Topic 20: Three Passions (Ficlet)
May. 11th, 2006 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sloaneYou've told us what passion means to you already, now tell us what three specific passions have driven or influenced your life most, and more importantly, how.
I.
“I’m looking for the truth,” he said during one of the few serious arguments he ever had with his wife.
“Well, then both of us are looking for the same thing,” she replied, her voice between anger and tears. His daughter, years later, called it an obsession. His own term was “faith”. At the core of it was this: the awareness of his limitation and a longing for transcendence into the infinite. It did not occur to him the first time he came across a manuscript of an obscure Italian Renaissance figure. Then, it was nothing more than a puzzle to intrigue his curiosity for a while, put aside easily. There was already a growing sense of disillusion with the people and the cause he worked for, true, but a century old mystery, interesting as it was, did not seem an adequate solution to anything.
But then the child died, and she never saw it; her pain engulfed her, and she was alone in her loss. He could not reach her. They had shared everything, and yet he could not reach her, any more than he had even been able to touch the daughter whose name she forbade him to mention a single time.
It wasn’t that Rambaldi promised a solution to death, though for a time, he was as guilty as any of the others he later scorned of seeing immortality as a promise contained in those faded, precise scribblings. No, the promise he came to understand step by bloody step was more complicated and more rewarding than that. It was the quest itself which transformed him, though. Maybe he would have left the CIA in any case; he might even have agreed to join the emerging Alliance without any other incentive than the realisation that he might as well employ his skills for his own benefit instead of that of ever changing governments ruled by ever smaller men. But without Rambaldi, he would have never seen the Alliance, too, was nothing but the means to an end, limited and petty itself. Rambaldi did not make him a killer, ruthless or manipulative; he had been all this already, and had either been called a patriot or a criminal because of it, depending on the speaker. But Rambaldi gave him a purpose that kept him going and changed him into a seeker, and Rambaldi cost him all else he had held dear.
The faith that burned in him was filled with as much hate for its origin as it was with anything else. Still, it kept its promise.
He was touching the infinite.
II.
When it came to successful interrogations, the key to breaking a person was to find what drove them, and correlate that to their greatest fears by taking it away. Often, but not always, it this amounted to the threat of death or physical pain. The reason why he came to use Jack Bristow so often as an interrogator at SD-6 was that Jack had a talent for finding out the answer if this wasn’t the case. Any thug could induce pain in various degrees or pull a trigger. Jack, though, was the only one who had correctly deduced what would break Arvin Sloane, back when they were going through additional training specifically designed to help field agents resist torture.
“It’s your desire for control,” Jack said when there were busy outlining interrogation profiles for each other, something their superiors had explicitly forbidden because of the possible long term psychological results between partners. “As long as you think you still have some remnant of control over a situation, you can withstand just about anything.”
At the time, Arvin laughed and said Jack was describing himself, but it was true, and he knew it. He wasn’t superhuman and in later years definitely not athletic, so amateurs like McKenas Cole were surprised to see him withstand pain that had driven other men insane. Cole hadn’t understood one could be in control even if tied up and used as a pin cushion, or, for that matter, thrown against a wall with a gun pointed at one’s head. On the other hand, it didn’t take physical pain to reduce Arvin Sloane to frustrated fury and helplessness, it simply took finding himself scheduled for execution because of a stupid mistake, with no means to change that.
His passion for control made him an excellent leader. Other agents who got promoted chafed at what they perceived at the restrictions of office; Sloane thrived on the challenge of assembling teams, outlining strategies, keeping his eye on the big picture and making sure events in and out of his office played out, by and large, the way he wanted him to. One long chess game with infinite variables, and he was so good at it that it ensured both Alliance and CIA kept him in leading positions, again and again. It gave him the ability to build up a global relief organization which also served to supply him with secret research in a record breaking time.
On the other hand, he sometimes suspected it was this passion that kept him from achieving whatever peace life offered, but it was too much a part of himself to ever give it up.
III.
Faith, truth, control, however one wanted to define it, they had to be sought out first. It was a conscious effort even while they held him in their grip. He never had to make an effort to love. It came naturally, and continued without ever stopping. He didn’t know how to fall out of love, so maybe it was fortunate that he did not love many people. The rest, be it those he felt benign sympathy for, like Marshall Flinkman, those he was indifferent towards like Michael Vaughn or those he actively disliked, as for example Ariana Kane, were easy to sacrifice if it had to be.
(Judy Barnett, whom he had liked and used nonetheless, had once told him that it was this which made him a sociopath.)
