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There is a hole in his mind, he is told. The Minbari’s last words, their final declaration of destiny interwoven with choice. There is a hole in his own mind, and there is a hole in the universe, ripping through every boundary that he can comprehend including the boundaries of himself. There is a hole in his mind and this assassin was prepared to die because of it, death as a gesture, as a devotional act. Like watching your friends explode around you in the darkness of space, like fireworks in the Earth’s atmosphere pulsing specks of color throughout blue skies where the noise of the blasts are musical in their harmlessness. It’s not as beautiful here; it’s not as blue, it’s not blue at all. It’s just dark. The assassin tries to sabotage him like ramming a badly damaged fighter into the crux of tragedy with the understanding that all tragedies end in the same way, that the song the universe had been composing to carry you along the waves of harmony was about to end and giving one final performance just as a statement, an audience bow.
The only difference is that this assassin did not escape their death. It was simple. It is simple. It will be simple. It will be and is and was a simple death - an explosion entirely unlike those set off on earth for entertainment - almost enviable.
Things were different for those he came from - back before humanity gave into the temptation of the stars. They didn’t quite understand it back then. They were always pilots. His grandfather taught him everything he knew. Everyone understands the skies, he thinks. Everyone gazes at the stars with wonder until the stars fix their eyes back down on them with contempt. He knows. He doesn’t know yet. He knows that there is a hole in his mind and he knows that there are twenty four hours of his life missing and he knows that the Minbari surrendered and he knows why but he doesn’t know why yet. He guided the stars into their present-day shape and shine. He doesn’t know that yet. He has always known.
+.
He has gotten used to death. It is difficult not to.
See: he drew himself a family, three stick figures all scattered and misshapen over Station Prime’s interior walls. None of that matters anymore. Stepping stones. He drew himself a family and forgot how to fill in the details. Six months. Stepping stones. He drew himself restraints. He drew himself a family and then he got carried away. He drew himself an incantation. He drew himself a new himself. Six months isn’t long enough. She would be six years old now. The reminder chained around his neck pummels into his flesh, pounding against his breastbone, peeling the flesh away, and carving it into an instrument that can play any tune the Associates desire. This is just how it is. The wind has taken everything, but the wind also rewards. The wind can give you freedom far beyond the imagination. The wind wipes away the rain with dedication and he does not care anymore. He never takes the necklace off, but it’s just routine at this point.
He can’t remember what color Sarah’s hair had been; it’s strung through his chest, and fading now, damaged from the plucking. They just keep strumming him into the strategy as the tune becomes incrementally less musical; eventually it stops sounding like music entirely and transforms into mechanical growl.
None of it matters now. It’s in the past. They aren’t in the past — no one knows where they are, actually, but this story is circular so none of it matters now. There are more sides to death than one may think.
He is the ammunition fired from their slick weaponry, carving away everything in its path that cannot resist. He is their telescope, their voice, their divine vision. He has gotten used to death. Three stars in a cluster, lost among each other. Two stars in a cluster, pocketed away from humanity. It’s just how it goes.
He has learned one thing from this experience: grief can be weaponized. It is the only emotion, he thinks, that carries the same insatiable hunger he feels.
+
His father fashions makeshift rain over the roof. In this unique version of the tale, the rain is no longer dreadful; it melts through the material and pools deep in his chest, swirling vibrant color into the solemn reds and pinks. Later, between the eons of sorrow, the rain will fall again. In space it’s always dark. The rain will beat against the simulated childhood rooftop of a space vessel, and this rain is too entangled in dread to be salvaged; at the same time he will look into her eyes and see his own ghost reflected back at him. Not his ghost - his transcendence, a child of the stars. He looks into her eyes and sees a thousand stories, and she holds his hand.
Let me help you, she says. You deserve to rest. Let me play the rain for you, let me read you the pathway of our shared memories bound together with the dust of stars. Listen, she says, the dread will pass. Later the dread passes. Later he passes. Everything stops eventually and everything eventually begins again.
Do you remember a time, she says, when we weren’t just percussion instruments to be slammed into melody? No, not yet, but I’m getting there. We disrupt the very foundation of it. They knock the universe around like sparring children fighting over toys. They gifted us holiness and we didn’t treat it holy enough. We don’t deserve holiness. Look at what we are doing to each other. Look at what they are doing to us, look at how the concept of holiness has been mangled and charred into an unidentifiable corpse. They’re both right, they’re both wrong. The younger races do not get a chance to form their own holiness. There isn’t much of a distinction, now, between everyone and everything. When he was younger, he had some of those miniature soldier figurines, fighting the wars of his youth.
Everyone he loves is faceless, plastic, maneuverable. Babylon 5 is the shelf on each side of the shared bedroom, lined with soldier toys as they blur into the background of the greater fight, the spar that consumes. Someone else will take his place. Our lives are only splintered, cut from the root.
+
He is not used to death. Death is infinite and intimate in nature, death is all around him, plaguing the younger races, invigorating the younger races, but ultimately only fueling the Shadows and their blinding philosophy. Imagine, he thinks, if they all kneeled at the altars of order and sung loud, loud, louder in obedience.
But no, that isn’t quite right, either.
He was once certain of the universe. The most blatant flaw of immortality: if you live long enough, you stop living. It crumbles and decimates you until you become something like an abomination — like, as the humans say, a ghost. When you eviscerate yourself, numbed by the anesthesia of millennia after millennia, hollowed out by witnessing the faith of others go unanswered, the question stops being applicable. The question becomes a shell. The question becomes just another thing to hide in, just another tool of manipulation lined up on a platter like blade-fire-blade, in the same way that the corporeal beings prepare to torture one another. The question is an illusion. The question only serves to deflect. The question only serves up more questions, a loop of uncertainty draping around the neck, a spiral of shock served plain on silver, like an apple in the mouth of flesh.
Who are you?
Death does not touch him. He is learning how to understand them.
Who is he?
He is not death. He is obedience. He is all light, all beauty and structure known to the universe, tampered down inside of an encounter suit.
But who is he?
Who is he?
He is a song. He is a song that echoes between the spaces that compose all that is; he is all that is and all that has been but he is not
the one who is. He is not one at all.
Death does not touch him. He is a hymn -- the kind that leaves the humanoid mouth when the final breath is taken. Death does not touch him. O, to sing forever. O, to be the song. It has been a very long time since a Vorlon has died.
Eventually the echo must be passed down. Eventually every song flickers out with the flash of a photograph, with the quick flame of stardust being stolen from those once innocent.
He is afraid to die. He wants to sing; he is afraid to die; he carries himself into the realm of the skies, where every soul that has ever lived eventually returns to. He carries himself into the other one’s mind, and he tries to sing.
The words don’t come out quite right. They’re tearing into him; they cannot help themselves, chained by temptation. Translation fails him. How many people has he been? How many lives has the universe lived?
This is a circular story - for the universe, perhaps, but he’s exhausted his visit, and sacrifices must be made. He can admit that in his final moments, even if he can’t talk right, the image of the father flickering into shards upon shards of void as he is siphoned away. As long as Sheridan is here, he will always be here.
He didn’t practice enough. He has, as they say, an old soul. He didn’t practice enough and now it is too late; they are ripping through him, picturesque.