# Babylon 5 and its characters and their words were created by J. Michael Straczynski, and belong to Joe and Warner Bros., and are used without permission. The rest belongs to Cathy Faye Rudolph.)

4__________

Garibaldi sat with her in the darkness. He'd wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the bed. Her eyes were empty; she sat still, unaware, unresponsive. He held her tenderly and, in the darkness, wept.

The horror of the dark images he'd seen through her eyes was compounded by his first sight of the congealing blood on her fist. There was no comm-unit here, and he didn't want to leave her to search for help. As he dressed her wounds Garibaldi realized that there was a good chance she might not come out of this...sane. He knew enough from what Lyta had told him to realize that the line between psi and insanity was thin. And sharp...like shattered crystal.

He remembered what he'd told Zack, how sometimes desperate people wanted to see if you cared enough to follow them into Hell. Well, Michael old buddy, you weren't content to see if she'd follow you into Hell: you decided to throw her in. Delusions of godhood, with a capital MG.

Several more hours passed, until with a convulsive gasp Seren returned to herself. Garibaldi forcibly restrained her, repeating her name, over and over, until she understood that she wasn't in the hands of the Corps. Only then did she stop struggling. It took another hour until she was able to suppress the violent trembling that wracked her body.

He didn't understand, and even after she'd explained, he wasn't much better off. He didn't understand how she had made herself invisible to the Corps. "Not 'invisible'," she said in a detached voice. "They didn't remember me...after." Before she averted her eyes, he saw overwhelming guilt and pain there.

He had to ask, he had to know. "Are you a teep? Or one of the empaths or TKs? Or something...someone like Ironheart?" She was staring at the corner, visiting some absent corner of Hell from her past, and her voice sounded thin as it wandered back.

"Not a teep. Was just a normal. A normal in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was the first of the psi-enhancement experiments, the ones designed to create the 'manipulators', the ascendants. All the prime candidates were P10 or better, but they decided that they needed a control subject. A normal. A normal with an advanced science background, a normal who could tell them something useful...if the experiment didn't kill him first."

She leaned her head back against the wall. "They came the night before the experiment. All I remember about it was the noise, lights, the hiss of the tranquilizer capsule. The next thing..." She stopped, closed her eyes in the pain of the memory. "The next thing I remember was hearing screaming all around me. Sustained, unbroken, terrified, hopeless screaming. Some of the subjects screamed as they struggled in the restraints. Some of them lay there and screamed at things only they could see. Some died between one scream and the next. The rest just...died. I was the only one that didn't die...that didn't wake up screaming..."

"I heard the technicians talking. PsiCorps was planning to take me apart, cell by cell. They saw it as an affront, an obscenity, that a normal had survived their procedure. The scientists argued, talked about me like I wasn't even there, debating about which laboratory would examine my body parts, cross-sections of my brain tissue. I could almost see it like it was real, suited technicians probing and slicing something from the PsiCorps lockers."

"I pushed the image away mentally, and somehow, it...moved. It was as if there had been multiple images, all aligned, and that pushing the first one set a myriad of others drifting slowly apart. All translucent, overlapping, drifting. I noticed that some of the images seemed...different. It was as if each possibility, each choice we make, could split off, drift away as yet another image. Different faces, different activities, drifting images that looked identical and some-- I saw one, one without the scenes of the PsiCorps dissection labs. I reached for the image, willed it closer, willed myself into it, and then...everything -- the present, the 'now', *reality* -- everything changed."

"There had been an accident after the experiment. The research team was killed in an explosion when one of the power units unaccountably overloaded. The computer system was completely destroyed, as were the monitoring systems. They found one survivor, a half-dead normal. They sent me to the medical center at Syria Planum."

"No one at Syria Planum knew that I'd been in the experiment, but the paranoia of the Corps led them back to review the records that had been offsite when the lab had blown. The Corps made plans to repeat the experiments from the last reported milestone."