Moreover, the people he did love had a power over him which they usually were not aware of. But then again, Emily, who had been the first and foremost, never thought in terms of power to begin with. Their marriage lasted through thirty years, and sometimes he still woke up expecting her to lie next to him, forgetting for a few, precious moments that she was dead. She would have deserved a better man, and he had tried to be that man whenever he was in her presence. Later, he tried to be that man for his daughter, but her very existence was proof of his true nature, and she was irrevocably woven into which consumed his life. He could never completely separate the two, and so what he could offer her was flawed from the start. Still, loving Nadia, as late as she had come into his life, was as inevitable as sunrise.
The only person he had shared as much of his life with as Emily was Jack. One did not use the term love for a friendship, not at the time when they were young at any rate, and so he did not. It would have embarassed them both. But somewhere between being young agents at Langley, quick dinners, endless debates, shared missions, somewhere between rivalry and celebrations of the other’s success he had realized he could not do without Jack Bristow, and so, for almost forty years now, he had seen to it that this situation would never occur. When the Alliance recruited him, it wasn’t even a question as to whether or not he would ask Jack to join him. When SD-6 fell apart, he knew they would work together again, never mind the current problem of Jack being busy hunting him. When he bargained his way back into the CIA, Jack was the first name on his list of requests. After his latest release from state custody, he wasn’t surprised to find Jack being the one to await him at the entrance of APO, radiating his Jack mixture of distrust and need.
He had his suspicions about the afterlife. But he knew with an absolute certainty that Jack would be there even then.
Sydney had been someone he was fond of when she was a child, though no more than that; recruiting her to the agency had been, to tell the truth, as much about Jack as it had been about her. But then he found himself looking forward to her visits, and not just because they cheered Emily up, felt a fierce pride when she accomplished her missions, and started to give her more and more difficult tasks so there would no damage to office discipline by showing her preference. When she made the mistake of informing her fiance of her employment, he regretted what he would have to do, and informed Jack ahead of time, but he did it nonetheless. Protocol had to be upheld. Then she stormed into his office and grabbed him, accusing him of having killed the boy. He saw the hatred, grief and sense of betrayal in her eyes, and something shifted.
“No, Agent Bristow,” he replied. “You killed him.”
She turned away, and that was the moment when he realised he loved her. It never occurred to him to become a better man for her sake, though. Loving Sydney meant saving her life on a couple of occasions, but it also meant using her talents, the passions that drove her, including her hatred of him. Anything else would have been waste. It meant unexpected moments of grace; when she visited him to tell him she did believe he was trying to do the right thing in Svogoda, he felt that elusive sense of peace touching him, but he knew it could not last.
Eventually, he believed, it would mean his death. And that was how it should be.
I.
“I’m looking for the truth,” he said during one of the few serious arguments he ever had with his wife.
“Well, then both of us are looking for the same thing,” she replied, her voice between anger and tears. His daughter, years later, called it an obsession. His own term was “faith”. At the core of it was this: the awareness of his limitation and a longing for transcendence into the infinite. It did not occur to him the first time he came across a manuscript of an obscure Italian Renaissance figure. Then, it was nothing more than a puzzle to intrigue his curiosity for a while, put aside easily. There was already a growing sense of disillusion with the people and the cause he worked for, true, but a century old mystery, interesting as it was, did not seem an adequate solution to anything.
But then the child died, and she never saw it; her pain engulfed her, and she was alone in her loss. He could not reach her. They had shared everything, and yet he could not reach her, any more than he had even been able to touch the daughter whose name she forbade him to mention a single time.
It wasn’t that Rambaldi promised a solution to death, though for a time, he was as guilty as any of the others he later scorned of seeing immortality as a promise contained in those faded, precise scribblings. No, the promise he came to understand step by bloody step was more complicated and more rewarding than that. It was the quest itself which transformed him, though. Maybe he would have left the CIA in any case; he might even have agreed to join the emerging Alliance without any other incentive than the realisation that he might as well employ his skills for his own benefit instead of that of ever changing governments ruled by ever smaller men. But without Rambaldi, he would have never seen the Alliance, too, was nothing but the means to an end, limited and petty itself. Rambaldi did not make him a killer, ruthless or manipulative; he had been all this already, and had either been called a patriot or a criminal because of it, depending on the speaker. But Rambaldi gave him a purpose that kept him going and changed him into a seeker, and Rambaldi cost him all else he had held dear.
The faith that burned in him was filled with as much hate for its origin as it was with anything else. Still, it kept its promise.
He was touching the infinite.
II.
When it came to successful interrogations, the key to breaking a person was to find what drove them, and correlate that to their greatest fears by taking it away. Often, but not always, it this amounted to the threat of death or physical pain. The reason why he came to use Jack Bristow so often as an interrogator at SD-6 was that Jack had a talent for finding out the answer if this wasn’t the case. Any thug could induce pain in various degrees or pull a trigger. Jack, though, was the only one who had correctly deduced what would break Arvin Sloane, back when they were going through additional training specifically designed to help field agents resist torture.
