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.

Current Mood: contemplative

It's not the torture, or the fact he had to order his best friend to cut of one of his fingers, or that the appendix in question is currently being reattached by a surgeon which means Arvin can't be elsewhere, taking her of the incredible mess that is SD-6 right now: no, what really makes him feel oddly helpless and at the same time indignant are two different things.

It should not have happened in the first place. Someone like McKennas Cole, admittedly once a good agent, or he wouldn't have bene hired to begin with, but still nowhere near top league, should not have been able to waltz into SD-6 and take everyone hostage the way he did. The fact Cole had to be someone else's flunky isn't really helping. It still shouldn't have happened. It means Arvin Sloane is getting sloppy, and that kind of thing gets you killed. He'll have to make sure it won't ever happen again.

The other thing that makes him linger once the operation is done, the immediate aftermath at SD-6 is dealt with and the doctor shows up for the third time to send Arvin home, which he only briefly considers responding to by shooting the unfortunate man, is that he can't think of any explanation Emily will buy. One does not return from a day at the bank with a severed and then reattached finger. On the other hand - an unfortunate simile, right now, but he can't think of any other - on the other hand, Arvin is supposed to be brilliant at the invention of convincing lies. He is brilliant at it. Has been for decades. So why the performance failure now?

"Arvin," Jack says, "you shouldn't still be here."

"You shouldn't, either," Arvin replies automatically, and it is true. Jack is at less than optimum condition himself.

Somehow, this short exchange leads to them heading off to a bar for a drink, which they haven't done in quite a while. Something has changed between them ever since Arvin recruited Sydney, and the tenseness only increased once he made Jack and Sydney actually work together. It was to be expected. Leave it to Jack Bristow not to recognize the obvious, the obvious being that Sydney is briliant at her - their - job and that working together actually allows for topics of conversations between Jack and his daughter as opposed to the endless silence that was between them before. Arvin does have other, more selfish reasons for the current arrangement as well, but these benefits are no less important. He loves the Bristows, but they never know what is good for them as well as he does. If that means a temporary distance between him and Jack, well. A painful necessity. Jack would come around. In fact, sitting in a bar together, sipping at the bitter Scotch which Jack likes more than Arvin does and Arvin has ordered anyway because this just wasn't a day for fine wine, isn't that an indication the coming around process had started?

"I... appreciate what you did today," Jack says, which is the Jack Bristow equivalent of a hug, and Arvin raises an eyebrow.

"What I did today was damage control," he replies, and Jack shakes his head.

"Damage control was activating the failsafe. Telling me to cut off your finger was saving Sydney's life."

There is the explanation for that shared drink, then. Jack feels grateful for a daughter saved instead of lying torn into bits among the ruins of a blown up building. Saving Sydney's life has been the reason for that quick decision down in the interrogation room, admittedly, but nonetheless, Arvin feels a tiny slice of disappointment adding to the odd sense of failure he has about the entire affair and concludes the Scotch has to be worse than expected.

"I keep my promises, Jack," he says. Jack doesn't point out that spoken from one CIA deserter to another, from one experienced liar to another, this statement is somewhat questionable. He doesn't ask which particular promise Arvin means, either. It is one given many years ago, in the aftermath of Laura's "death" and the discovery of her true identity, when Jack ended up in prison for a while until internal affairs concluded he had been a dupe, not a mole. Of course, Arvin's interpretation of keeping Sydney safe isn't Jack's, but preventing her death is a definition they can both agree on.

Somehow, Arvin's glass is empty, and Jack refills it. The bitterness of the taste has changed into a comfortable numbness, Arvin decides, and knows this should make him feel distrustful because he has no business being relaxed today, but decides to put off the distrust for just a few moments longer.

"It won't happen again," says Jack. He might mean today's incredible security breach, or this particular echo of old times, sharing a drink together, or either, or neither. Everything and nothing at all.

"Here's to unique occurences then," Arvin says, and raises his glass. The nerves in his finger must work again, because he can feel the throbbing pain, but he raises his glass, nonetheless, and so does Jack. Their eyes meet and hold as they drink.

