[#088] Remorse (Babylon 5)

[badly_knitted]

Theme Prompt: #088 - Regrets
Title: Remorse
Fandom: Babylon 5
Rating/Warnings: PG / Major spoilers for much of the show.
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 998
Summary: Londo Mollari is an old, tired man, looking back at a life full of regrets as he waits to meet his end.



A solitary figure stood, old, sick, and weary to the bone, staring out through the palace window at what had at one time been a thriving city, boasting some of the grandest architecture in the universe. The sun was setting, turning the sky into a blood red backdrop for the shattered, burning ruins of a once-proud civilisation. It was a scene of utter devastation.

The earthers had a saying: Pride cometh before a fall. It was apt; the Centauri had been a proud people, and this was what their hubris had wrought. His shoulders sagged; he was to blame for the ruined city, and everything that had led up to its destruction, no one else.

Emperor Londo Mollari. Who would have ever thought it? Many years ago, when he’d still been a man in his prime, filled with vigour and ambition, when his star had been in the ascendant and anything at all had seemed within his grasp if he just allied himself with the right people… He had said, back then, that he had no ambition to become the supreme ruler of his people, preferring to work behind the scenes, the power behind the throne. Had he meant it, or had it merely been a judicious lie, told to those with more power than he could boast in order to appear less ambitious than he truly was, and therefore less of a threat to their own schemes? He no longer recalled, but it hardly mattered now.

What did the universe care for one man’s ambitions and desires anyway? Fate and destiny did what they would, regardless, sweeping every living being along helplessly, caught up in their unstoppable tide. Now here he was, an old, tired man, and ruler of a broken people.

Ruler, Hah! That was perhaps the bitterest joke of all. He was little more than a puppet, controlled by his Keeper, nestled there against his neck, an inseparable part of him, sleeping now from an excess of alcohol. The one small blessing in all of this insanity was that the Keepers could not hold their liquor. It allowed him a few precious moments of freedom from their control, moments he made use of now and then for his own purposes. A small measure of autonomy, fleeting and illusory though it undoubtedly was.

He had sought to restore his people to greatness, and instead he had doomed them. Unable to face the destruction around him, he had ordered all the palace windows blocked off, all except this one in the throne room, so that he would never turn a corner and chance upon the heart-breaking sight unprepared and be thus brought to tears of regret for all his failures. So where did he spend all his time? Right here, gazing out of this one window, his penance perhaps, though his tears had long since run dry.

Regrets, oh yes, he had those in abundance, more regrets than there were gods in the Centauri pantheon. Did they have a god of regrets? If not, then they should. Perhaps on his death he himself might be elevated to godhood, Mollari, god of failure, god of remorse, god of shame. It would be fitting. What a fool he had been.

If he had only known back then what he knew now, perhaps none of this would have happened. If…

What? If he’d never met that triple damned Mister Morden? Never taken the time to answer his silly question? Answered him differently? But ambition, and frustration with the Narn problem had combined into an unstoppable flood or words that would have been better left unsaid.

“What do you want?”

Pah! He’d thought it nothing but idle curiosity at the time, but still Londo had told Morden exactly what he wanted, nothing less than to have everything back the way it had been when the Centauri had been supreme, glorious, a mighty empire bestriding the stars! He’d laid it all out in detail and thanks to Morden and his… associates, he’d got it, only to find that it wasn’t at all what he’d thought it would be. So many deaths, so much destruction, not just the Narns but countless other races as well, his own among them. He’d watched in horror as planets were bombarded from space, and the known universe had been torn apart by conflict.

The sobering truth was that he’d been used; they all had. His people had become little more than pawns, game pieces, positioned by races unimaginably older and more advanced than his own. They were expendable troops in a war that had been raging since the beginning of time, both sides convinced that they were right, but unwilling to put their own lives on the line in the quest for ultimate victory over all of creation.

Yes, well, everyone made mistakes. His own had merely been more catastrophic, and further reaching than most. It was a shame he’d failed to learn from them at a point in time when he might still have been able to prevent some of the harm he’d caused, but the time for regrets was almost at an end.

The past could not be altered, and the future was grim. Perhaps in some far-off future Centauri Prime might be restored to something resembling its former glory, but his people would never regain all that they’d lost, and perhaps they didn’t deserve to. Their time had come and gone long before Mister Morden had ever arrived on Babylon 5. They’d been consumed by dreams of past glories when perhaps they should have allowed the Centauri Empire to fade away gracefully.

The end was approaching, for him if not for his people. Soon he would face his old friend G’Kar one last time, just as he’d dreamed so very long ago, and he would breathe his last. Perhaps they both would, but he very much hoped G’kar would live.

Turning from the window he returned to his throne to await the end.

Soon.


The End