“It’s your desire for control,” Jack said when there were busy outlining interrogation profiles for each other, something their superiors had explicitly forbidden because of the possible long term psychological results between partners. “As long as you think you still have some remnant of control over a situation, you can withstand just about anything.”
At the time, Arvin laughed and said Jack was describing himself, but it was true, and he knew it. He wasn’t superhuman and in later years definitely not athletic, so amateurs like McKenas Cole were surprised to see him withstand pain that had driven other men insane. Cole hadn’t understood one could be in control even if tied up and used as a pin cushion, or, for that matter, thrown against a wall with a gun pointed at one’s head. On the other hand, it didn’t take physical pain to reduce Arvin Sloane to frustrated fury and helplessness, it simply took finding himself scheduled for execution because of a stupid mistake, with no means to change that.
His passion for control made him an excellent leader. Other agents who got promoted chafed at what they perceived at the restrictions of office; Sloane thrived on the challenge of assembling teams, outlining strategies, keeping his eye on the big picture and making sure events in and out of his office played out, by and large, the way he wanted him to. One long chess game with infinite variables, and he was so good at it that it ensured both Alliance and CIA kept him in leading positions, again and again. It gave him the ability to build up a global relief organization which also served to supply him with secret research in a record breaking time.
On the other hand, he sometimes suspected it was this passion that kept him from achieving whatever peace life offered, but it was too much a part of himself to ever give it up.
III.
Faith, truth, control, however one wanted to define it, they had to be sought out first. It was a conscious effort even while they held him in their grip. He never had to make an effort to love. It came naturally, and continued without ever stopping. He didn’t know how to fall out of love, so maybe it was fortunate that he did not love many people. The rest, be it those he felt benign sympathy for, like Marshall Flinkman, those he was indifferent towards like Michael Vaughn or those he actively disliked, as for example Ariana Kane, were easy to sacrifice if it had to be.
(Judy Barnett, whom he had liked and used nonetheless, had once told him that it was this which made him a sociopath.)
Moreover, the people he did love had a power over him which they usually were not aware of. But then again, Emily, who had been the first and foremost, never thought in terms of power to begin with. Their marriage lasted through thirty years, and sometimes he still woke up expecting her to lie next to him, forgetting for a few, precious moments that she was dead. She would have deserved a better man, and he had tried to be that man whenever he was in her presence. Later, he tried to be that man for his daughter, but her very existence was proof of his true nature, and she was irrevocably woven into which consumed his life. He could never completely separate the two, and so what he could offer her was flawed from the start. Still, loving Nadia, as late as she had come into his life, was as inevitable as sunrise.
The only person he had shared as much of his life with as Emily was Jack. One did not use the term love for a friendship, not at the time when they were young at any rate, and so he did not. It would have embarassed them both. But somewhere between being young agents at Langley, quick dinners, endless debates, shared missions, somewhere between rivalry and celebrations of the other’s success he had realized he could not do without Jack Bristow, and so, for almost forty years now, he had seen to it that this situation would never occur. When the Alliance recruited him, it wasn’t even a question as to whether or not he would ask Jack to join him. When SD-6 fell apart, he knew they would work together again, never mind the current problem of Jack being busy hunting him. When he bargained his way back into the CIA, Jack was the first name on his list of requests. After his latest release from state custody, he wasn’t surprised to find Jack being the one to await him at the entrance of APO, radiating his Jack mixture of distrust and need.
He had his suspicions about the afterlife. But he knew with an absolute certainty that Jack would be there even then.
Sydney had been someone he was fond of when she was a child, though no more than that; recruiting her to the agency had been, to tell the truth, as much about Jack as it had been about her. But then he found himself looking forward to her visits, and not just because they cheered Emily up, felt a fierce pride when she accomplished her missions, and started to give her more and more difficult tasks so there would no damage to office discipline by showing her preference. When she made the mistake of informing her fiance of her employment, he regretted what he would have to do, and informed Jack ahead of time, but he did it nonetheless. Protocol had to be upheld. Then she stormed into his office and grabbed him, accusing him of having killed the boy. He saw the hatred, grief and sense of betrayal in her eyes, and something shifted.
“No, Agent Bristow,” he replied. “You killed him.”
She turned away, and that was the moment when he realised he loved her. It never occurred to him to become a better man for her sake, though. Loving Sydney meant saving her life on a couple of occasions, but it also meant using her talents, the passions that drove her, including her hatred of him. Anything else would have been waste. It meant unexpected moments of grace; when she visited him to tell him she did believe he was trying to do the right thing in Svogoda, he felt that elusive sense of peace touching him, but he knew it could not last.
Eventually, he believed, it would mean his death. And that was how it should be.