Years later, remembering that day, Arvin can't recall what he eventually did tell Emily when he got home. What excuse he used, and how she reacted. Maybe there was disbelief, and maybe there was not, because those were her bad days, with the cancer putting her through hell day by day, hour by hour, and her medication only insufficient relief. What Arvin does remember are the shared drinks, Jack at the bar; his memory is convenient that way sometimes. He looks at the thin white circle around one of his fingers, which is only noticable of you pay close attention, and then it resembles nothing as much as a wedding ring, cut in the flesh. Which fits, in its way. Arvin still wears Emily's ring above his own, as widowers do, but what ties him to the Bristows never was as clear and simple as a marriage vow. It never will be. It should be a scar.

He won't let it fade, either.

Current Mood: numb
Current Location: Westchester

Emily always used to buy the Christmas presents, even for long-term employes who were not exactly part of their social circle, such as the Dixons or Marshall Flinkman, whom she knew from her occasional visits to the official Credit Dauphine offices, or from Christmas parties.

Before Laura died, she also used to buy presents for the Bristows. It was the only holiday shopping they did together, Arvin taking the time between missions or administration battles, and wondering, year after year, whether there wasn't some potential for global mind control via shopping malls. After Laura, Jack made it clear he did not wish any more gifts. Emily still bought presents for Sydney, though this was something Arvin found out only later, when they moved into a new house. There they were, still wrapped up. At first he wondered whether Jack had sent them back unopened, but abandoned the idea as soon as it came to him; Jack, with his unfailing courtesy towards Emily - perhaps the only remaining person Jack was unfailingly courteous toward -, would never have done such a thing. Emily probably never sent them to begin with. He looked at the bright colours of the wrapping paper and understood they had not just been for Sydney; they had been tributes to the life that was gone, before she had reconciled herself to the idea of accepting the loss.

In the year after Emily died, truly died with her life bleeding away on an Italian field, Arvin Sloane spent most of December moving from country to country, both for practical reasons - he had not yet made the deal that allowed for his very public rehabiliation and still was on the list of most wanted fugitives - and because he did not quite know what else to do with himself. True, there was a new goal to look for, his unknown daughter, the Passenger, but he did not even know her name. Each time he tried to imagine her, he ended up thinking of the girl he had known very well indeed. When he found out Allison had killed Sydney, he called Jack a couple of times, but hung up every time Jack said as much as "Yes" or "Bristow". What was there to say, after all? Arvin had been the one to place Allison Doren in Sydney's house.

(Sometimes, he indulged fantasies about this being a mistake; that there was no way Allison should have been capable of killing Sydney Bristow, whose life was protected by prophecies and destiny. Sometimes, he wondered whether perhaps Sydney had done the same thing as her mother before her; faked her own death for some unknown purpose, brilliantly and efficiently. Then he made another of his phonecalls, and the sound of Jack's voice, the blankness no longer a cover but the lack of any life, told him it could not be anything but true.)

He was in Hongkong, of the all the places, having nothing in particular to do until the meeting with another contact, when some street traders approached him. "A shawl for your daughter," one of them said, and another called "flowers, Sir, flowers for your wife".

Arvin thought of Emily and those carefully wrapped up, unopened presents in their old house. She would not have wanted flowers, though; she would have wanted seeds. He did buy the shawl, though, thinking about the way the rich red silk would have accentuated Sydney's skin and eyes. "Fit for a bride, Sir," the hawker said, and Arvin pretended not to listen. He spent the next hour hunting down seeds for the most exotic of flowers he could find, with a fair modicum of success. For some reason, the image that came to mind was not Emily in her garden, planting, teasing life out of the barren ground, but of Persephone who made the mistake of eating those seeds and trapping herself in the underworld. There was still something missing. Jack, he thought, of course.

