Warnings: There are lots of thoughts. // Indicates lyrics.
He hadn't understood. Or maybe I hadn't. I don't know anymore. I wish he could tell me. He always had an answer for everything, even if it appeared to be a complete non-sequitor that made no sense to me at the time.
/Lost in the darkness
Silence surrounds you.
Once there was morning,
Now endless night./
I'd told Stephen that all love was unrequited, that I hadn't returned his love for me. He hadn't been at all subtle about how he'd felt about me, and all I'd been able to do was tease him, rather harshly about unicorns. And after… after all I could think was that I should have slept with him once to have made his sacrifice worth it.
I didn't. I ignored his feelings for me. I closed down my own feelings without ever realizing that I was doing it.
I had been dead inside for such a long time. He didn't understand that.
My mother's death had taught me that not feeling was safer. If you didn't feel you couldn't be hurt. My brother's death and my father's disapproval over my enlistment into Earthforce reinforced this belief. And so I became the Ice Queen. I let no one in.
Then there was Talia. She almost convinced me to live again, to feel again. And then she betrayed me. Oh, she didn't mean to, but she did it all the same. Or maybe I should say Psi - Corp betrayed me…again; just like they did with mama. It was safer not to feel, not to know. And then…he came.
He was grieving for his own losses, just as I was. He'd shut everyone and everything out, claiming that: "Part of the heart goes dead. It's better to leave it that way." He believed it, believed the same way I did. He was as lost as I was, but he came out of the darkness after meeting me. He found the light, while I remained shrouded in shadows.
He couldn't leave me be. He wanted me to feel again. To live again… To love again. More specifically he wanted me to love him. He showed me that in a thousand little ways, from offering to teach me to speak Minbari to making a silly chart of everyone on the station with me in the center of it all.
I couldn't do it though. I couldn't love him.
I couldn't…
I was dead. I wanted to die. I was ready to die.
I was more than ready to let go of this world physically, just as I had emotionally. Or so I had thought.
In a twisted way I welcomed that explosion. I welcomed the darkness and my imminent demise. I wasn't happy about all the other people who had died in the explosion, but I felt an overwhelming relief at finally being able to let go of everything.
I was so very, very light…
He couldn't even let me have that!
No, that's not fair. Not to him. Not even to me.
He loved me. I know that. I knew it even then, even if I tried to ignore it. Even though I shouldn't have done that.
He pulled me back. He found the courage to say 'I love you' in words, not just actions. I know why he couldn't let me go.
I can't let him go either.
Complete metabolic shutdown.
I can't bear those words now. Just hearing them makes my soul shudder. I think they would make him shudder as well, if he could.
But he can't. He's lost. Even more lost than I was…am.
He's trapped in the icy darkness of a cryo-tube. I can't touch him, but I can't let him go either.
/IfI could reach you,
I'd guide you and teach you
To walk from the darkness
Back into the light/
He led me back into feelings. Oh I kicked and screamed and fought it. I have vague memories of destroying the med lab after I woke and found him gone, vanished into the darkness that I had just left.
I couldn't understand why he had done it. I never would have asked him to, and he knew that. He knew, he always knew what was going through my head even when I didn't.
He knew because he'd been where I was. He'd lost as much as I had, if not more. But more than that he also felt guilt where I only had pain. He tried to figure out his thoughts and emotions, even more than that he analyzed them, tried to understand them to better lock them away. I just ignored them all.
Is it any wonder that he knew me better than I knew myself?
I know that if he could have saved me and lived he would have done so. He'd have stayed and shown me how to live in a world of feelings. But he couldn't stay and he couldn't live, with his emotions intact and alive, without me. He could have gone on but not lived.
So he traded. His life for mine.
He wanted me to live and be happy. He wanted me to love, someone at the very least if it couldn't be him.
So here I am. I'm in a cold room, full of portable freezers, staring at him. I need him. I need him to show me how to go on. And he can't.
He can't reach me. He can't touch me, or talk to me.
And I'm left wondering what to do. How am I going to go on and live for the two of us? I just know that I have to, he trusts me to.
/Deep in your silence,
Please try to hear me:
I'll keep you near me
Till night passes by/
He may be lost to us, to me, but he gave me his life. I will protect it and his memory.
I will find a way to live the life he wanted me to, I just can't do it here. They know me. They know how I am, how I behave. I can't break those habits and remain on Babylon 5.
However, I can't take him with me if I leave. And I can't let him go. The thought of leaving him makes me cold, although some of the physical sensation could be because of the ambient temperature of the room.
I think he'd be proud of me, that thought was almost a comment worthy of him.
I wish he could hear me, that he could know how I feel. That I'll honour his sacrifice. That I will live, even if it kills me. That's a philosophy that I know he'd understand.
Still, all the same, I wish he were alive and smiling. I wish he'd tell me another bad joke, a terrible pun, or a long and meandering analogy explaining how we really were the reincarnated Knights of the Round Table.
He always said he was Sir Galahad.
What does that make me? The holy grail?
I suppose it does… Galahad died after finding the grail; gave his life for the quest. That is exactly what he did for me.
I want him back.
I need him.
Stephen says there's no hope. And maybe there isn't, at least not here.
I guess that gives me the solution to my problems.
/I will find the answer.
I'll never desert you—
I promise you this—
'till the day that I die…/
I'll carry his memory with me always. It will have a place in my heart.
For him I'll take the promotion to Captain on a new ship. I need to learn how to live again so I can teach him. And while I'm out there I will find a cure for him. I will bring him back.
I have my quest, to find myself and to find him for we are both lost, although I'm closer to being found.
And it is time for me to leave, but there is one thing I have to say, if I can only find the courage.
"I love you, Marcus."
~Finis
