a_sloane

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.

The linguist in me strongly objects to the simplification and indeed misuse of the term "Nemesis". I take it the question refers to a rather banal definition like "greatest enemy" or "most constant rival", or even "most hated person". Now of course there are several people in my life to whom such designations could be applied, and yet they do not really fit any of them.

Take Sydney. From the time she learned the truth about SD 6, she was without a doubt one of my most formidable opponents. I have always taken a certain pride in this, vain as it may sound; still, I can not see how one can deny Sydney became the magnificent warrior she is in part because of myself, both because I recruited her and trained her, and because later, once she had started to fight me, I was her reason to continue as an agent more often than not. But even if you ignore those periods in which we were allies, even while she continued to hate me, I have never seen Sydney as my enemy. I never hated her; the one time I genuinenly tried to kill her, I believed her to be someone else, and sought to avenge her death.

Or should I apply the title to Jack? I might have deliberately driven Sydney to shoot me, but what Jack did afterwards was entirely unplanned. He did, as he pointed out, best me even after I had bested Death herself. Given that Jack and I have worked with and against each other for most of our lives, quite often at the same time, you might certainly call him "a little more than kin and less than kind", as Shakespeare phrased it; and yet even in the times when we were most certainly fighting against each other, he was my friend. There were two occasions when he traded my life away to help Sydney - and yet I did not die - and one when he killed and resurrected me; when I shot him, I did so only because I knew I could bring him back. Surely, a true enemy seeks the complete annihilation of his foe?

And then there is Irina. We always saw each other a little too clearly for comfort, and we competed, for many years. For Jack for Sydney, for power - for Irina, which many of her opponents ignore to their detriment, headed the one organization to truly challenge the Alliance before its downfall - for Rambaldi. Jack understands obsession with a person, but not with an idea; Irina, on the other hand, understands the lure of the mystery itself only too well, though her motives still were somewhat different. But the idea of an enemy above all other enemies implies a certain exclusive intimacy, and I dare say Irina never gave me this, though we were, perhaps, more to each other at times than I ever wished to admit to myself. No, Irina and Jack always were each other's in this regard as in others, and I never fooled myself about this.

In any case, neither Sydney nor Jack nor Irina took from me what I loved most, and they most certainly did not transform me into who I became. I did not need to spend considerable time in the darkness to understand just who did this to me. There is a curse implied in the commandment of the Delphic Oracle, you know. Know thyself. Know thyself indeed.

But to call oneself one's greatest enemy has become such a trite cliché these days. In any case, and to return to the beginning, this is not what the term "nemesis" really means. Given the sad decline of education these days, I'm not suprised at the general ignorance, but rather than lamenting it, I shall attempt a little explanation. Nemesis is a Greek goddess, you see. The goddess of just anger. No, not one of the furies, though she resembles them in some of her obligations. Nemesis avenges hubris, that quality that makes us assume we are indeed not just the captains of our fate but can also shape the world to our liking; that we can even triumph over the gods themselves. Next to hubris, she punishes offenses to Themis, the goddess of justice and morality.

But most of all, she punishes heartless lovers. Understand that this does not mean "people who feign love". No, it means "people who love and yet hurt those they love".

Given all of this, there can really be no other choice. Who should my Nemesis be but my daughter Nadia?

Jack did not see her when I did. Nor did anyone else - certainly not the unlamented members of Prophet Five when she first started appearing to me. Maybe I am, and yet, I cannot think of anything more appropriate, and I have come to accept it as just. Nemesis always is, you know.

So, Nadia.

I did not know of her existence for most of her life. Even today, I wonder what would have happened to both of us if I had known, or found out after she was taken from Irina. But be that as it may, I learned of Nadia shortly after my wife Emily had died. At this point, I had startled young Mr. Sark and Irina by leaving them with the ongoing compilation of Il Dire, indeed all my Rambaldi collections, and whatever else I had, and disappearing. I went to Tibet, to see the man who, the army corps of engineers aside, had first drawn my attention to Milo Rambaldi. We all reach a point where we are exhausted and worn out enough to have no other question but "why?", like a child: and this was the one I posed. In reply, he showed me a manuscript that told me, in words written centuries before either she or I were born, that I had a daughter. It also told me my daughter was none other than the Passenger.

(Later, when I had started looking for her, Irina and I had an angry conversation on the phone. She said I should stop looking for her. "You're not looking for your daughter," she continued, "you're looking for the Passenger." "I'm looking for both," I replied.

