her hair was graying, her skin was wrinkling, her hands were dirty with the agony of perseverance.

If memory served, as it always did, John had told her that this had been when they had together faced Londo and survived because he'd let them go...or at least that's what John assumed. He'd shifted back in time again too fast to know for sure.

"Come. Take her. His Majesty has said that she is to be allowed one last moment with him."

She felt hands close around her arms, violating hands.

And then all went black.

She awoke bound to a flat surface. Every nerve cell in her body screamed at her that she was in pain, terrible pain, so much pain that it felt like her eyes were bleeding tears, that every cell and atom in her body wanted to burst forth from her skin just to get away from the raw heat. She heard her own screams as from a distance, though they sounded loud enough to resonate through the entire Epsilon System.

Did they hear her at the Great Machine?

"Let me go..."

She placed the voice bouncing around in her head, finally. Shag Toth, she thought, as much as she could think around the pain. Soul Hunter.

Soul...all souls...

His hands. Soft hands, despite everything.

She could not hear him through the whistling sound of anguish, the rasping of her own breath echoing in the still, silent night around them.

*****

**Early August, 2262**

All he did was brush his fingers gently across her exposed ankle, and she reacted as he'd never seen her react. She started awake with a prayer on her lips, her eyes wide and unseeing in the darkness as she clambered up the diagonal surface of the bed away from his lingering touch. He watched her limbs tangle with themselves in the mad attempt to get away, watched her eyes finally fix on him in desperation.

"Delenn," he hastened, reaching out his hands toward her shaking body. Gently, not intruding but reminding, he leaned over her from where he stood beside the bed. "It's me. It's just me. John."

She shook her head, then suddenly her eyes focused on his, and though her hands remained tight around the covers, her breath released in one long exhalation of timid relief.

Despite the fact that she appeared to recognize him she still shrank away from his questing hands, so he pulled back, merely standing by the side of the bed and watching her watching him.

"John," she whispered, then blinked several times and seemed to force herself to calm down, her eyes closing for a long moment and then opening again. He was surprised by their obsidian appearance, and passed it off as mere tricks of the light.

"I'm...sorry," she said then, sounding shocked at herself. "I'm sorry I reacted like...I'm sorry, John."

"What was it?" he asked, rather than acknowledging an apology he knew she would soon realize was unnecessary.

"It was...the Soul Hunter," she said, holding one palm to her forehead and pressing it as though for concentration as she curled up her legs against the surface of the bed, as best she could with its angle. She ended up almost fetal, and it was a pose he'd rarely seen her take. It worried him, to say the least. "You know of it?"

"I read the file," he said, pained because he remembered the cold, detailed medical report on the first near-death situation aboard Babylon 5 that had personally, directly involved his beloved wife. "Doctor Franklin said that despite the fact that you lost over two liters of blood during the incident, your constitution was strong enough that you recovered quite quickly. Commander Sinclair's report was not that different, except that he mentioned that, if such things were to be believed, which I believe they are, the Soul Hunter had managed to steal a tiny portion of your soul before he could stop it."

"It has been an emptiness, a darkness in me, that I cannot fill," she said, her eyes vacant again. "I have tried. You make me forget it."

He reached down and took one of her hands, and after the slightest, almost unrecognizable hesitation, she squeezed it thankfully, drawing strength from it.

"He was explaining to me how his mechanism worked," Delenn went on, her eyes seeming to grow more black. "How the tubing to steal my blood ran through the arteries in my ankles. As he spoke, his fingers brushed over my ankle..."

She visibly shivered, and he tightened his hold on her hand.

"I'm sorry. I was dreaming about it, and your touch...I thought you were him."

He shook his head and pulled her into an embrace, his arms tight around her as her head rested on his shoulder, her crown carefully turned away from his face. Her hands automatically came up to his shoulders, but as she gradually came back to herself, silent tears falling down her cheeks, her arms grew tight around him in return.

"You're not in any danger now," he told her, trying to be reassuring.

"Life is danger, John, and if one attempts to pretend otherwise, one is fooling no one but oneself. And this is never a good thing," she replied, and he smiled and kissed her just next to her mouth. She tried to smile in return, only partially succeeded, and just kept holding him, until finally he said that his legs hurt from standing so long and suggested that he crawl back into bed with her. It was only halfway through the long night, after all.

As Delenn drifted off to sleep, she heard the voices again, distant but distinct.

*****

**Early February, 2256**

"Even with the destruction of all three of the first Babylon stations and the disappearance of the fourth, the humans persist. Babylon 5 is almost finished...sources tell us that the complete crew complement will be ready to take command early in the new Earth solar year."

"They have already chosen a commander?"

"No. But our requests continue to go unheeded. If this continues, our mission will never be accomplished. The years pass by too fast."

"And the humans still do not suspect us of the sabotage of the earlier stations?"

"No. Only a select few are even aware of our requests to have the chosen human placed in the position of commander of the station. They are loyal, but obviously not powerful enough to get what we want."

"Perhaps we should simply tell them that it was our people who destroyed the previous three stations. Maybe then they would listen to us."

"Are you sure you are not just looking for an excuse to start another war, Morann?"

"It is well known that the Warrior caste still holds some measure of disdain for the humans."

"They did kill Dukhat..."

"One life. We killed hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of humans, the race which has been prophesied as being the one which will turn the tide of battle in the coming Shadow war."

"But of course it is also well known that there are members of this Council who doubt the prophecy."

"How could you doubt, any of you, after you have seen the human? The human with the soul of Valen?"

"I believe the real question should be how could any of you doubt Valen himself."

"How dare you..."

Delenn listened to the bickering around her with sadness, her eyes glazed over.

"We have digressed from the topic at hand. It is the belief of the Worker caste that we should find an ally on Earth who is more powerful...powerful enough and loyal enough to actually do something about our requests."

"But who?"

"I have received some information on the current `vice president' of their government. He is devious, loyal to what he believes is right. He is disdainful of the newfound peace, but he has been dealing with us for longer than many of the others. He does not trust us, so he finds us good business partners."

"And you believe that this man who does not trust our intentions, who could betray us at anytime, could help us?"

"We could help him to see that our purpose is for the greater good."

"If we threaten him in any way and the other humans find out, it could quite possibly cause even more political uproar between our two peoples than exists already. Should we really risk that?"

"We would be risking far more, at least according to the sacred prophecy, if we did nothing."

She listened to the sarcasm that dripped on the words `sacred prophecy' and shuddered, suddenly feeling cold.

"The Council should take a vote on the course of action. Will you follow us, allow us to contact this man on Earth that we believe can be trusted?"

"Let us vote, then."

"All those not in favor..."

No lights blinked out.

"Delenn? The Religious caste has not spoken. Are you in favor, or are you merely daydreaming?"

"What else does she do?"

Her eyes turned to the last one who had spoken, cool, unfeeling.

"It is better than listening to your constant bickering," she said coldly, her eyes sweeping the Council, some of whom immediately looked chastened. "It is all you ever do anymore. There has rarely been disdain between the members of this Council since the covenant was first formed with Valen. We are supposed to be the wisest, those who care the most. All we do is insult each other."

There was a long moment of silence while she watched them all from halfway beneath her hood, her lips pursed tightly, her hands drawn into fists of anger and cold sweat.

"She is right," one of them said eventually. "We must endeavor to be more productive and less disdainful."

"Unless any of you are so in doubt that you refuse to honor the covenant of Valen anymore..." one of the others said, a member of her own caste. Jenimer. "In which case you should leave this chamber now. A new Satai will be chosen to take your place."

No one spoke. All the lights remained on. No one moved.

"Good. Then I suggest we all listen to Delenn; since she spends so much of her time thinking rather than listening to our `constant bickering,' she must surely have come up with a solution to our problem by now."

"Yes, Delenn...tell us of the productivity of your own private thoughts."

Her sweat turned hot, her mouth relaxing slightly. If any of them noticed, they did not point it out. They were silent as they allowed her the moment, a moment in which she would either solve their problem as they had asked, or embarrass herself greatly.

At her times of `daydreaming,' she did not think of politics.

An idea struck her.

"I have decided that while the idea of having him stationed on the Babylon station is a good one, there are also other ways to learn more about him. I believe we should send someone personally to get close to him, to get to know him. A situation which he would not suspect could be orchestrated, leaving him exposed to the watching eyes of a spy."

"And who would this spy be? Who would be willing to watch a human so closely? There is still disdain for the humans among many of our people. Many do not understand why we surrendered, and they cannot know. They are restless, angry with the Council for keeping things from them."

"Then there is a simple solution, a solution suggested by Dukhat himself before he died, in reference to the coming darkness," she said, turning her eyes to the one who had spoken. "One of us will go, and watch him personally. And before any of you can protest, I will volunteer to do the job. Perhaps in my absence some of you could come to terms with one another."

They were silent for a long moment, all eyes on her. She was no longer afraid.

"You...alone...would watch this human?" Jenimer finally asked.

"Yes, I would. In fact, I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about the man who carries Valen's soul."

"Then you..."

"I suggest we stop discussing what has already been discussed and take a vote. Who agrees that I should do what I have suggested?"

Again, none of the lights flickered out.

"Then you are all in support. Good. I will begin preparations immediately."

"But how will you...?"

"There is a moon circling the planet Euphrates which has an atmosphere tolerable to both the humans and to us. It has not yet been explored by the humans...I do not think they are aware of its potential, despite how close it is to the sites of their previous Babylon stations. If we can lure them to this moon, it is sufficiently private that I could learn all I must about this human. I will make it seem as though we are both stranded on the surface, and at a predetermined time, one of our ships will arrive to `rescue' us...to take us home. Is this plan acceptable to you all?"

"Yes...but..."

"Allow me to worry about the details."

After another silence, one of her own caste, Rathenn, turned to her and said, "I hope you know what you are doing, Delenn."

I hope so too, she thought, sending a silent prayer to Valen.

I hope so.

*****
Part 2
Earth
*****

Do you know the way that I can?
Do you know the way that I can't lose?
Do you know the things that I can?
Do you know the things that I can't do?
Where is your heart?
Where is your heart gone to?
*****

**Early August, 2262**

"Delenn?"

She looked up, mildly startled by the voice interrupting her thoughts.

"I hardly ever see you here anymore," John said as he walked towards her, his hands gesturing to the garden around them.

"There are times when there is nothing more calming than simply looking at this rock garden," she replied quietly, turning her eyes back to it, her hands folded demurely in her lap, her back straight. She always sat this way here; he'd watched her watching this garden many times, but never commented before.

"Why is that?" he asked, sitting down beside her, careful not to touch her or jar whatever concentration she had found despite his distraction.

"It is something I said to the first commander of this station shortly after arriving here," she said, a vague smile of remembrance touching her lips. "I told him that while there are books thousands of pages long on Minbar about the power of one mind to change the entire universe, none of them express this as adequately as this garden. Despite the chaos it implies, I find it calming to look at. It makes me feel...less alone."

"Why do you feel alone?" he asked her, finally resting his hand on her thigh. One of her hands immediately covered it, her fingers slightly damp and warm. As though she was nervous.

"It is...nothing you need concern yourself about," she answered evasively, her eyes glued to the garden.

"Delenn," he said, in a tone of slight chiding. "You're my wife. I love you."

"I know," she whispered, and again the tiny smile touched her lips.

"Then you should know that whatever concerns you, concerns me. If you're troubled...I hate to see you upset, Delenn. I want to know if there's anything I can do."

"I suppose it is the natural human reaction," she said, her smile growing a little wider, a little more wan. "Where a Minbari is trained to listen to problems and express that she has had similar problems in her time and sympathizes, to allow the troubled one to know that she is not alone...humans seem to think that they must solve every problem. I must confess, I have found myself having the same opinion these last few years, in many situations. It was not only my body that changed, which still makes me uneasy."

"Is that what's troubling you, then?" he asked, and his eyes on her were so sincere that she turned and smiled at him, bringing up his hand to kiss one of his knuckles.

"It pleases me that you are concerned for me, John," she said warmly, and then her smile faded as she turned back to the garden. "No, it is not that. That is an unease I have grown used to."

"Then what is it? Please, Delenn, tell me."

She was silent, and he felt his own unease growing.

"Delenn," he said, attempting patience but knowing that it didn't come through in his voice. Too rough, his mind told him, but his emotions told his mind to screw off. "Listen, there have always been things that you have kept from me, and I've always been aware of this and allowed it. But as long as those secrets exist, Delenn, there is always going to be something between us, something keeping us apart. Neither of us has the time or the inclination to find an alternate way around that block. And Delenn, truthfully, we can't do this anymore. We can't keep closing each other out simply because it's convenient. Humans have a saying that communication is at the heart of every truly satisfying relationship, every relationship that survives all the hardships. I've always believed that saying, absolutely."

He watched her, watched the near complete lack of reaction on her composed face. She merely blinked, more than was usual. But he knew she was listening. The slight shift in her breath, her attempt to make it quieter so she could focus, did not go unnoticed by him. He'd breathed with her too long not to hear it now.

"And to be honest, Delenn," he said, his voice softening. "It hurts me that you feel you can't trust me with some things. It means that something vital is missing between us, and I want to learn how to get whatever that is back. I feel like we had the potential for total trust before, but what about now? What happened?"

He watched her mouth open to pull in a deep breath, and close again as she exhaled the air through her nose.

"If it were just me, Delenn, I would let you have your time to pause and consider, to decide when the best time is for such and such a ritual so we could share different things with each other. But Delenn, it's not just me anymore. It's not just us. If we're going to be parents...Delenn, the secrets between us keep a constant undercurrent of unease between us along with them, and we can't have that if we're going to raise this baby together. Parenting is the most challenging element of a relationship, and it can't be done without communication."

That certainly got a reaction out of her. While one of her hands had curled around her knee and was clutching with white knuckles, her other hand strayed to her stomach. Her face suddenly looked pained.

"That's it, isn't it?" he whispered. "This has to do with the baby."

She sighed softly, and he reached over and covered her hand with his own, warm against her flat belly.

"Delenn," he said softly, knowing that he'd almost broken through. "Talk to me. Please."

She frowned and let out another deep breath, and when it had left her body she seemed slightly slumped.

"It is as you said," she said finally, after he'd given her time. "It is not just *me* anymore, John. It is two lives now, instead of one. Two lives that I must be concerned about. Despite the physical limitations...the way that my White Star was drifting off the beacon just a few days ago, for example. What if I had been killed in that assault? What if I had been lost? It would not have just been *my* death...it would have been the death of two people, one of them not yet even created...the loss of a new soul of unknown origin. How could I allow that weight to rest on my soul?"

He reached around her with his other arm, hugging her shoulders, pulling himself a little closer to her side. She did not react, merely kept talking.

"But in spite of the physical limitations, which I'm sure I could grow used to...what about the other limitations? Do my actions, my thoughts, now affect not just myself? Does the way that I interact with you, as you say, change the life that grows inside me? Do the dark secrets that I keep tarnish what we have created?"

"No. It's not like that. For now, at least, this is between you and me. The baby is affected by what you feel, but not conscious of the reasons," he assured her.

She reached up a hand to her cheek, finding hot tears that she had to wipe away. He released her other hand and took the one at her face, using their joined hands to brush away her tears, then letting her go so he could touch her chin, turning her face towards him.

"I suppose my problem is that...you are right," she said, allowing herself to sway forwards towards him, her hands intertwined with his, her forehead against his. She closed her eyes. "There are many things that I have kept from you, kept from myself. Dark, horrible things. Things that tear my soul apart. If I release them now...then where will I be? Where will you be?"

Her voice dropped to a whisper.

"Will you still want me?" she asked, her tears renewing.

He frowned.

"I will always love you, Delenn. Nothing you could say or do will ever change that."

A sob hitched in her throat.

"If you were to know of the things that I know, I do not know if you would still be able to say that," she said, shaking her head.

"Then tell me," he offered, holding her more tightly. "Tell me everything and we'll see."

Her eyes lifted to his and he watched her hesitate, her mouth opening and closing until finally she slumped, defeated, a broken whisper escaping her lips. "I can't."

Despite his best efforts, the frustration welled up again, and he had to breathe carefully to control it.

"Fine," he said, then stopped again, trying to eliminate the edge in his voice. It didn't matter by that point, however; Delenn had already turned away, her eyes half-lidded with shame, her posture despairing. She did not touch him despite the fact that his hands still rested around her. He felt himself sinking as he looked at her, looked at the complete depression she'd fallen under. He'd rarely seen her quite like this. "Then we'll take this slowly. Very slowly. We'll open up to each other...carefully. One step at a time. Does that sound okay to you?"

She nodded her chin slightly, and he was reminded of the time just before Z'ha'dum. When he'd attacked her and she'd merely sat there, freely taking his verbal blows. She had not defended herself, per se. She had spoken the truth as she knew it, and he had penalized her for it. And all she had said in the end was a soft, "I do love you. If you believe nothing else I ever say, please believe that." He'd seen the defeat in her even before she'd let out a shaky breath and merely allowed herself to shiver as he'd made his way out the door.

He'd punished himself greatly for that. The last thing he had done, face to face, before going to certain death, was yell at her. For something that hadn't, in all fairness, been any fault of hers, or even Kosh's. It had been nobody's fault but his own, and he'd taken it out on her.

