Dexter looked at the empty cell in the picture again. Something caught his gaze, something just off-centre of his perception. He looked again, harder.
There was a brief flicker of light, and in his mind, a voice. Come to us. Come and see the light.
He frowned.
She knows why she has come here. It is not for diplomacy, not for strategy, or tactics, or alliances. It is not for the good of her people. It is for herself, one selfish action in a lifetime of service to the Minbari.
It is warm this night in the capital on Brakir. There are many people moving and dancing in the streets, processions and carnivals. The Day of the Dead is a holy event to these people, and even more so now, a time of celebration. There are so many dead to speak to. Yesterday there was mourning, tomorrow there will be morning. Tonight, there is a chance to meet again with old friends, old enemies.
Old loves.
Tomorrow, Satai Kats will return to Minbar to continue the slow rebuilding. Tomorrow, the faint semblance of diplomacy that brought her here will be concluded.
Tirivail understood. She alone would understand, Kats knew that. "Go," the warrior had said. "And if you see him, tell him…. tell him…."
"Tell him what?"
"I was wrong. He was not a coward. He was never a coward."
"I will."
Kats had not dared to hope. No one in living memory had experienced a Day of the Dead. The last had been over two hundred years ago. The very concept of the dead returning went against everything she had ever been taught. The warrior caste believed in ghosts and ancestor-spirits, but the religious caste taught that souls returned to the ether, to be endlessly reborn.
And even if the legends were true, who could say she would meet again with Kozorr? Why not her father, or Hedronn, or anyone?
But she had to hope.
She stood on the balcony, looking down at the people passing by in the street below. A tall, dignified-looking Centauri man moved with steady conviction, but he had the same air of desperate hope she had herself. In the alleyway beneath her room, a human sat moaning and whispering to himself. A Narn in a simple robe made for a nearby temple, and a Brakiri in the uniform of a Dark Star captain looked up at the sky, staring in wonder at the comet overhead.
"There you are," said a voice, and Kats stiffened, unable to believe that she had truly heard the words. Scars both old and new throbbed with remembered pain as she turned to see Kalain move from the shadows into her room.
He looked as he once had, before the illness had ravaged and torn his body. He looked proud and haughty and arrogant, a prince of all he surveyed. He had always belonged to a different time, the earlier days, where he could have walked beside Marrain and Parlonn and shaken the world with the sound of his footsteps.
But he had been born into the wrong time, and he had dedicated his life to changing that.
"You thought you were free of me," he said, his voice commanding and proud, not the hoarse rasp it had later become. "You thought you could escape from your sins."
Kats looked at him. "Why?" she said softly.
"Is this one of your worker tricks?" he asked. "To ask questions which make no sense?"
"Why did you do all the things you did to me? You enjoyed it, Kalain. Don't say you did not. Was that all there was to it?" She remembered his voice growing louder and louder, exhorting her to beg for forgiveness. She remembered his laughter at her screams and her pleas for mercy. Sebastian had been brutally cold and efficient. He had taken no pleasure in his work. But Kalain had.
"I did it to purify you, to make you repent your sins, to make you…."
"You are not of the religious caste. Why should you care for my sins? You are a warrior. Was I truly the most fitting opponent for you? Was I the only person you could fight?"
"Stop this! You lie! Have you forgotten who it was who massacred the Grey Council? Have you forgotten…?"
"No! I have not forgotten, and I never will forget. It was not I who did that, and you knew that. You always knew that. So, I ask you again, Kalain. Why?"
"Because…. because you deserved it! There was a day you would have knelt in the mud at my feet as I walked past, and you would have thanked the ancestors that I even deigned to look upon you! There was a day when you would have addressed me with downcast eyes and spoken only when given permission. There was a day when we were warriors, and that was understood by all, when we did not have to make people aware of anything, when we had but to speak to be obeyed, when…."
"When you had true power. When you had true respect?"
"Yes!"
Kats sighed. "Then that was what you wanted. You wanted respect and power, even if it was only from one person, only over one person. The rest of the Grey Council followed you only at Sinoval's orders. You had lost all respect from them when you faltered at Mars.
"But I was there. I was a worker who thought herself worthy to stand at your side. I thought myself able to command warriors. I thought myself worthy to stand in the Grey Council, where Valen himself once stood.
"So you brought me to the Grey Council, and you showed me just how little power I had, and you made for yourself someone whom you could command, someone you could hurt as much as you liked.
"I apologise, Kalain. I thought you tortured me for your own pleasure. I was wrong."
"I had to…. I was a warrior. I was…."
"Wrong?"
"I was wrong."
"I forgive you, Kalain. You hurt me, and you weakened me, and you almost broke me, but you did not. I am stronger now than I ever was, and for that I thank you, and I forgive you."
"I never apologised, and I never sought your forgiveness."
"I know, but I offer it all the same. Be at peace, Kalain."
"And you. There is…. someone else who wants to talk to you. I think you want to talk to him as well. I will see you again in another life, worker."
"May your Gods welcome you home," she said, the words sounding hollow to her, but she knew they were important to him.
Perhaps the Day of the Dead did not show you those you wished to speak to, but rather those you needed to speak to.
She touched her necklace gently, and then all the air seemed to be sucked from the room.
"My lady," said his voice. "I swear you are more lovely than ever."
She whispered his name, just once, and there were tears in her eyes.
The room was larger than she was used to, larger than she found comfortable, even. This was the place she had spent more time in than any other on Babylon 5, more even than her sleeping quarters, and yet she had never liked it.
Perhaps it was because this room seemed to breed so much strife, so much conflict.
Sometimes Delenn longed for the old days. There had been just a handful of them at the beginning. Herself, Londo, Lethke, Taan Churok, Vizhak. There were so many now, people she did not know, people who had not seen the things she had, people who did not seem to understand why there had to be an Alliance.