![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Topic 19: Creature of Habit
May. 7th, 2006 08:56 am„Habits,“ my instructor at Langley used to say, „make you predictable. A target. So do yourself a favour and don’t start getting them.”
I was young then, and quite sure to be able to follow his advice, but of course we all aquire habits. Mannerisms that set our environment at ease because they make us familiar and predictable to them. Or, conversely, disquiet them on an ongoing basis. I have found both factors useful. Even now, when I am, in the more important sense of the word, no longer alive.
I died when she did, four days ago. The rest is a play I find myself observing almost from the outside. There are two or three possible outcomes, and all include my death. I definitely intend to accomplish at least two rather important things before that point. But I am a dead man walking, more than I ever was in prison, and strangely enough, habits are all I have to establish myself to the fellow players, to become what I need to in the last of all games.
The habits of Arvin Sloane, then, the ones he finds hard to break. I am still wearing Emily’s wedding ring and my own. It used to be a common custom for widows and widowers in my youth, but hardly anyone follows it any more. Such a small thing, a ring; it hardly seems to impact the flesh at all, and yet when you take it off, the marks it leaves are deep. Almost two years ago, when I believed I was about to be executed by the state, I had to pull them off. Jack was thoughtful enough to hand them back to me later, something probably made easier by the fact they were in an envelope addressed to him. You could say I felt naked without them; not quite myself. There is little point in the habit, I suppose. Emily is gone, and it does not matter to her. And yet I cannot part with either ring. When I press my fingers against each other, a mannerism that I originally developed to appear older in an agency which at the time was dominated by age and then, when I myself aged into it, used to project a certain image to my employees, I hardly feel the metal, but it is there. I cannot do without it.
“Know when a habit becomes really lethal?” my instructor said. “When you don’t know you have it.”
The wearing of rings is somewhat inescabable to the attention. But there is another habit I did not realize I had, not until I saw her falling into the glass as I had done in Siena, felt the blood on my hands as Emily’s had been. “I betrayed everyone I ever loved,” I told another dead man walking who does not know what he is yet, and yet that is just a part of it. I kill them. Twice over. I should have known. Faking Emily’s death for the Alliance had required her drinking the same drug Jack later gave me, and I held her seemingly dead body in my arms just as I did her real corpse a year later. When they told me I would have to stop Nadia’s heart for thirty seconds, I should have known. But that long-dead man was right. We’re blind to our most lethal habits. I felt her shudder and die under my hand and did not know, I saw her come to life again as Emily had done and did not understand. Not until it was too late.
I died then. But breathing, too, is a habit one has to consciously get rid off.
I was young then, and quite sure to be able to follow his advice, but of course we all aquire habits. Mannerisms that set our environment at ease because they make us familiar and predictable to them. Or, conversely, disquiet them on an ongoing basis. I have found both factors useful. Even now, when I am, in the more important sense of the word, no longer alive.
I died when she did, four days ago. The rest is a play I find myself observing almost from the outside. There are two or three possible outcomes, and all include my death. I definitely intend to accomplish at least two rather important things before that point. But I am a dead man walking, more than I ever was in prison, and strangely enough, habits are all I have to establish myself to the fellow players, to become what I need to in the last of all games.
The habits of Arvin Sloane, then, the ones he finds hard to break. I am still wearing Emily’s wedding ring and my own. It used to be a common custom for widows and widowers in my youth, but hardly anyone follows it any more. Such a small thing, a ring; it hardly seems to impact the flesh at all, and yet when you take it off, the marks it leaves are deep. Almost two years ago, when I believed I was about to be executed by the state, I had to pull them off. Jack was thoughtful enough to hand them back to me later, something probably made easier by the fact they were in an envelope addressed to him. You could say I felt naked without them; not quite myself. There is little point in the habit, I suppose. Emily is gone, and it does not matter to her. And yet I cannot part with either ring. When I press my fingers against each other, a mannerism that I originally developed to appear older in an agency which at the time was dominated by age and then, when I myself aged into it, used to project a certain image to my employees, I hardly feel the metal, but it is there. I cannot do without it.
“Know when a habit becomes really lethal?” my instructor said. “When you don’t know you have it.”
The wearing of rings is somewhat inescabable to the attention. But there is another habit I did not realize I had, not until I saw her falling into the glass as I had done in Siena, felt the blood on my hands as Emily’s had been. “I betrayed everyone I ever loved,” I told another dead man walking who does not know what he is yet, and yet that is just a part of it. I kill them. Twice over. I should have known. Faking Emily’s death for the Alliance had required her drinking the same drug Jack later gave me, and I held her seemingly dead body in my arms just as I did her real corpse a year later. When they told me I would have to stop Nadia’s heart for thirty seconds, I should have known. But that long-dead man was right. We’re blind to our most lethal habits. I felt her shudder and die under my hand and did not know, I saw her come to life again as Emily had done and did not understand. Not until it was too late.
I died then. But breathing, too, is a habit one has to consciously get rid off.