One of the first Chinese customs he had learned about: presents made of red paper, to be burned at a funeral for the dead, so they would have them in their next life. Never mind that Jack was the only one of the three still alive, or that Arvin was not a Buddhist (or, for that matter, a Christian). There was so much to choose from, though. Cars, pagodas, houses. In the end, he picked a gun, of course.

It was time to meet his contact then; information was exchanged, favours were traded, and he left the meeting not without satisfaction. He could not afford to remain in Hongkong afterwards, though, and left within the hour, one identity exchanged for another, not an item of clothing the same he had arrived in. There were three things he kept, though. A shawl, seeds, a paper gun.

He should have known that presents, once bought, ultimately always found their recipients.

Current Mood: distressed

When one is young, one tends to try out quite a rich gallery of images. I did not know yet what I wished to be when I joined the CIA, but I did know I wished to suceed. Aside from the obvious requirements - intelligence, skill, dedication, and so forth - showing interest in the various occupations and passions of your superiors was an easy way to do so. When one of them complimented me on my shooting skills, I told him my father had taken me hunting as a boy. His face lit up, and he invited me to a hunting trip in Maine for the weekend.

"That was a bit obvious, don't you think?" said my new partner Jack Bristow later, when we were alone. We didn't know each other very well yet, but he was clearly the most gifted agent of my own age I had been able to discover, which made him either the worst rival or the best ally I could hope for. Getting assigned together might let me find out which it was going to be, which was why I had pushed for it. Now I gave him my best noncommittal look.

"My father took me hunting," he quoted. "Your father is a peaceful record store owner in Brooklyn who never touched a gun in his life."

This was entirely correct, but what was most interesting was this: I had not talked about my family background with Jack. Not out of any desire to hide it, but there were more interesting topics of conversation. Which meant he must have accessed my file. Because he was curious, or because he was looking for a weakness. Either possibility intrigued me, as did the fact he was letting me know what he had done, because there was no way he was not aware of the conclusion I would draw from his little observation. I looked at him and smiled.

"The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination," I conceded.

"Not if your imagination leaves you stuck with Pryors in Maine for the weekend," Jack said, deadpan.

Now I had little interest in hunting or Adam Pryors, other than his usefulness to me professionally. And I was reasonably sure the weekend would be dull, though no more so than having to do standard surveillance for an arms dealer's second cousin once removed, which was the sort of job young and inexperienced agents such as ourselves got. But he had made it just that much more colourful.

"Well," I said, "if it gets too bad, I shall rely on you coming to the rescue. There should be a phone in Pryors' lodge, and you can practice for work by telling him all about my aunt having had a heart attack."

Jack folded his arms and leaned back on the chair he sat on. "What makes you think I don't have anything better to do during the weekend than waiting for your phonecall in case you get bored with cozying up to Pryors?"

"Because we're partners, Jack," I said, and felt it the first time, that electric charge I was going to associate with him. Forget the either/or, I thought, regarding the future possibilities of rivalry versus alliance. Why shouldn't it be both/and? "And my father did teach me never to refuse a favor from a friend."

He looked as if he was going to protest he had not offered any favors, but that would only lead to me pointing out that he wouldn't have brought up the entire subject otherwise, and he knew it. So instead, he gave me one of his narrow long looks. And nodded.

I knew parental lessons would come in handy. Especially if one invents them.

Current Mood: good

“Friend” is a word we use far too easily, until we forget what it means. But then again, it rarely means the same thing to more than two or three persons; we are too different from each other. To me, the meaning got defined decades ago, and has been redefining itself ever since.

