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Another B5 fic enters the chat
I wrote this for a prompt over at Tumblr:
Maybe post-canon, Londo reads G'kar's book, and is comforted or amused by something about its descriptions of him?
I'll probably post this on AO3 eventually, but that would mean having to come up with a title. Now also posted on AO3!
Londo does not know what makes him order a copy of G'Kar's stupid book. The book is already circulating furtively on Centauri Prime. Londo is not quite sure what his people are getting out of reading it (entertainment, amusement, confirmation of their suspicions about other races; perhaps even a bit of quiet rebellion that the Drakh do not care about). As for himself, Londo not only refuses to examine his own motives closely, but he dares not, for fear of the Keeper picking up more than he wants it to know.
But he buys the book. And he reads it.
It becomes a bit of a ritual for him. When he isn't at state occasions, Londo takes most of his meals alone, sitting at one end of a vast dining table in a room meant for dozens of people. In front of him are neatly arranged gourmet dishes that he barely picks at, a bottle of brivari (his attendants have standing orders to bring another if he finishes it) .... and now, the book, and one of the few Centauri-to-Narn dictionaries that exists on the entire planet.
He could just read the bootleg Centauri translation already in circulation, but he suspects it is not very competently done, and he is surprised by the depth of his own feelings about reading it in the original language.
The Keeper does not particularly care about this new activity. It pays little attention to most of what he does, as long as he is not actively going against instructions.
Rather than bothering with a separate notebook or tablet in which to scribble his annotations as he struggles through the unfamiliar words, he scribbles on the book itself. He takes some pleasure from the knowledge that G'Kar would absolutely hate it. At first his notes are no more than those of a child learning orthography for the first time. Notes on pronunciation and meaning, a confused jumble as he tries to sort through the tenses and grammar and the strange pitfalls of Narnian spelling.
And slowly it begins to fall together and make sense.
It turns out that G'Kar was joking about "Prideful Wind Catcher" ... well, sort of. He uses a lot of nicknames and phrases to cover the identities of the real people in the book. Written Narn, it turns out, is very different from the spoken version: poetical and allusive, filled with creative epithets and figures of speech and shades of double meaning. Londo doesn't think of the Narn as a poetical people, or for that matter, of G'Kar as a poetical person, but what are a few more of his expectations turned inside out, at this point?
And he recognizes the events and the people that G'Kar is oh-so-poetically writing about. Oh, he recognizes them.
He recognizes them so much it hurts, and there are many times he puts the book project down, leaves it in his private quarters, locks it up. But he always brings it back out again, reads more, and by now he is becoming fluent enough in written Narn that he only needs the dictionary for unfamiliar words - which does not stop him from taking a sly, almost playful pleasure in writing increasingly complex notes in an unholy mix of Centauri and Narn, as if G'Kar can actually hear him through the pages.
Seeing G'Kar's impressions of him and the Centauri in general is a painful pleasure, like pressing on a bruise. It's spiteful and unfair and accurate and true, and he smiles a little at the thought of them then - of a younger G'Kar scribbling busily, in a prison cell, in his quarters, pouring out a flood of thoughts on his people's old enemy, their oppressors, that is very nearly evolving before Londo's eyes.
The chapters around Refa's murder are very hard to read.
About Cartagia, almost nothing is said, as if G'Kar did not even know how to approach that in writing ... or maybe he burned those pages.
It is easy for Londo to recognize himself in the early chapters. Unflattering, but easy. Later, it is much more difficult, because he can't quite believe that G'Kar actually sees him .... like that, the respect and warmth that shines between the figures of speech. And the last few sections, in which G'Kar is openly trying to amend those early negative impressions of the Centauri, and of Londo, are ones which he can only read in small snatches, and sometimes only when he has drunk so much that the Keeper is asleep, or when he is too drunk to care, or to remember most of it later.
And in between, there is the daily life on the station, and there is the voice of his friend, which Londo is slowly coming to hear even in the poetic and sometimes stilted style of Narn formal writing. It hurts, and it is wonderful, and sitting alone at the end of a long, empty table, he can almost imagine that he is back there, listening to G'Kar's voice telling him a story they both know by heart.
***
(After the death of Emperor Mollari II, Vir finds the book buried among Londo's personal effects, and - having become fluent in Narn during his years on Babylon 5 - reads the annotations ... all of them, from the earliest spelling notes to the crowded, sloppy, sometimes drunkenly incoherent handwriting filling every margin of every page in the last few chapters, as if Londo is having entire conversations with absent friends who cannot hear him, and with G'Kar most of all. It is profane and funny and loving and rambling and awful. Vir is not sure what to do with it. Publication seems far too invasive. In the end, he lets those who remain of their old friends read it, and he leaves it with a small collection of other personal effects, his and Londo's both, which are to be donated to a future museum long after they are both dead.)
