Work Text:
While he was in school, Vir put a lot of time into avoiding thinking about how things could have been different. Different wasn't something he could imagine or will into existence. He had to deal with the challenges in front of him. He had to keep moving.
Vir's father was dead, and Vir's mother spent enough time wandering labyrinths of what-might-have-been-if. He never asked what drug she was taking. He didn't smell anything obviously untoward when he visited, and she wasn't exceeding her allowance. She was clean and neatly dressed and looked like she was eating enough. She had a maid who didn't seem to be a spy for anyone.
Vir and his mother weren't important enough to spy on. They had the smallest of the family suites, one meant for a childless concubine that really didn't have room for Vir when he came back from school.
Vir knew that his mother found joy and safety in her memories and in the illusion that his father was still alive, just out of the room at the moment, and Vir couldn't quite hold a grudge for her having left him behind. After all, he had left her first and kept doing it every time he went away to school.
The Cotto family would keep Vir and support him even if he failed his coursework or started drinking or-- Well, Vir hadn't had a strong sense of the 'or' until he met Londo and had to follow after to clean up the mess.
Still, the Cotto family only kept Vir's mother on sufferance. The threat was never quite stated. It was just that she had no family, no money, no connections or talents that Vir's great-uncle valued. Great-Uncle Mehrin hadn't approved the marriage, but Vir's father had been the third son of a second son, so it hadn't mattered enough to fuss about.
Now, it would be shameful to turn her out while Vir was in good standing, and it would be tacky to expel Vir from the family for anything short of kin slaying. If Vir had been in line to inherit anything at all, even as third or fourth in line, someone might have assassinated him, just to be sure, but, under the circumstances...
Vir just wasn't worth the trouble.
He realized later, much later, that he had been lucky in his cousins. They were all at least a decade older or younger than he was. The older ones already had their own household staff who did everything that Vir might be trained for, and the younger ones were too vulnerable to manipulation by the man Vir might become.
Not that Vir would have.
Before he left for his first term at school, Vir's mother told him to embrace the opportunity to learn. "That's the one thing they can't take from you," she said fiercely. "Knowledge is portable."
Vir did his best. Not having cousins near his age helped with that, too. He didn't have to underperform in order to make someone else look good.
After the first couple of years, after watching his mother slip further and further into her dreams, Vir started deliberately underperforming. He learned as much as he could, but he kept it close and quiet.
Well, mostly. Learning languages required his full attention. It just wasn't anything his family would consider useful enough to encourage or dangerous enough to discourage.
And both of his parents had spoken several languages well and managed to get by in half a dozen more. It was Vir having a shadow of his dead father's skills.
Vir didn't show off his ability to manage currency conversions or to remember which worlds produced which luxury goods. The school didn't test for time management or organization.
Vir wasn't good at poetry. Genuinely not. Words were a way to communicate, and adding layers of meaning made that harder all around. He probably could have learned, but he didn't see much point.
He wasn't going to be writing letters for the Emperor or even letters to the Emperor. Nobody was going to pay his bills while he played with allusion and metaphor.
But his great-uncle might have liked him better if he'd been a poet. Possibly. Poets were harmless. They could bring trouble on themselves, but it seldom hurt their wider family.
Vir hadn't expected to be sent to Babylon 5. He hadn't expected Londo Mollari or any of the other people he encountered there. Vir had hoped to have more time with his mother, possibly a small apartment somewhere paid for by a small civil service position, some place they could live together while he tried to coax her back to the present.
Babylon 5 was so far away from Centauri Prime that he knew he'd see her even less often than he had while he was at school.
If he'd known more about Londo, he might have tried to bring her along. Londo could be kind about the strangest things and in the least expected ways, and he might have given Vir that much for himself.
But Vir hadn't known, and Londo had a reputation for being difficult. Londo hadn't even bothered to bring along one of his wives to act as hostess and household manager. The embassy staff didn't even include someone to clean Londo's rooms.
