a_sloane

What are ten things that no one knows about you, and that you will not willingly tell anyone about?


*meta, since he wouldn't even write most of them down in a locked entry*

1) Laura/Irina was not the only time Arvin cheated on Emily. It was, however, the only affair he had, and so the only sexual relationship he thinks of as a betrayal; the other occasions either happened during his time as a field agent where he couldn't have avoided them without breaking cover, or were one night stands that happened several years apart and which he successfully told himself did not matter because he never saw the people in question again.

2) He liked to believe that if Emily had lived, he would have been able to keep his promise to her and would have abandoned Rambaldi for good. Sydney once told him, and not even in anger, that she doesn't think he could have. A year, perhaps, maybe two, but not longer. In his heart of hearts, he knew she was right.

3) Not telling Emily about SD-6 and the Alliance wasn't really about keeping her safe and keeping the Alliance rules. He knew Emily; she would have never have betrayed her knowledge had he entrusted her with it. But she would not have been able to live with him in the full knowledge of what he was, and what he did, not unless he would have stopped immediately. He prefered lying to her to losing her, pure and simple.

4) He had some same-sex experiences in high school and in college. Considering he was going for a career in a highly conservative institution like the C.I.A. and considering the blackmail potential, that was where it ended, and he never mentioned said experiences to anyone. By the time he left the CIA, it had become irrelevant anyway; he was happily married, and the only man he still had less than platonic feelings for was unavailable and always would be.

5) He loved Nadia, and if he could gone back in time and changed one thing, it would have been her life; not just her survival in general, he'd change circumstances so that Elena Derevko dies an early death, Nadia gets adopted by a nice Argentinian couple and never finds out about either of her parents, living her life untouched by Rambaldi. On the other hand, much as he regretted individual actions that brought grief to Sydney - Danny comes to mind - he would not have taken himself out of Sydney's life, or her out of his. He never cared to examine whether this means he loved Nadia more or less than Sydney.

6) He thought of Sydney as a daughter until the day she stormed in his office, furious, and threw him against his desk. Which was when the whole murky business of not paternal feelings for Sydney started, though he succesfully managed to repress awareness of those until he found out Sydney was a double agent. Now if it simply had been a complete transition of feeling paternal to feeling attracted, it would have still been something not to talk about but at least admittable to himself. But he never entirely stopped seeing her as a daughter, and that was what made his feelings for Sydney something firmly labelled under "not to be thought about" in his subconscious.

7) On the other hand, he had no problem admitting to himself he felt the entire spectrum between fierce rivaly and possessive love for Jack. Thankfully, Jack could be relied upon on never figuring this out.

8) Arvin liked Andrew Llyod Webber. Genuinely loved his musicals, especially Phantom of the Opera and Evita. This isn't something no one knows, strictly speaking, but the three people who did are dead. Or at least supposed to be dead. Or vanished from his life. And he had no intention of telling anyone else.

9) If he ever figured out Rambaldi completely, every last mystery, his faith would not have survived. It depended on there being something eternally out of reach.

10) If what he was trying to do with Omnifam had succeeded - a genetically modified peaceful world, and he did think, for a while, that this was to be the grand justification for everything and Rambaldi's heritage - it would not have been a world where he himself fitted in. More to the point, it would not have been a world where anyone named Bristow or Derevko fitted in, or that still could produce such people. Which was the reason why he never really pressed the monks to reveal the last ingredient the way the Elena-engineered Arvin Clone did. A part of him did not want such a world to exist.

Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables. - Sappho



"So Irina is alive," I said to Elena Derevko, pretending only mild interest.

"As if I would let my little sister be killed by someone else," Elena scoffed, black eyes gleaming with delight. "She's a Derevko, and neither her fool of a husband nor yourself would be worthy. I'll do it myself."

Those few days I spent with the oldest of the Derevko sisters were among the least agreeable and yet most interesting of my life. She had only been a name before, competition in a race I had made myself abandon; as Sofia Vargas, she had been a lie. But here she was, one of the few people who could claim a knowledge of Rambaldi almost close to mine, if not the same understanding; the woman who had raised my daughter.

I despised her, of course. Because she was using a perversion of my own plans, because she had made it necessary for me to let Nadia believe I had betrayed her, because she had, as a matter of fact, betrayed Nadia, oh, and because she had used a man impersonating me who was responsible for some of the more painful hours of my life. Now there was also the new discovery she had set up Jack to kill who he believed to be Irina, and had held Irina under lock and key the entire time. If there is a Derevko making of fool of both Jack and myself, I would rather have it to be Irina, you know; I might never have been in love with Irina, but I... well, let us just say we understood each other. Her sister, on the other hand, thought she understood me and that I could not possibly be in the same position, which grated.

