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Babylon 5 fic: Gift
Currently traveling, but I finished a thing!
I got a prompt on Tumblr earlier this month for a roleswap AU with Londo & G'Kar. I wrote a short ficlet for it a few days ago, then was promptly seized by the urge to write the entire story that goes with it.
Gift on AO3 (2,953 words, Babylon 5, gen)
Mid season four. Narns deliver a gift to G'Kar. He does not appreciate it in the slightest.
(A roleswap AU of sorts, set around the same general time frame as "No Surrender, No Retreat" in canon, in which reconciliation occurs from a completely different and even more fraught direction.)
Although G'Kar had firmly rejected his people's demand to lead them, and continued to do so, he found himself spending increasing amounts of time on the rapidly rebuilding Narn homeworld. His duties on Babylon 5 felt less important than ever, with Earth and Minbar both enmeshed in internal conflict and the League in turmoil. With Narn free of the Centauri, there was no longer a price on his head. He missed his friends on Babylon 5, but he was able to see them during his trips back. And - truth be told - the station was filled with reminders of a time in his life he did not particularly want to revisit. On his homeworld, there was little chance of turning a corner and coming face to face with something (or someone) he had no wish to see.
Although he refused to take up an official position with the reconstructed Kha'Ri, he definitely had some role in the government whether he wanted it or not -- a position with no formal title, something of an ambassador from other worlds to his own people. He advised, he did not command, but he ended up meeting with the Kha'Ri nearly every day to offer counsel, as well as helping with the organization and training of the rebuilt military. It was not the quiet writer's life that he sometimes dreamed of, but there were times when he was able to sit in the red dust of the rock garden behind his quarters in Moxtoke, under the free skies of Narn, scribbling new pages of his book, and he could not imagine being more content in any other place.
He was there, pondering revisions to his latest chapter, when a group of Narn in the uniforms of the new space force entered the garden with enough noise and high spirits for an invasion force.
"Honored G'Kar! We have brought you a gift!"
G'Kar sighed deeply and laid down his book and pen. This was one thing he had been dealing with in frustrating quantity; it was a mix of genuine appreciation from his people, who still gave him far more credit for freeing them than he believed he deserved, and attempts to bribe him, and he did not care to find out which one this was. "The only gift I want is that of solitude, so please leave me to it."
"You'll like this one!" exclaimed one of the others, and G'Kar began to experience a deep sense of foreboding - perhaps this was what the humans called deja vu - even before they dragged out whatever it was they had brought. It was large - alive - tied up? An animal .... no ....
G'Quan, G'Kar thought, stunned, as they threw a chained, dust-covered, bleeding Londo Mollari at his feet.
There was a blank moment when he thought Mollari might be dead, and he had absolutely no idea how to feel about that - how he was supposed to feel about that - but then Mollari coughed.
"You fools," G'Kar said, finding that he could breathe again. "He is the Prime Minister of the Centauri, don't you know that? If they find out we have him, there will be war again, and we may not survive it this time." They had survived Cartagia's assassination as a people only because no one among the Centauri (other than this specific Centauri, and Vir) knew of his collaboration in the Emperor's death. Had he participated directly, the bombardment would not have stopped until every Narn was dead.
"They won't find out about it. We were discreet."
"Really?" G'Kar snapped. He wanted to take every single one of these idiotic hooligans and pitch them over the balustrade into the mud-choked river below the garden wall. Headfirst. "What did you do, abduct him from Babylon 5? Do you want trouble with the humans too?"
"From a shuttle, actually," said Mollari thickly.
He coughed again and pushed himself himself up, shakily, to his hands and knees, then sat awkwardly back on his heels; his hands were chained to his ankles, making it impossible for him to straighten up. Still, he looked up at G'Kar with something less than the abject terror that G'kar remembered so well and so painfully from the Dust incident. He looked afraid, it was true, but there was bravado in it, and even some wry humor.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. G'Kar couldn't even think what to say. Mollari, of course, had to have the first word.
"You know, G'Kar," he said, half smiling through bloody, slightly pointed Centauri teeth, "we have got to stop meeting like this."