I should have known then I had just doomed us both.)

I searched the world for her, not even knowing her name. When I had finally found her, she seemed at once heartbreakingly real and utterly remote: a beautiful young woman, Ophelia as painted by Millais. There was nothing of me that I recognized, though one could see the resemblance to both Irina and Sydney. I still remember the very moment when I knew she was my daughter in my heart as well as I had known it in my mind: not when she tried to escape - that was Irina - but when she told me she had tricked me as well as the CIA.

Nadia's decision to love me was a miraculous gift after that. For it was a decision, and not made blindly; she had seen just what I was capable of before we even started our journey, and she got another reminder when we arrived in Siena. It was my turn to make a decision afterwards. I finally saw mere biology was not enough; I had to become her father by transforming myself. All those years of watching Jack and Sydney, of loving Sydney myself, and I had still not understood this quintessential thing: a child changes you as much or more as you can ever hope to influence it. Unless, of course, you do not allow it.

For one year, one year that turned out to be the last I can never regret, I changed as much as I was and probably will be able to. I did not, to borrow an obvious image, become Paul, nor did I ever, but I was Saul somewhere between the ground and Damascus. It wasn't a sudden or simple thing, or something I felt unambiguous about. Events such as Anna Espinosa's return or the ursurper using my name made me feel I had betrayed something holy to me. I had stopped the quest, I had allowed to let Rambaldi's heritage to fall in the hands of greedy ignorants by turning my back on it. But I had gained my daughter, my daughter who greeted me each morning when I came to work and allowed me to be part of her life, my daughter who was happy, by and large, and surely, this was worth it?

Nemesis can be kind before she strikes.

My own last attempt to change the world was what claimed Nadia, with the malicious help of Yelena Derevko, granted, but Yelena would have never been able to use the drug that took Nadia's free will and sanity from her if I had not used the basic formula two years earlier. As a result, I killed my daughter three times, and perhaps the greatest irony, truly worthy of the Greeks as their most masterful and their most cruel, is that the third and fatal time, which had come without intention, was the true betrayal. The first time, when I shot her before she could kill her sister, she did not actually die, but sank into a coma; it did not make the action itself less of a killing. I had never loved Nadia more than when I pulled the trigger; there was no other choice, none but death to not just Sydney but everyone else, though I cannot claim I shot her to save the world; I did it because that was what she would have wanted had she been in possession of her mind. Nadia, you see, was a heroine.

The second time, I killed her because that was what was supposed to end the coma and bring her back. It was, I had been told, her one chance. Before she could be injected with the cure for the virus still affecting her, she had to be dead for thirty seconds. And so I killed her again. I had no guarantee it would work, of course, but at that point, nearly a year after that shot, there was little else I had not tried. This time, there was no distance, as there had been in Russia; she was in my arms, and I felt her shudder and struggle. I felt the death I brought her; every one of those thirty seconds.

It worked. Pandora, another of those so very appropriate Greek myths, had in her box all the plagues ever unleashed on men, and they all escaped. The most terrible of them, the last one, which has remained with us every since, was hope.

She did not have more than twenty four hours to live after that. The last time I killed my daughter Nadia did not happen through a gun shot or a cloth pressed on her face to stop her breath. I did not even see her die, and that makes the lack of intention irrelevant: it was the greatest betrayal of all. I pushed her to one side to snatch the Rambaldi manuscript she had thrown into the fire, and when I held it, the light had left her eyes.

It was not the last time I saw her. Of course it wasn't. And you see, it does not matter whether her form is something chosen by madness or fate, whether her voice is that of my own mind or truly her voice, proving all my previous smug dismissals of ghosts untrue. What I told her when she was still alive, that last day, is still true: I will always need her more than she ever needed me.

Nemesis is the daughter of Nyx, the goddess of the Night - and Oceanos, who is Water. Her anger is just, and her words are true, and she will not let go until she finds you well and duly punished.

There was really no one else it could have been.

Regret

He did warn her. Judy Barnett, armed with the weapons Freud, Jung and assorted successors equiped the psychiatric profession with, arrives to make him talk about his regrets. What Arvin Sloane tells her before talking about anything else is as clear as he could possibly be with her.