Most of all, though, I despised Elena Derevko because she was whole in a way I never had been, nor ever would be. There were never second thoughts to her, no regrets. She might not understand the true grandeur of Rambaldi's imagination, believing it to be a simple tool for world domination, but once she had committed to making his inventions her own, she never let anything stop her. It was like looking in a mirror, much as my confrontation with her puppet Ned had been, and seeing what others saw when they looked at me. Of course I despised her.

I am sure the feeling was mutual. Naturally, she did not trust me, no matter how much she respected my knowledge. She did not have time to do to me as she had done to Irina to make sure I was telling her the truth. So she came up with a way of tormenting me which was, I must admit, breathtakingly brilliant. After I had found out Irina was still alive, and that the Irina Jack had killed had been a product of Project Helix - some people would call this the elegance of nemesis, no doubt, given how both myself and Irina had profited from said Project not too long ago - I could not help but wonder at the magnitude of the deception. You see, I was sure that Jack would not have done the expedient think and simply killed Irina once he had determined that this was necessary. No, not Jack. I know him. He would have spoken to her first, touched her, breathed in her scent and then killed her. And yet, despite this closeness, he was deceived.

"Arguably a better proof of the perfection Project Helix can achieve than Allison Doren has been," I said to Elena, as I didn't wish her to speculate on my thoughts. Elena, proving she was the most dangerous of the Derevko sisters, looked at me and said: "Yes. Is there anyone you would wish to see doubled?"

"I've played this game," I said indifferently. "I prefer not to reuse tools. Besides, in the new world..."

"Yes," Elena said a bit impatiently, "in the new world, everything will be different anyway, but not this. I think there is someone. Jack Bristow is not the only one who brought death to his wife, no? Irina told me, and so did her boy Julian. Your wife, she was shot in your place. Her blood was on your hands when she died. And before that, she sacrificed one of her fingers so you would both be safe."

She came closer and whispered in my ear.

"What became of that finger, Arvin, hmmm? You know, that is more than enough DNA for Project Helix. Should this be my welcoming present for you, my new confederate? Your very own Emily to do with what you like, just as I gave Jack Bristow an Irina of his own to kill?"

McKenas Cole, poor amateur, had nothing on Elena Derevko. I said no, of course. It was easy to say. I knew the Bristows and Nadia had to be on their way by now, I knew we would all work together to stop Elena, even if they did not yet. But the idea, once pronounced, would never leave me, and Elena knew it.

To see Emily again, alive. Just once. To talk to her. To hear her voice. To touch her hand, to hear her breathe, alive and safe. It would not be Emily, it would be an illusion, I know that, but as opposed to Jack I have been kown to willingly prefer illusions.

It would also be a betrayal of Emily, the only one I have not committed, and that is what has kept me from pursuing such a course of action. Not the idea of someone else being doomed to live out their life in another woman's skin, as Ms. Doren had been; frankly, I would only care that the woman in question was a good enough actress to disappear into her role. Yes, I do have more than enough DNA, stored in a Swiss deposit. I think about it sometimes, still.

And then I think of Emily choosing to come with me, for the third and fatal time, despite all I had done, and I know I will not do this to her, or her memory.

I wish my subconscious would accept this as well and would stop sending me dreams in which I do it anyway.

Tolstoy once wrote in a somewhat overrated novel dealing with, among other things, a marriage, that all families were happy in the same way but that each was miserable in their own unique fashion. I'd qualify this: nobody is married in the same way, happily or not. In my time, I have seen marriages of convenience, marriages of passion, and the union of Jack and Irina, which defies description. He never stopped referring to her as his wife, you know, and yet it startled me to hear Irina refer to him as her husband. We were on something of a race against the clock then, trying to assemble Il Dire, and I had just returned from Tibet and new revelations which I wasn't yet prepared to share. It was just a casual mention, perhaps more remarkable for the fact it occured at all, because as a rule we tried not to raise the subject of either Jack or Sydney, not after the first time in the air plane when she had commanded silence in her imperial way. But there it was. "My husband". She had spent perhaps seven years with him as Laura, and only a few hours each week for half a year when he knew her as Irina. Tired as I was then, somewhere on the brink between being emptied by Emily's death and grasping for that new revelation, fatherhood, I nearly said out loud this did not equate marriage in my mind, but stopped myself doing so just in time. After all, there was work to be done.