And all he'd left had been a message.

She'd been so thin, so sunken when he'd first seen her upon returning to Babylon 5. The light in her eyes had gone out.

Would she end up that way now?

He touched her chin again, turning her face towards him, and kissed her softly against the side of her mouth. He felt her breath against his beard and shivered.

"I'm not angry with you, sweetheart. I'm just frustrated. And that's not even really your fault, it's my own problem. But...you have to help me out here, love. You once convinced me to go along with you for the reason that you had rarely asked me for anything. I have rarely asked you for anything untoward, Delenn. I think I deserve to ask for this."

He attempted a smile as he took her hands again.

"Trust me," he implored, raising both eyebrows. "Just give it a try for once."

She let out a sudden hiccup of a laugh, a release of both her surprised elation and her pent-up sorrows, the tears that had fallen. Because her hand was captured by his, she hid her embarrassment by leaning forward onto his shoulder.

"What is it?" he asked, smiling to see even the smallest vestige of joy in her.

"I was going to say that I trust you completely, as completely as I have ever trusted anyone," she replied, turning her head against his shoulder so she could speak and be heard. She kept her crown carefully facing away from his face. "But while this is true in its own way, your arguments seem to suggest that it is difficult for me to trust anyone completely in the truest sense of the word."

He nodded, bringing up one hand to brush through her hair.

"So instead I'll say this...I am...willing to try," she said, the traces of hesitancy in her voice mainly masked by the confidence she'd mustered. "I would like to trust you completely, John, just as you would like to trust me. Is that enough, for now?"

"If we work at it, yes, of course," he said, smiling now for his own reasons. He kissed the tip of her nose and she wrinkled it, making him chuckle and her follow. "I do love you, Delenn."

She squeezed his hand.

"If you believe nothing else I ever say, please believe that," he whispered in her ear. She was silent for a long minute, and then she started to cry again, but she was smiling. He laughed at her emotional reaction, rubbing her back with one hand.

"I think we'd better get you to Doctor Franklin," he said, grinning down at her as she tried to stop the tears, laughing at herself. "I think those human pregnancy hormones are starting to kick in."

"Maybe my humanity is merely starting to `kick in,'" she countered, making a show of sighing loudly as she tried to stop crying and wipe away her own tears.

"Maybe," he agreed as he stood and offered her his hand.

*****

**Early February, 2256**

As always when she entered Dukhat's sacred chamber, her heart sped up, her breath seeming to rattle slightly in her chest. Even after all this time, she could not help but feel unnerved by the Vorlons.

When she was with him, however, she felt comfortable with Kosh Naranek. There was something about his enigmatic nature that was soothing in a world that seemed to want everything to be more complex than it was. Everything Kosh said and did was amazingly simple, so simple that its meaning escaped those who were looking too deeply into the mirror instead of at what was really there.

She had been allowed for some time now to greet him by his real name. The other Vorlon, the one who always accompanied Kosh but rarely spoke, still had not given her a name. She had grown used to generally forgetting his presence; he seemed to prefer to watch and observe the interaction between herself and Kosh, more than anything else. She supposed he was something like an attaché to the presumably older, more experienced Vorlon.

"What do you think?" she asked with a forced air of casualness as she strode between the two hulking figures, making her way to the front. "Do you think we should be pushing the issue of the human, Jeffrey Sinclair? Or should we be waiting to allow time to unfold itself?"

Kosh was silent for a long moment, the steady beam of what appeared to be his eye almost closed. She'd grown to recognize particular widths in the small electronic circle as being similar to the squints of a human or Minbari eye while thinking. She knew this particular width to be consternation, and then it widened slightly to thoughtfulness. Finally it grew to its normal, average size as Kosh appeared to be simply looking at her, regarding her with calm composure as he always did.

"The truth continues to point to itself," he said finally, the unknown matrix of lights in the area of his chest pulsating as whatever electronic impulse in his encounter suit that was wired to do so spoke. "That never changes."

She pursed her lips, but the corners of her mouth were upturned in wry humor. At first, during the war, she had thought Kosh's answers to be evasive and had endured endless frustration because of them. But she had grown to understand that he always said exactly what he meant, and always said it in the most straightforward manner possible. One only had to look at the surface of the mirror rather than its content to find the answer.

"Unless you indicate otherwise, I will take that to be a yes," she said dryly, folding her hands against her stomach as she regarded the two aliens.

When Kosh did not speak, she smiled.

"Fine. Thank you for your advice, Ambassador. It is always pleasant seeing you. Thank you for coming to see me on such short notice."

She started to leave, but was surprised by the sudden rush of air she felt behind her. Both Vorlons rarely moved within the space of Dukhat's place. She had often wondered if it was perhaps cumbersome for them in their encounter suits.

When she turned her head, both Vorlons had turned around and were staring at her with their eerie eye-lights at full strength.

"Delenn," Kosh said, and again she was struck by the tones of his voice. It was low, computerized but somehow personal. Soft, even. Behind it, what sounded like a mixture of technological bleeps and strange, frightening screams of lives gone before.

Every time, his voice made her want to shiver, more than anything he ever said. She heard the lives and deaths of a thousand races in that voice.

Because he rarely spoke at all unless spoken to, much less to address her directly, she was immediately attentive, her eye ridges raised in anticipation.

"Time circles within and around itself," Kosh said, his eye light eventually decreasing in intensity. "And so it begins."

She had long since learned that it was useless to ask him what he meant. He would merely repeat what he'd said before, as though expecting a divine revelation to strike his listeners instantly, as it always seemed to strike him.

Or perhaps he was simple divinity himself.

She wondered sometimes who he really was beneath the encounter suit.

"Is that all?" she asked.

"It is through seeking answers in others that you find the answers within yourself," he continued. "Life is a process of discovery, of finding out who you are."

She waited, wondering if there was more.

"You ask questions," said Kosh, and his voice changed slightly, sounding almost tolerant. She was even more surprised now; he was actually talking to her, rather than spinning off circular logic which had no apparent relation to the situation at hand until the situation actually came to its pinnacle. "But you do not ask the most important question. Who are you, Ambassador Delenn?"

Ambassador Delenn, she thought. This is new. Ambassador to whom?

"When this answer is discovered, all other questions will have found resolution," Kosh said, then stopped altogether, his eye light going out. Apparently he was finished, content with what he'd said. She, however, was very confused; why had he referred to her as Ambassador? And what did the question of who she herself `was,' whatever that truly meant, have to do with Earthforce Commander Jeffrey Sinclair?

She found herself shaking her head as she left the chamber, knowing that if anyone were to go inside, curious about why she continued to visit it, they would find nothing.

Part Three
Water

*****
Tear me apart
Tear me apart from you
You laugh the light
I cry the wound in grey
*****

**Early August, 2262**

"I'm reluctant to give you any human medications to neutralize these overly emotional reactions," Stephen said as he ran the medical scanner over her abdomen, his eyes on his computer screen. "Frankly, Delenn, it's quite possible that the President is right...that human pregnancy hormones are getting the best of you, and quite likely amplifying your reactions because they're catching the Minbari portion of your system by surprise. But it's also possible that, if you are as human as you appear to be sometimes, you're going through some kind of stress-related mid-life crisis."

"I am only in the first part of my thirty-first cycle, Doctor," she protested, her eyes on the ceiling. "This is the optimum child- bearing time for my people. It is a time when life has probably settled into a comfortable routine, when perhaps the earliest children have grown enough to move on in their own ways, to not be so dependent. This is when most Minbari women have many of their children. If their children survive, of course...what is called Sudden Infant Death on your world has been a common problem on Minbar for many years, now."

"I know. It remains a medical mystery, since there appear to be no major genetic aberrations among your people as a whole," Franklin said, shaking his head as the scanner passed over her one more time, confirming the readings.

"Doctor...if there can be genetic aberrations such as myself and Valen..."

"Well, there is that," he agreed with a smile. "Well, your hormonal count is unusually high compared to your previous records, but not to an amount that you need to be worried about any kind of serious mania or depression, I think. If it progresses, however, let me know and we'll see what we can do. Otherwise, both you and the baby are as healthy as you were the last time you were in here."

"Which was not very healthy considering my system appeared to be fighting the baby," Delenn said flatly, breathing in and out carefully as he gently took her wrist between his fingers, counting out her pulse in the old-fashioned, more comforting manner.

"Not fighting the baby, Delenn. Your system...well, you essentially carry components of two biological systems within one body structure...human and Minbari. Normally, either of them would at first see the baby as a foreign object but immediately recognize it as part of the natural procreative process. But, because the baby appears to be half-human and half-Minbari in relatively equal measure, your two systems each see it as a foreign object, but do not attack it; they attack each other. That's the problem you're having. Which is why you can't overload yourself with stress right now, Delenn...it could be potentially damaging to both you and the baby."

"Yes...what were you saying about a `mid-life crisis?'" she asked, remembering the conversation they'd digressed from.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to do an external examination of my own. I'd just feel more comfortable knowing for myself, rather than leaving this entire pregnancy to technology," Stephen said, and she nodded, not really knowing what he meant. When he gently rolled up the top of her medical gown and placed warm, careful hands over her abdomen, she understood, sucking in a breath at the feel of air on her exposed skin. His hands moved over her gently, his fingers making their own assessment of whether everything was where it should be, from his own knowledge. "Tell me if anything hurts when I touch it. Anyway, Delenn, you may only be part-way through your thirty-first cycle, which would be, what, approximately forty-two human years? Many human women also consider this an optimum time to have children...but unfortunately, by this time, the human body has undergone a lot of wear and tear and usually doesn't reproduce as healthily as it might have. Now, we have a cure for such human diseases as Downs, but there are still complications..."

"Mainly to do with emotions, correct?" she asked, seeing where this was going.

"Precisely. At this stage in the human woman's life, the body begins to wind down. By the time she's in her late forties, early fifties, the entire reproductive system shuts down. Menopause."

"Our change of life does not occur until well past our forty-fifth cycle," she informed him, looking down her nose at him as she sat up on the table. "In fact, it is not even a good idea for a Minbari woman to begin bearing children before her twenty-first cycle, and that was merely ten cycles ago in my case."

"I know. I'm just saying, Delenn, that there may be things that the human portion of your biological clock is trying to tell you that the rest of your system doesn't understand. I'm just offering another theory for these sudden mood swings you've complained of."

She pursed her lips at him, and he laughed.

"Okay, okay. That President Sheridan's been complaining of."

She sighed softly as she pulled on one of her robes over the medical style suit she was wearing.

"Seriously, though, Delenn, I think that whatever's going on, you're under far too much stress. You were under far too much stress already, and now with the pregnancy it's important that you slow down. How long has it been since you've taken a vacation?"

She looked at him blankly.

"A break from work," he said, as though her problem was that she'd never heard the term. She knew what it meant, she simply didn't comprehend it in relation to herself.

"I believe the last vacation I took was...the month my parents took to show me around Tuzanor during my early sixth cycle, when I first began my in-depth studies, just over three cycles before I first went to serve the Council as an aide."

Stephen stared at her, his hands stilled on his equipment.

"Seriously?" he said after a long moment had passed of her simply looking back at him, wondering if she'd said something wrong. "You must have been something like eight years old at the time, Delenn...you really haven't taken a vacation since then?"

"Not really," she said, shaking her head. "John and I relax occasionally, of course, but never for more than a day or so. Sometimes an entire weekend."

She watched Stephen's Adam's apple working.

"No wonder you're so stressed," he said finally, and she couldn't help smiling at his stunned wonderment. "Good Lord, Delenn...where do you get the stamina?"

She shrugged as she had seen John do quite often. It seemed a very useful human gesture, and she'd vowed long ago to learn how to use it properly.

"Well, since you're apparently new to the concept of taking a break away from it all," Stephen said, again shaking his head, "I suggest you start small. Try another weekend, say. Perhaps three or four days. Maybe on Minbar?"

She considered and found that the idea was not only intriguing, but quite appealing. Especially if John were with her.

"That actually sounds wonderful, Stephen," she said, her eyes going distant as she considered. They could take one of the White Stars through hyper space to her home planet and perhaps spend a few days in her home town. Tuzanor could wait. They would be living there once the Alliance headquarters were finished, after all. "Is it...all right if I ask John to join me?"

He chuckled.

"Delenn, believe me, if both of you allow yourselves to relax for a couple of days, I'm sure the stress you're feeling with each other will dissipate some. I think it'd be a very good idea if you and the President took a vacation together. Besides, he needs a good rest too. He's been going practically non-stop since the Shadow war began almost three years ago, and even before that. I don't think he's ever yet stopped in to see me further about what they might or might not have done to him when he was captured and held on Mars a year ago."

"My doctors saw to that," she assured him.

"Thank heaven for that. So, can I expect to not be seeing you for the next few days?"

"Hopefully, Doctor."

"Listen, Delenn...it's still very early in the pregnancy, and I don't know how many human symptoms will develop. I want you to know that if you start to feel extreme nausea and occasionally vomit, or find you can't eat or sleep properly, it's normal for a human female. If it's bad enough, come to me and I'll give you something to tone down or eliminate the symptoms. I just wanted to warn you in case it was different for Minbari females. We've never had a pregnant Minbari on this station before."

Her eyes were slightly wider.

"Yes. There is little pain in a Minbari pregnancy," she said, looking slightly stunned. "But I had read that the human pregnancy was different..."

"Just in case, you'd better take some of these with you," he said, handing her a small box of pills. "Take one with water if you have really bad nausea. These should be safe."

"Thank you," she said, pulling her robe tighter around herself as she accepted the pills and turned to leave MedLab.

"Delenn?" he called after her, and she stopped at the door. "Good luck."

"I may well need it," she called back, then turned and left.

*****

**Mid February, 2256**

"Ah, Commander Sinclair. How good of you to come. Please, sit down."

Jeffrey Sinclair did as asked, though his gaze was wary as his eyes traveled around the office. He had never been called before even a Senator before, much less the recently chosen Vice President. As far as he knew, his record of late had been exemplary, particularly in his handling of the most recent Mars Riots.

"Before you ask, Commander, you haven't done anything wrong. I've asked you here for a different reason."

The Vice President was at first surprised by the deep-running confidence in the younger man's voice when he spoke, and impressed by the squint of paranoia in the Commander's eyes. He'd heard that Jeffrey Sinclair had been less of a man since the Battle of the Line; that Sinclair had never quite gotten over the fact that the Minbari had surrendered, and somewhere along the way he'd missed it. Which was why Clark had been surprised when his Minbari contacts had requested this mission for this particular man.

"If I might ask, why have you called me here, sir?" Sinclair asked, his tone wary.

"I have a mission for you, Sinclair," Vice President William Morgan Clark replied.

Sinclair was silent, surprised. He knew he hadn't been thrown onto Mars for nothing; he'd thought the military had been trying to push him away, particularly because of the reasonable doubt behind his testimony considering the Battle of the Line. It had been a long eight years since the battle, and many still felt that either Sinclair had betrayed Earth in some way that he couldn't or wouldn't explain, or that something had gone wrong and he'd paid the price and never quite recovered from it.

"We've been hearing reports that the Minbari have discovered that one of the moons of the planet Euphrates, one of its more distant moons, actually, farther away from the sun than the planet itself, is capable of sustaining Minbari life. Now, their life requirements are so similar to our own that we figure that it's not fair that they should be the only ones with a chance to claim this moon as their territory."

"I wasn't aware the Minbari were interested in territory, Vice President," Sinclair said, merely a statement. No feeling. Clark noted this. Sinclair appeared to have no ill feelings towards the Minbari, and from a cursory point of view, he didn't appear to feel anything special for them either.

"Mostly they just float around in their big ships and don't pay attention to anyone else in the galaxy, yes," Clark said, folding his hands on his desk. "But sometimes they acquire new planets, not simply for the sake of possible future sites for colonization, but for their mineral wealth and sometimes artifacts of dead races which once lived there. We would like this moon for basically the same reason."

"You'd like me to survey the planet, and hopefully before the Minbari get there," Sinclair observed, and when Clark smirked and nodded, Sinclair cleared his throat, shifted positions, and calmly folded his hands in his lap. Other than this elusive physical response, he didn't say anything.

"Something wrong, Commander?" Clark asked, raising both eyebrows.

Sinclair's eyes turned fully towards the Vice President, and Clark was surprised by the darkness within them. They had been wrong about this man. This was not a weak man, and to consider him so would be a grave mistake. Even now, Clark could see that.

"Sir, are you aware of the ancient defense systems that have been recorded around the moons in the Epsilon Grid? Apparently, the planet is unprotected, or at least if it is, the defense network is not bothered by our intrusions into nearby space. Not to mention, of course, that the moon of the planet Euphrates which you speak of--- if, indeed, it is not so far out that it can still be called a moon--- circles dangerously close to Sector 14, a place which has been called the Bermuda Triangle of the stars."

"Simply a myth, Commander," Clark dismissed the notion offhand. "I'm sure Babylon 4 was sabotaged, just like all the rest."

"Even so, it would still mean that there is a danger in Grid Epsilon, wouldn't it sir? Which means that the real reason you've called me in to do this assignment is because I'm expendable. Because there are certain members of Earthforce who would love to someday hear that I just...disappeared. Out in space. Lost forever, no longer to be worried about."

