An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Oh, why not. I started watching Babylon 5 in 2003 with friends at college. We moved on then to Farscape and Battlestar Galactica, the latter of which became my proper entree into LJ/DW fandom in about 2006. (I had lurked amongst the puppy piles of Farscape fandom for several years, but that is a different story.)
I never published fic for B5. BSG became a multi-year all-encompassing obsession, and earned me some of the best friends of my life. They turned me onto Stargate, which is where I met so many of the rest of you, and from there we wheeled through the last however many years of fandom.
I started a Babylon 5 story, long ago, in 2006 or 2007. It featured John and Delenn hosting his family on Minbar shortly after the show. It ran to nearly 23,000 words, in which almost nothing of note happened other than for John’s sister--our narrator--to try to figure out what the years had done to her brother, to try to get to know the enigmatic woman who was now her sister-in-law.
It ran 23,000 words and I put it down, quite obviously because having put the main players into place with a small bit of plot, I didn’t know what happened next. It is good in the way things we wrote fifteen years ago are good--you see the writer you were, and the writer you became, and all the steps in between. You see potential more than greatness, somewhere under all those em-dashes and semi-colons. You see all the love that you still carry for these characters. And oh, how I loved them.
Babylon 5 remains one of the best-plotted, most meaningful stories out there. It is not always good in other ways--the writing is often clunky, the first season is *terrible*, the acting is uneven at best, and the effects are extremely of their time. But it is telling a story of triumph of democracy over tyranny, of why we choose war and how we choose peace, of falling in love despite ourselves...it is timely, and it is wonderful.
In light of Mira Furlan’s death and my current meander down Babylon 5 memory lane, I figured: oh, why not. Here is that Babylon 5 story I never finished, in all its imperfect glory. I love it the way only an author can, but I hope you will like it, too.