G'Kar stared at him. He was not sure who among the available options he was most angry at. The socket of his artificial eye throbbed. He reached down and grasped the chain around Mollari's wrist -- Mollari did not even flinch when G'Kar reached for him, but gasped a little while G'Kar started to pull him up by the chain. The soft Centauri skin around his wrist, much more fragile than Narn skin, was abraded and bleeding.
"Where is the key for these?" G'Kar snapped.
One of the Narn space marines produced it, rather sullenly, G'Kar noted; this gift was not going over at all as they'd hoped. G'Kar unlocked the chains so Mollari could stand up, then had to support him with a not very gentle hand under his arm when he nearly fell over. Mollari winced a little, and grasped G'Kar's metal-studded sleeve.
At least getting him inside without being seen wouldn't be problem. G'Kar's quarters in the Narn capital fronted directly onto the gardens.
"This will remain between us for now," G'Kar snapped at the uncomfortably shuffling Narn marines. "If anyone breathes a word of it, I have enough clout to make sure the culprit will be knee-deep in sludge in the newly build sewage treatment plant for the rest of the reconstruction. You, you ... and you." He pointed at three of the guiltiest-looking parties. "Guard the gate and make sure no one bothers me for the next few hours."
He kicked the chains aside and steered Mollari, with no particular effort at care, towards the door to his quarters. Mollari came, stumbling, trying not to fall. Behind him, G'Kar heard an outbreak of excited, speculative murmuring and realized dismally that he had just created wildfire speculation on what he was going to be doing with his new "gift" for the next few hours. Curse it.
"I should throw you in a cell," he muttered. Holding up a sagging Mollari with one arm, he locked the door, then steered Mollari to the slab-built table and planted him firmly in a chair. "I should throw you down a well and seal over the top." When it was clear that Mollari was not going to fall off the chair, he stomped into the kitchen. Centauri bravado aside, the cracked lips and slightly sunken eyes suggested that they hadn't given him any water in however long they'd had him. G'Kar experienced a visceral, unwanted empathy. He added viciously, filling a jug of water, "And then brick that over with an enormous ziggurat as a monument to stupidity that will endure for a thousand years."
G'Kar found a clean cup, filled it, stomped back and slammed the jug and cup down by Mollari's elbow, making him jump as he evidently was jolted out of a weariness-induced fugue state.
"Thanks," Mollari murmured. He picked up the cup with both hands -- his hands were shaking, the sleeves sticking to his bloody wrists. After he had drained the cup and refilled it and drank half of that, he asked, "What are you going to do with me?"
G'Kar was back in the kitchen, soaking a towel with lukewarm water. "I am still deciding that. The monument to stupidity is sounding good." He wrung out the towel, came back and handed it to Mollari, who took it with a slightly confused look. "Your face," G'Kar said, gesturing. "Not that your face is anything to remark on normally, but the current color range is more suited to one of us than a Centauri."
"Oh." Mollari dabbed at his split lip and winced, then pressed the towel under his bruised eye.
He looked around, curiosity about his surroundings visibly rousing in him as he recovered a little. The main room of G'Kar's Moxtoke quarters was a long room with low slab-style furnishings and ample western sun through its tall windows. The paintings on the wall were by the famous landscape artist Nu'Kan and had been rescued from a Centauri villa after the liberation. G'Kar liked the place. He did not know how he felt about Mollari seeing it.
"Why aren't you on Babylon 5 right now?" G'Kar asked, leaning against the counter with folded arms.
"You mean besides the obvious?"
"Don't joke about it. Just you being here could be a serious diplomatic incident, let alone under these circumstances."
"There's been a lot going on," Mollari said, making a variety of faces as he dabbed at the cuts and bruising on his wrists. His crest was a lopsided ruin, but he didn't seem to have noticed that yet. "You know, G'Kar, you're a very hard man to get hold of. I went by your quarters a couple of times recently, but you weren't there. I wanted to talk to you."
"Did it ever occur to you that I don't want to talk to you? Maybe because I said it out loud, to your face?"
Mollari scowled at him. "I know that. But it's important. I am going to assume you haven't remained completely in the dark about current political developments, as I am aware that Narn has supplied destroyers in the defense of Babylon 5, as have we. I have a proposal to take it a step further, and move towards formal recognition of the Earth resistance from our two governments."