Clark's eyes narrowed, his gaze becoming serious.

"Did I tell you the real reason why I've called you in for this assignment?" he said coldly, a threat in his tone.

Sinclair closed his mouth but looked stubborn as he crossed his arms over his chest.

"I accept the mission," he said in the same no-nonsense, you-can't-fool-me voice.

"Now look here, Sinclair, I'm not giving you an option to...what did you say?"

"I said I accept the mission," Sinclair repeated, and Clark stared. After that declaration of a moment before?

"May I ask your reasoning?" Clark asked then, slowly.

"I believe my time on Mars is done," Sinclair answered, a small smirk touching the corner of his mouth. "Unclaimed, uncharted territory sounds like a good idea right about now."

Clark was silent for a long moment, observing the quasi-triumphant smile at the corner of Sinclair's mouth.

"Good," he said finally. "Good. Then you'll leave in a week. Your mission profile is in that folder just in front of you. I will give you a personal final debriefing on the day of your departure, and you will debrief me on the status of the moon when you get back."

"Thank you, sir," Sinclair said with sarcastic formality as he stood, saluted, and turned to the door.

"Oh, and Sinclair?"

"Yes sir?"

"Try to avoid another war with the Minbari, hm?"

"Yes sir. Of course."

*****

**Early August, 2262**

"What did Stephen say?" John asked, breaking Delenn from her reverie. She turned from where she'd been facing the wall with her hands clasped behind her back, a pose of thoughtful consideration and respect for the privacy of her husband, who'd been busily at work with something when she'd entered the office unannounced.

The smile that lit her face, her form of greeting after a long day, was enough to ease the feeling of devastation that had come along with the news of the near failure of the Centauri economy since reparations for the war had been paid.

"He suggested that I may be under the influence of hormones, as you said, or that I may be going through some kind of human mid-life crisis," she replied, repeating what Stephen had said to her.

John laughed, finding the latter suggestion amusing. The thought of his Delenn going through a mid-life crisis was quite incredible...sometimes she seemed so human, and others she was the complete alien that she'd started out as.

He smiled and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands.

"Interesting theories, both. In all seriousness, however, I think the problem both of us is having is more of a problem between us," he said, watching her to gauge her reaction. He was surprised by the thin line her lips formed instantly as she turned away from him again. The smile on his face faded even before she spoke.

"Why must you assume that there are problems between us?" she asked, and he heard her hesitate, as though she wanted to say his name. She declined. "We have a perfectly happy marriage."

"Perhaps you have a perfectly happy marriage," was his instant retort, a little more biting than he would have liked. Not that he would have liked to blurt that particular sentence at all.

The quiet sob that ripped through her was instantaneous, taking her breath away while he watched, his own breath held as he berated himself.

"I didn't mean that," he said quickly, his voice hushed, stunned at himself; he hadn't even fully realized that the resentment which his statement implied had existed. To the best of his conscious knowledge, things were going relatively well, particularly now that the Lochley situation was for the most part over.

He watched her throat working, the defeated bend of her neck as she looked downwards in sudden shame.

"Yes, you did," she said, her voice low and shaking. "You do not say things that you do not mean, John."

A shiver passed through her and he felt suddenly sick to his stomach.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, and he felt his heart tighten as he watched her profile, her eyes half-closed. "I did not know you felt that way. You...you should have told me earlier. I...I'm sorry."

Even as she spoke the tears started down her cheeks, and she turned on her heel and made her way for the door. He stood and rounded the desk, but did not make any overt physical move closer towards her as she made her escape.

"Delenn, please," he called, raising his voice so that she could not make the excuse of not having heard. "Don't go."

Her steps halted, her skirts swaying around her ankles with inertia.

"I may have meant the sentiment in what I said, but the words were poorly chosen," he implored, staring at the back of her head as though he could drill inside and force her to turn around and look at him, fall into his eyes and forgive him.

Her crown tilted as her head bobbed, finally turning part way back towards him, giving him a view of her trembling chin, her tear- stained cheek, the hollow of an eye that he knew would look frightened, empty.

"If you are not happy with me, John, then you should have said so," she accused despite the note of self-directed disappointment in her voice. "It seems a little late now..."

"Delenn, that's not it," he said, shaking his head vehemently even though she wasn't watching the motion.

He was surprised by her hands coming up to hold the sides of her head, a universal gesture of frustration. He'd never seen her frustrated enough to make it.

"John, what do you *want*? I have tried so hard to make myself remotely *normal* to you so that we could have a normal life by both our estimations, but I am obviously not succeeding, and I just don't know what you want anymore, John. I'm so confused...I have never been so confused in my lifetime..."

"Delenn..." he attempted to interrupt her tirade, sickened and sorrowed by the soft hitches in her throat between her words.

"And I don't know what to do anymore, John," she whispered, shaking her head. "I don't know what to do."

He swallowed and took a short step towards her, as though preparing himself for the emotional step that he made yet another attempt to take.

"Talk to me," he said softly. "Trust me. Tell me why you're so upset."

A long, shuddering breath rattled through her body, lifting her shoulders and depositing them back in their position of just-barely held together dignity.

"There are some things that you need not know, John," she said simply, her voice stronger, and she took a step forward, starting to go.

A hot rush of rage flushed through him and he sprinted forward and grabbed her arm, swinging her around to face him. She did not resist, allowing herself to be carried by the momentum.

"Goddamn it, Delenn, that's exactly what I'm talking about!" he shouted, watching her eyes as they met his defiantly despite the tears still streaming down her cheeks. " `Some things that I need not know?' For God's sake, Delenn! I'm not blind. I can tell when you're upset, I can tell when it has something to do with me, and I can tell when you're making excuses both to yourself and me not to tell me about it. I can't deal with that, Delenn."

"Why must you try to force me to tell you something that I do not want you to know, and that you probably do not want to know either?" she challenged, her own voice rising, her English melting away into the thicker depths of her accent.

"Because I *care*, for Christ's sake!" he roared, causing her to take a step back from him. Her eyes did not leave his, merely growing hotter.

*****

Franklin was halfway down the hallway towards President Sheridan's office when he was stopped by Michael Garibaldi, who walked towards him holding up a hand and shaking his head emphatically.

"I don't think you wanna go in there just now," Garibaldi warned as Stephen looked at him oddly.

Then he heard it.

If he'd ever heard either of them yell so loudly, he couldn't remember it.

*****
Part Four
Air

*****
Afternoons
I saw you there you were on your way
You kissed me cold and for the first time
Heaven seemed insane
For taking you away
*****

<P

**Early August, 2262**

She hesitated, then turned away and started cursing loudly in Minbari, aware that she lost many of her skills concerning the English language when she was angry or upset enough.

"I may be the most infuriating man you've ever met, but that's virtually a prerequisite for the man you fall in love with," he tossed back at her as he listened to her, and when she halted, stunned, he chuckled wryly and added, "And don't pretend you're surprised that I've picked up some Minbari over the years."

She managed to laugh at that, and what worried him was that it bordered on hysterical.

"Oh, Valen," she whispered as her quick laughter subsided. "I don't know what to do."

This time when she started out the door he stepped to the side of her and smacked out his hand against the manual switch to close the door. It slid shut dangerously close to her face and she came to a complete stop in front of it, her breath coming in clearly audible, quick jolts. He couldn't tell if she was crying again or not.

He stepped around behind her, deliberately moving himself so that he was mere inches away from her, his breath rustling the hair left at the back of her neck where it was brushed to either side, his warmth reaching her through her many layers of Minbari silk and skin. He did not touch her.

"What I want," he whispered hoarsely, his words directed towards the exposed back of her neck, "is to be able to look into your eyes and see no hesitation staring back at me. To see a complete and utter trust, and to know that it's perfectly reflected. I want to know that when you're upset or angry you can come to me and yell or scream or cry or just let me hold you, and that you can come to me when your life is spinning out of control or you're unbelievably happy and I can offer the same support. I want to know that when I wake up and can't get the flash of Z'ha'dum out from behind my eyelids, I'm allowed to bury myself in you until you make it go away. That I can cry on your shoulder and not feel that you think any less of me because of it."

She was surprised by the thickness in his voice, by the tears that she could feel had appeared on his face, as suddenly as the ones she had shed.

"Delenn, your problem is that you're looking at this as though it's the most complex thing in your universe, and it's not. Humans have a saying that the simplest answer is usually the right one, and this situation applies. It's so easy, Delenn; just trust me. You don't have to do anything. We've been through all the formal rituals. Just make the decision to trust me and then do. Just open up and let everything out, all the fear and doubt you have about me, all the questions and secrets you keep from me. Let them into the open, where we can lay them to rest together. They'll haunt you forever if you don't."

He finally touched her, his palm resting flat between her shoulder blades.

"As I said earlier, John, I am willing to try," she said after she'd composed herself. "But slowly...it must not be a sudden transition for me. There are too many things that I've held buried for far too long that are still not at rest within me."

He leaned forward and brushed his lips across the exposed skin at the back of her neck and she shivered and swayed towards the closed door, her hands coming up to rest against it, holding herself steady.

"In other words, John," she said firmly, denying the purely physical reaction he'd just witnessed, "you must stop pushing me. I will tell you everything when I am ready, and if before, I fear it would damage me, which would only make matters worse."

"You're right," he whispered, his attention now focused on her neck, his hands coming up to frame it against her shoulders as he nibbled at her skin, moving closer to her, pressing her closer to the door. Her breath came more quickly as her entire body came alive with the thrilling realization that he was attempting a seduction. It was rare of him, and rarer still of her; their romantic acts were usually initiated by both of them together, in mutual understanding.

"It is...why I came to your office in the first place," she said, sucking in a long breath as his lips nipped at the skin just above the collar of her robe. Her hands tightened against the door.

Hearing her words, he stepped back, letting go of her, freeing her, watching her cooped up breath come rushing out as she turned to face him, her skin flushed and her pupils dilated.

"Why did you come in the first place?" he inquired, endeavoring to make his voice sound normal, even nonchalant.

"I wanted to tell you that Stephen has recommended that I take a vacation," she said, and if she noticed that he was no less affected by his display a moment before, she did not say. "I have decided to heed his advice and vacation on Minbar for several days."

"Oh?" he asked, unable to hide the sudden disappointment in his voice. "This isn't another attempt to bring us closer by separating us for awhile, is it?"

She smiled wanly.

"No, John; I came here to ask if you would be willing to come with me. Just relax for a few days, away from Babylon 5, away from the Alliance, away from our everyday stresses, and be alone together."

Something about the way she said `alone together' bugged him on some instinctual level.

"Say those last two words again," he requested, and the corners of her lips curled in amusement.

"Alone together," she repeated, her voice lowered a notch as she humored him.

His instincts had been right; she was coming onto him, in her own subtle Minbari way.

He grinned suddenly, widely.

"Delenn, you have no idea how good that sounds to me right now," he said, considering the possibilities of several days `alone together' on Minbar.

"I think I can guess," she teased as she stepped into his arms, embracing him tightly, her stomach brushing against the source of her teasing.

"Oh jeez," he sighed, burying his face in her hair as she chuckled. "You realize that if you hadn't caught me in this situation many times before I might be sufficiently embarrassed to make some excuse and run out on you?"

"I would rather it be me who catches you in such a situation than anyone else," she said dryly. "Besides, I am abundantly flattered every single time, no matter how embarrassed you are."

"And you call me the incorrigible one," he said through his chuckles.

*****

**Late February, 2256**

"Delenn."

She turned, only mildly startled, an instant smile lighting her face.

"Draal," she said, her voice rich with the warmth of friendship. "I did not expect you."

"I heard that you would be on the surface for a short time before you left on your covert mission," Draal replied, smiling warmly as he stepped closer to her, bowing his head in greeting, a gesture which she returned. "I wanted to see you."

"Is something the matter?" she asked as she turned back to packing her things.

"No...not really. I am merely...concerned, Delenn. The date of prophecy grows ever closer. It is clear that the next Great War will be upon us soon."

"I am well aware of this, Draal," she said, and he stared at the books she packed into her bag. Copies of several of the books of Valen, volumes of keela poetry, and a small, leather-bound human- style volume with something clearly human written across the front, something he didn't recognize.

She saw his gaze and smiled vaguely as she pushed the book further into her bag.

"The humans call it the Bible, meaning a collection of books. Prophecies of their God. I have been studying it and several other human works as I have studied their language and culture. This particular volume has been secularly important to them, as the prophecies of Valen are to us."

"You were an impudent child," Draal said, shaking his head at the memory. "You would rather daydream than do your studies. Since then, I have never known anyone to study with the dedication that you do. You dedicate yourself to learning a culture that is not your own based on the strength of an unclear prophecy."

"Such is faith, dearest teacher," she said, and he smiled.

"Yes. A great faith. A pure faith. I have never seen such a faith. It gives me courage for the upcoming struggle."

"Then what is your concern, my friend?" she asked, finally turning towards him as she completed packing. She would leave as soon as he was finished.

"I am concerned at your dedication, Delenn. Must all of this fall on your shoulders?"

"I am the only one who is willing to do this. And I am certainly the only one who is genuinely interested in the humans," she said dryly, a look of sparkling mischief in her eyes. He recognized that look, that barely contained excitement bubbling beneath her surface, waiting to be unleashed on whatever she was focused on at that moment. There had always been something in Delenn that was uncommon even among the aggressive Warrior caste, much less the Religious. If he had not known better, he would have recognized it as passion. But she was too careful for that.

He could tell by that look in her eyes that there was something more to this mission even than what he had suspected, immediately recognizing the surface excuse as being nothing more than that...an excuse.

Her packing made it clear that she intended to be gone for several days. Enough, perhaps less than she would need if she were to take a major sabbatical, a vision quest of sorts in the wilds, ostensibly the reason for her departure. However, he had also noticed the food she had placed in the bag, which suggested that she would not be fasting, which directly contradicted the notion that she was going on any sort of spiritual journey.

"Delenn, I sense that you are immersing yourself in something dangerous, something unknown," he said, a slight shift of warning in his voice. She blinked, her only acknowledgment of the direct change of tone. He watched the understanding of his concern flood her dark grey-green eyes, and something like sympathy, leading him to believe that his assumption was correct; there was much that she knew that she could not tell him, and she was sorry for it. "I would ask you to be careful. There is greatness ahead of you. Your father and Dukhat saw it in you early on, and it has been my honor to nurse it along. There are a select few who follow you who have wondered if you are the one who has been prophesied."

"I doubt it, Draal," she said, but her eyes flickered away from his, losing themselves in empty space.

"No, I do not believe you do. You do not doubt Valen," Draal countered, and when her eyes returned to his, there was a trace of darkness, a maturity that he had never seen before.

He had heard of her rising power in the Council since the war, and the turns it had taken because of the way she seemed to defy much of the Council's decisions and motions. He had been unsure of her own personal power since she had regained her spirits after the war.

It became clear to him now.

"The truth points to itself," she said then without emotion, though some particular force of gravity seemed to weigh in her words that he could only begin to comprehend.

"I suppose it does," he replied, feeling some measure of sadness in his heart for the loss of innocence in his young student. He could not be sure whether this change in her was for good or for the unthinkable.

*****

Delenn watched the human Commander's lone transport shuttle arrive with wide, interested eyes, aware of the silent stares of the rest of the Council behind her.

"Are you ready?" one of the nine asked from behind her.

"It is time," she agreed, nodding her chin even as her eyes remained fixed on the small shuttle's position on the great canopy of the stars around them.

She did not react when one of the cruiser's tiny missiles struck the shuttle, but merely watched as it started to burn, it's tiny life pod instantly dropping out, the Commander presumably inside of it.

"Life readings constant," someone remarked from behind her.

When the life pod was sufficiently far away, another hit from their ship, hidden behind the moon itself in an angle that the shuttle could not have detected it, destroyed the shuttle completely.

The life pod angled towards the moon's surface, obviously being carefully piloted by one of the better fighter pilots in history, considered so mainly because he was one of the only ones to have survived the Battle of the Line, if under suspicious circumstances.

"It is done," someone commented, as if it were necessary.

"Yes. I will depart shortly," Delenn said, turning away from the expanse of space around them, towards the doors of the chamber.

"Delenn." She turned, greeting the gaze of the nine around her. All of their hoods were off, their eyes meeting hers directly. "Valen go with you."

"And with you," she returned, bowing slowly in respect. The eight returned the gesture as one, then replaced their hoods together, a final dismissal.

"And Valen's strength be my aid," she added silently to herself as she stepped out into the hallway of the cruiser, passing the dozens of acolytes wandering the halls without paying any attention to their awed stares, as though they knew how important what she was about to do would be.

As she piloted her own Minbari life pod towards the moon, she heard a voice whispering through her mind, beckoning her to speak the words aloud.

And so in the quiet of a tiny life pod, she made a declaration the importance of which she could not have imagined.

"And so it begins."