"I manipulate people," he says. "I'm good at that, and I know it. I lie. I keep secrets. I divulge only what I must in order to elicit the reaction I need. That skill, in part, is why I'm still alive. One of those secrets affects the only two people I care about in the world, Sydney and Jack Bristow. There are many secrets I enjoy keeping. There is power in secrets that you keep. But this one, no. This one wears on me. It has for many years. It's central to my very existence. It's who I am."

Naturally, Dr. Barnett takes this as a challenge. She'll make him confess this secret. This greatest regret. She will not be manipulated. She has read his files, she has profiled him for the CIA. Both Bristows, even the completely repressed Jack, have at times confided in her. She is more than ready for Arvin Sloane. Of course, she also has to admit to mundane curiosity. This is a man who at one point used a weapon to burn a church full of people alive, not because he hated any of them, not because he actually planned to keep the weapon himself; simply because he needed it as a bargaining tool in order to aquire a manuscript, and had to demonstrate its effectiveness to the thug who possessed the manuscript in question. So what past crime does haunt him?

"I have betrayed people," he tells her at last, standing in front of a cloak room, "many of whom deserved it. But only one didn't. It was a long time ago. I sometimes try to convince myself that it was worth it, that she was worth it."

This is stunning and anticlimatic at the same time. Adultery. An affair. Something any clerk or bookkeeper who never in his life harmed a fly could have confessed to. On the one hand, Dr. Barnett is disappointed, and chides herself for it; on the other, she is even more intrigued because of the degree of sociopathy this choice reveals, and of course once he names the woman in question, the implications for her patients are fascinating.

"Are you telling me Sydney is your daughter?" she whispers.

"I never tried to prove it, one way or the other. But the strength that Sydney finds within, I like to believe that comes from me." He smiles at her. "Hmm, how about that. The world didn't come to an end."

She has sex with him the same night and is aware what this says about her. In the months that follow their brief affair, she never can make up her mind whether his confession was a complete lie, a mixture of lies and truths, or actually true. He is, she thinks, capable of telling the truth if it serves his purpose. He did have an affair with Irina Derevko, though it resulted in a woman named Nadia Santos rather than in Sydney Bristow. But is this really his primary regret? Because it meant a betrayal of his late wife? Because it meant a betrayal of Jack Bristow before Jack betrayed him? Or did he just use the story to camouflage something else, if, indeed, he felt regret at all?

She can't decide, and it is something that keeps gnawing at her, together with her own sense of failure and embarrassment about her conduct. More than a year later, he's in prison again, his case awaiting revaluation, and her superiors ask her to interview him. She reviews the files first and is somewhat stunned that both Bristows and even Marcus Dixon have written statements pleading his case.

Her interview with him mostly consists of cool, polite statements on both parts. He says the expected things, and says them well; after all, he doesn't want to stay in prison, that is the one thing Judy Barnett is sure about. At last, she throws caution away and embarks on a final gamble.

"Given that your daughter Nadia is of such tremendous importance to you," she says softly, "would you still call the affair that produced her your greatest regret?"

There is a spark in his eyes, but she can't tell whether it is anger or acknowledgement.

"I never called it my greatest regret," he replies. "I called it the secret I never wanted to have. Why else would I have shared it? Really, my dear, a woman in your profession should know that a man in mine never chooses his words by accident."

Judy Barnett rises, and only years of self discipline prevent her from flushing. She can't believe he's still able to do that to her.

"Judy," he says, and she tries to ignore him, switching off the recording tape, packing it into her purse.

"The fundamental problems with regrets is this: they imply one wishes an action undone, and yet without that action, one would never have reached the state to regret it."

She stops, considering this.

"But you do wish actions undone?" she asks, cursing herself for being weak enough to pose the question he undoubtedly wants her to ask.

"Naturally, Dr. Barnett," he says, and smiles at her again. "Don't we all?"

Not the pure sociopaths among us, she thinks, but doesn't say it out loud. She has this much discipline at least, and besides, she knows it isn't true. But she finishes packing, and without looking at him, says cooly: "Name one. Just one."

Shooting his daughter would be an obvious choice, but then again, given that not shooting her would have resulted in the death of Sydney Bristow and hell on earth, not a realistic one. Never having heard of Rambaldi would be the most sensible choice, given the harm his pursuit of Rambaldi wrought on all those people he claimed to love. Or even something like his order to kill Sydney's fiance Danny, following Alliance procedures, the action which ensured Sydney's hate for him.

