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mundane_bingo, I think the very existence of such a challenge was what spurred me to complete it. Mundanity ahoy!
Title: "We'll Crack the Darkest Sky Wide Open"
Author:icepixie
Rating: G
Pairing: Ivanova/Garibaldi
Word Count: 1,756
Timeline: Approximately six months before "Language Lessons." (Timeline/master list.)
Summary: Susan, Michael, and Sofie move to Minbar. It's a new beginning, but not in the old way.
*
"Michael, will you come here for a minute?"
Susan heard him set a box on the floor and walk down the hall to the bathroom. "Yeah?" he asked as he poked his head in the door.
She pointed at the collection of odd spiky bits attached approximately at eye level to one of the shelves in the closet. "Do you have any idea what these are?"
He stared at them, lips pursed and brow furrowed. "Something to do with bonecrest hygiene?" he finally ventured. He touched one that had a little loop of wire at the end, tentatively, as if it were an explosive device. Which, for all they knew, it might be.
"I'll add it to the list," she said, shaking her head.
Some of the oddities of their new Minbari home were easily explainable. They had quickly realized that the small shelves attached to the east wall in every room were altars stripped of the crystals that would have made them instantly recognizable. The portraits or short narratives portrayed in the stained glass windows meshed with what they already knew of Minbari residential architecture—although they had been both amused and a little unnerved to realize that the figure which made up one of their bedroom windows was Valen, alias Jeffrey Sinclair. They had made sure to place the bed so that the portrait's gaze did not reach it.
Other things, like the instruments in the bathroom and the small hole in the ceiling of the dining area, they had more trouble figuring out, and that was where their list for Delenn came in. Susan only hoped that the unexplainable oddities were common to all Minbari architecture, and not just artifacts from their home's ninety-year history.
"How many things have we got on it now?" Michael asked.
"This makes thirteen, assuming we haven't decided that it's better not to know what the picture in the kitchen window is about."
"It can't be worse than it looks." He paused. "Can it?"
She snickered at his horrified expression. Kneeling to open the box marked "bathroom," she asked, "Are you about done out there?"
"Pretty close," he said. "We're going to need to put stops on a couple of the drawers in the kitchen. Most of them are okay, but that little cabinet in the corner doesn't have any; she could pull them right out."
"She would, too." They shared a smile—albeit one tinged with exasperation—at their daughter's insistence on investigating everything she could get her small hands on.
Childproofing their new home had been an interesting experience so far, with a combination of expected hazards to take care of and unexpected ones to figure out what the hell to do about. Though their house, like several in the city, had been converted for use by the non-Minbari working at the ISA and Ranger—Anla'Shok, Susan, you should get used to calling them that—headquarters, most of the structure was still profoundly foreign. It left them to wonder things such as whether the small tree which appeared to be growing in the middle of the living area was poisonous to small children who might decide to eat its leaves.
The fact that they now owned a house was itself almost as strange as the design. She hadn't lived in a house since she was seventeen. First it was university dorms, then assorted EarthForce housing, from a bunk bed on training missions to the relatively luxurious (by EarthForce standards) officer's quarters she had lived in on Babylon 5. Most recently there had been the two-bedroom apartment in Green Sector they had moved to after Sofie was born. Living area was at a premium in deep space, and having this much room seemed sinful; back on B5, they could've fit several conference rooms into their house's footprint. The openness of it sent the hair on the back of her neck creeping up.
While Michael returned to the kitchen, she began transferring items from the box at her feet into the closet: sheets, towels, Sofie's bath toys. It all seemed to take up laughably little space in the cavernous closet, though a similar complement of stuff had been plenty to fill their storage areas on the station. She carefully set a rubber duck on the shelf, reminding herself that they had good reasons for this move.
She'd been conflicted when John told her he'd put her name forward for EarthForce liaison to the Rangers. She'd commanded B5 for more than six years, and she loved every inch of the place—even the really dirty places. There was little that pleased her more than knowing everything was, for the moment at least, running smoothly in the little city in space that was her responsibility.
On the other hand, she'd missed John and Delenn since they'd moved to Minbar. The joint chiefs would stick her in administration sooner or later anyway, and any other position would be on Earth, where she still, after all these years, wasn't sure she could live again. Besides, Michael could still serve in the ISA cabinet on Minbar; it would be far more difficult from Earth.
And some part of her wanted Sofie to grow up on a planet, with sun and rain and more trees than the little piece of woodland B5 offered in the park. She'd known they made the right choice when, the moment they stepped out of the Tuzanor spaceport yesterday afternoon, Sofie had stared up at the sky, entranced by the arching bowl over her head that was the exact color of her eyes.