****
Part Five
Alchemy

*****
Kiss and kill me sweetly
Come and drive me home
Drag the miles in me
I am yours alone
*****

**Early August, 2262**

Since their marriage, John and Delenn had kept their separate quarters, mainly because they each had extremely different living habits. Delenn's chimes and candles and incense could be charming and soothing, and sometimes they drove John crazy. Most of the food she preferred to eat remained thoroughly unappreciable to John, and the general way she lived her life outside of `work': sleeping, eating, meditating, praying, studying, and maintaining herself in odd fashions; oils and lotions that resembled Minbari chemical cleansing baths that she could no longer use, her intense need for privacy when she was dressing, undressing, or showering...all of this was still unusual to him, since he had never thought that even the term `absolute privacy' could go quite so far as she did sometimes, even at their most intimate times.

Not to mention that the way she switched back and forth from her Minbari customs to completely human ways that she had picked up over the years and through her transformation unnerved him. He never knew quite what to expect.

Of course, one thing that always got to him was that damned diagonal bed. For one thing, one had to lie on one's back and hope that the force of gravity kept one in place. Getting restless in the middle of the night was not an option, and even a small rustling of the covers on his part was enough to instantly wake Delenn and have her inquiring about how he was doing trying to sleep on the damned thing.

Not to mention that it was hard work just keeping the covers from sliding off the end of the bed; John had wondered if this was why Minbari slept in such tight, heat-conserving clothing somewhat reminiscent of Earth long underwear. It had taken him months to convince Delenn to humor him and create some variation on her normal undergarments for sleeping, and she had done so and become quite used to the sheer black shift, a variation on a human teddy.

So sometimes, John was relieved by nothing so much as just crawling into his normal, flat, soft human bed, a bed that he'd always taken for granted before the thought of taking a very alien woman as a lover had ever crossed his mind. Of course he preferred to sleep with Delenn next to him. Both of them were ravaged by nightmares, his the loud and screaming type, hers the quiet and frowning type, and besides, he'd largely grown used to her warmth next to him, the feel of her presence, the smell of her skin as he breathed in his sleep.

But of course, aside from the Minbari belief that to lie flat during sleep was merely inviting death of body or worse, death of spirit (they believed lying flat allowed all the blood to settle evenly and go unmoving, inviting all kinds of physical and spiritual problems), Delenn found his bed as uncomfortable as he found hers, saying that it gave her a back ache. And since she was not what humans liked to call a `snuggler,' rarely inviting or encouraging mid-night touching at all, it didn't seem to make much difference to her whether she was lying on her side or back, while he secretly yearned sometimes to just be allowed to spoon her up against him and hold her the entire night through.

Delenn also seemed to find his habits unappealing. She'd twice commented on the oddity of listening to him singing strange Earth tunes in the shower, and on the fact that he didn't seem to mind walking around soaking wet and not doing much about it except waiting to get dry. She would watch him shaving from the doorway of the bathroom, as always dressed in Valen-knew how many layers of Minbari silk despite the humidity in the room from the often real-water shower, and she would comment that despite his constant nicking of his delicate skin, he didn't seem to pay any more attention to his task one day than he did the one before, instead doing it while he read some recent report on the workings of the Alliance or singing quietly to himself, self-conscious under her gaze but not enough so to interrupt his routine.

She hated most Earth food, but the breakfast cereals he kept in his kitchen were a favorite of hers to ridicule. She would pour out whole bowl-sized portions of Cheerios onto his kitchen table in front of him and arrange the little O's into elaborate patterns or language characters, and when he'd inquire with an amused raised eyebrow what exactly she was doing she would tilt her head in the way that he'd come to recognize was the Minbari equivalent of a shrug, and say that she hadn't yet discovered another use for the cereal.

And of course she seemed to get nervous being completely without incense or chimes or crystals for any length of time, while he did concede to candles when she was around, which seemed a comfort to her.

They'd never really spoken of any of this; when one or both of them felt it was needed, they just went their separate ways.

And, conversely, when one or both of them felt it was needed, they came together, often not parting for days or weeks at a time.

Tonight, mainly because of their arguments of earlier, John went to her quarters, hoping to find her there. When he found all of the rooms empty, he went back to his quarters, wondering if she was still working, out somewhere about the station.

But it was past nine o'clock at night, and she was usually at least an hour into her meditations by that time of night.

The instant he entered his quarters, he could sense her presence, and of course he could always smell her, particularly if she'd been spending any amount of time in her own quarters. She carried with her a scent of her own derived from many things: incense, oils, lotions, scented candles, the human herbal shampoo she used in her hair, human soap, and a mixture of assorted scents whose origins were unknown. And, of course, there was something undeniably *her*---there was always that element. *Her* skin, her spirit.

"Delenn?" he called out, allowing the surprise into his voice. He had expected, what with the gist of their arguments, that he would have to come to her. Stephen's theory of some kind of mid-life emotional crisis was starting to look pretty accurate to John, and going with that, he'd thought that she would not come to him; it would have to be the other way around, particularly in the interests of taking this `slowly.'

She appeared from the bathroom, padding out in bare feet, wearing nothing but her Minbari underwear, which was essentially nothing but a black silk slip, dropping to midway down her thigh, straps spaghetti thin and neckline low and dipping between her breasts. The rest of her clothes were on the couch, he noticed for the first time, and her shoes were resting against the wall closest to the door.

All of this was a rarity. It had taken him so long to get her to wear less than the traditional `cover-everything-but-the-feet-hands-and- head' Minbari pajamas, and he had not yet convinced her to be content walking around their private quarters in anything less than two or three layers of her usual dresses and robes, or sometimes, if he was lucky, the bare-footed, low-collared meditation outfit she put on when she was exceptionally relaxed. Or at least, he had thought that he had not yet convinced her to trust him with that much skin during the daytime.

Yet here she was, in her slip. And of course, Minbari did not wear anything beneath that.

The furtiveness in her steps made her look like a child who'd just been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Perhaps she hadn't intended for him to find her this way.

But it was late, after all...surely she'd expected him...

"Hi," he said, in the same surprised voice, though amusement colored it this time as she stopped several feet from him, her stance somewhat awkward, obviously quite aware of how much more of her than usual he could observe. "You know, Delenn, if you'd greet me like this every night, you might flatter yourself more often."

His direct reference to their conversation earlier colored the tips of her ears a bright, hot red and she pursed her lips, but it was an amused motion, not one of disgruntlement as it sometimes appeared.

"I was..." she started to explain, then waved a hand dismissively. "That's not important. I'm here now."

"Yes you are," he agreed, stepping towards her. She smiled almost slyly and retreated back into the bathroom. He followed her, standing in the doorway as she moved over into the corner, standing on his scale, glancing down at the weight it provided. He watched, puzzled, as she then stepped away and simply stared at herself in the mirror, first head on, and then turning to observe her profile and framing her abdomen with one hand at her stomach and one at her lower back.

"I have not changed," she explained, and he realized what she meant and smiled. "Stephen tells me that if this pregnancy is more human than Minbari, I will only noticeably start to look very physically different in about three months. If this pregnancy is more Minbari than human, which I suspect it may be considering that Minbari is still the dominant genetic system of my body, then I will not look very physically different for four months. But I feel very different already, and it has been only three weeks. Less than that even since I discovered that I was with child."

He listened to her, noticing the analytical detachment of her tone but the clear emotions of her eyes as she stared at herself in the mirror.

"Do I look different to you, John?" she asked then, glancing at his mirror reflection leaning against the mirrored door frame.

He smiled a secret little smile in return at her reflection.

"Yes," he said, and the ridges above her eyes lifted, questioning. "But not so as to be noticeably different to anyone who doesn't know you as well as I do."

"Then what is it?" she asked, turning to face him, abandoning her mirror reflection and the lack of answers she found in it. "What do you see?"

He lifted a hand and pointed with two fingers, indicating her eyes. Following his motion her hands moved instinctively to her face, her fingers passing over her eyes as though she could discover what he knew with the simple motion.

"Turmoil. Joy. Wonder. Surprise. Anguish. Love. Hope. Faith," he listed them off one by one, the slight smile never leaving his lips as he allowed himself to become lost in her eyes. "All of these things have become more pronounced in your eyes."

She reacted with a flushed, happy smile. He wasn't sure if she was glad that she was different, or simply glad that she was different to him; that he had noticed. Intimate words were not common between them other than the usual three, and even those were rare. He had been hurt too badly to say them too often, and she still found the sensation they brought up in her so strange and different and overwhelming that she saved it for special occasions.

"John..." she began, and her pause seemed less out of hesitation and more out of a sly need to surprise him. "Join me?"

She gestured towards his bathtub/shower ensemble against the wall, then stepped towards it, pushing aside one side of the curtain to turn on the taps, kneeling on her bare knees on the tiled floor to adjust the heat.

He felt a rush of heat go to the very core of his being, and suddenly he thanked God that all the command quarters (which his still were, though he wasn't a member of Earthforce) were equipped with real water showers apart from the normal hyper spray.

It was such a treat when Delenn decided to be intimate.

Normally she wouldn't let him see her even partially unclothed until night time or the occasional mid-afternoon lovemaking. Now here she was, in only her Minbari underwear, kneeling on his bathroom floor preparing to take a shower, and asking him to join her.

Definitely pregnancy hormones, he thought to himself as he pulled at his collar, loosening his shirt.

"You're sure?" he commented, and the slight tone of sarcasm in his voice did not go unnoticed. She glanced back at him in amusement as she got back to her feet and slipped out of her slip in one smooth motion, leaving her completely naked. As she stepped out of the garment, she said, "We have been married for almost a year, John, and courting for far longer. One would think you would not be surprised that I sometimes feel...experimental."

"Experimental, yes, by Minbari estimation, but never quite like this," he called to her as she disappeared behind the shower curtain. He started to take off his clothes as he listened to her smooth breathing amplified in the small space underneath the spray. "I mean, wonder of all wonders, a shared shower? Delenn, you are positively *scathing* today."

"The thought has never appealed to me before, though I must admit it's rarely even occurred to me. Many of the better sexual experiences I have shared with you would not have occurred to me on my own. Perhaps you should make more of an effort to educate me in these matters, John."

"Take things into my own hands, you mean," he commented lustily, and she chuckled lowly, catching the reference.

"And why not?" she said, and he finished undressing, glanced at himself in the mirror out of habit, and was just stepping into the shower as she finished her sentence. "As you're so fond of reminding me, John, you are my husband and I am your wife, at least according to Earth tradition, and with that comes certain allowances for intimacy that should not be quashed or pushed aside simply because *I am not aware.* I have been trained to be a non-sexual being, John, but not only does the human part of my body have quite a problem with that belief, but the Minbari portion of both my body and soul has always believed that the notion that passion is a bad thing is a ridiculous one."

"So you're literally saying..."

"Don't always wait for my permission for something I might not even be aware of, John," she said, smiling at him from under the shower spray. He was shivering in the cold so she reached out and pulled him under the water with her, her hands running up and down his arms, trying to warm him quickly. "Take the initiative. I assure you that if I don't like something, I will tell you."

He looked sheepish for a moment.

"There are things that I've always wanted to do, to try," he said then, and he suddenly blushed as he realized what he was thinking about. "Things that I used to do with Anna. Things that I never fully appreciated when I was with her. But you're such a private person when it comes to romance, Delenn...or at least that's the feeling that I get, even if it is the only way you know how to be. I've always felt uncomfortable...well, trying to put any moves on you."

"You weren't so uncomfortable `putting the moves on me' this morning," she teased, noticing that while he kept shivering, he was no longer cold. Her hands were running over his chest, tracing his muscles, barely touching his skin. She was simply exploring, touching him in the semi-intimate way she liked to, but it affected him greatly. She sympathized; every touch, from the slightest brush of his fingers against hers to the seeming soul-deep kisses they'd shared very rarely made her heart speed to twice it's normal rate. "You stopped because you realized that we were having a serious conversation and that we were in a somewhat public place. We're alone now, and we're already passed the stage where we take off all our clothes. Why don't you try again?"

He smiled at her.

"And now you're reading my mind..." he said, and she noted the shift that had taken place in his voice. It was lower, more whispery even than usual, less harsh than the business tone he normally spoke in which had become even more harsh since Z'ha'dum, the end of the Great War and his rise to President of the ambitious Interstellar Alliance. She heard the hunger in that voice, a hunger so deep, so complete, that it called to her like a yearning. As though he'd been without her, breathed without her, for too long and had been dying to feel her again. She felt the instant ache within her, the way that every limb suddenly felt loose, jellied.

She felt herself relax completely and allowed herself to be molded by his hands, her own will disappearing as she waited for him to guide her, to show her something that she hadn't even thought of. He turned her around so that the spray was hitting her chest and he was behind her, and he briefly massaged her shoulders, leaning down to kiss the back of her neck as he'd done earlier.

She stood still, her arms wrapped around herself.

He stopped touching her and reached around her, picking up the bottle of the shampoo she liked that she kept here for those mornings when she did wake up in this room, though they were few and far between in recent months.

She heard the bottle pop open, then a still silence for a moment, and then he replaced the bottle and she felt her eyes closing of their own accord when his hands slipped into her hair, lathering it up with the shampoo. He did what he affectionately called her `mane' first, which tingled but didn't affect her in any major way, but when he asked her to tilt back her head and he leaned over and worked at the hair on the top of her head, before the break at the back of her skull that her crest created, she found her limbs suddenly singing at her, telling her that if something didn't happen soon, she was going to collapse, the feeling was so deep and completely intoxicating.

She let out a small, strangled sound and he chuckled at her, leaning down to whisper in her ear, "This is only the beginning."

She thought her knees would fail her with just those words, but she managed to stay standing, though one of her hands strayed out to hold her up against the wall.

She kept her eyes closed as the water washed over her head, the feeling of its trail between the bones of her crest utterly bewitching. She had always loved water, if only for this sensation and not its far greater beauty.

While the shampoo washed out of her hair she listened to him repeating the process on his own, and he pressed her forward closer to the wall as he stepped under the shower head to wash away the shampoo from his own hair. She moved with him, shuddering violently when his body brushed hers.

"Delenn, if I hadn't been there when it happened, sometimes I'd swear you never lost your virginity," he commented as he put his hands on her waist, holding her steady so she wouldn't fall.

"I suppose it depends how you look at it," she whispered back. "I have been through the pain and the blood, but I have not been through much of the emotion and the sexuality that appears to make one `experienced' in your culture."

"You've been reading erotica," he said, chuckling. "I swear, Delenn, Garibaldi has been a *bad* influence on you..."

"I'm only trying to understand," she said defensively, but she was smiling. "Mr. Garibaldi's...colorful explanations have helped me greatly."

"He gave you a copy of the Kama Sutra, didn't he?"

"No, actually, Susan gave that to me almost a year and a half ago. I still do not understand many of the principles."

He couldn't help it; he lowered his forehead to her back, just between her shoulder blades, and laughed. She laughed with him, more out of joy at his laughter than understanding of what was so amusing.

"God, Delenn, you are a joy," he commented with a small snort as he pulled himself together, and she glanced back at him, smiling.

"I am glad you find me so," she said, and he kissed her on the nose, something she knew she would not likely ever get used to. She continued to wrinkle her nose each time he did it.

"Now hush," he said, still smiling. "Sit down with me."

Mildly surprised, she watched as he sat down, easing himself against the back of the bathtub, and she followed his motions, sitting in front of him, falling back against him when he pulled her closer, feeling his front pressed against her back. She listened as another tube was popped open and then closed, waiting, anticipating his next actions with her heart hammering in her ears.

First he touched her with his hands, loosening all her suddenly taut muscles with just a few careful strokes across her shoulders, upper back, arms, neck. Then his hands left her again, and when they returned, he was holding something. She recognized it---a human invention of the late twentieth century, a ball of entwined soft plastic that provided more soap lather than the average sponge, and which, she realized just by looking at it, would be much more erotic to use.

She relaxed back against him fully, realizing that she would take virtually no part in this seduction, making it just that. He had taken what she'd said past its literal meaning, and was attempting to make love to *her*---to completely lead the process.

One of his hands lifted her left leg while the other slid around her body, pulling her closer. The plastic invention was scratchy but not unpleasant, but his fingers around it were pure torture as he ran the soap over her skin, his fingers lightly massaging it in, the water washing it away as he finished. When his hands brushed her foot, she shivered, thinking of that morning and the Soul Hunter, and whispered a soft apology which he didn't fully understand but accepted anyway, not saying anything in return.

His hands traveled back up her leg, over her hip, up and down her arm and around her left breast and she found herself breathing quickly and through her mouth before he'd even gotten that far. She felt her limbs trembling and knew that he could see it, feel it. Her eyes had slipped closed again. She couldn't bear to watch his hands.

She gasped as he focused on her breasts, giving them a little extra attention, his fingers tracing underneath their curves and the path between them. He caught the same strangled noise from her, a tiny gurgle in the back of her throat that hadn't been intended as the beginning of a word or even a breath; it was simply a noise, something inexplicable that her body felt the need to project.

He moved on to her shoulders, making her lean forward then as he did her back, his hands slipping down until she was shuddering deeply again, and she relaxed slightly when he moved to her neck, then her other arm, then her stomach and other side. He soaped between her legs but only briefly, as though he didn't dare go further, or at least not yet.

He finished with her other leg, and when he put it down, she did not think there was a part of herself that was not trembling, poised on the brink of a mental breakdown at the sheer overload of physical surrender.