Vir had understood immediately that that was why he was there. He wasn't expected to do anything about Londo's behavior, but he was supposed to make sure that Londo's clothing was clean and that the embassy didn't reek of alcohol or sex or anything even less savory.
Londo had Vir running errands and screening visitors, too, and that was necessary work. It was just that nobody back home expected Vir to be good at it.
That was fine. Vir didn't need to carry anyone's expectations. He'd seen what those could do to people-- How they could crush, constrict, and erode the heart and mind.
If he'd somehow managed to forget, he had Londo in front of him as an example.
Londo's life had somehow-- Vir didn't know, didn't want to know, the details-- hollowed him out, taking all of the parts that made being alive actually good.
Vir suspected that Londo had chosen what to keep but not what to let go. Londo had only realized, after each piece went, that, actually, he'd be happier if he'd held onto something else.
Londo had held onto everything he was supposed to want, everything Vir never expected to have.
Vir thought he'd rather have a small life than a life that tore him to pieces to make him big enough to fit and then demanded he smile about it.
When Great-Uncle Mehrin died, Vir didn't return to Centauri Prime. He sent very polite apologies for his absence and alluded vaguely to the duties of his position and to the fact that Ambassador Mollari didn't have other staff to cover Vir's absence.
Vir took care to offer condolences in the appropriate forms to acknowledge each mourner's status, both in terms of familial proximity to the deceased and in terms of the new family hierarchy. He used the correct titles and relationships and wrote the message in his own hand.
Doing less would have been either deliberately rude or a clear signal of Vir's incompetence, which might be taken as deliberate, too, in a sneer at the prole who's getting it wrong sort of way but wouldn't be anything but what his relatives expected.
Likely, they'd credit Londo's influence and teaching for Vir's performance of the niceties which... Vir doubted that Londo could write a full family, formal condolence letter without wandering away in the middle of it to visit the casino.
Which reminded Vir to draft Londo's condolence letter to the Cotto family. Londo's actual signature on that was as much personalization as anyone would expect between him and Vir's family given their difference in rank. The signature would even appear as a social apology for keeping Vir from attending.
Since Londo at least sometimes wanted to know what he was signing, Vir simply said, "My Great-Uncle Mehrin, senior in the house, has passed the threshold. We're too busy-- with one thing and another-- for me to make the trip and stay the full forty days."
Londo looked at Vir sideways for a fraction of a moment then smiled sadly and nodded. "Of course, of course. Your help is necessary."
Vir knew that look-- Londo had been trying to tell if Vir simply didn't care to go or if Vir had an over-inflated sense of his own worth that needed puncturing.
"We weren't close," Vir said. "I mean, he sent me here."
Londo's expression went a little stiff because he knew what Vir meant and because Londo hated remembering the time when he'd been a joke and Babylon 5 had been the punchline. Before anyone who didn't know Londo would have noticed the stiffness, Londo shattered it with a grin. "Then we will drink to him together! I have just the thing!"
And they did drink later. The part for Great-Uncle Mehrin was just his name and a single sip. A single sip of the most middling vintage Londo could find on station.
The rest of the conversation was Londo quizzing Vir on how the change in the Family affected him.
Would Vir lose an allowance and demand to be paid more? Would Vir wear mourning?
"A little armband of white flowers should be easy to get," Londo told Vir. "Probably not actually rhvyn flowers-- Humans complain of the smell. Rude in both directions. But I have a list of flowers from other places that look close enough if nobody's really looking."
Vir hadn't thought of the armband. He really should have. He was glad, though, to have alternatives to the rhvyn flowers. He knew the scent was the point-- something about reminding us that we haven't escaped ourselves-- but he was just as happy to forgo it.
When he'd been in school, at least half of his classes, at any given time, had at least one boy wearing rhvyn, so all of the classrooms, much of the building, smelled of rhvyn, and school was not a place Vir wanted to revisit, ever.
Or maybe the scent was something-something about continuity for those left behind? So you couldn't forget that somebody was always mourning? That sounded wrong, so it might be something Vir heard while his family was traveling, before his father died, before the Cotto family repossessed their ship.