Maybe post-canon, Londo reads G'kar's book, and is comforted or amused by something about its descriptions of him?
Londo does not know what makes him order a copy of G'Kar's stupid book. The book is already circulating furtively on Centauri Prime. Londo is not quite sure what his people are getting out of reading it (entertainment, amusement, confirmation of their suspicions about other races; perhaps even a bit of quiet rebellion that the Drakh do not care about). As for himself, Londo not only refuses to examine his own motives closely, but he dares not, for fear of the Keeper picking up more than he wants it to know.
But he buys the book. And he reads it.
It becomes a bit of a ritual for him. When he isn't at state occasions, Londo takes most of his meals alone, sitting at one end of a vast dining table in a room meant for dozens of people. In front of him are neatly arranged gourmet dishes that he barely picks at, a bottle of brivari (his attendants have standing orders to bring another if he finishes it) .... and now, the book, and one of the few Centauri-to-Narn dictionaries that exists on the entire planet.
He could just read the bootleg Centauri translation already in circulation, but he suspects it is not very competently done, and he is surprised by the depth of his own feelings about reading it in the original language.
The Keeper does not particularly care about this new activity. It pays little attention to most of what he does, as long as he is not actively going against instructions.
Rather than bothering with a separate notebook or tablet in which to scribble his annotations as he struggles through the unfamiliar words, he scribbles on the book itself. He takes some pleasure from the knowledge that G'Kar would absolutely hate it. At first his notes are no more than those of a child learning orthography for the first time. Notes on pronunciation and meaning, a confused jumble as he tries to sort through the tenses and grammar and the strange pitfalls of Narnian spelling.
And slowly it begins to fall together and make sense.
It turns out that G'Kar was joking about "Prideful Wind Catcher" ... well, sort of. He uses a lot of nicknames and phrases to cover the identities of the real people in the book. Written Narn, it turns out, is very different from the spoken version: poetical and allusive, filled with creative epithets and figures of speech and shades of double meaning. Londo doesn't think of the Narn as a poetical people, or for that matter, of G'Kar as a poetical person, but what are a few more of his expectations turned inside out, at this point?
And he recognizes the events and the people that G'Kar is oh-so-poetically writing about. Oh, he recognizes them.
He recognizes them so much it hurts, and there are many times he puts the book project down, leaves it in his private quarters, locks it up. But he always brings it back out again, reads more, and by now he is becoming fluent enough in written Narn that he only needs the dictionary for unfamiliar words - which does not stop him from taking a sly, almost playful pleasure in writing increasingly complex notes in an unholy mix of Centauri and Narn, as if G'Kar can actually hear him through the pages.
Seeing G'Kar's impressions of him and the Centauri in general is a painful pleasure, like pressing on a bruise. It's spiteful and unfair and accurate and true, and he smiles a little at the thought of them then - of a younger G'Kar scribbling busily, in a prison cell, in his quarters, pouring out a flood of thoughts on his people's old enemy, their oppressors, that is very nearly evolving before Londo's eyes.
The chapters around Refa's murder are very hard to read.
About Cartagia, almost nothing is said, as if G'Kar did not even know how to approach that in writing ... or maybe he burned those pages.
It is easy for Londo to recognize himself in the early chapters. Unflattering, but easy. Later, it is much more difficult, because he can't quite believe that G'Kar actually sees him .... like that, the respect and warmth that shines between the figures of speech. And the last few sections, in which G'Kar is openly trying to amend those early negative impressions of the Centauri, and of Londo, are ones which he can only read in small snatches, and sometimes only when he has drunk so much that the Keeper is asleep, or when he is too drunk to care, or to remember most of it later.
And in between, there is the daily life on the station, and there is the voice of his friend, which Londo is slowly coming to hear even in the poetic and sometimes stilted style of Narn formal writing. It hurts, and it is wonderful, and sitting alone at the end of a long, empty table, he can almost imagine that he is back there, listening to G'Kar's voice telling him a story they both know by heart.
***
(After the death of Emperor Mollari II, Vir finds the book buried among Londo's personal effects, and - having become fluent in Narn during his years on Babylon 5 - reads the annotations ... all of them, from the earliest spelling notes to the crowded, sloppy, sometimes drunkenly incoherent handwriting filling every margin of every page in the last few chapters, as if Londo is having entire conversations with absent friends who cannot hear him, and with G'Kar most of all. It is profane and funny and loving and rambling and awful. Vir is not sure what to do with it. Publication seems far too invasive. In the end, he lets those who remain of their old friends read it, and he leaves it with a small collection of other personal effects, his and Londo's both, which are to be donated to a future museum long after they are both dead.)
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