She was still relaxed. She was usually relaxed when they made love; it was all an exercise in calm passion for her, usually; slow and precise, her breathing centred to allow her to remain collected despite her body's loss of control. He'd seen her differently on very few isolated occasions, and he wasn't sure if he liked that or not. On the one hand, he could tell that despite her composure she thoroughly enjoyed sex, which was satisfying enough in itself. Besides, it was soothing, to not have any real expectations, to just know that it was going to happen, and it was going to be calm, and easy. But on the other hand he sometimes longed to see her eyes burning with blind, almost enraged desire, her skin on fire, her breath caught on whisperings of Valen's name and Minbari nonsensical syllables and her hands gripping him as though she would lose herself if she let go. He had seen her that way before, made love to her that way before, and nothing had ever been quite so arousing.

Besides, it was always nice to exceed expectations...or to create some if there were none.

He put away the plastic sponge and turned his full attention to her. Her breath had calmed quickly, going from quick and harsh to suddenly slow and calm, as though she were sleeping, though he knew she wasn't.

He reached forward and turned the knob, making the shower hotter. He knew that if it were her choice, the water would probably be hotter than most humans could comfortably allow. Minbari did not notice heat in the same fashion. They didn't even perspire in the same fashion.

Then he touched her neck, pulling her head back against his shoulder as his fingers brushed down across the arteries in her neck, against her clavicle and the hollow at the base of her throat. She tilted her head back against him out of instinct but protested in a voice that had been fogged over, much to his delight.

"John, be careful..." she warned, even as her crest lightly brushed his cheek. He knew that if aimed correctly it could crush bones, and if angled correctly it could slice open skin. "I can't..."

"I know," he said, and his hands lifted to her cheeks, turning her head. "Turn this way, then."

He turned her head to the side against his chest, the top of her head just under his chin, the exoskeletal structure at the back of her head facing away from him.

She sighed and relaxed once again as his hands moved over her chest, lingering only briefly on her breasts and her stomach before they continued downward.

This time his hand between her legs was brave, not retreating immediately. On instinct, she parted her thighs, receiving him. This she was familiar with, if, granted, not from behind. His hands brushed her thighs briefly, starting a whole new round of insane trembling, before his fingers finally dipped lower and one slipped inside her, his thumb moving against the bundle of nerves that was apparently more sensitive to a Minbari...Minbari were trained to largely ignore the major erogenous zones left on their bodies, bodies which had supposedly evolved greatly from the human body. Only in certain rituals---the Shan Fal, for example---or during the female or male cycle did these portions of the body normally come into play. Or at least that was how he understood it to be.

She took a deep breath, inadvertently pulling him in deeper. Now he shivered against her, always captivated by the impulsive responses of her body, the telltale signs that she was affected more deeply than her calm breathing would indicate.

With his other arm against her stomach he pulled her back against him, skin to skin, and as he moved inside of her, he bent his mouth to her ear.

"Let me give you a piece of advice," he whispered, and the sudden shudder in her breath indicated that he had broken her concentration: she was paying attention to him. "Loosen up. Let yourself go. You'll enjoy it more."

Her breath caught, her hands on his knees, indicating that she didn't understand.

"Do what you feel you have to do to bring yourself, and me, the most pleasure possible. You've done it before...remember after I came back from Mars. You remember how you enjoyed that even though it hurt, how it was you who allayed my doubts. Remember me when you returned three weeks ago, and remember how you reacted. We conceived a child together that night, Delenn. Passion can't be a bad thing."

She laughed into the skin of his chest, her muscles tightening around him as he added another finger. She groaned softly, and he realized that he was halfway there; she'd loosened up enough that she wasn't paying attention to controlling herself anymore.

"It can be that way whenever you want, Delenn. Just passion. Just a beautiful, physical expression of a love that can't be bridled by mere physicality. Just...let it go."

Her response was immediate. She leaned forward, spearing herself on his hand, letting out a small strangled noise as she grabbed his hand with both of hers and adjusted his angle.

She'd done this during the Shan Fal and the other rituals, helped him to learn where it affected her the most, but not much since.

He felt the difference immediately as her breathing sped up, her hands falling away, apparently having shown him what she wanted. She leaned back against him, the back of her head carefully resting against his shoulder, her eyes closed, but she wasn't attempting her breathing exercises. She was letting it happen naturally, letting herself feel it entirely. He saw it in the way her face contorted in sudden pain, the pain of overwhelming feelings that she always kept closely locked up. He heard it in her ragged breathing, her tight hands on his knees, knuckles white even under the hot water.

He moved his other hand on her stomach, positioning it over her lower abdomen, the place she'd been framing in the mirror, and watched as her hands left his knees and gripped the hand over her stomach, holding it closer to her. Her nails bit into his wrist, but he didn't feel it; he could only feel her, her sudden rush towards the completion of her feelings with her pleasure, her wet hair trailing down his chest, her smooth skin against him, against the erection he'd acquired somewhere along the way.

Even as he felt her falling towards oblivion, he felt himself following her, surprised by the sudden strength of his own reaction.

Suddenly he stopped all motion and she let out a small sound of frustration, frowning in the way she had that only seemed to make her that much more beautiful.

"Stand up," he growled in her ear, taking her by the elbows as he carefully stood, keeping his balance as best he could while he attempted to help her up. Her knees were shaking, her eyes suddenly lost as she looked at him, asking him what he was doing. "Stand here."

He pushed her back against the wall and she flattened herself against it as he stepped up in front of her, taking her hips in his hands, lifting her. She spread her legs instantly, understanding, accepting, and he listened to the sweet sound of her gasp echoing around them as he pierced inside of her, not careful as usual, but close to desperation. He gripped the safety bars on either side of her as he pressed against her, moved against her, his face buried in her neck as he fought, fought to let everything go as he'd told her to do. Her hands were at his neck, her lips at his temple whispering in her native language, prayers that he didn't understand, her legs wrapped around his.

When she came she cried out, a single, non-verbal syllable of pure, painful release, and as her spasms rolled through her entire body, causing her to coil her muscles tightly everywhere, against his skin, he whispered the name of his own maker and joined her, spiraling down towards the inevitable darkness of the soul that came before the promise of renewal.

She finished her descent and opened her eyes to reality before he did, so she carefully lowered herself off of him, sliding down his body until her feet were flat on solid ground, the water rushing around them. His face was at her shoulder, facing the wall, his breathing irregular. Her own breath was coming in heavy, harsh pants, a sound she wasn't used to from herself but that she didn't mind. She didn't feel like controlling it. Not now.

"John," she whispered against his neck as she placed her hands against the back of his head, turning his face in towards hers, guiding him with her voice. He enveloped her in a tight embrace instantly, his arms gripping her while his soul cried out to hers, joining in their coupling of a moment earlier. "I love you."

She more felt than heard his reply, whispered against her skin even as the water swallowed all sound. She smiled.

"No matter what our problems, we will always be this way," she said then, and he lifted his head to smile back at her, his eyes meeting hers and losing themselves as he lowered his head to taste her mouth for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.

*****
Part Six

Gold
*****
She sets things tragic
She is Venus, she is Mars
She's electric
And the struggle of
*****

**Late February, 2256**

He'd been lucky to land on open ground, what with the sharp rocks all around him now, on this part of the moon where he'd wandered. The air was breathable but it was to his lungs like the air at the top of a high mountain on earth; he had to breathe deeply to get used to it, until his body adjusted by producing extra red blood cells. High oxygen count, he thought to himself, before he even bothered to bring out his hand held equipment. Hell, if he was going to be stranded here, he might as well do the best he could to complete the preliminary scans he'd come here for.

High oxygen, low carbon dioxide, no visible system of recycling. No green plants, or any plants, for that matter. Just rocks. Reddish brown rocks, dusty but hard.

The dust spinning in the air around him was an annoyance, but not a danger to his respiratory system. The chill of the sharp wind, however...

He couldn't see any trace of civilization...not even an ancient one, long gone. Nothing that might have produced the defense system he assumed had taken out his shuttle.

He wondered if he should have walked so far from the life pod, from the only beacon he had to his known world.

He had no idea how he'd get out of here now. Very few people even knew about his mission, and Sinclair suspected that Vice President Clark wouldn't mind all that much if he never returned from his journey.

He was, after all, expendable. Even more so than most, because of whatever might or might not have happened to him during the Battle of the Line.

He gritted his teeth at the thought and quickly turned his thoughts away, back to the geological survey he was attempting to perform with his meager equipment. The pack on his back was starting to feel heavier with every step he took, and his feet hurt. One didn't do much walking at all anymore on Earth, what with all the transport tubes and high tech automobiles.

Darkness fell on his particular side of the dismal moon quickly, and the ground was lit by two other moons rising over the horizon of the planet Euphrates. It was a beautiful sight. But their presence was fleeting because of their differing orbits, moving out high into the sky where their light didn't provide as much illumination. He used a sodium flashlight from there on; there were some things that technology would probably never change.

Without the surveying to occupy him now, in the quiet and darkness of an alien environment, his anger came to the fore. He didn't know why he'd accepted this mission. He probably wouldn't have had a choice anyway, but he had accepted it freely. When they'd been trapped together in the deserts of Mars, Michael Garibaldi had commented to him that despite the fact that it was not prominent, somewhere, buried in his psyche, Jeffrey Sinclair had a death wish. Some deeply hidden anger over his treatment since the war, and what had happened during the Battle itself, and the fear of that unknown...these things were bringing him down. And of course his most recent tangle with Catherine Sakai, six months ago almost exactly, did not help matters.

At the time, he had scoffed at Michael, surprised and even a little wounded by the suggestion of his supposed tendency towards martyrdom. But as time wore on and his silent anger grew, becoming harder to explain away to himself, he began to wonder. Did he want to die? Did he want to go to a place where he could forget that twenty four hours of his life were missing, that he hadn't been respected since, quietly considered a traitor or at the very least lazy and negligent? Did he want to go to a place where he didn't wake up every morning in an empty bed confused, wondering why there had been so many women, so many people that he'd loved, but no one that he could be with for something as simple as just that, waking up next to in the morning?

He was bereft, and it was not a pleasant sensation.

And now here he was, literally stranded. His soul was alone with itself on a moon not unlike those deserts on Mars, and he couldn't keep it bottled up anymore, not like when he had something, anything...Tennyson, alcohol...to distract him. Now all he could do was recite the words to himself, in his mind, and wonder why they were so important to him, which only led to more anger.

*****

After walking for an interminable amount of time and having reached the unnerving, `...Death closes all; but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods,' he found a network of caves stretching far off into the horizon, ending at what looked like a massive canyon.

And less than a mile away from the first of the small caves, a life pod, not unlike his own, but smaller, bluer, more sophisticatedly built.

Minbari.

He felt his jaw tighten, then loosen, as he stared at the small structure, laid out on the ground.

He had nothing against the Minbari. He had nothing particularly for the Minbari, either. He did not resent them for the war as so many did; it was in the past, and he had moved on from that to discovering his own petty interests. He did not have any particular respect for them. He simply didn't think of them, when he could avoid it.

But he did have a problem with the fact that he was now alone on a planet with something quite possibly worse than himself.

He knew that many Minbari resented the humans for the war. Would he encounter Minbari that felt this way? How many Minbari would he encounter? Were there other life pods scattered about the surface, victims of the same ancient defense grid?

He stared at the small ship until he felt the cold burning through his bones, then turned away and kept walking, finding the caves, first small ones, then several large ones. He entered one cautiously, looking around for other signs of life, and soon discovered that the larger caves were interconnected.

He left a trail of small rocks behind himself as he walked, so he would be able to find his way out again.

He did not find anyone else as he made his way closer to the heart of the caves, hoping to find a place where the wind would not disturb him anymore.

The echoing silence frightened him, as it made his feelings echo all the more.

"`And this grey spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought,'" he whispered to himself as his eyes flitted around himself, searching, always searching.

It was going to be an exceptionally long night.

*****

He had managed to find a cave where the wind did not whistle, where it was not as cold, the air more compact. He immediately set up a form of camp, spreading his several blankets in one area on the floor, arranging several tall, thin candles (still a traditional safety provision for situations such as this) in a close circle around the area, and lighting them before he put out his light, hoping to conserve the energy. Quickly the small space heated up nicely, and he arranged himself as comfortably as possible under the makeshift bedcovers he'd created, and blew out all of the candles but one, which he kept to his right, close to his head. It was his version of having one eye open all night without truly having to stay that alert.

He fell asleep to visions of fire and darkness and memories of Catherine's golden skin glowing in candlelight.

*****

He didn't know how long he'd been sleeping when he heard it.

A slight scuffling, nothing more than the sound a rat might make as it darted from one corner to another. But it was enough to wake Jeff fully, pulling him completely from his slumber and all traces of whatever dreams he might have had that he immediately forgot. His breath paused, his movement ceased as he listened, poised on the brink of fear.

Not alone, his mind screamed at him, and he mentally hissed at it to shut up.

The candle still flickered beside him, only a bit melted, a pool of hardened wax around the bottom of the candleholder. The shadows the tiny fire created across the flowing walls of rock around him were surreal, and an annoyance to eyes that did not want disturbances, that wanted to know who was there, who was waiting in darkness to steal his soul.

The sound had ceased and he did not hear it again for several long minutes and started to doubt himself, to wonder if he'd imagined it or dreamed it, when it came again. A tiny echo of sound against the floor of the cave, from somewhere not too far away but far enough.

He was on his feet immediately, pulling on his boots, dropping off his jacket so as not to be held back by anything so bulky, his hand reaching down to grab the candle, not taking the time for anything else. His service PPG sat nearby, but he didn't even bother with that.

He sped down the corridors in silence, the candle creating disconcerting images against the walls as he moved, uncaring that whoever it might be would see the light coming.

He reached the next larger opening after the tunnels had narrowed slightly, and the candlelight flooded instantly, lighting up a miniature cavern, hulking figures in shadow cast by the rocks around him, and one smaller, more lively shadow against the far wall.

He pounced, his aim surprisingly true as his hand struck out, catching the unseen intruder, strong fingers snatching first fabric, and then moving to wrap around warm, pulsing flesh; a neck, a slender neck, his fingers brushing the artery on either side. He pressed the unresisting body up against the wall, surprised by the lack of reaction from whoever it was that he was attacking without warning. His free hand brought up the candle, held it up towards the face of the intruder...

To say he was surprised by the sight that greeted him was the least he *could* say. The first he saw were two dark, luminescent eyes, deep blue in the firelight, the twin moons he'd seen earlier against his imagination. Then the shadows passed and his eyes traveled over full, red lips, soft cheekbones, a pointed chin upturned towards him as the lips slipped apart, the only testament to the onslaught of his fingers against the throat. Before he could say anything, even admit to himself the poetry that sang through his soul only seeing this much, this fleeting glimpse of pure beauty, he let go of the neck and ripped the hood away.

The crest curving up away from her smooth head was daunting the moment it was set free, slanted reverently towards the sky, grey in the candle-light, curved and sharp and corrugated.

"Minbari," he whispered, only out of surprise. He had seen Minbari Warriors before, but never a woman. Never this...precise work of universal art before him, a veritable sculpture of flesh and bone and blood, a complete capturing somehow of all of the universe's best, most cherished qualities, from the good to the dark.

Her lips curved up in an amused half-smile (the Minbari did not seem to do much of anything more than halfway) at his reaction, and his eyes fell away from the formidable presence of her exoskeletal bone structure and back to her face, where they again froze.

Perfection, he thought again. Pure. Undiluted. Perfection.

Her skin was smooth porcelain, the color of peaches and cream frozen yogurt, the streak on her utterly bald head a light lavender. Her ears were small and seemed out of place just underneath the danger of her crest, and her nose was far too delicate and innocent for the mischief in her lips, in their full curvature, their ageless color. Her eyes, shadowed by her prominent Minbari eye ridges, shone with a wisdom he'd seen in few, tainted with a darkness and a sly passion he suspected she wasn't even aware of by the blissful innocence in the corners of her eyes and mouth. But even despite that innocence, there was a power that shone in those eyes. And that he was sure she was aware of. She wielded it with a reserve too great not to be aware of it.

Lord, give me the gift to paint, he thought, and let me capture this creature forever. Or at least give me the gift of poetry, and let me sit here for eternity and describe her so that someone, somewhere in the future realizes that no matter what the universe throws at you, there is still absolute beauty.

"Speak," he said suddenly, his voice ringing through the silent cave. "Say something."

He needed to hear her voice.

"Delenn," she whispered, and he realized that he'd leaned towards her, close enough that he felt her breath against his lips when she spoke. The single two syllables tore apart all the order in his body, his soul; her voice sang to him of the wonders of all life, all of the universe. He'd been right. It merely completed the ensemble. She was everything: Mozart and Tennyson and all one hundred and fifty- four sonnets. She was DeVinci and Michelangelo captured in one second in time, one spirit, one mind. One body.

After a long moment of just looking into her eyes, seeing far away galaxies and other things he could not begin to understand, he realized that he did not know what she'd said, that he did not speak enough Minbari. And yet he had to know, had to find out what that one word was, the word that had turned him into the instant disciple that he was as he stood there, in front of her, one of his hands against the wall over her shoulder, the other still holding the candle.

"What does that mean?" he asked, his voice hushed.