It wasn’t that Jack Bristow and myself worked together when young; naturally professionalism demands you get along with your partner in the field. But those kind of relationships are quickly established and easily discarded, if needs be. Jack had other partners, especially since I got promoted somewhat faster, and so did I. Jack used to remark we shared an unsentimental patriotism and the devotion to our wives in those days, but these traits were not exactly rare among C.I.A. agents, either; we could have found them in other people as well. There was, of course, the lack of false modesty and the awareness we were both brilliant, which simply demanded either rivalry or alliance, though I myself never was a friend of either/or; the obvious solution was both/and, to me. Yet again, we were not unique in this, either. And we did have other friends. But even before I made the choices that were to cause me to leave the C.I.A., even before Laura became Irina and Jack lost a part of himself that enabled him to open to – selected - strangers, there was a distinction. It was forged somewhere between those walks in Washington, talking while the lanterns ignited, somewhere between patching each other up after the mole in Berlin we were supposed to question turned out to be a triple and arguing over the new restrictions handed out to the Company in the aftermath of the Nixon administration. Somewhere between enduring his peculiar fondness for ABBA and defending the works of an admittedly overpopular British composer who nonetheless did produce some of my favourite songs. Somewhere between tacit agreements certain interrogation methods would never make it into the official report and the sunset watched on Mount Abu in India during a stakeout. Decades later, it was still there, despite or perhaps because of what had happened in between.

It might be the very thing that seperates comfortable aquaintance from friendship; betrayal, and the aftermath. I betrayed Jack through my affair with his wife, and later through recruiting his daughter. Jack betrayed me through doing to me what Irina had done to him, and later by trading in my life twice, though the bargain was never called in, once for, as I later found out, Vaughn who amazingly had enough blood to need a cure after all, and once because Katya and Irina or solely Katya were in a mood for games. He put me through death and resurrection; I did the same to him. We were in vastly different states at the respective time, yet I was and remain convinced of this: neither of us would have dealt out death if we had not known we could also resurrect.

We were, after all, best friends.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Undisclosed

This might or might not have happened. After all, he is quite adroit at rewriting his past.

But this is the way he remembers it, in the dark.

Six-years-old Sydney, busy assembling all her stuffed animals, hiding them on her bed, under her bed, building a fortress with the carpet as well. (An expensive carpet; this used to be his office and has only just been transformed into a children's room, improvised on the spot because the CIA when arresting Sydney's father did not give advance warning.) Somewhere - in kindergarden, in school, who really knows? - she heard the story of the flood, and is somehow convinced there will be a new one. She thinks it rather unfair there will be only two of each kind allowed to survive, though; she wants to save them all.

"You can't," Arvin says, asked for his opinion. In other circumstances, he'd smile benignly and express approval, but he is not exactly himself these days. The idea of Jack getting interrogated as a potential traitor is infuriating; the revelation that the late Laura Bristow was never Laura at all, but a KGB agent named Irina Derevko and might not be dead at all is more than that.

"Yes, I can," Sydney insists, and Arvin Sloane has odd thoughts. Ridiculous thoughts. He could, for example, report to the Assistant Director. Tell the man that Agent Bristow was not the only one taken in by Laura - by Derevko, he corrects himself, not wishing to call her Irina, a name which with its Byzantine connotations carries a strange allure. One of the reasons why Jack is now suspected of having been Derevko's accomplice instead of her dupe is Jack's previous track record. He's one of the best agents around, no one's fool; could such a man be fooled for near seven years? Well, Sir, yes; look at my own record. I am no one's fool, either, and she did the same thing to me. In fact, I believe some of the information Derevko gathered, which you believe indicates Agent Bristow's guilt as it concerned cases he was not involved with, came through me. So you see, Sir, it should either be both of us in that interrogation cell, or neither of us.

Why, thank you, Agent Sloane. Please join Agent Bristow in state custody. Oh, and your wife has just filed her divorce papers. But at least you don't have to worry about Agent Bristow's little daughter any more. Upon hearing of your touching confession, Agent Bristow changed his request regarding you as a custodian. She'll be raised in an excellent orphanage instead.

"Sometimes," Arvin says to Sydney, "you have to sacrifice some to protect those you love best. Or you'll lose them all."

He won't say anything to the Assistant Director. Of course he won't.

Sydney stares at him, a frown on her forehead which could have been her father's, brown eyes darkening into her mother's near black.

"You're lying," she states flatly. It's not like Sydney to be disrespectful to an adult, but that is what she says. A part of him hopes she'll be able to keep that naiveté for a long time.