Besides, the woman you once had an affair with is the very last person to discuss marriage with, or your late wife.

Still. I dare say when Emily and I married we were in love like most young couples are, to give Tolstoy his due; what changed this passionate state of being entranced with each other into a marriage was not the exchange of vows as such but the decades we spent together. What made it a marriage was knowing each other at all times of the day and night, down to knowing by the noises we made when reading the newspaper what kind of article the other had just started. What made it a marriage was watching each other age and finding those signs of age so much a part of the other that we would not have traded them for our younger incarnations. What made it a marriage were the dark times, the lost child we never spoke of, the confession I made about my betrayal without naming a name and the way Emily received it, and the long fight against her cancer. What made it a marriage was the language we shared, and which we could not share with anyone else; allusions to a moment or a sensation gone since years and recalled with a word, or a look.

What made it a marriage was that in over thirty years, we did not leave each other. It probably would have been better for Emily if she had done. She tried, once, near the end. But I asked her to come with me again, and she did; only half an hour later I had her blood on my hands, springing from the wound a bullet had left that had been meant for me. This, too, then turned out to be marriage, to me: bringing death to the person I loved more than anyone else.

There is a custom, rapidly going out of fashion, about marriage rings. Widowers and widows wear the rings of their spouses as well as their own. When we faked Emily's death, not even a year before she did die, she had to leave her wedding ring with me. I took it as a pledge then, for our reunion once the Alliance had fallen. It was in fact her second ring; at one point during her cancer treatment, her fingers had swollen and her first ring had to be cut open. Later, I found out she had taken those two halfs, had gotten a goldsmith to melt them together again and had kept that first ring with her during those three months of secrecy and plotting. It was the one she wore then Dixon shot her. Later, Jack sent it to me, poste restante, to Switzerland, care of the Zurich central post office.

I'm wearing all three now. The first one she gave me, when we were young; it has never left my hand, and you can probably hardly read the inscription by now. Which is simply her name; Emily was not one for hallmark sentiments. The second one she gave me; new, and worn by her only for a few months. There are edges, and they cut into my flesh. And the one I gave her, broken, remelded, and, I fear, with an inscription, as sentimental as young men in love, or old men, for that matter, are ever going to get. After all, I never claimed Emily's virtues for myself.

These rings have been with me since she died, and they always will be.

This is what marriage means to me.

The five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Everyone grieves in their life, be it over the loss of a loved one or a dream they just can't reach. How do you grieve?

I.

Emily never saw her. She couldn't bear it, and by the time she had changed her mind, it was too late. It was one more loss that cut her up inside: to not even know what her daughter looked like. Arvin, who had seen the corpse, so small, so incredibly small, who had touched the limbs still covered with traces of Emily's blood, didn't know if he could speak of it, and would never find out.

"Never say her name again," Emily told him. "Never say it. Promise me, Arvin. Never."

Seeing Emily suffer, locked in a hell she did not allow him in, was in a way worse than losing their child. So he did what she asked. Jacquelyne was their secret, the one they never, ever, talked about, to no one, not even each other. But they thought about it, every time their eyes met over Sydney Bristow's head, every time the gardenias were in bloom again as they had been then, every time someone in their vicinity hummed "Michelle", which for some reason had been the song Emily had been singing to herself during her pregnancy when she couldn't sleep. Their hands would meet and cradle each other in the silence about what could never be talked of.

Emily had let him back in. It was the bargain he had struck.


II.

Somewhere in his files there was probably an estimate of his body count. It was something he did not waste much time contemplating until he was forced to tell Emily the truth, and even then the irony did not strike him: he had never killed out of hate. Neither as a CIA agent nor as a member of what the CIA termed a terrorist organization. It had been done out of duty, out of ambition, self defense, sometimes even for convenience, but he had never felt rage driving him to murder until Emily died.

He had no idea how many people he killed, and their faces, by and large, never haunted him, not even in those times when he was trying to become the kind of man Nadia deserved as a father, but there were exceptions. Diane Dixon was one of them. He had met her on a couple of social occasions, a pretty woman, a devoted wife, and what made her death stay with him was not regret as much as it was distaste and something suspiciously like self loathing at the utter pointlessness of it. Her death for Emily's, it had seemed what that consuming anger demanded, but after it was done, there was just more emptiness, and another corpse.