This time the smile reached her eyes, and he felt his knees getting weak. She didn't look mischievous this time, but purely amused.

"It is my name," she answered in well spoken English, flavored with an accent he suspected was foreign even on her own world.

He smiled suddenly, realizing how foolish he was being, and while it seemed totally natural to him, it must have been highly unusual for her, someone he'd never met.

"Your name? Delenn?" he tried to say it, but his pronunciation was off, he could tell. He said it, "De-linn," a not-uncommon name on earth these last few years.

"De-len," she corrected, and he watched her mouth moving to the syllables, her tongue gently hitting her teeth. "Yes. My name. Just Delenn. We do not...we do not have surnames on Minbar."

He nodded; he'd known this.

"Delenn," he repeated, getting it correct the second time. It sounded and felt wonderful on his lips, like the sweetest Earth wine. "Does it...does it mean anything?"

She considered telling him its literal meaning, but decided that it would be saying too much.

"No," she said, and he looked disappointed, but quickly moved on to the next thing.

"Family name?"

"Mir."

"My name's Sinclair. Jeffrey Sinclair," he introduced himself finally, looking mildly sheepish, but probably only for her sake, as he finally removed his hand. He then backed away just enough to allow her to stand up straight, away from the wall, no longer confined.

She had not minded. She had not known what to expect, but she had not anticipated an ordinary greeting, even by human standards.

Not from the one with the soul of Valen.

"Jeff," he corrected then, and she smiled, charmed by the nickname. She did not understand humans, but there were things about them that she'd come to appreciate over the years. "Do you...do you completely speak English?"

"I have tried to learn as much of it as I can," she answered, and he seemed satisfied. She knew that she spoke it quite well. She had spent eleven human years studying it, after all. "Do you speak any Minbari at all?"

"Not much," he replied, his eyes unflinchingly focused on her as she brushed the dust off her back from her encounter with the wall, then took a step towards him.

"I am sorry that I startled you," she said, the same small, enigmatic smile at the corners of her lips. "My life pod crashed here several hours ago and I have been wandering these caves, attempting to find a good place to spend the night. Perhaps you have found a place?"

He stared at her for a moment, thinking over her words in his head, noting the subtle nuances of language.

"You speak it very well," he commented then, and with the normality of the statement he felt himself flooding back, felt the normal, somewhat resentful Jeffrey Sinclair returning to take the place of the hidden poet within. He didn't however allow the usual diplomatic, phony grin onto his face, the one he usually introduced himself properly in: Hi, I'm Jeff Sinclair. I don't particularly like you, but I'm going to put up with you anyway. I have some deep-seated wish to become a martyr.

He couldn't do that now. He couldn't do anything false. He'd been with her for less than five minutes, and he already respected her too much to even attempt to mislead her.

But he did smile. A genuine smile. A smile that he hadn't felt on his face for many years.

"Follow me," he said, gesturing ahead. When he didn't move, she started forward, aware of his presence just behind and to her right, his candle lighting their path, their two shadows stretching on the walls around them. "Were you hit down by the same defense system I was?"

"Is that what it was?" she asked in reply.

"I can't think what else it might have been. What were you doing up there?"

"I have been sent to do a preliminary survey on this moon for my government. It is possible that this would be useful territory to the Minbari," she answered, spinning out the half-lie with ease.

"Mm. Funny thing. My government sent me here for the same reason. I'm starting to wonder if they knew this would happen though...if they don't want me to come back."

"Why would you think that?" she asked.

He stared at her back as she moved. She was wearing a heavy parka not unlike his own, though it was thick and entirely some substance like leather, not fur like much of his was. The coat ended midway to her thigh and from there she was wearing several layers of black cloth slacks, her boots thick and just higher than her ankles. All black. Warrior?

"No particular reason. I just don't trust the government," he said, hoping that she would recognize the joke in his voice, if she even comprehended the concept of human humor.

"There is not much that is not to trust about our government," she commented, and he was silent for a moment, then said, "Our government sometimes does things that the ordinary individual cannot fathom. If I've become a nuisance to them, it's not totally implausible that they sent me here knowing that I would not likely come back."

"And have you become a nuisance to them?" she asked.

"`I am become a name; for always roaming with a hungry heart much have I seen and known---cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, myself not least, but honor'd of them all,'" he repeated wistfully, and she glanced back at him.

"That sounds like Ti'lar," she commented. "The song of the soul among my people."

"I wouldn't be surprised if they are quite similar," he agreed with a smile. "I'm sorry; I have a tendency to quote."

"I do not mind," she answered, and he felt his insides clench. Say that again, he thought. Tell me you don't mind me.

"Perhaps they just wanted me to be alone with myself for awhile, they being some unknown, ubiquitous universal presence that realizes the darkness of my soul," he said, then frowned to himself. Why was he telling her this? He'd known her for five minutes, and even so, he didn't know anything more than her name.

"If so, they have failed," she said with a tiny smile. "I am with you. If it bothers you, however, I will leave. There are other caves, other places..."

"No," he said quickly. "No, please, don't go. I don't...I don't want to be alone with myself, you see. I'm...more glad that you're here than you could possibly imagine."

"You do not know me," she commented.

No kidding, he thought. It didn't matter, though. It didn't seem to matter in the slightest.

"No. No...but something inside me tells me that somehow, somewhere, you know me," he answered as they entered his little cavern, and he caught another of her enigmatic smiles as he turned and bent to light several of the other candles again. "Is that strange?"

"No. It is...the way of things," she said simply, and he understood the statement perfectly. "And if my knowledge, however undiscovered it may be, is a comfort to you, a balm to the darkness of your soul, then I am glad we have found each other. I will stay with you while we are trapped here."

Double meaning in that, he thought to himself. While we are trapped here, in this cycle of my own creation.

"Wouldn't it have also bothered you to be alone?" he asked, watching her as she slipped the black pack she'd been carrying off her back and took several blankets out of it, blankets of the roughest, warmest Minbari silk. She arranged them as he had his, but in a tighter wad, and glanced back at him before reaching into her bag and handing him several candles of her own.

"Keep these somewhere, in case we need them, which I suspect we will," she said, then knelt before her bag again, reaching inside and rummaging around for something he could not see. "No, it would not have bothered me. A Minbari spends much of their life alone, praying, meditating. Considering."

"Then you are not glad to have found companionship," he said, not knowing what to feel.

"I did not say that," she said, glancing at him with a twinkle in her eye. "It would not have bothered me to be alone, but I am delighted to have found someone. Someone who obviously understands."

"Understands what?" he inquired, genuinely curious, because he too knew that he understood...something. He just couldn't figure out what it was.

"Simply understands," she said cryptically, and this time the calling in his soul did not tell him what she meant.

She came up with a book and moved over onto her blankets, against the wall, sitting with her feet crossed into her lap, yoga style on Earth. Her book against her legs, she relaxed, starting to breathe slowly and deeply. He recognized the beginnings of meditation. The book in her lap was one of the books of Valen. He didn't know much about the prophet; only that he was the most important of the Minbari leaders, a religious man of a thousand years ago who was respected by all castes, and followed by all Minbari, his teachings instilled virtually from birth or even before.

"Sleep," she said in a quiet, calm voice, her eyes still on him as she focused her breathing. "I must meditate before I join you. You may put out as many of the candles as you wish; it will not make a difference to me."

"But your book..." he started to say, gesturing towards it with his hand.

"I know every page, every word," she said with a slight smile. "I have in the past read it with my eyes closed, in absolute darkness, with nothing but the guiding touch of my fingers across the page. Its presence is not a necessity, but a comfort."

He nodded; his Tennyson and Shakespeare volumes were the same for him.

"But do you know it?" he asked then, knowing it would be his last question before he obeyed her and surrendered himself to sleep.

Her glance was sharper than her others, as though surprised by his question. As if it were especially bold, or audacious.

"No," she answered then, and he nodded slightly, satisfied more than she could know by the answer, and turned to attempt sleep for the second time that night. He put out all but the one candle again, and rustled around in the dark for a few minutes before finally getting comfortable. This time he did not feel exhausted, or angry. He felt strangely at peace, but his heart was beating loudly at the prospect of the strange, captivating woman sitting just across the room from him.

He could hear her breathing, and eventually the sound lulled him to sleep under her watchful eyes.

"Do not be afraid, for I am always with you, until the end of time," she whispered as she listened to his breathing even out.

She closed her book and leaned back against the wall, her eyes finally slipping shut as a rush of pure fear swam through her veins.

*****
Part Seven
Chaos

*****
Inside where it's warm
Wrap myself in you
Outside where I'm torn
Fight myself in two
In two
Into you
*****

**Early August, 2262**

This time he knew that she would be in his quarters, and lying flat in them no less. He had left her that way that morning, and he knew that she would not have moved much during the day.

Still, for tradition's sake, he called her name softly as he entered his quarters, the door closing and locking behind himself.

She slowly turned her head towards him from where she was still lying on the couch, underneath a single satin sheet, in her nightgown. Her eyelids cracked open and she looked at him, her eyes silently grateful to him for being quiet, for not turning the lights any higher than the dim resolution they were at now.

"Hi," he whispered as he knelt beside her, his hand finding hers as he bent to kiss her forehead. "How are you feeling?"

She did not answer other than a small, quiet groan, and he nodded and kissed her forehead again, hoping the motion was soothing. His other hand came up to stroke her cheek as her eyes slid closed again, her face turning back towards the corner of the couch where she'd kept herself pressed for most of the day. When he'd seen her at lunch she'd been feeling well enough to sit up and watch a crystal of twentieth century cartoons she'd requested he borrow from Michael---a strange request to John, though Michael hadn't seemed surprised in the slightest, handing over the data crystal willingly. Now she was back to lying here, in a half-fetal curl, one hand above her head, one across her belly pressed tight against the skin that she had commented was unusually tender, her eyes closed, her tolerance of loud noise and bright light nil.

"I'm sorry you're sick," he whispered, not for the first time that day. "I know...Minbari don't get sick often. This is the human part of the pregnancy vying for control, and it's probably worse because it has to fight off the Minbari part of your system."

Her chin moved just slightly, her current version of a nod.

"You do not..." she trailed off, swallowing, then continued, "...need to apologize, John. I am ill. There is nothing that can be done about it."

"Actually, if you'd just take..."

"I do not wish to take the antibiotics Stephen gave me just yet," she said, another argument they'd had before during the day. "He did not run any tests using them...what if my conflicting systems do not accept them? It could do more harm, John. I cannot take that risk, not just now."

Her face contorted in sudden pain and she curled a little tighter, releasing herself a moment later, her skin burning against his fingers. If she was fully human, he might have checked her for a fever, but she was still Minbari in this respect. Minbari did not normally sweat in their outer layers of skin, but cooled themselves down by perspiring on one of the lower layers, which meant that when they did so, their outer layers of skin felt unbearably hot to the human touch. It was uncomfortable for them, but not in the same way. When a Minbari did begin to sweat on the outer layers, that was when one usually had to worry about a fever in them.

"Is there anything I can get you?" he asked, and he knew she could hear the pitiful desperation in his voice. He couldn't bear to see her this way, in so much pain. He had rarely seen her in physical pain, and it felt so wrong, to watch her and not do anything. To be so useless.

"Water," she requested from between chapped lips which she wetted with a quick dart of her tiny tongue.

He nodded and let go of her hand, stepping away, into the soft light of the kitchen, the only light in the main area that was still on. He kept his eyes on her as he moved around the kitchen, pouring cold, filtered water. He could only see the side of her face, pressed against the back of the couch, her fingers curled near her forehead. Her skin was unusually pale, even for her. She would have bouts of tremendous pain and heat, like the one he'd just witnessed, and then she'd have long periods of extreme discomfort in her belly and aching in her muscles, her skin cold and clammy.

He knew that if she moved too quickly, opened her eyes too suddenly, heard anything loudly enough to pierce the slight haze she'd built over her brain, the tides would immediately turn and she'd be sprawling in pain, everything in her stomach a lost cause.

He went back to her side, and she gradually turned her head and opened her eyes, beckoning him. He nodded, put down the water, and reached down with both hands to help her to a slow sitting position. He sat down next to her as she finally managed to sit all the way up, leaning against his side, her head against his shoulder, her crest gently brushing his cheek.

He'd discovered early on that while the bony formation could cause extreme discomfort, pain, or even death when angled properly, usually deliberately on the Minbari's part (or so Delenn had told him), it was softer than it appeared. It reminded him of her hips; the same soft skin, with an underlying bony sharpness.

"Here," he said, putting one arm around her to hold her, the other hand coming up with the glass of water, helping her shaking hands to hold it as she drank from it slowly, carefully, tiny sips at a time.

"Mmph," she protested, pushing the glass away for a moment. "Everything tastes...like blood, John. Everything tastes like blood. Salt and metal."

"Metallic tastes are common to pregnant human women too," he said, and she closed her eyes.

"I should have read more about pregnant human women, obviously," she commented dryly, and he smiled and handed her the glass again. She finished it slowly, and he was patient. There was nothing he'd rather be doing than taking care of her, and he'd as much said so when he'd left work early, postponing several meetings for the next day. He had managed to begin arrangements for their little `vacation,' though. For that he was grateful. Now, seeing her like this, he wanted to get away, alone with her, as soon as possible. Away from all the pressures of their ordinary, everyday lives.

He glanced at her as she closed her eyes and rested her head on his shoulder again, her arms coming up around him, holding herself to him as closely as she could without upsetting herself. His arms around her seemed a comfort to her, for which he was grateful, since he didn't know what else to do.

It was only a few moments before she started in his arms, making a strangled sound in the back of her throat and then slapping a hand over her mouth. His arms fell away instantly, setting her free. She stepped off the couch and was running, scrambling into the bathroom, kneeling on the floor. He was right behind her, his hand rubbing soothing patterns over her back as she heaved, mostly dry, and he whispered sweet nothings as her breath shuddered, her eyes closed tightly, trying not to cry. Some of his words were in English, and some in roughly spoken Minbari, words of comfort that he'd picked up from her over the years, and she appreciated the effort.

When she was finished he helped her clean herself up and watched as she lay down on the floor, against the cool tiles, her head in his lap. He kept one hand on the top of her head, almost protectively, and ran the other through her hair, knowing she found it soothing.

When he heard her breathing even out, long and slow, he gently slipped his hands down her body, one arm under her knees, the other under her arms, and he picked her up, curling her against his chest, and only half-asleep, she responded, her arms around him, her face against his neck. He carried her to the bed, making sure all the lights were off everywhere except that single comforting kitchen light, and he set her down carefully against the covers, then rolled them out from underneath her and pulled them up to just under her arms. She rolled partially onto her side immediately, her arm again swinging over her stomach.

He undressed and slipped into bed next to her, and uncaring of whatever Minbari modesty she normally practiced, he spooned up against her as he'd so longed to do before. Sliding down her body slightly, he settled with his lips at her neck, his arms around her middle, his hands flat against her belly, underneath her own hand, which closed over his while she was still slightly awake. Apparently, she didn't mind the position.

When he finally felt the heat in her skin fade to its normal temperature, he slept.

*****

**Late February, 2256**

He awoke with a start, the kind of sudden pounding heartache that reminded him that he wasn't alone.

"You slept late," his mysterious companion's soft, lyrical voice whispered to him from across the space. He quickly propped himself up on his elbows, unnerved by the slight echo of her voice, the way that he couldn't place her location with just his ears.

She had set up several candles around her own space, scented candles. The air around them smelled of fruit and jasmine. She was sitting against the wall, her knees pulled up under her chin, her arms around her legs, watching him. She must have been doing so for quite some time; her candles were burned down by about an hour's worth, and her books were lying open around her, but he could tell that she had not been looking at them.

"Incense does that to me," he joked, and she quirked a small smile at him, lifting her chin from her knees to peer at him curiously.

"If it bothers you, tell me," she said, and he shook his head as he sat up.

"It doesn't bother me. It's quite nice, actually."

"Good. It is...soothing to me," she said, and he found himself feeling self-conscious under the weight of her gaze as he moved about, looking for food in his pack.

"I thought you said you weren't in need of comfort," he said, and she chuckled wryly. He'd never heard a Minbari chuckle before. He hadn't been sure if they knew how to laugh.

"The soul is always in need of comfort," she replied, smiling sagely. "It is our greatest darkness, our greatest light. The goal is to stand somewhere between the two, to have an understanding of both."

"Whose goal might that be?" he asked, glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes.

"The goal of any soul that has lived and lost its way. Every soul does this...it is part of the journey. The soul must lose itself to find its way."

"I like that," he said with a smile as he sat back down with a food pack. He held out one towards her, but she shook her head, indicating her own pack and a plate next to it, holding a half-eaten slice of Minbari bread and the core of some kind of fruit.

"Surely you have a quote for that," she said, a slight note of teasing in her voice, and he chuckled.

"You already know me too well," he commented with a smirk.

She frowned and said, "It is not in my belief system that one can ever know another soul `too well'...oh, it is painful sometimes to know one so completely, but it is rare and wonderful."

"Mm," he said, eyes slipping closed as he listened to her musical voice and considered the question she had posed. "I think I've got one. `All times I have enjoy'd greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea.'"