The thought reminded her to go across the hall and look in on her daughter, who was currently corralled in her bedroom with the Minbari version of a baby gate. It had multicolored crystals embedded in its clear plastic (of course it did). They were arranged in geometric patterns which, though some kind of holographic overlay, appeared to constantly change, rather like a kaleidoscope. When they had given it to their friends the previous day, David being too old for it anymore, Delenn had called the crystals intellectually and spiritually stimulating. John had merely said that they could distract a child nicely when one had things to do around the house.
Rather than being enthralled by the gate, Sofie, predictably, had spent much of the afternoon attempting to climb it. She had finally seemed to grasp the futility of trying to scale the smooth surface—much to her parents' relief—and turned her attention to her stuffed animal collection as evening came on. Interstellar freight charges being what they were, they hadn't been able to bring much with them, and Susan knew the girl was clinging to the familiarity of her fuzzy bears and rabbits.
Sofie looked up at her step and toddled over to the door. "Mama!" she said brightly. "Up?" She raised her arms expectantly.
Susan obliged her, grunting softly as she settled the girl against her hip. "You are getting way too heavy for this," she said. In response, Sofie nestled her head against her shoulder, a sigh of contentment escaping her lips. Susan chuckled. Barely two and her daughter knew exactly how to charm her into practically anything. Adolescence was going to be hell.
There was little left to do in the bathroom, and she put the last few towels away with one hand before shutting off the light and heading for the living room. The hallway echoed as she walked through it. But she smiled as she watched Michael stow their military-issue duffel bags in the closet near the front door, and listened to the soft breathing of their growing daughter. Their house would fill up with time.
"Hey," Michael said, finally noticing their presence when she stood right behind him. He tweaked one of Sofie's pigtails, and got a giggle in return. "Are we done?"
"I think so." She set Sofie on her feet. "We should get going if we're going to be on time for dinner." They were due at Delenn and John's house in twenty minutes. While it didn't take long to walk there, they had discovered the day before that bundling their particularly squirmy child up for the chilly Minbari spring took much longer than clothing her for the constant temperature on B5. They'd begun adjusting their routines accordingly.
Several layers later, they made it out of the house and onto the sidewalk. They walked slowly, letting Sofie set the pace as she walked between them, each of her hands in one of theirs. When they had gone a few yards from the house, Michael chanced to glance behind them, and drew her attention to the sight he'd found.
Minbar's star was setting, and it had set the western sky aflame in pink and bronze. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but though the sun gilded all of the buildings on the street, it seemed to make the stained glass windows and crystalline walls of their house glow especially bright, like a beacon for travelers who hadn't even known they were lost.
She felt a tug on her hand, and tore her gaze from the sunset to see what Sofie wanted.
What Sofie wanted was to get closer to a bug she had found on the sidewalk. She had dropped to her knees to give the multi-legged, fuzzy blue creature a more thorough inspection, and from the way she was trying to slide her hand out of her mother's grasp, Susan had a feeling that the next thing she had planned was to see how caterpillar a la Minbar tasted.
"Come on, solnyshko"—oh, the endearment was truer than she had realized, she thought, noticing now that the sunlight had turned strands of her daughter's hair to gold. "We're going to have real food in a minute."
Sofie was far more interested in the caterpillar than in the prospect of dinner, and they saw her face begin to curl into her classic "impending tantrum" expression. With one smooth movement, Michael scooped her up and sat her on his shoulders.
The effect was instantaneous. She adored being carried like this, and surveyed the world happily from her new perch, all thoughts of the caterpillar forgotten.
Despite the spring chill, warmth stole over Susan. Her whole life, moving to a new place or taking a new posting had always meant starting over. Watching Sofie wave at her from atop Michael's shoulders, seeing him grin along with her, she knew that she would never have to start from scratch again.
Notes:
1. solnyshko = "little sun." According to the internet, it's a Russian endearment for small children.
2. The title is from Hem's "Half Acre."
3. Ohgod, I know nothing about children. I did a lot of internet research, but really, I understand if you're laughing at some blatant mistake I made. Point it out and I'll totally laugh along with you.
4. Now I will bore you with meta babble! Though it's short, this fic has a long and torturous history. (Let us not even discuss how many words I cut from it and how many drafts it's been through over the past year.) I started it not long after I watched "Sleeping in Light" for the first time. I had this to say about it in my original reaction post:
Largely, this is where I'm coming from when I write Ivanova in this series. What if she didn't have to always start over? What if she could hang on to some constants in her life? (Even though she never meant for Garibaldi to be a constant in her life.) What would this Susan Ivanova be like?
Presumably this is a question that would have been partially answered in S5 had Claudia Christian elected to stay on the show. At any rate, those are the questions I'm trying to answer, and the answers are what hold this AU together. Or at least I intend them to.
mundane_bingo, I think the very existence of such a challenge was what spurred me to complete it. Mundanity ahoy!Title: "We'll Crack the Darkest Sky Wide Open"
Author:
icepixieRating: G
Pairing: Ivanova/Garibaldi
Word Count: 1,756
Timeline: Approximately six months before "Language Lessons." (Timeline/master list.)
