Lost Dreams

Disclaimer: Babylon 5 and its characters don't belong to me. The characters mentioned all belong to J. Michael Straczynski.

"Lost Dreams"
by Christine Anderson
aka Anla'shok Ivanova
Written for the Theatrical Muse 'daydreams' challenge.

When I was young, when my parents surrendered to chaos and I was so often caught between them, I dreamed of healing such damage as they had caused. When they were killed in what I believed then simply a random accident, I dreamed of repairing muscle and bone, cleansing bodies of illness and disease.

I dreamed of saving lives because I had seen too many lost.

I hid from my parents' true natures as I hid from my own, and it was this which kept me from those dreams of healing.

The language of my spells is the language of equations; precise, rigid, mathematical. It is the language in which all creations of the Shadows speak to one another.

My kind were never meant to heal, but to destroy. We were meant to do what has come so easily to me, and not to do the things that I cannot.

In time I found myself to be a mirror for all that my order aspired to and failed to be.

When my dream failed me, I did not know who I was. I sought other dreams, and many escaped me.

In the years of my apprenticeship, Elizar and I shared a dream. We were friends once, though he was arrogant and sure of himself, and I was neither. In those days we dreamed of great quests on which we would embark together, of discoveries we would make, and of the greatness of the mages of old coming again in our time.

We dreamed with the foolishness of boys, neither of us knowing then that it was not to be. In time Elizar found his quest, but it was a quest for darkness, upon which I could not- would not- join him.

Before her death, I dreamed that Isabelle and I could be happy together, that somehow what befell my parents would never have happened between us. I dreamed this despite all evidence to the contrary; mages were never meant to live together so closely, and even the handful of weeks every three years when we used to gather often proved too much.

I still believe, useless though this belief is now, that Isabelle could have risen above our typical quickness to anger. She was truly the best of us, and of all the technomages she remains one of the few I think ever held any real understanding of... No. There are no words, for the things that she knew.

Nor are there any words left for the dreams I lost the day she died.

Feedback?

fanfiction