"Very good," she complimented, running the tip of her tongue around her lips. He watched the motion, mesmerized. "These quotes of yours...do they come from your prophets?"

"Some of us would claim so," he said with a smile, and she tilted her head curiously at him. "Many of the storytellers of our planet are not acknowledged as prophets...they are nothing more than storytellers. But there are those of us, secret admirers of the work, that believe that there's something deeper...that maybe sometimes a mere storyteller can simply, through grace and wisdom, tip the scales and look a little into the past or future."

"Time is fluid," she commented. "It does not seem entirely implausible."

"No, not at all," he agreed, smiling. "Tell me...tell me something about this prophet of yours, Valen."

She shifted, and he had the distinct impression that she was suddenly uncomfortable, but her face evened into its normal, lovely mask after a second. As he watched, she moved to sitting cross-legged, her hands reaching out for her books, closing them all and setting them aside.

"He appeared to my people one thousand of your years ago almost to the date," she said, her eyes on the books under her hands. "He brought with him a weapon that saved us in the last Great War, and with that a new hope for peace, for enlightenment. He was wise, and kind, and great. Everyone instantly respected and admired him, despite the fact that my people quickly learned that he was Minbari but somehow...not. Minbari not born of Minbari, they called him. It is unknown exactly where he came from, and how he knew so much. His visions of the future have continued to fill us with hope, and fear. Almost all of them have come true. His teachings remain the backbone of our society."

"Do your people not believe in a...well, we call it a god," he asked, fascinated by her, by her tone, her words. "A higher being, someone who created the universe."

She let out a short laugh of disbelief, and he drew himself back against the wall, slightly startled by the sound.

"We would not presume to believe that we can even begin to understand the creation of the universe," she said, then glanced at him. "I suppose that would be belief to some, though. We...we believe that we shall soon see the First Ones of the universe, the earliest races, the ones who do know how it was all created. Valen wrote that we would see them soon, and I believe."

"And what about you, the individual? What role do you play in this belief system, in...in Valen's teachings?" he asked, eyebrows lifted.

"Each individual is cherished, a child of Valen and more importantly, of the universe," she replied. "I am no different."

"Aren't you?" he asked, eyes narrowing at her slightly, considering her. "There is something about you, Delenn, that makes you seem...larger, somehow. Your presence is...well, I wouldn't say commanding, exactly, but it is...encompassing."

She smiled wanly, tilting her head.

"I appreciate the compliment, but I think that is merely your perception of me. It is the mystical quality of my people that your people sees because you do not understand us. I am a curiosity to you. I am sure if you were to spend any length of time with me among my own people, with us, you would grow as used to me as to everything else you have grown used to."

He nodded, not voicing his conviction that that wasn't true; there was something about her far from common, something more than that mystical quality that he freely admitted he saw in many of her people.

She had changed, he noticed for the first time, his eyes sweeping her petite, curled figure. Minbari silks, in varying shades of purple, woven in intricate patterns on a simple tunic that fell to just below her hips, and loose pants. Bare feet. Such small feet. Her fingers against her knees were small too, slender, pale.

"We may be here for awhile," he said, glancing at the candles surrounding them. "Are we just going to sit around like this, talking?"

"Is there something you would rather be doing?" she asked, her eyes half-lidded in the light. "I am fine by myself, meditating, if you would prefer mental privacy."

He smiled, his eyes lighting up in the candlelight. She watched him, her eyes glinting obsidian.

"We're both here to supposedly do a preliminary survey of this place," he said, gesturing to his equipment and hers, across from him, not all too unlike his own, though perhaps more advanced. "We should do that, during the daytime."

"It will only take a few days," she said, and one of her eye ridges lifted; the human version of a cocked eyebrow. She did not have eyebrows; in fact, he knew from his myriad experiences with the Minbari during the war, she would have no body hair anywhere except her eyelashes. He didn't know why evolution had left them with even that small bit. "Less time for a surface scan because we do not have to go through the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we will not be able to do more in-depth scans of the atmosphere, but we can make do."

"Agreed. But still, it is an occupation. How do we know when we'll get off this rock?"

"My ship should be returning for me in approximately one of your weeks," she said, one of the first fully truthful things that had escaped her mouth yet. "My beacon was damaged, so I cannot summon them any quicker."

"I turned on my beacon, but I don't know if or when my people will respond," he said with a slight shrug. "So, we're here for at least a week, then."

"Then let us go," she said, getting to her feet in one smooth motion. "Our work will be made faster if we do it together."

"Sure you want to risk exposing a human to your technology?" he asked as he stood, gesturing to her equipment.

She chuckled.

"I do not think it will be a problem. Surveying equipment is not generally considered a force of destruction."

He laughed at that, his eyes on her as she packed several things into her pack, then glanced off to the side, into the darkness.

"I will...be back in a moment," she said. "I must change."

She disappeared into the shadows, out of range of the candlelight, and he could hear her breathing, her clothing rustling in the echoing stillness.

"Ready," she said as she emerged, dressed again in what she'd been wearing the night before, not that unlike his own standard survival outfit. "Shall we?"

He gestured ahead of himself, and she nodded and stepped in front of him.

He'd thought that the night would be long. It was going to be an even longer week.

*****

**Early August, 2262**

The door chimed, louder than he would have liked.

"Come," he called as softly as he could.

The door slid open and then shut again as someone entered.

"Mr. President," greeted a low, female voice. Captain Elizabeth Lochley. "Is this a bad time?"

He turned his head towards her, following the line of her eyes as she looked past his shoulder, into the sleeping area, at the small figure of Delenn sprawled underneath the dark covers, dwarfed by the bed. Her hands were curled against the pillows, her lingering discomfort still obvious. To his eyes, anyway.

"It's fine," he said, his voice just above a whisper. "But speak softly. I'd rather not wake her. She's had a rough night."

"I heard that the Ambassador was not feeling well," Lochley said, her voice lower, to his appreciation. "How is she doing?"

"She'll...she'll be all right," he said, his eyes again on the sleeping form of his wife. "It's not especially serious. She just needs to rest."

"Is there anything Stephen can do for her?" the Captain inquired quietly, and John glanced back at her, smiling.

"Not really," he said, and his eyes fell on Delenn's face, unlined in sleep. "She's pregnant."

He could hear the shock in Captain Lochley's silence.

"That's...incredible," Lochley said finally. "I didn't think..."

"Mm, believe me, Captain Lochley, we're just as surprised as you."

"Well, congratulations are in order, then."

"We're not counting our blessings just yet," he said, glancing back at her. "This...this is just morning sickness. But her two biologies are conflicting with the addition of this new, combined biology...we still don't know if she can carry the baby to term and...live."

His voice grew hoarse, and he cleared his throat and covered his mouth with one hand, his arms folded over his bare chest.

"Ah," Lochley commented, struck by the emotion in his voice. She knew him to be an emotional man, but normally reserved. Delenn had always been his weakness, or perhaps his greatest strength. "In that case, let us hope for the best."

"Mm, indeed," he said, suddenly gathering himself professionally. He reached out and pulled closed the doors of the bedroom, then turned to Lochley, arms folded over his chest again, but not in thoughtfulness. "What is it, Captain Lochley? Surely you didn't come to talk about Delenn."

"Though the subject is important, of course," Lochley said with a faint smile. "Actually, Mr. President, I believe it concerns her...I was just informed that you were not planning on attending the council meeting tonight. Sir, with your upcoming vacation, and the number of Ambassadors who have traveled here specifically for this, I just don't know when..."

He grimaced.

"That was today?" he shook his head. "I've been so wrapped up with...anyway, Captain, of course I'll attend. Just give me a minute...I'll see if Delenn's feeling up to it."

"Her presence is just as important," Lochley commented, and John nodded, grimacing again. He disappeared between the bedroom doors and she turned to the decor of his quarters. There were no pictures. Not even of Delenn. She saw several picture frames scattered around the room, but all of them were lying flat, on tables, shelves. She walked over and picked one up. His other wife, Anna Sheridan.

Why were all the pictures turned down? There were no pictures of her, she who had been his first, if short-lived, wife. Couldn't he forget Anna similarly?

There were some mysteries about John Sheridan that she wasn't sure she would ever want to know.

*****

He sat down next to her carefully, not wishing to jar her, and leaned over her, his lips brushing her forehead. She stirred instantly, her lips sliding open, air whistling out against his cheek, her face turning towards him though her eyes scrunched shut.

"Mm, what time is it?" she whispered, her voice husky with sleep.

"Almost seven," he answered, smiling down at her as her eyes fluttered open, finally settling on his face. "The Council meeting is soon...are you feeling up to it? I can make some excuse, if you want..."

Her eyes widened and she sat up quickly, quicker than made him comfortable. But she didn't sway, didn't bolt, didn't react at all except to push against him where he was blocking her way.

"It's important that I be there, I..." she began, and he chuckled and reached out to her, catching her arm before she could slip off the bed.

"Don't overextend yourself if you don't need to," he warned, his tone playful, glad to see her suddenly looking so exuberant.

She stared at him a moment, then smiled, albeit a little nervously.

"I...don't have any clothes here except the ones I was wearing yesterday," she said then, softly, biting her lip.

"It's okay, we'll get you some," he said, kissing her lightly on the mouth before he let her go. She slipped off the bed and padded directly across to the bathroom, closing the door behind herself. He smiled, shook his head, and picked up his suit, dressing quickly while he heard her freshening up in the bathroom. When he'd finished, he made his way back into the living room, again closing the bedroom doors behind himself.

"We'll be right there," he assured Captain Lochley, who turned when he reappeared.

"Then Ambassador Delenn is feeling better?" Lochley inquired, watching him as he brushed his hair, observing himself in the nearest small mirror.

"Yes, apparently. I'm sure she appreciates your concern," he said distractedly. "Thank you, Captain."

"We'll wait for you, Mr. President," the Captain said, then bowed and started out.

"Oh, Libby," he called after her, and she turned back, knowing he meant business when he used the old nickname. "Don't tell anyone...about Delenn. I don't know if I was even supposed to tell you. We haven't discussed it yet."

"Of course, sir. John," Lochley returned, with a slight smile. "You may trust my discretion."

"Thank you," he said again, more genuinely this time, and she nodded, turned, and left.

"I heard all of that," Delenn commented dryly as she came out of the bedroom, pulling on her clothes from the other day as she walked. He glanced at her for a reaction, but she only looked vaguely smug, so he stood in front of her and helped her finish fastening herself up.

"If you're quick, we should have just enough time to get you some new clothes and get to the meeting on time," he said, finishing with her collar as she clicked the fastener at her waist into place. "Are you going to be okay?"

"I think so," she said, placing a hand over her stomach. "I am calm for now. If that changes, I will be sure to let you know."

He laughed and ushered her out the door.

*****
Part Eight
Line

*****
Another floor
Another ceiling
Counting stars with double meanings
*****

**Late February, 2256**

They had not spoken much since that morning, keeping themselves busy with their `survey,' jotting down data in the notebook he'd brought with him, and then, when they'd returned, eating their respective dinners in silence.

After her meal, she'd gone back to reading her texts, her knees again folded against her chest. He'd pulled out his volume of Tennyson, but he couldn't help being distracted by her constant presence. He watched her, watched the way her bottom lip caught on her teeth in consternation as she concentrated, seeming almost to be willing her eyes to bore a hole through the pages. He watched the way her body would be almost preternaturally still for indefinite lengths of time and then she would shift, her entire body, just to get a different balance.

She was fascinating. He didn't know whether it was because he was alone with her in a barren environment, or because he was emotionally unstable, more so than usual, or if it was because she was beautiful and enigmatic and he'd never been quite so captivated by a woman in his life. Even Catherine, whom he'd loved and denied for far too long to feel for her this innocent infatuation which clenched his mind when he looked at this creature, an infatuation tainted with the darkness of angry, almost furious desire.

Perfection, he thought when he looked at Delenn. And that was the frightening part. He had told himself time and again that he was not looking for pure perfection. That such beauty always came with a price, and that the price was borne in pain. He didn't want that.

But he was captivated, held prisoner by her mere presence. Who was she? Was it really coincidence that they'd ended up on this planet together, all alone in the night? Was she who she claimed to be, and was she as pure as she appeared to be? Had she been sent to assassinate him, physically or emotionally, or to teach him something? Or had they met purely by chance? Was it fate?

He had so many questions, and none that he felt remotely comfortable voicing aloud.

That was, of course, when he wasn't entertaining the eerie notion that perhaps it didn't matter what he spoke aloud; maybe she could read his thoughts.

They had telepaths on Minbar...

In the end, it came down to an internal struggle that he hadn't bothered fighting in a long time, and not over anyone but himself. Even with Catherine, it was always about his feelings.

Every inch of rational thought screamed at him that Delenn of the Minbari could not be trusted. That there was something important that she was hiding, something potentially vital to his survival, or perhaps the survival of something greater. But every ounce of emotion, all the last vestiges of spirituality within him, cried out in defiance that she was the only one he'd come across in a long time who could be trusted absolutely. The only one who would never betray him.

And he didn't even know her.

So he watched her, allowing himself his childish fascination in everything she did, every move she made, every word she spoke, every inflection in her voice.

It occurred to him that he had not heard her laugh. He'd heard her chuckle, he'd heard her bark derision, only in the last day. But he had not heard her laugh. A full, pure laugh, the laugh of the soul, the laugh that bolstered happiness and created delight, piercing through the darkness. The laugh that showed the true face of a person, underneath all other layers. Even sleep could be corrupted eventually, after too many years of pain and fear and death.

It was his new crusade. He would do anything to hear that sound come from her lips. And so, set in his course of action, he put down his book, propped himself on one elbow, focused his eyes on her intently, and said, "Do you know, a variation on the word `Delenn' on my world means `woolen?' Of a sheep, essentially."

At first her glance was incredulous, and then her book dropped closed and she stared at him for a long moment as though trying to fathom him as he'd been trying to fathom her, spurned on by the weak attempt at humor he'd made. It had occurred to him and he'd found it just silly enough to seem hilarious in his own mind, especially considering the very non-woolen woman before him.

And then she was laughing, great rolls of it bubbling up through her chest and exploding through her mouth. Her head was thrown back, her knees clenched together and her hands in turn clenching her knees, her stomach ailing her, laughing so hard she felt her eyes watering and had to force herself to calm down.

As she came back to herself she saw the width and brightness of his smile through her moist eyes and brushed away the tears. Sighing several great breaths, she attempted to bring her body under control, to stop the mad shaking her sudden fit of merriment had induced.

"Oh, Valen's Name," she whispered, shaking her head as another chuckle rolled through her. "Thank you. I think I needed that."

"You're welcome. I thought you might find that funny," he said, his smile growing more familiar, less bright. His eyes were shining at her, and she felt herself truly comforted under their gaze. She had been with him for a day, and already she could see Valen in those eyes. They had not shone like this aboard her ship, under the influence of drugs and torture.

"It seems to me that very little about you is `woolen,'" he added, his smile going lopsided as he grinned at her.

She shook her head, smiling.

"What exactly is a sheep?" she asked then, and now he laughed loudly, and she chortled with him, covering her mouth with her hands as she started to hiccup, her system unused to this. Members of the Grey Council did not laugh; not like this. She calmed herself quickly, doing her breathing exercises to soothe her diaphragm.

"It's a fairly small animal with woolen hair. This wool is stripped off of it and used in the making of human clothing," Jeff explained, grinning. "I suppose there are similar animals on your planet?"

"No," she shook her head, trying to make herself stop smiling but finding it difficult. "We respect our animals too much to do any such thing as strip their hide...we use the silks of our spiders and, um..."

"Caterpillars?"

"Something like that. We use these silks because they are produced with reverence and we treat them with reverence, always repaying the creatures the debt we owe them."

"I've heard Minbari silk is the best in the galaxy," he said, rolling over onto his stomach as he watched her, chin propped up in his hands. "The most colorful, the softest...the most expensive anywhere but on Minbar, and it's uncommon for a non-Minbari to even get onto the planet, much less be able to buy anything."

"Mm. Touch it," she offered, crawling to the edge of her area and holding out one of her arms across the space between them. She had changed back into the same ensemble as before.

He did, his fingers lightly brushing the fabric and then, covertly, just to have the chance to feel it again, moving against the skin of her wrist.

"It is beautiful," he commented, surprised and dismayed by the emotion in his voice, which had dropped an octave, a bare whisper in the flickering stillness around them. His hand dropped away but she did not move, poised in front of him, her eyes locked with his for a long moment before she silently moved back to her place, crossing her legs, her face set in a lack of expression that he hadn't yet seen from her. Some kind of defense mechanism?

"Among my people, the word `Jefri' means..." she paused, considering. "Well, I suppose the best translation would be, `misguided angel.'"

The solemn silence stretched between them and he realized that something very important had just happened, one of those events that was not meant to be fully understood until it was the right time. Something he would come to understand later, if he was lucky.

His eyes had drifted away when he heard her moving, positioning herself against the hard rock wall. He had not noticed her doing so the night before, and it was curious to him now, because when she had righted herself in a satisfactory angle against the wall, she closed her eyes, focused her breathing, and appeared, from her relaxed posture, to be attempting to go to sleep. If she had been meditating, he would have recognized it.

