Work Text:
Londo Mollari will die a tyrant, and he expects he will be remembered as a tyrant, and he has wasted too many drunken snatches of freedom thinking about what he wishes for a memorial. His stomach roils at the thought of a temple like Cartagia had planned, and it's hard to know what to blame on the brivari and what to blame on himself. He thinks he would hate it more than anything, to be deified for this, to be immortalized so strongly as Cartagia wished to be.
He will be deified, as they all are, but it's a matter of scale. There are no public statues of Cartagia, which Londo has seen to himself, and few if any prayers made in his name. Many emperors make so little a note on history: their godhood is nothing more than a name on a plaque on a temple wall, probably built and maintained by donations from their own family. Londo would have Emperor Mollari II remembered in the same way: an embarrassing stain on the histories, consigned to being argued over by academics and forgotten by all else.
He has never had any use of religion, except for performative shows of nationalism or the pleasure of looking at a statue of Li, and he has never held any real belief in the gods. He still does not want to be counted among their number. Even though he does not believe, it feels like an act of desecration.
Let the Centauri Empire forget Emperor Mollari II.
And as for those who have known Londo himself, personally—
Timov has remained herself in the face of everything he has done, every unkind word he's said, and Londo is not humbled that they've managed to reach something like companionship, but he was sorry to send her away to her safety. Let her be the happy widow Mariel and Daggair had aspired to. Let her dance on his grave, as the humans say.
Vir is safe. Londo has seen that Vir is safe, has kept him at arm's length, too far away to be harmed as Londo is harming everyone. He can only hope that Vir does not hate him too much.
Delenn and Sheridan—let whatever they are escaping to work. Let them make the universe a better place.
And there is G'kar.
They have been locked in each other's orbits since the moment they first laid eyes on one another. No, before that, even: they have been tied together by fate since Londo first dreamed of his death. He was only a child then, and he has spent his entire life knowing he would die, and he has hated. He has hated the Narn, and he has hated G'kar, and he does not know what his life would have looked like without that hate. He does not know who he would be without that hate.
It is not lost on him, that so much of what he is now comes back to that dream of the Narn who is now his only hope and friend, killing him.
And it is a funny thing, to feel the dream bearing down on him, fate heavy in the air, and to feel—relief.
Londo does not know that G'kar will survive the night, but there may be a chance. Maybe they will die together, at each other's hands, or maybe only Londo will die. They are both old now, but G'kar is stronger, fitter. G'kar has not been poisoning himself a bit at a time for years. G'kar is not so crushed with grief, despite his own heavy share. He may live. Londo has to hope that he will live.
Londo does not deserve to be remembered as G'kar's friend, let alone—
***
Timov dies before news of her husband's death can reach her. She had no dream to predict it, and she dies peacefully in the bed she has slept in alone for much of her married life. She does not have to bear that final thing for Londo, the untangling of his legacy.
Like so many things, and like the throne, it falls to Vir.
The histories of the Centauri have always been works of propaganda more than works of fact, but that is far from unique to them among the many cultures inhabiting the universe. The histories written under the guidance of Emperor Cotto I are no different, though they are kinder to his predecessor than many. They are kinder in many things than Centauri histories tend to be.
Emperor Cotto I rebuilds what his predecessor destroyed, and he insists that Emperor Mollari II was a good man, a difficult man, giving of himself to shield his people as much as he could. It is not a truth that rests easy on a still burning planet, but it will fit better, after decades of Cotto peace.
There is no great temple erected in the Mollari name, and the family, passed to a cousin, commemorates its second emperor with a plaque in the temple built for Emperor Mollari I, which they have maintained for centuries.
There are two statues, gold sentinels flanking the capital, and it is not an unusual way to honor an emperor, but it is an entirely unique way to honor a Narn. Londo and G'kar stand, back to back, looking separately out over the world they died on. Maybe not friends, but allies.
***
The Book of G'kar has several things to say about Ambassador Mollari—mainly negative, as the prophet worked through his rapidly shifting philosophy—but writings from later in the Prophet G'kar's life are more mixed. With his death on Centauri Prime—
Well, without the steadying hand of the Alliance, there might have been another war between their peoples, but there was not. It had caused a schism of a sort in his followers, who interpreted different things in his well documented hatred, in their brief period of public friendship, in the significant gaps in later records, in their shared death. Some saw betrayal, and others saw something approaching the truth of a shared destiny, the last casualties of their long wars.
(There would be pilgrimages of a sort, in the future, to the great statue of the Prophet G'kar on Centauri Prime; and that first generation on both sides, those who remembered their wars, would never be comfortable in each other's presence. Their children would do better, and their grandchildren better still, and that peace might not last to eternity, but it was something.)
***
They loved each other deeply, in their own ways, warped by grief and loss and hatred and xenophobia, by expectations and wars. They acted on it briefly, in those last days on Babylon 5, when they thought their wars were nearly done, before Londo gave himself away to suffer for his people. They thought about it, after, apart, when there was nothing to be done. They had not spoken of it to anyone, had not left records, and the facts died with them.
They knew each other's hands, when they died together, wrapped around each others' throats. It was not so bad, to go together, when it was a choice.