Summary: Susan, Michael, and Sofie move to Minbar. It's a new beginning, but not in the old way.
"Michael, will you come here for a minute?"
Susan heard him set a box on the floor and walk down the hall to the bathroom. "Yeah?" he asked as he poked his head in the door.
She pointed at the collection of odd spiky bits attached approximately at eye level to one of the shelves in the closet. "Do you have any idea what these are?"
He stared at them, lips pursed and brow furrowed. "Something to do with bonecrest hygiene?" he finally ventured. He touched one that had a little loop of wire at the end, tentatively, as if it were an explosive device. Which, for all they knew, it might be.
"I'll add it to the list," she said, shaking her head.
Some of the oddities of their new Minbari home were easily explainable. They had quickly realized that the small shelves attached to the east wall in every room were altars stripped of the crystals that would have made them instantly recognizable. The portraits or short narratives portrayed in the stained glass windows meshed with what they already knew of Minbari residential architecture—although they had been both amused and a little unnerved to realize that the figure which made up one of their bedroom windows was Valen, alias Jeffrey Sinclair. They had made sure to place the bed so that the portrait's gaze did not reach it.
Other things, like the instruments in the bathroom and the small hole in the ceiling of the dining area, they had more trouble figuring out, and that was where their list for Delenn came in. Susan only hoped that the unexplainable oddities were common to all Minbari architecture, and not just artifacts from their home's ninety-year history.
"How many things have we got on it now?" Michael asked.
"This makes thirteen, assuming we haven't decided that it's better not to know what the picture in the kitchen window is about."
"It can't be worse than it looks." He paused. "Can it?"
She snickered at his horrified expression. Kneeling to open the box marked "bathroom," she asked, "Are you about done out there?"
"Pretty close," he said. "We're going to need to put stops on a couple of the drawers in the kitchen. Most of them are okay, but that little cabinet in the corner doesn't have any; she could pull them right out."
"She would, too." They shared a smile—albeit one tinged with exasperation—at their daughter's insistence on investigating everything she could get her small hands on.
Childproofing their new home had been an interesting experience so far, with a combination of expected hazards to take care of and unexpected ones to figure out what the hell to do about. Though their house, like several in the city, had been converted for use by the non-Minbari working at the ISA and Ranger—Anla'Shok, Susan, you should get used to calling them that—headquarters, most of the structure was still profoundly foreign. It left them to wonder things such as whether the small tree which appeared to be growing in the middle of the living area was poisonous to small children who might decide to eat its leaves.
The fact that they now owned a house was itself almost as strange as the design. She hadn't lived in a house since she was seventeen. First it was university dorms, then assorted EarthForce housing, from a bunk bed on training missions to the relatively luxurious (by EarthForce standards) officer's quarters she had lived in on Babylon 5. Most recently there had been the two-bedroom apartment in Green Sector they had moved to after Sofie was born. Living area was at a premium in deep space, and having this much room seemed sinful; back on B5, they could've fit several conference rooms into their house's footprint. The openness of it sent the hair on the back of her neck creeping up.
While Michael returned to the kitchen, she began transferring items from the box at her feet into the closet: sheets, towels, Sofie's bath toys. It all seemed to take up laughably little space in the cavernous closet, though a similar complement of stuff had been plenty to fill their storage areas on the station. She carefully set a rubber duck on the shelf, reminding herself that they had good reasons for this move.
She'd been conflicted when John told her he'd put her name forward for EarthForce liaison to the Rangers. She'd commanded B5 for more than six years, and she loved every inch of the place—even the really dirty places. There was little that pleased her more than knowing everything was, for the moment at least, running smoothly in the little city in space that was her responsibility.
On the other hand, she'd missed John and Delenn since they'd moved to Minbar. The joint chiefs would stick her in administration sooner or later anyway, and any other position would be on Earth, where she still, after all these years, wasn't sure she could live again. Besides, Michael could still serve in the ISA cabinet on Minbar; it would be far more difficult from Earth.
And some part of her wanted Sofie to grow up on a planet, with sun and rain and more trees than the little piece of woodland B5 offered in the park. She'd known they made the right choice when, the moment they stepped out of the Tuzanor spaceport yesterday afternoon, Sofie had stared up at the sky, entranced by the arching bowl over her head that was the exact color of her eyes.
The thought reminded her to go across the hall and look in on her daughter, who was currently corralled in her bedroom with the Minbari version of a baby gate. It had multicolored crystals embedded in its clear plastic (of course it did). They were arranged in geometric patterns which, though some kind of holographic overlay, appeared to constantly change, rather like a kaleidoscope. When they had given it to their friends the previous day, David being too old for it anymore, Delenn had called the crystals intellectually and spiritually stimulating. John had merely said that they could distract a child nicely when one had things to do around the house.