So much for anger.


III.

Looking back, he had started to bargain for Nadia even before finding her. Learning of her existence had been what made him continue after Emily's death. She was his miracle, not Jaquelyne returned from the dead, of course, but his transgression with Irina at last justified, all the years of devotion to Rambaldi rewarded by the one thing he had never hoped for. Then she became a reality, not an idea but a young woman right in front of him, and he realized miracles were not given freely. The comparison to Abraham was a bargain in itself, not just vanity; Abraham's faith was tested, but in the end, Isaac was spared.

It took his near-death, and Nadia leaving after saving his life, to make him realize what the bargain was, though: giving up Rambaldi for Nadia, or giving up Nadia for Rambaldi. For a year and a half, he chose Nadia. The sense of having betrayed his faith never vanished, and when he killed the hapless goon of the ursurper who babbled of immortality and rewards, he struck at himself as well. Still, watching Nadia live and thrive near him seemed to be justification enough. Then she fell victims to his past sins, and as she sank into her coma, the bargain he had to drive for her grew sharper and sharper. In addition to Rambaldi, there were now his dignity, his pride, the hard-won trust, such as it was, from Jack and Sydney. But the bargain was kept, at last: Nadia awoke.

Nobody had told him how to deal with the absence of grief, though. So he started a new bargain, and doomed them both.

You'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.

When we started our journey together, Nadia and I had at the same time too many and too few topics to talk about. By unspoken mutual consent, we avoided what I had done to her at first, and she understandably did not want to trust me with anything about her past yet. We ended up trading impressions of countries we had visited, and on the things we encountered while travelling through China. I do not know why, but I told her an ancient Chinese tale that involved a fox spirit.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" she asked me. If we had been father and daughter for all of her life, I would have assumed she was teasing me. But as I said, we were new to each other, and nothing, especially not humour, could be taken for granted, and thus I replied to her question in a literal manner.

"No," I said. "I do not think the dead return to us in this way."

There were, of course, other ways. Jack had resurrected me from what I had believed to be my death at the time only a few weeks earlier, Irina had made us all believe in her death decades ago, and I shall never forget the sensation that filled me when I saw that envelope with Sydney's handwriting on it, briefly before she returned in the flesh, after two years during which she had been presumed dead and gone. But in none of these cases, anything supernatural had been involved.

"Sydney," Nadia said, and the name of her newfound sister sounded untried and uncertain in her voice, "Sydney told me that you once pretended that your wife was haunting you."

I did not look at Nadia when I replied that I had been under surveillance at the time, and anything I said to Sydney, or Jack for that matter, about Emily had been meant for the ears of the Alliance. It had been a dangerous game I was playing, perhaps the most dangerous of my life, and they had to believe everything I wanted them to believe.

"But why pretend this?" Nadia asked.

"Gaslight was one of Emily's favourite movies," I said, and Nadia looked at me with those eyes she shares with Sydney and Irina, and fell silent for a while. I had told her the truth, but not all of it. Presenting myself as haunted by the wife I had to make everyone believe I killed had been one way to ensure the Alliance believed in my, shall we say, innocence regarding her survival later on, and of course in my lack of knowledge about her eventual fate. It had nothing to do with my actual beliefs. And yet when Emily did die, not a year later, I found myself looking for signs of the kind I had once placed myself. There were none. Of course there weren't; it would have been ridiculous. And yet I tried to find them, in between planning and carrying out what was ultimately a competely unsatisfying act of retaliation, and then I left everything behind for a while and went to Tibet, using that very road I was on with Nadia at the time she asked that question, and still somehow, against all reason, I expected to sense something. This particular kind of insanity did not stop until I learned of Nadia's existence.

Naturally, I could not mention any of this to her.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked her instead, hoping to steer the conversation away into safer territory, but as it turned out, I had been blind again. For Nadia stared at me, and with an anger I hadn't seen in her since she told me that if she had known I was her father, she'd have tried to get adopted by someone else, said: "Of course I do. You made me into a ghost, you gave my hand and my brain to one, how couldn't I believe in ghosts?"

And there it was. The topic we had not been talking about since leaving Los Angeles together. The mind of Rambaldi himself, I had told her, and yes, I believed - I still believe - she had access to it while the formula I had used on her was on her veins. Now I had thought this to be primarily a matter of chemistry and DNA, and secondarily one of visions - the visions Rambaldi had, all those centuries ago, and the ones the Passenger could access - but that was beside the point.