G'Kar crushed a surge of guilt. "If this is official business, I can take care of it when I'm back on Babylon 5."
"Which will be when, exactly? They said you've been gone more than you're there. I decided it was too important to wait."
An awful suspicion dawned on G'Kar. "Where were you going when you were attacked on that shuttle, exactly?"
Mollari avoided his eyes. "Narn."
"Narn!" He might have known that there wouldn't be any Narns on a shuttle to Centauri Prime, or anywhere else that Mollari was likely to go in the course of his normal diplomatic duties. "Are you out of your mind? You're probably lucky they captured you. You'd have been killed outright as soon as you set foot in the shuttleport."
"The situation here is not that bad, surely," Mollari protested.
"For us? No. For you? Do you understand that your people bombed us into rubble? That millions of us died? Your people were running death camps on my world until a few months ago."
Mollari averted his gaze, looking out the window, but he didn't seem to find what he sought there either, in the red skies of Narn or the dust drifting thick on the windowsill.
"It's not like your world is a great tourist destination to begin with," Mollari said, retreating into petulance. "No one in their right mind would come here on purpose."
G'Kar ground his teeth until his jaw ached. "Yet you are here. Does that make you out of your mind, or simply a reckless moron?"
Mollari curled his lip, baring his useless small fangs with brittle defiance that made G'Kar think of an animal in a trap. "I needed to talk to you. Since you weren't on the station, I had to come where you are."
"If you wished to die, I could have arranged it," G'Kar snapped, throwing Mollari's own words back at him. The reaction was a brief flash of humor rather than anger, a wry twist of the corner of a bruised Centauri mouth. "This proposal is worth your life to you, then?"
"It's the principle of the thing."
"What principle, your compelling urge for a pointless death?"
"It isn't that," Mollari protested, almost sounding hurt. He started to say something else, caught himself with a tight look, and pressed the bloodstained towel to his face again.
G'Kar suddenly realized that he did not want to know any more about Mollari's reasons for being here than he already did.
"Who else knows you're here?" he asked.
"Just Vir."
In spite of his ongoing urge to strangle Mollari for multiple reasons, G'Kar had to bark out a reluctant half-laugh at the idea of Vir's reaction to that. "Let me guess, you said something like 'Vir, I'm going to Narn, see you in six days' as you marched out the door?"
"Something like that."
"I knew you were an idiot, but I failed to realize how much of one until this moment."
"Hey!" Mollari snapped, lowering the towel so he could glower properly.
G'Kar could picture him all too well, brash and scared and bolstering himself with foolhardy daring and a generous dose of brivari, on a flight filled with hostile Narns. Being chained, roughed up a little, and thrown at G'Kar's feet was probably the best of the possible outcomes, and he supposed that Mollari was starting to realize it.
Stupid. Reckless. .... Brave, so much so that even a Narn could respect it.
It had been so much easier to hate him.
G'Kar sighed. "I don't suppose they bothered to feed you."
"I don't think it was at the top of the priority list," Mollari said. He drank some more water.
And G'Kar could read enough into that. He remembered the feeling of being in the hands of his own mortal enemies, chained and helpless. The concealed terror, the hopelessness. The knowledge that there were a lot of ways this could end, and none of them were likely to be good.
He rummaged in the kitchen, found a nutrient bar that ought to be Centauri-compatible -- it was a standard type, used on a number of worlds; for all he knew it might be from the supplies left behind by the retreating Centauri colonial force -- and slapped it down at Mollari's elbow.
"Where is this proposal you wanted me to look at?" he asked, as Mollari, after a curious look at him, unwrapped the bar with shaking, tired fingers and then wolfed down half of it in one gulp. "I don't suppose you came halfway across the galaxy without bringing it with you."
"I did have a copy." The words were indistinct, through a mouthful of the other half of the nutrient bar. After some chewing: "I don't any longer. What happened to it, you can probably guess."
"Ah." G'Kar rubbed his temple. So a trip to Babylon 5 was next, then. In the company of Mollari, who he would probably have to protect from every other person on the regular Narn-to-Babylon-5 shuttle.
Idiot.
At the moment, the idiot was visibly swaying with weariness. G'Kar retrieved a clean robe from the bedroom and draped it on the back of the chair.
