Author’s Note: A slightly AU missing scene from “Sleeping in Light.”

Acknowledgments: Thanks so much to Medie for being my beta reader, my cheerleader, and as always, a hand to hold as “OMG deadline is almost here and I’m not finished!” panic inevitably set in. Oh, and for coming up with the title! *g* Love you, hon!

Written for: Muccamukk for rarepairfest 2013.

Cast me gently
Into morning
For the night has been unkind
Take me to a
Place so holy
That I can wash this from my mind
The memory of choosing not to fight
– Sarah McLachlan, “Answer”

Delenn found him in the courtyard after dinner. He would later wonder if she’d made the rounds, after hearing from Susan about the conversation they’d had, but at the time he’d been too engrossed in staring out at the city. Tuzanor, the “City of Sorrows” that had been the birthplace of the Rangers…Valen’s favorite city on all of Minbar.

Figures, Michael reflected dourly. Twenty years gone and a thousand years dead and I still can’t get away from you.

He only noticed she was there when a throat was cleared delicately behind him. Embarrassed to have been caught staring into space, he turned. “Hey, I was just, ah…admiring the scenery.”

Delenn smiled and came to stand at his shoulder. “It is beautiful,” she agreed. Silence lapsed between them for a moment, then she asked, “I did not get the chance to ask at dinner…how are you, Michael?”

He shrugged with deliberate nonchalance. “Me? I’m peachy as always. Why?”

“I noticed…in your toast…that there was someone you did not mention,” Delenn pointed out astutely.

Michael grimaced. “You mean Jeff?” She nodded. He sighed and turned again to stare out at the skyline of the city. “I guess that’s because even after all this time, it still doesn’t feel like he’s really gone. Especially not here on Minbar. Hell, I see a reminder of him everywhere I look.” He waved a hand at the temple that was visible from where he stood, one of dozens in Tuzanor and probably thousands over the whole of the planet dedicated improbably to the man he’d once called his best friend. “Literally.”

Turning back to Delenn, he offered her a crooked smile. “This was his house once, wasn’t it?”

She smiled. “Twice, actually. It was built for Valen a thousand years ago, but it was also given to him again when he came to Minbar as Jeffrey Sinclair. None but the Entil’zha may live here, so…” her voice trailed off into sadness.

So when John was gone, she would have to move? Or would she be allowed to stay by virtue of having held the title herself? Not that it mattered much to him, either way. Delenn would be taken care of. She was respected, even revered, too much by her people not to be. Just like Jeff–or rather, the person he became–had been.

Garibaldi dropped his eyes. “I went through hell and back, and he wasn’t there, and I hated him for it. He was the one person who’d always been there for me and then because of some damn prophecy he ran off to save a bunch of strangers he’d never even met and left me behind. I guess part of me still hasn’t forgiven him for that.”

Delenn sounded troubled. “I see.”

“I mean, I get that he had to do it,” Michael admitted, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “And I get why. But he was my best friend and he didn’t even have the guts to say goodbye to my face.”

Another long silence fell between them, then Delenn asked, “Would you be able to forgive him if he had?”

Michael laughed shortly. “I don’t know. Hell, I probably would’ve badgered him into taking me along. Maybe he knew that. But I guess I’ll never know.”

Something enigmatic came into her expression then, and she laid a hand on his arm. “Come with me.”

Surprised, Michael followed, even when she led him out of the house and into the quiet, star-spangled night. At first he thought they were headed for the temple, and that she was going to give him some rigmarole about Jeff still being here in spirit, but then at the last minute Delenn turned aside and stopped at the door of a small, nondescript house he’d never noticed before. She pressed her hand to the arrangement of crystals beside the door that served as a door chime, then after a moment a voice from inside said, “Yes?”

Michael caught his breath.

Delenn leaned close to the almost invisible speaker and announced herself. “It’s Delenn.”

That same impossible voice said, “Come in.”

The door slid open and at first Michael thought he must have been imagining things, because the person who rose to greet them was definitely Minbari. But then Jeff’s familiar eyes widened in an otherwise mostly unfamiliar face. “Michael.”

Garibaldi said the first thing that leaped to mind. “You son of a bitch.”

Jeff looked from him to Delenn, startled. Clearly that wasn’t the reaction he’d been expecting, which somehow only made Michael angrier. “Why’d you do it, huh? Do you have any idea the hell I went through after you left? What Bester did to me? What I nearly did to myself?”

Jeff just stared at him in surprise, then looked at Delenn again. “I don’t understand. Delenn told me you married Lise and were CEO of Edgars Industries.”

Delenn dropped her eyes, abashed. Michael almost snorted. He’d think after living with the Minbari for a century, Jeff would’ve remembered they were the masters of the half-truth. No doubt she’d told him exactly what he needed to hear not to feel guilty about the choice he’d made.

Garibaldi wasn’t letting him off that easy. “Sure, now,” he shot back. “But it was a hell of a long hard road to get there.” Especially with Jeff gone, the one person Michael’d always counted on to believe in him. “What are you even doing here, anyway? I thought you ‘traveled beyond’ nine hundred years ago.”