Because that was more a plant gardens of the stuff and dry it to put in sachets that you fold into your clothes thing than it was a wearing fresh flowers thing. But the wearing fresh flowers thing might also be a class and financial status marker. Like having ice in pre-Industrial days signaled that you could afford ice, even out of season, even in a bad year, even when no one else can find it.
(Vir ended up going with an earth flower, baby's breath, that looked almost right. All of the humans on the station thought every flower arrangement needed the stuff, so they made sure they had it on hand.)
"Yes, yes," Londo said. "Visible respect shown for importance in the family and proximity to you clearly indicated. Your Great-Uncle? Never a close relationship. Never."
"He never liked my mother," Vir said as if that explained everything. He thought that, for Londo, it would.
Londo clicked his tongue and asked another, sharper, set of questions about the new familial regime.
Would it change his mother's stipend? Her servants? Her address? Her legal status?
Vir laughed politely at the mention of legal status because Londo clearly meant it as a ridiculous question instead of a borderline insulting one.
A legal status change right now would only happen if Vir's mother were, legally, either his Great-Uncle's concubine or his cousin's-- Vir had written the letter so recently. Why was the name of the new head of the family escaping him?
The other questions were things Vir absolutely needed to investigate. Some of them depended entirely on Cousin Whoever's goodwill, and Vir just didn't know.
"I guess I thought he'd live forever," Vir said. He shook his head. "I can't have because nobody does. I know that."
"Have another drink," Londo said. He patted Vir on the back once, firmly. "You'll feel better, and it's polite!"
Vir managed a shaky smile. "Thank you," he said. He never specified for what, and Londo didn't ask.
In the morning, once Londo was safely in a long meeting, something about getting Ocellian fabrics at a fair price, Vir wrote slightly less formal letters to his Great-Uncle's widow and to the new head of the Cotto family, asking each a slightly different set of polite questions.
Londo not only signed the condolence letter, but he also wrote personal notes to the two by custom deemed most dearly bereaved-- usually widow and eldest son; if the eldest son was gone, the line between second son and eldest son of deceased son was wobbly and required checking ages. Londo had even gotten their names right.
It was a sign of patronage towards Vir more than toward the Cottos generally, and Vir expected his cousins would know as much.
It was a less obviously kind gesture than the wine and the questions, but it would do Vir's mother and, therefore, Vir more reliable good.
Years later, people would ask Vir why he'd served Londo so faithfully when it was so clear that Londo... made bad choices. That was the kindest way to put it, wasn't it?
Vir had remained loyal not so much because of this one moment as because of all of the similar, surrounding moments.
After Londo became Emperor, Lady Timov took Vir's mother into her household. Offworlders, those who found out about it, read that as hostage taking, but Vir hadn't.
With Lady Timov involved, it was the opposite, and, while Vir's mother was too ill to offer much in exchange for the hospitality, Lady Timov offered much that had been lacking in the Cotto household.
Vir's mother recovered enough to garden in a greenhouse that was all her own. Any time the plants died, she started over. Vir sent her seeds and cuttings from worlds he visited.
After he made sure he wasn't sending anything that might cause problems if it got loose. He'd been warned against Earth's mint family by multiple different people, and a little research had told him that sending such would not be harmless.
Then Vir had wondered whether the things Londo had done-- the things Vir had watched Londo do, had helped Londo do-- were like mint taking root in the soul. No matter what you did after, you were never getting all of it out.
Londo had tried. Londo had certainly tried. Then he'd given up.
Vir didn't think he could have stopped Londo, and Vir hadn't been in a position to walk away. Vir could maybe have delayed things if he'd known what he was seeing was different from the usual. How would he have known? It was his first diplomatic posting.
Vir still didn't know everything that had happened with Mr Morden and his patrons, but the things he did know made him suspect that what remained hidden was worse.
Vir only knew how Refa died because Vir knew a few Narns who were willing to share information with him. Only a few. Vir's actions during the War weren't widely known, probably never would be because they would not be popular back home, not even with the change in regime, but the Narn remembered. It was what they did.