"If you'd rather wear filthy Centauri rags, go ahead, otherwise you'll have to cope with Narn clothes for now. There's a bathroom through there, real water for showers. We have plenty of water in the capital, and the filtration is perfectly competent, before you ask. I'm going to go find someone to arrange transport for both of us back to Babylon 5 in the morning."
Mollari looked as if he was struggling with words, but finally he said, "I appreciate the consideration."
"It is not consideration, it is a simple matter of wanting you off my planet as quickly as possible."
G'Kar went out into the garden, where he found his designated guards were still guarding with anxious diligence.
"I need transport to Babylon 5 to be arranged for two passengers. I also want an evening meal to be ordered."
Before he could go back inside, there were a number of messages that had arrived in his absence from the Kha'Ri, and he spent a little time scribbling responses. (Narns used screens for long-distance communication as much as anyone else, but for communication within the same city, runners and written messages were often preferred for anything confidential.) By the time he was done with that, the food had arrived, and dusk was purpling the red sky.
G'Kar went in carrying the steaming dinner basket of freshly made meat rolls. His quarters were dim and silent, filled with a light smell of bathing soaps. He supposed he wouldn't have been so lucky (or Mollari so stupid) for his uninvited guest to have taken off, so where was he?
Ah. Easy enough to find. There was no guest bedroom, but Mollari had found the bed. He was sprawled on G'Kar's unmade bed, wearing the borrowed Narn sleeping robe with the blankets pulled halfway over him, fast asleep in the limp abandon of utter exhaustion. With the robe gaping in a way that bordered on indecent for a Centauri male, more bruises were visible, blotching his chest and girdling his pale throat.
How in the world had You no longer exist in my universe come to this in a matter of months? Mollari was put in this universe as a trial to everyone who knew him.
G'Kar left him alone, placed the basket on the countertop for later, and poured himself a glass of taree. He could let the idiot sleep for a while. Later, he would hear this proposal. They had three exceedingly uncomfortable days ahead of them on a shuttle to Babylon 5 to discuss it; he supposed even they could come to some kind of accord by then.
I got a prompt on Tumblr earlier this month for a roleswap AU with Londo & G'Kar. I wrote a short ficlet for it a few days ago, then was promptly seized by the urge to write the entire story that goes with it.
Gift on AO3 (2,953 words, Babylon 5, gen)
Mid season four. Narns deliver a gift to G'Kar. He does not appreciate it in the slightest.
(A roleswap AU of sorts, set around the same general time frame as "No Surrender, No Retreat" in canon, in which reconciliation occurs from a completely different and even more fraught direction.)
Although G'Kar had firmly rejected his people's demand to lead them, and continued to do so, he found himself spending increasing amounts of time on the rapidly rebuilding Narn homeworld. His duties on Babylon 5 felt less important than ever, with Earth and Minbar both enmeshed in internal conflict and the League in turmoil. With Narn free of the Centauri, there was no longer a price on his head. He missed his friends on Babylon 5, but he was able to see them during his trips back. And - truth be told - the station was filled with reminders of a time in his life he did not particularly want to revisit. On his homeworld, there was little chance of turning a corner and coming face to face with something (or someone) he had no wish to see.
Although he refused to take up an official position with the reconstructed Kha'Ri, he definitely had some role in the government whether he wanted it or not -- a position with no formal title, something of an ambassador from other worlds to his own people. He advised, he did not command, but he ended up meeting with the Kha'Ri nearly every day to offer counsel, as well as helping with the organization and training of the rebuilt military. It was not the quiet writer's life that he sometimes dreamed of, but there were times when he was able to sit in the red dust of the rock garden behind his quarters in Moxtoke, under the free skies of Narn, scribbling new pages of his book, and he could not imagine being more content in any other place.
He was there, pondering revisions to his latest chapter, when a group of Narn in the uniforms of the new space force entered the garden with enough noise and high spirits for an invasion force.
"Honored G'Kar! We have brought you a gift!"
G'Kar sighed deeply and laid down his book and pen. This was one thing he had been dealing with in frustrating quantity; it was a mix of genuine appreciation from his people, who still gave him far more credit for freeing them than he believed he deserved, and attempts to bribe him, and he did not care to find out which one this was. "The only gift I want is that of solitude, so please leave me to it."