“I did,” Jeff answered, his voice wry. “Where do you think I traveled to?”

That was unexpected enough to stop Michael mid-rant. “Okay, but…how? Why?”

Jeff looked at both of them. “Maybe you should come in, sit down.” He grimaced. “It’s kind of a long story.”

He led them into the small living area of the house and waited until they were seated to disappear into the kitchen, returning with a small tea service that he poured with surprisingly little ceremony for the person the Minbari supposedly dedicated all their ceremonies too.

Michael couldn’t help but watch him, trying to take in this new version of his old friend. Even though he supposed it really wasn’t new–this was the form he’d worn now for a hundred years. Hell, being Minbari was probably more comfortable to him now than being human had been. It sure seemed to suit him, something Michael tried to resent, but found he couldn’t.

Jeff waited until they were all three fairly settled before dropping his eyes to his hands and beginning his story. “When my work on Minbar in the past was done, the Vorlons came for me. They knew that some of the Minbari would never be willing to accept my human life as my prophesied ‘return,’ never mind that I’d made the prophecy myself with exactly that in mind. They informed me that I was going to be preserved just in case it became necessary to use me in this form. I tried to argue–I’d built a new life for myself there, in the past. The last thing I wanted to do was leave everything behind again. But the Vorlons aren’t exactly very good at taking no for an answer. The next thing I remember was waking up here, in a Tuzanor that was familiar for all the wrong reasons. It took a little while to find out what was going on, but eventually I learned that the Vorlons and the Shadows had departed to join the other First Ones beyond the Rim. I guess at that point I just became so much excess baggage, so they left me behind.”

Michael’s breath caught in his throat again. That had been only a year after Jeff left! He looked accusingly at Delenn. “And you waited this long to tell me?”

“I did not know, at first,” she answered quietly. “It was many years before Jeffrey contacted me.”

Jeff nodded quietly. “I knew Delenn had assumed the mantle of Entil’zha after I left, just as Zathras said she would, and that Sheridan would take it up after her. My presence would’ve only thrown things into confusion, maybe even undermined their authority. So, I reinvented myself again, as Mafak of the worker caste, and joined one of the worker guilds. I’ve been living here in Tuzanor ever since.”

Garibaldi’d picked up enough of the various Minbari dialects over the years to know that the name Jeff had chosen for himself meant ‘new beginning.’ It made sense and stung at the same time: he couldn’t go back to his old life, either of them, so he made a new one all over again. “So, what, now that John’s dying, are you going to step up and lead the Rangers again?”

Delenn shifted uncomfortably at his side and he realized belatedly he might’ve been a little blunt.

“No,” Jeff shook his head. “As a matter of fact, Delenn and I spoke about it, and she’s chosen someone else for that role.” He gave her a quizzical look and she nodded, although with enough hesitation to suggest she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that whoever she had chosen would accept. Jeff’s gaze grew distant even as he added more quietly, “Delenn knows she can call on me if needed, but if I have a choice, I’d like to live out my last years anonymously.”

Michael could understand that. Hell, he could hear in Jeff’s voice how tired he obviously was. He’d already lived longer and done more than most humans would in a lifetime.

But he’d done it alone when Michael would’ve happily stood at Valen’s shoulder just as he’d done for Jeff Sinclair, and that he wasn’t quite ready to forgive. “You still haven’t answered my question. Why’d you leave me behind?”

Delenn set down her teacup, clearly uncomfortable, and rose. “Perhaps you would like to speak alone,” she suggested.

Garibaldi almost objected, almost told her if she left now, she ran the risk that her precious Valen wouldn’t be around to help if needed after all. But then he caught her eyes and remembered this was probably the last night she was ever going to get to spend with John, and he couldn’t. He’d been denied the chance to say goodbye: he couldn’t deny it to her, or anyone. “Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good,” he said instead. “I’ll find my own way back.”

Delenn nodded. She and Jeff exchanged the traditional bows and then she left, leaving him alone with Jeff for the first time in over twenty years.

As awkward silences went, this one was a doozy. Michael was finally the one who broke it. “Well?”

Jeff took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I did it to protect you. Both from the aging effect of the time field, and from the future I thought was in store for you if I didn’t go. Do you remember that message you got from Susan in the future, a possible future? The one where Babylon 5 was destroyed by the Shadows?”

“Yeah,” he answered quietly.

“The first time we went to Babylon 4, I had a time flash. I saw us together on the station, in the middle of an invasion. We were losing, and losing badly, in the middle of an evacuation.” He paused and closed his eyes, the memory clearly pretty painful for something that had never happened. “You’d rigged the fusion reactor and were planning to go down with the station. I tried to convince you to come with me, but we got separated in the confusion.”

“But you said yourself, that was what the future held if you didn’t go back,” Michael pointed out. “That doesn’t stop you from saying goodbye.”

