B5: Londo gets visions from a timeline where he made different choices? (any point in canon)
This was intended to be quite a lot longer, but I stalled out a while back with just this part written. I figure it's better to post some than none at all. One of these days I hope to make a complete fic out of it, though! (I really do adore the prompt.)
The dreams begin on the night after Londo meets G'Kar in the ZĂłcalo for a drink he never expected to have, the night after they sign the accord (on separate pages) and, maybe, take the first tentative steps toward ... something different than what they've been before.
Nightmares are nothing out of the ordinary for him, especially the past couple of years. But this dream has that peculiar ringing clarity that goes along with his true-dreams, the death-dream and the others. The ones that have all come true (shadow-ships flying overhead, looking up into the blue Centauri Prime sky) or will come true (iron-strong Narn hands wrapped around his throat).
He is in the throne room, and Cartagia is on the throne. Also hardly unusual for his recent nightmares. But this is an older Cartagia, his short crest streaked with gray, his once-lean body and handsome face now showing damage from the wantonness of over-indulgence.
The throne room is dim, the curtains show signs that the servants have not been dusting frequently.
Cringing, obviously frightened, a courtier approaches Cartagia. "Majesty, we have heard back from the fleet, the campaign to recapture Beta IV --"
Cartagia waves a hand through the air. "Do we care? Tell us something interesting. Good news, preferably."
"Majesty, there is very little good news. The latest campaigns go badly --"
Londo, who spent too much time in Cartagia's court not to know how Cartagia deals with news he doesn't want to hear, even in dreams, turns away and so he only hears the wet, meaty thud.
A hand touches Londo's arm and he nearly jumps out of his skin before the awareness comes that this is a dream and nothing can hurt him. Still, when he turns his head, he does not expect to see Lady Morella beside him. She, too, looks older and much wearier than when he last saw her. There is a scar on the side of her face, jagged, from near her eye to the corner of her mouth.
She is frowning at him as if she knows him but can't place him. "Come," she breathes, barely moving her lips, and they retreat through the curtains together into an adjacent hallway.
This too is wrong ... the floor stained, a drunken couple groaning in the corner. They go past them until they enter an empty apartment, and Morella turns to fix Londo with her keen stare.
"I have seen you before," she says quietly.
"You prophesied my rise to the throne, Lady."
Morella shakes her head slowly.
It is a dream, Londo reminds himself, his stomach cold. This is not even a theoretical future that could come to be, because Cartagia is dead; Londo held his body in his own arms, watched the life go out of his eyes, saw the royal physicians declare him dead.
"Can you tell me what has happened here?" Londo asks her.
"What do you mean?" Morella draws her gaze back from somewhere distant.
"Cartagia sits on the throne. What did they mean, the campaign goes badly? What campaign?"
"The war." Morella gazes at him, her eyes sharp. "The second Narn war. We are eight years into it now. You don't know any of this, do you?"
"No, Lady." This is a dream, he thinks rather desperately, fingering the carved woodwork on the back of a chair beside him. Everything seems so real, the slight mustiness of the unaired room, the smell of blood ... "Tell me, why are we at war with Narn again?"
"They attacked us at Ragesh IV. We attacked them back. Border skirmishes, flaring into a true war that neither will back down from. They mean to wipe us out this time. They have made allegiances with the Drazi and others." She draws a sudden breath. "I do know you. I met you once, on Babylon 5 --"
"Yes, Lady," he says, almost desperate to grasp some thread of familiarity. "You gave me a prophesy --"
"I do not remember that. It was after Turhan died. I met you briefly at the funeral ... the ambassador we sent to the human space station."
"Yes, Lady." He was never at Turhan's funeral. "Can you tell me -- er -- did we speak there?"
"Briefly, I believe." She looks at him with a kind of sympathy, almost pity. "Yours was a position of little importance, I am afraid."
It had been, he thinks numbly. A joke, a laughingstock. "Do you -- know what happened to me after that?"
"No," she says impatiently. "I assume you went back there."
"Yes, I have been, er, out of the loop for some time. Tell me more of the war with the Narns. Eight years?" With Cartagia on the throne .... "What of our occupation of Narn?"
"In Turhan's father's time?"
"No," he says, again with that cold feeling. "More recently."
"Could we even manage it now?" Lady Morella breathes. "I suppose I should be glad Turhan didn't live to see this. He always believed peace with the Narn could be achieved, even after the Ragesh attack. But this war grinds on, we kill them, they kill us, they take our colonies, we take theirs."
"And may I assume," Londo says slowly, "that we have no -- um -- no powerful allies in this war, no one to help us?"
"Why does it matter to you?" Once again her keen eyes turn on him. "I see so much around you that I cannot understand. Blood and shadows ... though none of that is a surprise in this terrible place." She leaned closer, peering at him. Her voice fell. "You do not belong here."
Londo wakes with a yelp and a jolt, tangled in his bedcovers and drenched in sweat. He has to reach for the chrono display on his screen to be sure that it was the same night he thought it was.
Only a dream, he thinks, pouring himself a glass of brivari with a shaking hand. Sleep is definitely not happening again that night. The strange vision of an older, dissolute Cartagia floats in his mind's eye, oddly vivid. And Morella with that scar ... he should have asked how she got it, and then is glad he did not.
It could not be a true dream. The things that have happened already -- Cartagia's death, the Shadow alliance, all of it -- cannot be undone.
But he finds himself thinking, as he refills his glass after having barely tasted the first: if he had never welcomed Mr. Morden's company, the war would not have happened -- not as such; but Turhan would still have died, one way or another. Cartagia or someone like him would have ascended to the throne. The war with the Narn would not have happened ... or would it? They were eager for another war, as they had proven at Ragesh. His people were too.
"I do not know what you wish to tell me," he says aloud, to the universe at large. "But I would like you to stop it. Consider your message to have been received, whatever it is."
But the universe, of course, is not that kind.