"You'll like this one!" exclaimed one of the others, and G'Kar began to experience a deep sense of foreboding - perhaps this was what the humans called deja vu - even before they dragged out whatever it was they had brought. It was large - alive - tied up? An animal .... no ....
G'Quan, G'Kar thought, stunned, as they threw a chained, dust-covered, bleeding Londo Mollari at his feet.
There was a blank moment when he thought Mollari might be dead, and he had absolutely no idea how to feel about that - how he was supposed to feel about that - but then Mollari coughed.
"You fools," G'Kar said, finding that he could breathe again. "He is the Prime Minister of the Centauri, don't you know that? If they find out we have him, there will be war again, and we may not survive it this time." They had survived Cartagia's assassination as a people only because no one among the Centauri (other than this specific Centauri, and Vir) knew of his collaboration in the Emperor's death. Had he participated directly, the bombardment would not have stopped until every Narn was dead.
"They won't find out about it. We were discreet."
"Really?" G'Kar snapped. He wanted to take every single one of these idiotic hooligans and pitch them over the balustrade into the mud-choked river below the garden wall. Headfirst. "What did you do, abduct him from Babylon 5? Do you want trouble with the humans too?"
"From a shuttle, actually," said Mollari thickly.
He coughed again and pushed himself himself up, shakily, to his hands and knees, then sat awkwardly back on his heels; his hands were chained to his ankles, making it impossible for him to straighten up. Still, he looked up at G'Kar with something less than the abject terror that G'kar remembered so well and so painfully from the Dust incident. He looked afraid, it was true, but there was bravado in it, and even some wry humor.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. G'Kar couldn't even think what to say. Mollari, of course, had to have the first word.
"You know, G'Kar," he said, half smiling through bloody, slightly pointed Centauri teeth, "we have got to stop meeting like this."
G'Kar stared at him. He was not sure who among the available options he was most angry at. The socket of his artificial eye throbbed. He reached down and grasped the chain around Mollari's wrist -- Mollari did not even flinch when G'Kar reached for him, but gasped a little while G'Kar started to pull him up by the chain. The soft Centauri skin around his wrist, much more fragile than Narn skin, was abraded and bleeding.
"Where is the key for these?" G'Kar snapped.
One of the Narn space marines produced it, rather sullenly, G'Kar noted; this gift was not going over at all as they'd hoped. G'Kar unlocked the chains so Mollari could stand up, then had to support him with a not very gentle hand under his arm when he nearly fell over. Mollari winced a little, and grasped G'Kar's metal-studded sleeve.
At least getting him inside without being seen wouldn't be problem. G'Kar's quarters in the Narn capital fronted directly onto the gardens.
"This will remain between us for now," G'Kar snapped at the uncomfortably shuffling Narn marines. "If anyone breathes a word of it, I have enough clout to make sure the culprit will be knee-deep in sludge in the newly build sewage treatment plant for the rest of the reconstruction. You, you ... and you." He pointed at three of the guiltiest-looking parties. "Guard the gate and make sure no one bothers me for the next few hours."
He kicked the chains aside and steered Mollari, with no particular effort at care, towards the door to his quarters. Mollari came, stumbling, trying not to fall. Behind him, G'Kar heard an outbreak of excited, speculative murmuring and realized dismally that he had just created wildfire speculation on what he was going to be doing with his new "gift" for the next few hours. Curse it.
"I should throw you in a cell," he muttered. Holding up a sagging Mollari with one arm, he locked the door, then steered Mollari to the slab-built table and planted him firmly in a chair. "I should throw you down a well and seal over the top." When it was clear that Mollari was not going to fall off the chair, he stomped into the kitchen. Centauri bravado aside, the cracked lips and slightly sunken eyes suggested that they hadn't given him any water in however long they'd had him. G'Kar experienced a visceral, unwanted empathy. He added viciously, filling a jug of water, "And then brick that over with an enormous ziggurat as a monument to stupidity that will endure for a thousand years."