Jeff nodded. “I was afraid if I told you what we were doing, you would insist on coming along. But because the first time you and I were exposed to the time field, we didn’t have any sort of protection, just that two year jump forward in time almost doubled my age. If you’d come with us…trying to come home after Babylon 4 was ready to go would’ve killed you.”

“And what if I would’ve gone along with you, to the past?”

“You couldn’t,” Jeff answered. “Because it didn’t happen. It was a closed circle, Michael. Nothing happened then that wasn’t meant to.”

“Yeah, well did it ever occur to you that maybe if you’d given me the chance to choose for myself, that maybe that closed circle would’ve included me after all?”

“It doesn’t matter, because it didn’t,” Jeff insisted. He sighed, and for a moment the weight of two worlds and two lifetimes seemed to settle on his shoulders. “Was it really that bad?”

“Yes,” Garibaldi answered flatly. He laid it all out in plain terms; Bester, the brainwashing, quitting the only job he’d ever loved in a fit of pique that wasn’t even his, his betrayal of Sheridan, meeting up again with Lise, working for Edgars, finding out he’d been used all along, the Asimov Bester had planted in his brain, his spiral back into the bottle that he almost hadn’t pulled out of… “And you know what the worst part was? Every time things got worse, I’d find myself thinking, ‘I wish Jeff were here.’ Because you knew me better than anyone, and you would’ve straightened me out before it went as far as it did, no matter what junk Bester put in my head. And because…” The next part was harder to say because it was something he’d never admitted to anyone except himself. “Because I realized only after you were gone that I hadn’t followed you to Babylon 5 to prove myself to anyone, or even out of friendship. I’d followed you because I loved you and I would’ve followed you anywhere. But you didn’t give me that chance.”

By this point Jeff wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was looking anywhere but at Michael, and Michael didn’t blame him one bit.

“I’m sorry,” he finally spoke in a quiet tone heavy with regret. “If I’d known–”

“You wouldn’t have done anything differently,” Michael cut him off.

That finally brought Jeff’s eyes back to his. “Don’t be so sure of that,” he contradicted quietly.

Michael’s throat closed up. For years, he’d wanted nothing more than to see that look in Jeff’s eyes, even if he hadn’t known it until Jeff was already gone. But it was too late. He’d moved on, and all the apologies or regrets in the world weren’t gonna change that. Not now. He’d betrayed too many people in his life, himself included. He wasn’t going to add Lise and Mary to that list. Not even for Jeff.

He force a lighter tone into his voice. “Probably just as well. I mean, considering Delenn’s one of your descendants, you obviously found someone back there, in the past.”

Jeff looked surprised for a moment, and Michael almost laughed. It just figured that Delenn wouldn’t have told him she’d found out she was his great-great-great-something grandkid. “Yes,” he admitted after a pause, shock fading into fond remembrance. “I found someone.” He didn’t say who. Not that it would’ve mattered, it wasn’t like it was going to be anyone Michael knew.

There was another long, pregnant pause, then Michael asked, “So, what now?”

Jeff looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Am I just supposed to forget you’re here, let you go back to that anonymous life you want?” he asked.

“Is that what you want?”

Michael shook his head. “I don’t know anymore.”

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment, Michael still struggling to make the alien in front of him align with the friend he’d once known better than any other soul in the universe. “I’ll be honest, Jeff, it’s never gonna be the way it was. There are some things I don’t know if I can ever forgive, and I can’t even look at you without being reminded of them.”

For the first time since he’d met them at the door, Jeff looked self-conscious about the Minbari body he’d probably long forgotten wasn’t the one he started out with. He looked resigned as well. “I understand.”

“But,” Michael interjected. “I’ve also spent way too many years without you as a part of my life. I’d be an idiot to throw away the chance to change that over something that happened twenty years ago.” He took a deep breath. “I have a kid…Mary. She’s…she’s incredible. Half the time I can’t even figure out how the hell she’s mine.” Something settled into place and he met Jeff’s eyes again. “I’d like you to meet her. You would’ve been her godfather, you know.” Well…if he hadn’t been her other dad, but there was no point going down that road.

Jeff smiled sadly. “I’d like that.”

He hated it. Hated that this was what they were reduced to, tiptoeing around each other like a couple of strangers. But it was a hell of a lot better than nothing, and nothing was what he’d had for far too long. Michael rose from his seat, leaving the tea behind. “I should get back. But I’ll come again, okay? Just don’t…don’t disappear on me this time.”

“I won’t.” Jeff stood as well. “I don’t think I realized until I opened the door and saw you standing there how much I’d missed having you in my life, too.”

Michael regarded him for another long moment before finally deciding to hell with it and pulling Jeff into a hug. Jeff’s arms tightened around him for a moment, then let go without a word. They walked together to the door.

Michael turned in the doorway. “Do me a favor. Even if it’s only temporary…say it this time? To my face?”

Jeff smiled ruefully at him, his voice still quiet and heavy with regret. “Goodbye, old friend.”

Then the door closed between them.