"What are you doing?" he asked, allowing his curiosity into his voice. They truly were a fascinating people, the Minbari, he thought, and none so fascinating as this one. He wondered if she thought the same of him, of his people. Though she didn't appear to hold any sort of interest in him whatsoever, except as a companion on a lonely, isolated world that was as alien to her as to him.

"I am trying to sleep," she replied, a small smile playing with her lips. "Do you have a problem with that?"

"No," he answered, watching her as her hands reached out, her eyes still closed, and her fingers pinched out most of the candles around her. All but one. She did not harm herself, didn't even appear to feel any heat. Her aim was perfect, despite her closed eyes.

He wondered, not for the first time, what caste she was of. This exercise suggested Warrior to him. But then, he didn't know much about what made who a part of which caste.

"Why do you...why do you sit up when you sleep?" he asked, becoming braver.

"It is bad luck to sleep on one's back, horizontal with the ground," she answered coolly. "The position invites death, and with it, the posture, so far from that needed for simple defense, invites the Soul Hunter."

"Soul Hunter?" he repeated, but she did not elaborate. Her breath started to even out, and he watched her drifting off...

She turned her head, coming fully awake again, and shifted her entire body as he'd watched her doing all evening. Every limb twitched in motion, but the result of her pains was nothing more than a simple shift in weight balance.

Uncomfortable, he realized. She was physically uncomfortable. The Minbari might not have slept flat, but however they did sleep, it was not quite like this, up against a bumpy rock wall with more of the same underneath her bottom, where all her weight rested. Even her hands, so poetic in their own right, limp where they rested between her knees, appeared to protest out of discomfort.

The second time she shifted she had been closer to sleep, and he could see the frustration in the way her knees and fingers clenched, the strain in the slight arch her neck made before she attempted to settle in again.

"Delenn," he said softly, having moved himself quite some time ago. He was sitting against a makeshift pillow he'd created out of his blankets and some of his clothes, piled against one of the rocks jutting up from the cave floor from previous earthquakes.

Her eyes shot open, obviously startled by the disturbance, and they flew to him, questioning instantly as she sat up straight, peering at him.

"You're never going to get to sleep like that," he said with a gentle smile. "Come here."

He patted the ground in front of himself, and her eyes followed the motion and moved back to his face, her head cocking to one side, considering him, not understanding.

"But I..." she began, and he shook his head.

"Please, Delenn. Trust me."

His words seemed to touch her deeply, for he saw a sudden doubt in her eyes, watched her convictions in herself falter for a moment before she righted herself, gathering her courage and her Minbari silk covers and crawling across the open space, pulling along her last lit candle. She placed the candle next to his and moved herself where he indicated, between his bent knees. Without asking permission and therefore hesitant, he touched her shoulders, using that leverage to maneuver her, to pull her up against him, back against his chest, resting in the angle he'd seen her take against the far wall. She went willingly but her limbs were tense, untrusting. He did not do anything else, removing his hands from her, placing them on his knees, simply waiting.

After an interminably long period of time, her exhaustion got the better of her, and he felt whatever pride or modesty she had left fading away, her muscles finally relaxing back against him. Her body went limp against his around the same time her smooth head tucked underneath his chin, against his chest, her crest carefully turned away from his face.

"Be careful of my crest when sleeping," she whispered groggily just before she fell asleep, her breathing low, deep and even. He heeded the warning despite not understanding it: could he hurt her, or himself? Or both?

He fell asleep shortly after, and somewhere along the line, his arms had slipped around her slim waist, holding her close to himself as he slept, his head back against the rocks. And he didn't care.

The strange thing was, neither did she.

*****

**Early August, 2262**

She had swayed once during her short speech, causing a general stir in the meeting room mainly consisting of concerned voices in a variety of strange accents inquiring as to whether she was all right. But after a moment with closed eyes and a hand at her forehead, thumb pressed to her temple, she glanced back at John and flicked him a small smile of encouragement, and the hands at her elbow and waist left, going back to their casual, professional place at the small of his back.

She finished without further incident and sat down, at which point Ambassador Vir Cotto, who had chosen to attend the meeting despite the Centauri Republic's cessation from the Alliance, leaned over from where he sat next to her and inquired more quietly, more personally, how she was feeling.

"I am fine, Vir," she whispered at him, waving off further protests, trying to be quiet while John spoke, to give him the reciprocal courtesy.

Afterwards she noticed Captain Lochley staring at her, and she smiled sweetly, the smile widening as she noticed the nervous manner in which the Captain's eyes fell away. Apparently John is not the only one mystified by a pregnant half-human half-Minbari, she thought to herself, amused. She had broken many molds in her lifetime; why not another?

Walking down the hallway, each of them with hands folded behind their backs, contemplating various things, John glanced at her with concern several times but did not say anything, while she simmered in her own bemusement. She was partially amused at his attempt to be courteous, partially aggrieved that she had been so sick and might be again, but more for his sake than hers. They had discussed little regarding the pregnancy, but the first thing Stephen had asked her was whether she wanted to take the risk of keeping the child. She had been shocked at first; souls were a precious thing on her world, and they were not to be damaged for the petty interests of their parents. She had been so shocked that she had asked what the question meant, what Stephen was implying by asking it, and John and Stephen had shared an uncomfortable glance.

John had sat on the bed with her, taking over the job that neither man really wanted to do. It was obvious that she had no idea.

"Delenn," John had said softly, his hands picking up one of hers, his fingers tracing the lines of her fingers. "Your two biologies...they're conflicting over this new addition to your system. Now, you're genetically unstable enough as it is...Stephen just isn't sure if you can carry this baby to term and live to see it. If we keep this baby, there's a chance that neither you nor the child will survive."

She had tried not to overreact, her free hand clenching underneath the covers, but John knew her too well. Her jaw had tightened, her eyes blazed, her voice hardened a little, but it was enough to have him looking scared. A fight with a Minbari woman was a very unpleasant thing, particularly when she was Ambassador Delenn of the family Mir, former Satai of the Grey Council, breaker of the Grey Council and then creator of the new, reformed Grey Council, unofficial leader of the Religious Caste, Entil'zha of the Anla'shok, leader of the Advisory Council to the new Interstellar Alliance, wife of the President of said Alliance. She was a woman who had taken the torture of the Starfire Wheel to stop a civil war among her people, who had taken a knife wound to save a man she was unsure of, a man who was unsure of her. Though he didn't know it at the time, she was a woman who had started a brutal war, killing hundreds of thousands, with merely a few words, a woman who had stopped the same war with similar resolve.

No, it was not good to fight with her. Not at all.

"So you are suggesting that I should...that we should..." she trailed off on a partially choked breath, feeling it well up in her, the utter surprise that such a thing would be even considerable. She was aware of the fact that medical abortion was legal among the humans, had been for some time; it was one of the reasons why her people had found them so barbaric. But it was *not* legal among the Minbari. In fact, the technology had never even been fully developed. All life was cherished on Minbar, all souls were equal. Souls had been lost in the last few years; procreation was all the more revered and respected now. And because the rituals of love and sex were so reserved, so careful, there had never seemed to be a need...even in medical emergency, the woman usually sacrificed herself rather than kill a soul so young so brutally, tainting it.

"The procedure is quick, painless for both," Stephen had interjected then, seeing the fire in Delenn's eyes, directed at no one in particular. As though she was seething over the fact that the question merely existed.

"It is sanctioned murder!" she had shouted, and John had dropped her hand, wincing. Stephen had taken several steps back, stunned. Delenn did not yell. It had been rare that she had raised her voice at all, even to John in private, and even so, she seemed to always, in public at least, keep some measure of civility or pleasantry in her tone.

She had gritted her teeth, forcing herself to breathe, to calm down. "I'm...sorry. I know that it is not considered so on your world, but...John, Stephen, I'm afraid that the question is a `moot point' to me. I am at least in some part Minbari. This baby is at least in some part Minbari. Minbari do not kill Minbari. It is our greatest covenant with Valen. I cannot break that, nor would I if it was my last chance for survival. I cannot kill a soul that has just been reborn, a child of the stuff of you and of me, John. Of us together."

She had looked at him imploringly, begging him to understand her view, though she saw the pain in his eyes.

"Delenn...I want this baby as much as you do," he had whispered, and she noticed that Stephen had turned away, as though trying to give them some measure of privacy. "But I have to be honest with you. If it comes down to a choice between the baby and you, I would always choose you."

She had looked at him for a long moment, then finally given him a tiny smile, which had received a relieved echo on his shell-shocked face. Her fingers had brushed his cheek, then dropped back to the bed, where his hands had taken them again.

"I can understand that, John. But you must understand that I cannot condone it. If it is true that I may die because of this child, then I will die. There is no choice for me, and I would not want myself to consider one."

He'd looked at her for the longest time, warring inwardly with himself.

"We'll monitor her closely," Stephen had broken in quietly. "We'll do everything we can to make sure this goes smoothly. If we're lucky, her system will adjust to this baby as quickly as it did to the original changes, and then there shouldn't be a problem."

"John," she'd said when he still looked unsure. "Consider this...when you visited our future, you said that we had a son, a son named David. Both of us seemed alive and well, did we not?"

Something had lit in the back of his eyes, a deep-running hope.

"Maybe..." he'd said, and nothing else. The concept of time was not one to be trifled with. He would be nothing less than careful about what he believed from his so-called future and what he didn't. He would be content to simply wait.

But he had been determined to try for his own reasons, and seeing the absolute conviction in her eyes, he knew that he had no choice. They would try. If something went wrong...well, then they'd have to discuss this further.

So she knew that even the so-called normal human morning sickness she had been experiencing worried him, perhaps even terrified him.

Did he even begin to realize her own terror?

She shivered just thinking about it. They had less than nineteen years left. She had just less than a year before they could be absolutely sure if both she and the baby would survive her own body's onslaught.

The sentence carried the same weight, all the same.

*****

**Late February, 2256**

Again the day had passed uneventfully, after beginning differently than ever before, for both of them.

She had stirred first, immediately confused, first about her surroundings, and then about the weight on her stomach. Her glance at the candlelit cave had answered both questions: she was on a moon in Grid Epsilon, sleeping in the same way any average Minbari would, except that she was doing it up against a man, a *human* man with the soul of Valen. His arms were comfortably settled around her waist, as if they were old lovers and he were able to do so without worrying about any sort of repercussions.

Despite her acute awareness of the fact that the simple warmth of another being's arms around her was rare and wonderful, and that his particular arms, their weight on her trembling skin, felt absolutely sublime, she frowned, gently chastising herself for such casualness. She should not have accepted his offer at all last night, but she wanted to give him the impression that she trusted him---which she herself found surprisingly easy to believe---and also, she had genuinely realized that his body would be far more comfortable than the rocks, against which she had been having trouble sleeping both nights.

When she pushed his arms away and slipped away from his warmth, he opened his eyes and lifted his head, instantly wary. She stopped in a crawling position, glancing back at him to make absolutely sure he recognized her so they didn't have a repeat of the other night's introductions. His eyes came unclouded when he saw her, and a smile spread across his face as he yawned and stretched. She watched the process, fascinated. Minbari did not yawn, and stretching was never so careless an act. She wondered how he did not directly put out his back, cracking his shoulders like that.

"Good morning," he said, a waking, groggy mumble.

<"Good morning,"> she replied, but she did so in Minbari, just to test. He looked at her, instantly intrigued by the sound.

"It occurs to me," he said, seeming surprised with himself, "that we've been here for over a day now, and I haven't heard you speak anything fluent in your own language until now. You...speak very well with the English language. I'd gotten used to it."

"You do not understand any Minbari, then?" she asked, tilting her head at him.

"I understand a few words. I had very little physical contact with your people during the war, and I've had only slightly more since then during the rare diplomatic proceedings where I've served as security, but all of those meetings have been in English. It's mostly from listening to Minbari talk to each other that I've learned what I have."

He noticed that the corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled, just like a human.

"I could teach you some, if you'd like," she said, and glanced over at his book. "I also read your language. I could teach you to say your verse in Minbari."

It was a strange offer, a strange situation. On any other day, he would have been surprised to find himself accepting.

"I'd like that," he said with a warm smile, which she returned whole- heartedly, despite the fact that he'd noticed she'd moved back across the cavern into her own little space, taking her covers with her, wrapping them around her slim legs, her arms around her torso, obviously chilly.

"Jeffrey Sinclair," she said after a long moment of silence, somehow managing to run all the syllables together into one word.

He grinned at her use of his name, the first time she had called him by anything.

"Yes, Delenn of Mir?" he answered, turning her own method back on her.

She pursed her lips, but he could tell already, just by the slight curve in her mouth, that she was amused.

"I wanted to thank you," she said, her voice soft, her eyes shining. "For last night. It was...much more comfortable."

He chuckled, glancing at the wall behind her.

"I imagine so," he said, smiling. "Anyway, it was my pleasure. Anytime."

"You seem to already place a great deal of trust in me, letting me get so close," she said, smiling. He wondered if she noticed the double meaning in her words.

"I have no reason not to trust you," he said, and she mentally ticked off another item on her list of something she'd wanted to learn about him. He was honest. He was not racist. He was kind, thoughtful, and his soul appeared good, if muddled.

"You attacked me the other night," she reminded him with a faint smile, recalling the look of wonder in his eyes when he'd first seen her. She didn't think she'd ever felt so good. Not since her First ceremony, at least. Or perhaps the time when Dukhat had held her hand...

He grimaced, realizing for the first time that he had done just that.

"Yes, I did," he said, and she wondered if she should have said anything when she witnessed the sudden guilt in his gaze, the imploring note in his voice. "I'm sorry. I didn't know who you were...I knew I wasn't alone on this place, and I wasn't sure if my company would be hostile."

"I felt the same," she assured him with a smile.

"But I doubt you would have come close to strangling me just to see who I was," he said, and she chuckled.

"Probably not, but I have grown used to the fact that human and Minbari methods for dealing with a variety of situations are *very* different," she said with a grin. "And besides, if I had been a Warrior, I might have done the same or worse to you if you had snuck up on me."

"You know, when I first saw you, all dressed in black, that slightly predatory gleam in your eye, I thought you might have been a Warrior," he said, and she looked vaguely bemused.

"Predatory gleam?" she repeated. "Hm...perhaps I must meditate more."

He laughed.

"Well, I found it appealing," he offered, and she smiled wanly. "Anyway, now that I've heard your voice, listened to you speak of Valen, watched you meditating, I can see you as nothing other than Religious. Do you merely practice, or are you a...we call them Priests or Priestesses, on Earth."

"I am a Priestess of a sort," she replied, her hands touching her books. "But Religious Priests are common among my caste. There are not many who do not take an active role in the Religion."

"It seems strange to think of a religion that worships a man, not a god," he commented, and she cocked her head.

"Does it? It is the opposite for me...it is strange to think of a religion which worships a being which may or may not even exist."

"We have an expression," he said, in answer to that. "Seeing is not necessarily believing, and believing is not necessarily seeing. The very core of our belief system is that something does not have to be tangible to be real. We believe in the soul, the consciousness, in the same way as we believe in our gods. We have no proof, but we somehow *know* they're there."

"The soul and the consciousness are proven," she argued with a slight, intrigued smile. "Or at least they are considered so on Minbar. So much would not be possible without consciousness...telepathy, Dreaming, conscience, emotion, intelligence, shared consciousness...it is all tangible in various forms, or at least it is considered to be so. As for the soul; if it can be stolen, surely it must exist."

"You mentioned a Soul Hunter earlier," he said. "What is it?"

"It steals souls, collects them," she answered.

"We have similar myths on Earth."

"Except that the Soul Hunter is not a myth," she said, her voice hardening slightly.

He didn't bother to argue. He had a feeling there was no way he could win.

"But still, how do you substantiate the physical presence of the soul?" he asked, curious to hear her answer.

"The soul is not a physical entity," she replied. "It is a creation of the stuff of the universe, the stuff of stars, containing all the beauty, all the horror, that makes everything what it is. But if you are looking for tangible essence...it does exist. I have not seen a soul, only because I kept my eyes closed, but I have felt it."

His eyes were intent on her, waiting for more, so she took a deep breath and continued.

He could see the grief in her eyes as she spoke.

"One of my greatest teachers was killed during the war between our two peoples," she said, glancing at him and then away. "I held his body long after the life had left it. Finally, when every cell in his body had died, with nothing left to hold him back, his soul left its shell to move on, to be reborn into a new body. I had closed my eyes, not wishing to taboo the soul's passage with my anger. But as it traveled, I felt it brush my cheek...warm, soft, enveloping. Penetrating against my skin. Comforting."

She swallowed and silenced after this particular confession, and he could tell that she'd just shared something intensely private, something she'd thought she'd never tell anyone. If she had been surprised that he seemed to place so much trust in her, then he was delighted and, frankly, honored that she seemed to place so much trust in him.

There was nothing to say to such a heartfelt anecdote, so he didn't speak, watching her as she recomposed herself and turned back to him, a slight, not entirely genuine smile touching her lips.

"So, shall we begin our day of exciting surveying?" she questioned earnestly, and he chuckled at her quite obvious attempt at humor and nodded, leaning over to pick up his equipment.

He looked forward to that night. Where would she sleep this time?

END PART EIGHT