It says something about his disturbed state, though, that he wonders, even for a moment, whether she isn't right.

In my entire life, I never met a man who managed to be as simultanously brilliant and dense as Jack Bristow did. Jack made me face certain truths about myself I was unaware of or had clad in a more convenient robe... and then, just as I was stunned and infuriated by his insight, he finished his analysis by managing to miss the entire point. The most glaring example of this habit of his happened some years ago, when I was about to be executed for something I had not actually done, an irony I was not in a position to appreciate and did my best to avoid. We had a blistering conversation along with a perfectly chosen (and drugged, but I was not to find this out until later) wine, in the course of which he said something I cannot forget:

Irina Derevko affected your life every bit as much as she affected mine. I knew the possibility existed that Sydney would be drawn into our world, but I often wondered why you were the one who sought her out, why you showed such paternal affection toward her. Now I know. You did it because you were angry and jealous and wanted to take away the one thing that was important to both Irina and me, the symbol of what we had and you didn't: Sydney.

Now. Being jealous did not fit with the image I had of myself. I could have retorted that if anyone was behaving in an obviously angry and jealous manner, it was Jack. (And over a twenty five years old affair, no less.) But that would have been too easy a dismissal of what was far more true than I wanted it to be, and yet was entirely mistaken in its application. I never saw Sydney as "the symbol of what Jack and Irina had", but I did recruit her out of jealousy, at least in parts. It wasn't the reason I would have named myself at the time; as I said, Jack had and has a talent for making me face what was unknown or unacknowledged. The core of the matter is this: I wanted her to be my daughter then, and this was the one way I knew how to make her into at least my creation. The only daughter I was aware of had died shortly after Emily had given birth to her, and I did not yet know there was another daughter. But I did know Sydney, knew her since her birth, even though I had not seen her since her early childhood. Why her, and not an adopted child, or any of the young people, female or male, at SD-6 who did look for a mentor figure as much as Sydney at that stage did? Because she was Jack's daughter. (Irina, at that point, was out of the game, and had not been heard of for years.) I was jealous, yes. And yet not in the way he later thought I was.

You see, the point wasn't to take Sydney away. In fact, had I known the entire affect her recruitment would have on Jack's relationship with me, it might have been the one thing which would have made me either change my plans or at least hesitate for a long time. (And then again, had I known what Sydney was to become, I would have recruited her anyway, but back then, she was still mostly a child to me.) Taking Sydney "away" would have implied removing her and myself from Jack, and that was positively the last thing I wanted. What I wanted was what I had, for several years at SD-6 and later for a precious year at APO: both Jack and Sydney with me.

Which brings us back to the matter of jealousy. Jack, in his simultanously brilliant and dense analysis in that cell, seemed to be under the impression that I had been jealous of his relationship with Irina because I had wanted Irina for myself. Now, to give credit where due: Irina was and is one of the most desirable women on the planet. I might never have had the kind of schoolboy crush on her Jack did, but I can still remember some of the dresses she wore in the Seventies and the expression she had when winning a game, which I always thought was Irina at her most alluring, because you could see that devious mind transforming her from beautiful to stunning. But it wasn't Jack I envied, living with Irina, or Laura as we thought of her then, for those six years, then being broken by her and hungering for her for the rest of his life. No. Preparing for what turned out to be not just my execution but my first resurrection, I stared in the mirror after he left, and found myself thinking: Irina, you splendid bitch, how do you do that? He still loves you. Now I might have made his daughter into a spy, but I was there all those years. Before you. After you. And you weren't. But he'll still kill me because of you, and the stupidity of letting myself get into this situation aside, that is the most infuriating aspect of the whole affair.

It was quite cold in that cell. Dead men, walking or contemplating their fate in the mirror, are not coddled. I didn't notice the lack of temperature, though.

I was jealous enough to burn.