And some of them still hoped that Vir would tell them stories about G'Kar. Vir wasn't against doing that, not in theory, but most of his stories about G'Kar involved Londo and, at best, lingered on the knife-edge of treason if Vir told them honestly.
One of Lady Timov's wards-- she had so many that Vir didn't bother to keep track-- wrote Vir regularly with updates on his mother's activities and her health. Those letters told Vir things his mother would have forgotten to mention or preferred not to tell him.
Vir didn't write back directly. That would have offered an intimacy that implied things about the future. Instead, he wrote his replies to Lady Timov.
Vir's mother, according to the letters, had frequent headaches and a hand tremor that was never going to disappear. She kept an image of Vir in a locket. She had asked Lady Timov, more than once, to find Vir a wife because the Cottos had chosen so badly the first time.
Lyndisty's family had tried very hard to enforce the betrothal after Londo's ascension, but Londo had flicked their claims aside and declared that he would have to approve any such connections for Vir.
Londo had then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about the matter which was a terrible frustration to many families and a bit of a scandal. Why would the Emperor be so invested in Vir Cotto remaining single?
Vir didn't think Londo cared at all about whether or not Vir married. Londo simply thought marriage was miserable and wasn't going to exert himself to inflict it on someone he liked. If Vir had asked permission to marry someone socially suitable, it would have happened. If Vir had asked to take an official concubine, someone not suitable for actual marriage, Londo would have offered alcohol and obscenely frank advice on sex.
Lady Timov thought that Vir should marry, but she also thought he needed someone sensible who would manage his household and host his dinners without asking the wrong sort of questions. She'd already suggested three different ladies who, it seemed, would happily trade themselves and all expectations of grand romance or even love for security, companionship, and access to off-world libraries.
At least anyone Lady Timov picked would be a spy for her rather than a spy for the darkness lurking in the Imperial court. She didn't go there often, and most of the court otherwise tried to pretend that she didn't exist.
At least half of Vir's staff, when he was off-world, were spies. He spent a lot of effort watching for poisons and traps. He kept his travel plans as quiet as possible or, when possible, via transports attached to military convoys. He'd had some close calls but not nearly as many as he'd expected.
He thought that was partly because his position at court was ambiguous. The Emperor favored Vir obviously enough that there was gossip about whether it was familial or sexual. If Vir had been at court more, or even on planet more, spite would have tilted the gossip toward the sexual simply to undermine his other connections.
Then again, if the malice became too obvious, Londo might take steps. It happened. People, even very important people, disappeared in the middle of the night. It wasn't the same sort of terror that had strangled Cartagia's court when smiling or frowning at the wrong moment might mean your entire family dead, not in the least.
One poor woman died because her shadow fell on the Emperor while she was giving him a massage. Which may or may not have been a euphemism for more intimate activities.
Everyone, even those benefiting from current Imperial policies, had known that Cartagia was mad. There had been at least a dozen active conspiracies against him before Vir-- Before Londo came up with his scheme. It had needed doing. If all else failed, his palace guard was likely to murder him eventually.
Who the guards would have put forward to replace the dead emperor-- Well, those sort of coups were always wobbly on the what happens next part. The purges could kill tens of thousands.
Vir couldn't regret Cartagia's death. Eventually, he'd realized that that meant he couldn't regret how Cartagia died. The man wouldn't have obligingly dropped dead of his own accord, so someone had always been going to have to kill him.
Vir had needed months to stop having nightmares about it, but Londo had been patient. Well, patient for Londo which wasn't very.
"Yes, Vir. Yes. You don't want to be that person. That's a luxury. Or luck. Some people never know that they could kill. Or that they couldn't. You never even wondered."
Vir had wondered, but he'd also known that he was too small, too weak for direct and open action. Forging documents was so much simpler because it was a process with no single step too big or too sudden.
He hadn't ever managed to explain that to Londo. Well, really, Vir hadn't ever tried.
Londo was too big, too certain of his choices. Even when he was wrong.
