Author: Wanderlustlover ... wanderlustlover@satx.rr.com

"Alpha and Omega; And Kith, Be Damned"

A story I will warn that will only make sense to those who have watched Babylon 5 and read Psi-Corps Trilogy: Dark Genesis.

~*~*~

Coming back hurt more each time. He decided that the lights were too bright. That the blankets were too harsh. The air much too cold each time. The voices too loud. The faces too strong and young. The world was leaving him behind without a choice in the matter.

He really and truly hated that each time he came back he sounded more and more like a child. He complained and whined more. He cried now and then. He wet his bed when he couldn't help it. He complained in his thoughts to himself. All of these things which he hated.

All of these things which made him pray, each time his eye lids scratched open across his eyes, that he would die before his eyes might open again. But each time he opened his eyes the world was still there and he was still being treated for old age and infirmity. He had put it off dozens of years long than anyone expected already. Nothing could stop death, that bastard, the universe was finally coming to swallow him whole.

Clack. Clack.

Clack. Clack.

The sound came from out of no where and he tried to move his body to see over and beyond his bed, an effort none of his body aside from his paranoid mind seemed to respond to.

Clack. Clack.

Clack. Clack.

And then a face. He swore.

"Hello, Mr. Bester."

It could have been anyone but her. Hell, the thought made him laugh, why not her? Why not, indeed? The infallible end was coming and it was trying to make him small again.

But why was it she still seemed so young even with the soft spots at the edges of her eyes? That her eyes carried that same fire deep within the earthen brown and copper tones. And her hair barely seemed to be touched by any gray and where it did, it seemed more regal silver than anything else did.

"Alexander," he rasped out of lips that moved as fast as tectonic plates with a voice that sounded like air being thrust through a straw with a dozen holes in it.

{Why are you here?}

"No fond welcome, Alfred? No curiosity to how I've been and how life's going? How old the children are and the how the husband is doing?" She placed her hands on the side rails to his bed, instituted long ago because he'd fallen out and broken part of his hip in doing so.

"Dear me and I thought we'd broken through all the hostility," she said.

{There never was anything but that, Mrs. Alexander. You cut my throat, I cut yours.} Looking down at him, her face blank, except for a tugging emotion in her eyes he couldn't place. At first he thought it to be that disgusting pity, but it wasn't.

"Call me Lyta. You never really did," she said, while a scraping sound shuddered through the room, and she sat next to his bed. "And it's past time we stopped parading our wall. They've grown lives of their own, amassed body counts, and bleed blood freshly anytime their touched."

{Why are you here?} He shouted at her defiantely, only to have it come out like a whisper. His eyes watered and he flared in annoyance and shame at the fact in the face of one of his life long greatest enemies he was an old, infallible man on his deathbed.

Because he had been bested by this woman.

"Put that all away, we are far past playing with our walls and our tally sheets. No one won the war, Alfred. So many people died on both sides that all we can do is be sickened and try to remember why it happened, why it can never happen again, and get on with our lives." She left her hands on the bars thoughtfully.

"No one knows I'm here you are perfectly safe," she let go and sat back in her chair, her eyes growing cloudy. "Mercy will be having her next child in two months and that will make five grand children in total. I never thought I would live this long. I always thought one day I would simply die in the line of the job. It's what we were trained for from birth."

"You betrayed," he muttered, barely audibly. It started a string of coughs and she didn't speak till he was done.

"No one ever quits," she said with a hoarse and broken laughter. "The job changes, but the training doesn't ever. I expected to work and die for the Psi-Corps. I expected to work and die for the revolution. There is no more war now, no one to protect them from anymore, anywhere, there hasn't been for years."

{You're babbling, Alexander.} He sent sharply at her, even as he started noticing his body having the twinge reaction that meant he would need to use the bathroom again. {Get to your point and leave me be.}

{Why am I here?} She sent to him with ire in her voice when it touched her head. {Because kith *is* mother and father.}

She felt his eyes close and open a few times, felt waves of anger, confusion and indignation, but she said nothing, expecting little and almost laughed when he finally said resigned to no hate even. {You are not family.}

"Put away your trained sensibilities, your ties to Psi-Corps, and your vendetta against me and the world. For once in this world, for once before you die, miserable and alone as you lived," she said, looking to him. "It's time we both put away out toys and just talked about the truth."

{I would like to just die in peace.} He said, his eyes growing a black fire behind them, one that seemed to take all his strength just to maintain. He just went back to looking tired when the fire faded from his eyes long before he even finished his sentence.

"We are kith from so far back that only the oldest of the old blood running in our veins would remember it. Only those thought echoes, that we are trained to forget, passed down by parents so long ago, would remember the days when. Drop all your old and tired guards, Alfred," She said standing. "Take my hand and let me show you the way."

And echo of the words 'this time' seemed to hang between them though neither said it. There was a long silence, still and suffocating as the pall of death between them. It seemed an eternity between them both in time and distance before he actually did move. He placed his hand in hers and the wave that came from him was defeat.

"No, not surrender. Not an ending, a beginning," she said after a second, a soft light beginning to shine over their two hands. Warmth began to fill his body erasing aches and pains as the space behind his eyes saw only white light and heard only the softness of her voice.

"It all began with six very special people named...Monkey, Blood, Teal, Smoke, Mercy, and James."

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