Current Mood: jealous
Current Location: Undisclosed

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.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Undisclosed

"Desperate affairs require desperate measures. " - Horatio Nelson

Being tortured by one's former employee was never pleasant; when the former employee in question had also managed to infiltrate and take over one's place of work, there is indignity added to injury. On the bright side of things, Arvin Sloane had the pleasure of seeing McKennas Cole reduced to the state of aploplexy and hysteria by Sloane's refusal to break and scream. As compensations for pain and impending were conceerned, it was better than nothing. Still. On one level, Cole was a disappointment. He had hired the man, once upon a time, and here he was, unable to break a middle-aged man, and starting to shoot his own minions instead.

Of course, Cole would pay for being a disappointment in addition to being an ursurper by being blown up very soon, but then, so would Sloane. Of all the ways to die, this wasn't the one he had had in mind. He imagined Emily being left alone with the cancer slowly eating her body; he thought of never seeing Jack or Sydney again. He thought of the unsolved mysteries of Rambaldi.

The fury about it all kept the pain away a bit longer.

Then Jack walked in, and Sloane thought: Of course. Who else but Jack? Jack began to remove the needles Cole had stuck into Sloane, and though he was as swift and precise as always, Sloane thought he detected some sign of concern. Well, of course Jack was about to be blown up very soon as well, and even Jack Bristow had to be less than charmed by the prospet.

"Arvin," Jack said, "did you execute the failsafe?"

"Yes," Sloane whispered.

Jack pulled out another needle. "We need to deactivate it."

"Are they still in the building?"

"Only one left." Another needle went. There wasn't any noticable lack of pain because of this.

"I won't let anyone in the vault," Sloane said. It occured to him, suddenly and with the clarity that torture brings, that there was something right in being here with Jack. He had always assumed they would die together one day, either during a shared mission or at each other's hands. There was a rightness to it. And if it happened through an explosion, well, that was as good as any other method.

"Sydney's going to stop them," Jack insisted.

Sloane knew he had forgotten something.

"Is Sydney here?"

His eyes met Jack's, and he knew that dying together wasn't in the cards yet. Not if they would take Sydney with them. Presumably, there were a lot of other people left in the building in addition to Sydney, but Jack had brought up the one being who mattered to both of them.

"How do I shut off the failsafe?" Jack asked, and there was a rare urgency in his voice.

"The override is a keypad in my office but it's biometric. It won't deactivate without my fingerprint," Sloane said. He had been right about the lack of relief the removal of the needles had caused. Instead, every mark they had left seemed to burn with doubled intensity. It was getting hard to speak.

Jack tried prying off the steel bars around Sloane's wrists with a bar from the table. It was a rare example of clumsiness on Jack's part; this clearly wasn't his best day. Sydney, Sloane thought; remember that Sydney's life is at stake.

"Oh, come on, Jack! It's going to take hours to get my hands out of here," he hissed, exasparated. This wasn't the time to play games. Surely, Jack saw the obvious solution. Surely.

Jack grunted but kept trying. It seemed Sloane had to spell it out to him.

"Marshall has a device that can duplicate fingerprints but we haven't got the time! You could take my fingerprint. Jack, take my right index fingerprint."

Jack stared at him. It wasn't the best moment for the memory, but Sloane could not help but recall ordering Jack to remove not one, not two, but eight fings of a Latin revolutionary before the man finally consented to talk. The screams, the smell, and Jack's face in between.

"Just take it!" he yelled, finally doing what McKennas Cole had tried to achieve in vain; raising his voice.

Getting a rubber hose, Jack tied it around Sloane's wrist. It would probably prevent major blood loss. This hadn't always worked in the past, the revolutionary being a point in question.

" Right... index..." Sloane whispered. The marks of the needles spread their fire throughout his body. When Jack took a pair of pinchers, he closed his eyes.

All things being said and done, the moment of the cut was a relief.

Current Mood: determined

ooc: set in the middle of the third season, not in present day, for obvious reasons.

Annus Mirabilis

“Let’s talk about sex,” Judy Barnett said, about an hour after we had slept together for the first time, and when I looked at her, she actually sported a slight blush, a rare thing for a psychiatrist. “Not ours. That was… unexpected. But pleasurable. I mean sex in general.”