"I could see the images, the possibilities. I chose, and chose again, and kept moving between the images, and each time things, the here and now, changed. The experiments to make the ascendants were terminated, deemed a dead end, and all research was redirected."

Her mouth was dry, and her face pale. "All research was redirected." The statement was bitter in her mouth. "Instead of the one research effort, there were now dozens, hundreds. The Corps began concentrating on enhancement of certain single abilities--higher TP, TK, even empaths. They began by creating a base of operations at Syria Planum. I had tried to stop just the one set of experiments, and instead..."

Garibaldi understood. The collaboration of PsiCorps with the Shadow Allies, the numerous experiments on Talia Winters, even the program that created Jason Ironheart, all of that had happened because she had moved the 'now' between the possibilities.

She whispered softly to herself--

"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Garibaldi could hear the pleading in her whisper. "I didn't know you believed in God."

"I don't know what I believe in anymore," she replied, closing her eyes. She'd come to Babylon 5 in part because of what she had seen in the images, but she refused to tamper any further with the possibilities. Now she always had to be on guard, against fear and fatigue, against weakness, against reaching out to grasp those images, the other nows. The proximity of the Great Machine, something in its power or effects, seemed to make it easier to endure the images and the constant temptation. And so she stayed on Epsilon 3.

Garibaldi had intended to ask her to come back to the station with him, ostensibly to check into Medlab to get her hand looked at. But she needed to be near the Great Machine, he heard it in her voice, saw it in her eyes. She was too vulnerable, too aware of the cascade of consequences of her actions. He cradled her right hand in his and deliberately, gently, raised her hand to his lips and kissed her open palm. It was an apology, a confession of fear, a profession of the depth of his feeling.

She spoke his name. He looked into her face, into her eyes. Her eyes were like the light-traced seas, light green with refracted rainbows, warmth and light and love beckoning, calling to him, drawing him in, whispering his name...

---- She spoke his name, in a soft contralto that instantly transmuted his fascination into desire. He covered her hands with his, willing her to know what he felt. He wanted to drown in the sea of her eyes. She spoke again. "Michael." He could feel her pulse in her hands, and his own trembling only barely restrained. She leaned even closer, close enough for him to feel the moisture in her breath, to feel the brush of her body against his -- it's always the quiet ones, he thought, always the ones you least suspect of being able to capture your soul.

Her voice softened even more. "Make yourself useful, Michael." He asked the question with his eyes. She stood on tiptoe, and whispered as drops of water from her hair rained on his shirt.

"Now."

His lips lightly brushed her cheek, and he gave her soft kisses at the base of her neck. He pulled her close, and he felt the water from her hair drip down her back and over his fingers. Her kisses had a bittersweet tang, like chocolate, like summer peaches. He felt released, suddenly free of the fear of letting go. He kissed her deeply, and felt her still-damp hands exploring under his shirt to touch his bare skin.

Her passion spoke itself in gasps and sighs and entreaties. She matched his passionate rhythm, whispering his name over and over, urgency stressing each breath. Release drew forth laughter from the two of them, and soft shared kisses, tickling and caresses. He took her hand, and gazed into her eyes. "Forever," she whispered, as he kissed the palm of her hand...

He gazed into her eyes, still holding her hand. He realized that she'd reached into the possibilities to share that vision with him. The tears spilling down her cheeks were a testament to what it had cost her to turn away from that possibility, to keep from making it the here and now. To be afraid all the time, all the time, of what might happen if she ever lost control, if she ever let go...

She trembled when he held her. His fingertips brushed her cheek, her lips. He whispered to her again the sentence of seven words, and her reply was startlingly poignant. Her reply, just five words, would haunt his nights and dreams for years to come, the words laced with the taste of bittersweet chocolate and summer peaches. And whether the memory came in waking hours, or in deep dreams, he would see her standing in the tapestried doorway, watching as he left. It was at those times, wherever he was, that he would whisper in his heart, as a prayer, as a warning, as a blessing...as words of love...

"...and the wisdom to know the difference."