"I had not thought of it this way," I said, and did not mean Rambaldi or his ghost. Nadia's face softened. She sighed.

"I know," she said. I waited for her to continue, to challenge me about my beliefs, about what I had done to her, or to tell me why she had come with me regardless. A part of me, I must admit, was also wondering whether she would tell me what it had been like to see what she had seen with Rambaldi's eyes. But she said nothing more on the subject, and instead asked me where we would stay that night. Twenty four hours later, I had found the man I had been looking for, and he treated her like one of the Rambaldi objects he collected.

"My daughter is not an artifact," I told him, and yet he was a mirror to me, a mirror I did not care for.

I never talked with anyone about ghosts again.

With Valentine's Day around the corner we want you to think about love. Who do you love? What does it do to you? Does it lift you up like a bad cheesy power ballad? Does it destroy you? What does love do to you? What has it done to you in the past?

Yesterday, I went to the house that used to be my home for many a year. It does not belong to me any longer and has not for years; after the end of SD-6, the state confiscated it, as I had expected. The only thing of value to me that was still there by the time I left had not been in the house anyway. It was the garden, Emily's garden.

No matter where we lived in the course of over thirty years of our married life, Emily started to plant. She did this even if I had warned her we would have to move in a few months. When she had years, as was the case with our home in Pacific Palisades, she worked her magic so thoroughly that even five years of another, less gifted gardener, could not erase it. I stood outside and regarded what grew, what promised to bloom quite soon, with that mixture that always comes to me when I think of Emily these days: the grief that I lost her, and the fierce joy that she existed.

I met her in the same year I started to work with Jack Bristow; as coincidences go, this was a rather odd one. There was no particular moment at which I could say I fell in love with her, or she with me. But by the end of that year, it was quite obvious to both of us that living apart would no longer do, and I proposed. Though eventually, many years later, our marriage would lead Emily to her death, I cannot wish it otherwise. There are things I would alter about my past if I could, but never this. Loving Emily was what made my life worth living, and there was just one thing more painful than watching her suffer as she did when we lost Jacquelyn. As she did in her brave fight against her cancer. Sometimes, even these days, I wake up and the thought of Emily being eaten away by this enemy inside suffocates me. Then I remember it went into remission.

And then I remember that she is dead.

Emily is not the only person I ever loved. But she may be the only one in whom I never evoked hate as well as love in return, no matter what I did. When she showed me the wire she wore, that last day, that was my only fear: that I had lost her at last. That she come to hate me. But then she tore it away, and decided to come with me once more.

If she had loved me less, she might be alive today. This irony is somewhat inescapable. I think Dixon's wife Diane died for it. It also strikes me that my daughter Nadia, whose existence owes its fact to the only hurt dealt out to Emily I cannot wish undone due to what it resulted in, would in all likelihood still be conscious and healthy somewhere in the world if I had never looked for her. Or if after our disastrous first encounter I had not successfully tried to win her affection. Which, presumably, is why Irina tried to keep her existence a secret from me, and kept away from Nadia herself. Irina and I never were in the slightest danger of loving each other, but we understood each other because we always saw each other very clearly, without any illusions. During the two years Sydney was gone, I spoke to her once, and she asked me whether I could really believe our unknown child would be better with us in her life than without, given that happened to her other daughter and my late wife.

(It was Irina's kind of question; she never fights fair, and one never expects her to.)

"I can't know whether her life would be better or worse with me in it," I said. "But I do know mine is worse without her."

"You selfish bastard," she said.

"And what are you doing right now, Irina?" I asked back. "Ruining Jack's life all over again?"

She hung up on me after that. So, what does love do to me? It provides me with a reason for my continued existence and makes it worthwhile. It does not destroy me, no; but it seems it enables me to destroy those I love most.

*locked*
Except for Jack and Sydney. They remain eminently undestroyable. Given what Nadia and Emily have in common, and what Jack and Sydney share in regards to me, I can only conclude that hating me must provide protection. Sometimes I wonder whether this is why I started to keep secrets from them again. When she visited me after I shot Nadia, there was no hatred in Sydney any more, for the first time since her fiance Danny died. After I had finished absorbing this moment of grace, I started to worry. Whereas I always found Sydney's earlier vows that she would never forgive me quite reassuring. Jack, of course, is unable to ever exorcise hatred once he started, which means he should survive us all.

Muse: Arvin Sloane
Fandom: Alias