For the last several years, Londo had looked, to Vir's experienced eyes, like Londo knew things were wrong but saw no other path forward. Sometimes, when Londo didn't know Vir was watching, Vir saw flickers of an Emperor who wasn't, who couldn't be, Londo Mollari. That Emperor was politically clumsy, randomly cruel, and desperately unhappy.
Vir had thought about that for a very long time.
The Londo Vir knew in private was still the same man, older, more tired, more bitter, but still fundamentally the same. Londo's mind seemed to be intact and his memories as well.
Which meant that, when Londo was being the Emperor, he was executing someone else's agenda-- possible-- or he wasn't actually himself.
Vir took more than a year to admit that much of Emperor Londo Mollari's strangeness could be explained if his actual goal was gridlock in terms of policy, legislation, and diplomacy and stalemate in the struggles between the factions of the court.
The realization didn't make Vir happy and didn't offer him any sort of map for moving forward. It wasn't something he could discuss with another Centauri-- except maybe Lady Timov-- and revealing it to any non-Centauri would invite disaster.
Vir didn't think that he could rescue Londo, so Vir focused on what he knew Londo had always wanted. Vir learned how government finances worked and what that meant for farmers and merchants and all of the people who weren't aristocrats. He learned the details of current laws and studied proposed laws to see what the repercussions could be.
He found far too much that was intended to bind and hobble and hood. Most of it looked harmless but would cut deep if the Centauri people tried to resist.
Vir wished that he could believe that Londo didn't know, but Londo was being too particular about keeping Vir in off-world, diplomatic positions.
Londo either hoped Vir wouldn't notice or hoped that Vir would be subtle and restrained in his responses.
Or, maybe, that Vir would run and never look back.
Londo had to know that Vir wouldn't run. Londo also knew that Vir would be Emperor one day.
Vir hoped that whoever had the knife to Londo's back didn't know about the prophecy. Vir had never told anyone, and he doubted Londo had.
If Londo had, Vir would be at court full time. Vir was sure of it. There'd probably be a knife in his back, too.
Vir needed allies. That had to be the next step. He doubted Londo would interfere, but it would probably be better if Vir didn't look to Londo for guidance.
Not if it wasn't always Londo speaking.
Vir's mother passed in the spring during the fourth year after Londo's coronation.
Vir wasn't there-- the end had come too suddenly-- but she wasn't alone. Someone she knew and liked was there to close her eyes and to sing the first Gate open.
Vir took some comfort in that. He'd have done it if he'd been there, but no one, not even his mother, had ever pretended that his voice was melodious.
He'd spent so many years worried that she'd die and that no one would do any of that for her, that no one would think to tell him until long after it happened.
The Cotto family, generally, didn't believe that the Gates needed to be opened. They considered it a peasant superstition.
Vir wasn't sure that he believed in the Gates, but he knew that his mother had believed and that it would matter to her that everything be done properly.
Vir took an extra day after he got the news to make sure his duties would be covered for the full mourning period. Speed would not let Vir see his mother smile again, and he had plenty of time to arrive before the second Gate needed opening.
Vir also took time to send the Emperor a message informing him that Vir would need to return to Centauri Prime for the funeral and the mourning. The only personal touch to the message was that Vir signed it as 'Vir Cotto who will be wearing ashes.'
That was a Vir to Londo thing rather than an Ambassador Cotto to the Emperor thing. Londo would understand.
Vir had not worn ashes since his father died.
When Vir arrived at the shuttle port, one of Lady Timov's servants met him there. Once they were on the road, the servant said, "Lady Timov's husband is visiting."
Vir felt a jolt of-- of something that he couldn't quite name. Something a little warm and a little frightening and a lot like grief. He closed his eyes. "I understand."
Vir did.
The Emperor couldn't attend any event without making it either an Occasion or a circus, but he could simply happen to visit his wife and her fosterlings while someone else's private occasion happened.
It was a thin covering that would fool no one who actually thought about it for a moment, but it would do.
