## Preface

light and shade (the void is clean)
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/40517403.

Rating:
  Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
  No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Babylon 5 (TV 1993)
Character:
  Mr. Morden (Babylon 5)
Additional Tags:
  Introspection, Episode: s2e16 In the Shadows of Z'Ha'Dum
Language:
  English
Collections:
  Allbingo
Stats:
  Published: 2022-07-23 Words: 648 Chapters: 1/1

# light and shade (the void is clean)

by ToothpasteCheesecake

Summary

> They can’t touch him. Knowing this fact is like knowing darkness. The shadows and the Shadows.

> (Morden, in the holding cell, for hours and hours.)

Notes

> for a prompt on my allbingo card: partial shade

> idk what this is but

## light and shade (the void is clean)

They can’t touch him. Knowing this fact is like knowing darkness, intimacy without touch, intimacy without kindness. Darkness is a trust fall for him now. The shadows and the Shadows.

And there’s something intimate about darkness, too, isn’t there? Where he rests, it is dark. It is always, always dark. Here, in this cell, the lights nearly blind him—-his eyes melting from his skull, leaving void where his vision should be, John Sheridan like a bird holy-dedicated to pecking up the remains of his efficiency. This seems familiar, this metaphor carved into him, under the embalming fluids he drowns in now. John Sheridan wants to know the truth. He wants to know how Morden survived. He isn’t ready for the answers, and Morden is a dead man if he splinters under the pressure of Sheridan’s threats. They’re empty threats—he is convincing himself of this.

He is their emissary, but he’s not stupid. He’s expendable. Mere convenience. His body is wading through the freezing lakewater of borrowed time. His body on the table, prepared for the autopsy at the right words. Cut into him, and what floods out? Darkness, he supposes, which is what it always circles back to, this circular narrative. Life’s decay, maybe, the remnants of his old life skeletons within—almost skeletons. There are still a few shards of meat left on their bones, a tragedy. He tries to eat it, to suck the bone clean, free of remaining desires, but these desires simply get stuck between his teeth, his teeth, his teeth. It’s unsightly.

Londo Mollari will hear of this, and he’ll get out. They can’t touch him.

The Vorlon will hear of this, too. There’s a strange sense of evisceration when Morden thinks of him. He can’t quite discern what Kosh will do, when he finds out—but they had sparred once, the shattering of his outer shell. He’s nothing more than cryptic light.

But, he reminds himself, the light is the enemy of darkness. And so he must do his job. They’re two sides of a coin; again, he is not stupid. The Vorlons and the Shadows. Pure light, pure obedience; pure darkness, pure chaos. They fit together in ways that the universe cannot parse quite yet.

Morden is very good at following orders.

Ah, he had said, gazing at Sheridan with an acidic, destructive stare. A smile resembling a dog with its teeth bared—-and life, for him, always returns back to teeth. Ouroboros, the capacity to consume oneself without fear. That.

He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t need to. He focuses his thoughts on his inevitable release, meditating with his fingers folded triangular. When he attempts to make the position, his hands first rest against one another, forming a gesture of prayer—how sick, how sickening. The things he has learned since the Icarus have drained any possible belief directly from his essence, his onyx lifeblood.

But he changes back, swift and calm and pumping raw like a torn-out heart, a core discarded, and it’s — it’s okay. It’s fine now. No memory of gentleness remains. This is required.

This universe is not gentle. This universe takes and takes and takes. Selfish universe, with its death and its inevitable tragedy and its inherent suffering. Selfish Morden, who has transformed himself into something stronger than the shine of diamond. He enjoys it now; the taking and the taking and the false giving and the debt. He buries himself in the comfort of chaos. If suffering is universal—well. We all die at some point; might as well speed up the process.

He doesn’t know if they’ll keep him around once the catalyst unfolds. But he’s right about one thing: a security guard comes in, and escorts him out. It was all a mistake, sir. Captain didn’t mean it. You can leave whenever.

They can’t touch him. Nothing can touch him.

## Afterword

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