G'Kar found a clean cup, filled it, stomped back and slammed the jug and cup down by Mollari's elbow, making him jump as he evidently was jolted out of a weariness-induced fugue state.
"Thanks," Mollari murmured. He picked up the cup with both hands -- his hands were shaking, the sleeves sticking to his bloody wrists. After he had drained the cup and refilled it and drank half of that, he asked, "What are you going to do with me?"
G'Kar was back in the kitchen, soaking a towel with lukewarm water. "I am still deciding that. The monument to stupidity is sounding good." He wrung out the towel, came back and handed it to Mollari, who took it with a slightly confused look. "Your face," G'Kar said, gesturing. "Not that your face is anything to remark on normally, but the current color range is more suited to one of us than a Centauri."
"Oh." Mollari dabbed at his split lip and winced, then pressed the towel under his bruised eye.
He looked around, curiosity about his surroundings visibly rousing in him as he recovered a little. The main room of G'Kar's Moxtoke quarters was a long room with low slab-style furnishings and ample western sun through its tall windows. The paintings on the wall were by the famous landscape artist Nu'Kan and had been rescued from a Centauri villa after the liberation. G'Kar liked the place. He did not know how he felt about Mollari seeing it.
"Why aren't you on Babylon 5 right now?" G'Kar asked, leaning against the counter with folded arms.
"You mean besides the obvious?"
"Don't joke about it. Just you being here could be a serious diplomatic incident, let alone under these circumstances."
"There's been a lot going on," Mollari said, making a variety of faces as he dabbed at the cuts and bruising on his wrists. His crest was a lopsided ruin, but he didn't seem to have noticed that yet. "You know, G'Kar, you're a very hard man to get hold of. I went by your quarters a couple of times recently, but you weren't there. I wanted to talk to you."
"Did it ever occur to you that I don't want to talk to you? Maybe because I said it out loud, to your face?"
Mollari scowled at him. "I know that. But it's important. I am going to assume you haven't remained completely in the dark about current political developments, as I am aware that Narn has supplied destroyers in the defense of Babylon 5, as have we. I have a proposal to take it a step further, and move towards formal recognition of the Earth resistance from our two governments."
G'Kar crushed a surge of guilt. "If this is official business, I can take care of it when I'm back on Babylon 5."
"Which will be when, exactly? They said you've been gone more than you're there. I decided it was too important to wait."
An awful suspicion dawned on G'Kar. "Where were you going when you were attacked on that shuttle, exactly?"
Mollari avoided his eyes. "Narn."
"Narn!" He might have known that there wouldn't be any Narns on a shuttle to Centauri Prime, or anywhere else that Mollari was likely to go in the course of his normal diplomatic duties. "Are you out of your mind? You're probably lucky they captured you. You'd have been killed outright as soon as you set foot in the shuttleport."
"The situation here is not that bad, surely," Mollari protested.
"For us? No. For you? Do you understand that your people bombed us into rubble? That millions of us died? Your people were running death camps on my world until a few months ago."
Mollari averted his gaze, looking out the window, but he didn't seem to find what he sought there either, in the red skies of Narn or the dust drifting thick on the windowsill.
"It's not like your world is a great tourist destination to begin with," Mollari said, retreating into petulance. "No one in their right mind would come here on purpose."
G'Kar ground his teeth until his jaw ached. "Yet you are here. Does that make you out of your mind, or simply a reckless moron?"
Mollari curled his lip, baring his useless small fangs with brittle defiance that made G'Kar think of an animal in a trap. "I needed to talk to you. Since you weren't on the station, I had to come where you are."
"If you wished to die, I could have arranged it," G'Kar snapped, throwing Mollari's own words back at him. The reaction was a brief flash of humor rather than anger, a wry twist of the corner of a bruised Centauri mouth. "This proposal is worth your life to you, then?"
"It's the principle of the thing."
"What principle, your compelling urge for a pointless death?"
"It isn't that," Mollari protested, almost sounding hurt. He started to say something else, caught himself with a tight look, and pressed the bloodstained towel to his face again.
G'Kar suddenly realized that he did not want to know any more about Mollari's reasons for being here than he already did.
"Who else knows you're here?" he asked.
"Just Vir."
