Topic 21: This is no world... (Ficlet)
May. 19th, 2006 06:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sloaneThis is no world,
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips.
We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,
And pass them current too.
When he sees her looking at him with that familiar expression, the one she wore striding in his office, accusing him of murdering her fiance, he thinks: Sydney. Hardly, Nadia says. You want her to be here, too. Of course you do.
“We can celebrate, Arvin,” the woman looking at him with Sydney’s eyes says. “Sydney Bristow is dead.”
After all, Nadia comments, you got her killed, too. You knew Anna was on her way, and you didn’t even try to warn Sydney, or Jack. You found a way to contact Sark to further your own agenda, but not to save Sydney.
She never called him Arvin. “Mr. Sloane” in the office, naturally, and though he offered her the use of his first name in private one time she was visiting him and Emily, she did not take him up on it, years before she had any reason to resent him. It made her uncomfortable, she confessed, blushing somewhat, and Emily later said it was because she saw him as a father figure. He did not insist on a change, either.
“Does this mean you’re sending me to my room?” she asks and is so utterly Sydney in it that he almost reaches out to touch her shoulder. Next to her, her sister stands, the wound at her throat still raw. Dad, Nadia says, You’re talking to ghosts. Let’s face it, your judgment isn’t stellar right now. But you know, you could at least acknowledge what you’ve done instead of trying to avoid it. She’s dead. We’re both dead. Thanks to you. This is merely another bloody shard, dressed up in her clothes.
****
“Despite everything,” Sydney once asked him, when he told her Anna Espinosa would not be Nadia’s death, “you still believe?”
“I have nothing left but my faith,” he replied. It was not quite true then, though he did not know it. Then, he still had Nadia, and Jack, and even Sydney herself. But it is true now. And yet, Sydney’s life is protected by prophecies as surely as Nadia’s ever was. Anna should not have been able to kill her, either.
Anna didn’t, Nadia says as he sits down opposite of who has to be Anna. You know who got both of us killed, Dad. He was chosen, too.
“How did it happen?” he asks out loud, and the woman uses Sydney’s voice, cool and precise, to tell him.
“Sydney wasn’t a martyr or a legend. She was just a person. Who deserved nothing more than to be shot in the back. And so she was. The Chosen One. She died, just as easy as anyone.”
His judgment is impaired, but not utterly broken. It is time to stop wishing. If this is true, if this can happen, then this counterfeit will be able to retrieve what faith tells him only Sydney could. But then, her purpose will be over. Before she went on her mission to Nepal, he had vague ideas of how to use Anna Espinosa. He had already started by bringing the doubt in her heart about Prophet Five’s future plans with her out in the open. Now he doesn’t have the patience for mind games any more, especially if they involve puppets staring at him with Sydney’s tilted lips and her murder on their hands. The world has changed, his world at least, and his time is running out.
There isn’t even a question of method. He knows exactly how he’ll kill her.
****
Bringing death to Nadia at the hospital, when he believed it would be just for half a minute, so that the conditions for the cure would be met, he had a white cloth to protect her face from his direct touch. Not for Sydney.
“Sydney deserved better,” he says after having tasered her killer and feels her throat under his bare hands. Strangulation was really Jack’s favourite method, not his. Given that most of the death he dealt out was for business reasons, CIA business, Alliance business, his own, it felt far too personal. But this is different. Maybe he would have dealt with Anna through a bullet or poison if she had not worn Sydney’s shape, would not look at him with Sydney’s eyes even now. There is a nakedness in strangling someone, an intimacy that removes any pretensions about the nature of the act.
Nothing less would do.
The alarm interrupts them. It feels like blasphemy. “I don’t die that easily,” she says, and the alchemy of revelation changes his rage into wonder. They regard each other for a moment when the guard comes in, and he knows.
“Sydney,” he thinks, and this time there is no shape of daughters dead or alive to tell him otherwise.
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips.
We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,
And pass them current too.
When he sees her looking at him with that familiar expression, the one she wore striding in his office, accusing him of murdering her fiance, he thinks: Sydney. Hardly, Nadia says. You want her to be here, too. Of course you do.
“We can celebrate, Arvin,” the woman looking at him with Sydney’s eyes says. “Sydney Bristow is dead.”
After all, Nadia comments, you got her killed, too. You knew Anna was on her way, and you didn’t even try to warn Sydney, or Jack. You found a way to contact Sark to further your own agenda, but not to save Sydney.
She never called him Arvin. “Mr. Sloane” in the office, naturally, and though he offered her the use of his first name in private one time she was visiting him and Emily, she did not take him up on it, years before she had any reason to resent him. It made her uncomfortable, she confessed, blushing somewhat, and Emily later said it was because she saw him as a father figure. He did not insist on a change, either.
“Does this mean you’re sending me to my room?” she asks and is so utterly Sydney in it that he almost reaches out to touch her shoulder. Next to her, her sister stands, the wound at her throat still raw. Dad, Nadia says, You’re talking to ghosts. Let’s face it, your judgment isn’t stellar right now. But you know, you could at least acknowledge what you’ve done instead of trying to avoid it. She’s dead. We’re both dead. Thanks to you. This is merely another bloody shard, dressed up in her clothes.
****
“Despite everything,” Sydney once asked him, when he told her Anna Espinosa would not be Nadia’s death, “you still believe?”
“I have nothing left but my faith,” he replied. It was not quite true then, though he did not know it. Then, he still had Nadia, and Jack, and even Sydney herself. But it is true now. And yet, Sydney’s life is protected by prophecies as surely as Nadia’s ever was. Anna should not have been able to kill her, either.
Anna didn’t, Nadia says as he sits down opposite of who has to be Anna. You know who got both of us killed, Dad. He was chosen, too.
“How did it happen?” he asks out loud, and the woman uses Sydney’s voice, cool and precise, to tell him.
“Sydney wasn’t a martyr or a legend. She was just a person. Who deserved nothing more than to be shot in the back. And so she was. The Chosen One. She died, just as easy as anyone.”
His judgment is impaired, but not utterly broken. It is time to stop wishing. If this is true, if this can happen, then this counterfeit will be able to retrieve what faith tells him only Sydney could. But then, her purpose will be over. Before she went on her mission to Nepal, he had vague ideas of how to use Anna Espinosa. He had already started by bringing the doubt in her heart about Prophet Five’s future plans with her out in the open. Now he doesn’t have the patience for mind games any more, especially if they involve puppets staring at him with Sydney’s tilted lips and her murder on their hands. The world has changed, his world at least, and his time is running out.
There isn’t even a question of method. He knows exactly how he’ll kill her.
****
Bringing death to Nadia at the hospital, when he believed it would be just for half a minute, so that the conditions for the cure would be met, he had a white cloth to protect her face from his direct touch. Not for Sydney.
“Sydney deserved better,” he says after having tasered her killer and feels her throat under his bare hands. Strangulation was really Jack’s favourite method, not his. Given that most of the death he dealt out was for business reasons, CIA business, Alliance business, his own, it felt far too personal. But this is different. Maybe he would have dealt with Anna through a bullet or poison if she had not worn Sydney’s shape, would not look at him with Sydney’s eyes even now. There is a nakedness in strangling someone, an intimacy that removes any pretensions about the nature of the act.
Nothing less would do.
The alarm interrupts them. It feels like blasphemy. “I don’t die that easily,” she says, and the alchemy of revelation changes his rage into wonder. They regard each other for a moment when the guard comes in, and he knows.
“Sydney,” he thinks, and this time there is no shape of daughters dead or alive to tell him otherwise.