"I shouldn't have bothered playing Elena Derevko," he said. "I should have done what Irina did. I should have killed her on sight."

She never asks him another question again.

Think about a big decision you made in your life, now pretend there was a twist of fate and you acted differently. Write a fic showing us the different you, or just tell us how you your life would be different now.

In retrospect, he's fairly certain that what ruined his life, and so many others, was the attempt to do the right thing.

Things have always been a bit uneasy between him and Laura Bristow, more so because as Jack's best friend and his wife, they basically had no choice but to get along, and neither of them, he suspects, ever liked having no choice about anything. But when Laura makes a pass at him at a party, so subtle and yet so clear that neither Jack nor Emily, who both are in the same room, ever notice, he does have a choice.

All uneasiness aside, Laura is beautiful. She is also clearly in love with her husband, or the best actress in the world. Arvin Sloane is not a modest man, but his vanity is intellectual; he's quite aware that he's not attractive. So whatever motivates Laura, it can't be a sudden passion. And Laura herself can't be that perfect doting wife she pretends to be, because that woman wouldn't have dreamt of doing something like this. Even if he were not married and in love with his own wife, even if he didn't count Jack as his best friend, there is a very good reason to find all of this suspicious and to act on this suspicion. There are only bad reasons to respond to her pass, to meet her a week later in an anonymous motel. It would be partly for curiosity, as he can never resist a puzzle. Partly because he wants to prove something to himself, and something to Jack, even though Jack must never find out, about Laura-The-Perfect. And partly because she is beautiful, and quite simply one of the most magnetic woman on the planet, and when she looks at him while making her pass, he realizes, for the first time, he's not the good man Jack believes him to be, either.

But he makes the right choice, the sensible choice. He pretends not to notice Laura's signal. And he puts her under surveillance, 24 hours a day. A week later, he doesn't have an assignment with her in a motel, he knows that she's meeting another man, and not for adultery, either. Two weeks later, he has her identified as Irina Derevko, KGB agent.

As this discovery is bound to ruin Jack's life in every imaginable way, Arvin decides to act on it alone, all the stronger motivated because of that single moment of temptation. So Laura Bristow has a car accident. The other driver dies instantly, too. And the body of Irina Derevko's KGB handler, Cuvee, rots somewhere in the desert where it will never be found.

Jack is devastated, but nobody suspects him of having betrayed the CIA to his wife, and thus he's able to be there for little Sydney. For a while, all goes well, or as well as they can under the circumstances. Then things start to unravel. Because Laura-who-was-Irina, it seems, has two sisters, Katya and Elena, both working for the KGB as well, and not inclined to believe in an accident. They think Irina's husband must have found out the truth. They come to America, Katya to avenge her sister, Elena pretending to want that, too, but really to get her hands on Sydney for her own purposes. Jack survives Katya's first attempt, but it reveals the truth to him. Which leads him to certain conclusions. Once he figures it out, he shows up at Arvin's house at night, fairly drunk, and asks, point blank.

"Yes," Arvin whispers, and as his ill luck would have it, Emily overhears them. Jack looks at him and nods, slowly, then leaves. It's the end of their friendship, because while Jack can intellectually understand what Arvin did, and why it was for the best, he can't possibly forgive. Add to this that in the same night, while Jack is at Sloane's house, Elena Derevko strikes and abducts Sydney, never to be seen again, and it's not really that surprising that Jack Bristow, after two years of looking for his daughter in vain and having lost both his wife and his friend, wakes up one morning and decides to let Katya Derevko shoot him. Not many people show up at his funeral.

Arvin still has Emily, but ever since she heard what he did to Laura, she's looking at him with different eyes as well, for all the knowledge that Laura was a KGB agent and that the woman she believed to be her friend didn't really exist. She withdraws from him. When Jack dies, Arvin decides that the best thing for Emily would be if he divorced her, since clearly, he only does damage to those he loves, and besides, she doesn't seem to want him anymore.

Years later, when Emily is diagnosed with cancer, she's too proud to contact him, and dies in solitude.

By this time, Arvin Sloane has become utterly absorbed in Rambaldi. Without Emily, without the Bristows, there is nothing and no one holding him back. There isn't the discovery of a daughter waiting for him, either, because he killed the woman who would have been her mother.

He dies on a planet utterly transformed by the work of Rambaldi, but in truth, what was human in him died many years before that.

It all started with an attempt to do the right thing.