Rather than being enthralled by the gate, Sofie, predictably, had spent much of the afternoon attempting to climb it. She had finally seemed to grasp the futility of trying to scale the smooth surface—much to her parents' relief—and turned her attention to her stuffed animal collection as evening came on. Interstellar freight charges being what they were, they hadn't been able to bring much with them, and Susan knew the girl was clinging to the familiarity of her fuzzy bears and rabbits.
Sofie looked up at her step and toddled over to the door. "Mama!" she said brightly. "Up?" She raised her arms expectantly.
Susan obliged her, grunting softly as she settled the girl against her hip. "You are getting way too heavy for this," she said. In response, Sofie nestled her head against her shoulder, a sigh of contentment escaping her lips. Susan chuckled. Barely two and her daughter knew exactly how to charm her into practically anything. Adolescence was going to be hell.
There was little left to do in the bathroom, and she put the last few towels away with one hand before shutting off the light and heading for the living room. The hallway echoed as she walked through it. But she smiled as she watched Michael stow their military-issue duffel bags in the closet near the front door, and listened to the soft breathing of their growing daughter. Their house would fill up with time.
"Hey," Michael said, finally noticing their presence when she stood right behind him. He tweaked one of Sofie's pigtails, and got a giggle in return. "Are we done?"
"I think so." She set Sofie on her feet. "We should get going if we're going to be on time for dinner." They were due at Delenn and John's house in twenty minutes. While it didn't take long to walk there, they had discovered the day before that bundling their particularly squirmy child up for the chilly Minbari spring took much longer than clothing her for the constant temperature on B5. They'd begun adjusting their routines accordingly.
Several layers later, they made it out of the house and onto the sidewalk. They walked slowly, letting Sofie set the pace as she walked between them, each of her hands in one of theirs. When they had gone a few yards from the house, Michael chanced to glance behind them, and drew her attention to the sight he'd found.
Minbar's star was setting, and it had set the western sky aflame in pink and bronze. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but though the sun gilded all of the buildings on the street, it seemed to make the stained glass windows and crystalline walls of their house glow especially bright, like a beacon for travelers who hadn't even known they were lost.
She felt a tug on her hand, and tore her gaze from the sunset to see what Sofie wanted.
What Sofie wanted was to get closer to a bug she had found on the sidewalk. She had dropped to her knees to give the multi-legged, fuzzy blue creature a more thorough inspection, and from the way she was trying to slide her hand out of her mother's grasp, Susan had a feeling that the next thing she had planned was to see how caterpillar a la Minbar tasted.
"Come on, solnyshko"—oh, the endearment was truer than she had realized, she thought, noticing now that the sunlight had turned strands of her daughter's hair to gold. "We're going to have real food in a minute."
Sofie was far more interested in the caterpillar than in the prospect of dinner, and they saw her face begin to curl into her classic "impending tantrum" expression. With one smooth movement, Michael scooped her up and sat her on his shoulders.
The effect was instantaneous. She adored being carried like this, and surveyed the world happily from her new perch, all thoughts of the caterpillar forgotten.
Despite the spring chill, warmth stole over Susan. Her whole life, moving to a new place or taking a new posting had always meant starting over. Watching Sofie wave at her from atop Michael's shoulders, seeing him grin along with her, she knew that she would never have to start from scratch again.
Notes:
1. solnyshko = "little sun." According to the internet, it's a Russian endearment for small children.
2. The title is from Hem's "Half Acre."
3. Ohgod, I know nothing about children. I did a lot of internet research, but really, I understand if you're laughing at some blatant mistake I made. Point it out and I'll totally laugh along with you.
4. Now I will bore you with meta babble! Though it's short, this fic has a long and torturous history. (Let us not even discuss how many words I cut from it and how many drafts it's been through over the past year.) I started it not long after I watched "Sleeping in Light" for the first time. I had this to say about it in my original reaction post:
I liked Susan especially throughout the whole thing--greatly enjoyed that she was still as cynical as ever even twenty years later--although I felt terribly for her, so sad and bitter after all those years. I feel like, in some ways, we constantly see her starting over--at Babylon 5, leaving to command a starship, and now as head of the Rangers. These aren't situations that have to be presented in terms of starting over, but for her, they are, and I get the feeling she would like to be someone who has a foundation to build on instead.
Largely, this is where I'm coming from when I write Ivanova in this series. What if she didn't have to always start over? What if she could hang on to some constants in her life? (Even though she never meant for Garibaldi to be a constant in her life.) What would this Susan Ivanova be like?
Presumably this is a question that would have been partially answered in S5 had Claudia Christian elected to stay on the show. At any rate, those are the questions I'm trying to answer, and the answers are what hold this AU together. Or at least I intend them to.