In spite of his ongoing urge to strangle Mollari for multiple reasons, G'Kar had to bark out a reluctant half-laugh at the idea of Vir's reaction to that. "Let me guess, you said something like 'Vir, I'm going to Narn, see you in six days' as you marched out the door?"
"Something like that."
"I knew you were an idiot, but I failed to realize how much of one until this moment."
"Hey!" Mollari snapped, lowering the towel so he could glower properly.
G'Kar could picture him all too well, brash and scared and bolstering himself with foolhardy daring and a generous dose of brivari, on a flight filled with hostile Narns. Being chained, roughed up a little, and thrown at G'Kar's feet was probably the best of the possible outcomes, and he supposed that Mollari was starting to realize it.
Stupid. Reckless. .... Brave, so much so that even a Narn could respect it.
It had been so much easier to hate him.
G'Kar sighed. "I don't suppose they bothered to feed you."
"I don't think it was at the top of the priority list," Mollari said. He drank some more water.
And G'Kar could read enough into that. He remembered the feeling of being in the hands of his own mortal enemies, chained and helpless. The concealed terror, the hopelessness. The knowledge that there were a lot of ways this could end, and none of them were likely to be good.
He rummaged in the kitchen, found a nutrient bar that ought to be Centauri-compatible -- it was a standard type, used on a number of worlds; for all he knew it might be from the supplies left behind by the retreating Centauri colonial force -- and slapped it down at Mollari's elbow.
"Where is this proposal you wanted me to look at?" he asked, as Mollari, after a curious look at him, unwrapped the bar with shaking, tired fingers and then wolfed down half of it in one gulp. "I don't suppose you came halfway across the galaxy without bringing it with you."
"I did have a copy." The words were indistinct, through a mouthful of the other half of the nutrient bar. After some chewing: "I don't any longer. What happened to it, you can probably guess."
"Ah." G'Kar rubbed his temple. So a trip to Babylon 5 was next, then. In the company of Mollari, who he would probably have to protect from every other person on the regular Narn-to-Babylon-5 shuttle.
Idiot.
At the moment, the idiot was visibly swaying with weariness. G'Kar retrieved a clean robe from the bedroom and draped it on the back of the chair.
"If you'd rather wear filthy Centauri rags, go ahead, otherwise you'll have to cope with Narn clothes for now. There's a bathroom through there, real water for showers. We have plenty of water in the capital, and the filtration is perfectly competent, before you ask. I'm going to go find someone to arrange transport for both of us back to Babylon 5 in the morning."
Mollari looked as if he was struggling with words, but finally he said, "I appreciate the consideration."
"It is not consideration, it is a simple matter of wanting you off my planet as quickly as possible."
G'Kar went out into the garden, where he found his designated guards were still guarding with anxious diligence.
"I need transport to Babylon 5 to be arranged for two passengers. I also want an evening meal to be ordered."
Before he could go back inside, there were a number of messages that had arrived in his absence from the Kha'Ri, and he spent a little time scribbling responses. (Narns used screens for long-distance communication as much as anyone else, but for communication within the same city, runners and written messages were often preferred for anything confidential.) By the time he was done with that, the food had arrived, and dusk was purpling the red sky.
G'Kar went in carrying the steaming dinner basket of freshly made meat rolls. His quarters were dim and silent, filled with a light smell of bathing soaps. He supposed he wouldn't have been so lucky (or Mollari so stupid) for his uninvited guest to have taken off, so where was he?
Ah. Easy enough to find. There was no guest bedroom, but Mollari had found the bed. He was sprawled on G'Kar's unmade bed, wearing the borrowed Narn sleeping robe with the blankets pulled halfway over him, fast asleep in the limp abandon of utter exhaustion. With the robe gaping in a way that bordered on indecent for a Centauri male, more bruises were visible, blotching his chest and girdling his pale throat.
How in the world had You no longer exist in my universe come to this in a matter of months? Mollari was put in this universe as a trial to everyone who knew him.
G'Kar left him alone, placed the basket on the countertop for later, and poured himself a glass of taree. He could let the idiot sleep for a while. Later, he would hear this proposal. They had three exceedingly uncomfortable days ahead of them on a shuttle to Babylon 5 to discuss it; he supposed even they could come to some kind of accord by then.