None of Vir's relatives would attend. Vir had told them that he intended it to be a quiet affair, just Vir and his mother's servants. "She wouldn't want a fuss," Vir had said.
Which wasn't true, not entirely. She'd have liked to watch all of them try to convince Vir that they understood his loss and sympathized, that they thought she had been a jewel in the Cotto treasury.
Vir was the one who didn't want a fuss. He was usually happy enough to use his relatives for whatever they were good for, but this...
They had never welcomed Vir and his mother, so they were not welcome now.
Vir had some distant relatives on his mother's side, but none of them had done anything for her after her husband died. Vir had more sympathy for them than he did for the Cottos because his mother's family had never had money or influence or much of anything beyond what they needed to get by.
Londo was there, at the edges, as Vir knelt to his mother's bier. Londo said nothing, didn't even move, when Vir sang the first and second Gates. Londo presented Vir with the ash that Vir would wear for the next year and held the jar so that Vir could remove some to sprinkle on his head.
The ash was a mix of burnt cloth-- from Vir's mother's pillow-- and burnt aromatic wood. Vir could tell by the scent that Londo had paid a fortune to get wood from Mbarli. It was distinctive, expensive, and something Vir's mother had believed maintained a stronger connection between the dead and the living than other woods did.
Vir didn't believe that, but he had to stop for a moment after he removed the first pinch because Londo's quiet kindness was harder to bear than the grief of loss was.
No one was ever going to know that Vir hadn't ordered the wood himself. It wasn't a formal or Imperial gift; it wasn't any sort of polite acknowledgement of Vir's bereavement.
After the burial, after Vir sang the third Gate beside his mother's grave, he and Londo sat together in Vir's mother's greenhouse.
This time, Londo had brought good wine, and Vir had brought a Minbari intoxicant that he'd learned to enjoy.
Neither of them said anything much. A bit about the weather, a bit about the latest lady's fashions and what they showed or didn't, a bit about new foods Vir had sampled in his travels that he thought the Emperor might enjoy.
At the end of an hour, Londo said, "I do not believe anyone will wear ash for me."
Vir couldn't help a sharp inhalation. It was such a naked admission of isolation and alienation, and Londo had said it as if it were trivial, as if it didn't matter to him.
Vir refilled Londo's glass and then his own. "I will," Vir said. He'd know for years now that he would.
Londo looked surprised then sad. He put a hand on Vir's wrist. "What did I ever do to deserve you?"
Vir reached over and patted Londo's hand. Vir managed a small smile. "It's not about deserving or not," he said. "It's just how it is." There were so many things Vir wanted to say, but he didn't know who was listening.
"Ah," Londo said, sounding as if he understood. "You must live for that, Vir." It was a command. "Only the best, yes?"
"Only the best," Vir agreed.
"Your mother is lucky to have such a son to sing the Gates for her."
Vir looked away. "I don't have much of a voice."
Londo removed his hand from Vir's wrist and waved it dismissively. "That may matter to the living."
"Would you want that?" Vir thought that most of the court would be scandalized even if the opening was sung by the most beautiful voices imaginable.
"I think that I will need all the help I can get," Londo said. "And it would be a beautiful--" He made an obscene gesture. "--to all the toadies and scoundrels."
Vir laughed. "It would." He hoped that day would be a long time off. He hoped--
Vir wondered if Londo hoped for anything any more. Vir wished that Londo would tell him what needed to be done to make things better. Vir understood that Londo probably didn't know.
Vir raised his glass and hoped that Londo would understand. "To pouring vast amounts of sand into all the gears."
Londo laughed, just a single huff. "Indeed, Vir. Indeed. You should enjoy your opportunities to do what I cannot." He touched his glass to Vir's with an audible clink.
"I'll take that as permission," Vir said. He thought they were having the same conversation, that all the layers matched.
If Londo wasn't saying anything more specific, wasn't offering plans or goals or anything, it was because he couldn't. For whatever reason.
Vir set aside all consideration of politics and permission to keep talking to his mentor. Vir feared they wouldn't have many further opportunities after Vir started seriously doing what Londo could not.