“Let’s not,” I said immediately. “I can’t think of a subject more dreary when analyzed and treated as academia.”

“Arvin,” she said, surprising me with her bluntness,“I didn’t come to Zurich because Jack Bristow told me you needed to get laid. He said you were… troubled and needed someone to talk to. That is what I offered, and then you manipulated me into going to dinner with you and seduced me. Not that I’m complaining, but one doesn’t have to be a genius to conclude you were using sex as an evasive tactic. I didn’t get my degree for nothing, you know.”

It was I decided to pursue the relationship. I had already imparted the information I wished her to have, so there was no reason to see her again, but I thought: why not? She was attractive, a skilled conversationalist despite her professional tendency to overanalyze every word, we were of an age and moved, one might say, in the same circles, and there was no expectation of romance. We could, perhaps, manage something approaching friendship.

“I’m sure you’ve earned it,” I said.

Her degree, of course.

“But I am afraid my opinion on sex in general would still not be worthy of your professional attention. It is a powerful part of human life, of course, I’d be the last to deny that. If not quite an unlosable game. And definitely not the answer to all questions.”

“Remind me,” Judy said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve read Larkin. How did that poem go again?”

“Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me)” I quoted, and smiled at her. “Annus Mirabilis.”

She shook her head. “No, not the opening lines. The later part. The one you were just alluding to.”

“And every life became/ A brilliant breaking of the bank,/ A quite unlosable game,” I obliged her.

“Hm. A poem which has a middle-aged man complaining that the sexual revolution came too late for him, and you know it by heart. That’s fascinating, Arvin.”

“I was thirteen in 1963,” I said, amused and, I confess, delighted by the challenge. “Which made me just the right age in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I suppose, but then again, you know my file. No orgies at Height-Ashbury, I’m afraid. I never quite saw the attraction.”

She propped herself up against the wall and looked at me. “No,” she said, calmly, “you were an ambitious young man who joined an extremely conservative government agency and married as soon as possible.”

This was in danger of losing its amusement value and becoming insulting to Emily.

“I fell in love with my future wife,” I said. “Whom we shall not discuss, Dr. Barnett.”

“Of course not,” she said in her best non-judgmental therapist manner. “We were discussing sex, not love.”

“Touché.”

“It must have been humiliating to find out,” Judy said, “that Irina Derevko didn’t just play her husband, but yourself as well. The oldest trick in the book, and all that. And you fell for it. Was that when you felt you lost the unlosable game?”

“No,” I said, and it was not even necessary to lie. I had lost it much earlier than that. “You cannot lose something which has results you cannot regret.”

She took this to refer to Sydney, as I had meant her to. I had been very careful in my confession about the affair not to hint at the daughter I actually knew I had now, the daughter I was still looking for. The Passenger. My child. Who wasn’t the only reason why I could not wish the affair with Irina away.

The truth, which I had no intention of sharing with Judy Barnett or anyone else for that matter, was, as the truth tends to be, far more complicated. Sex with Irina had been a betrayal of Emily, and that is why it should never have started, never mind the professional implication, which, yes, was somewhat sobering. But it gave me two things I needed and would have never admitted needing at the time. I was different then, and so was she. We were both playing roles in our daily lives, though Irina was the only one constantly aware that she did. It was years before I left the agency, but what I found in me in those motel rooms, in alleys and on the back seat of her car was not so far from the man who was to lead SD-6.

There was another thing she gave me. One question Judy had not asked, probably because it would imply judgment, was why, of all the women to have an affair with, I had picked my best friend’s wife, thus making the betrayal two-fold.

Or perhaps she had not asked because she had guessed. Irina had, I think; we never talked about it. The late Philip Larkin’s eloges on the outbreak of sexual freedom in the 60s aside, Judy did have a point earlier, though not quite in the way she had meant it. It would have been quite unthinkable, you see, for someone at the agency to indulge in what was quaintly called an “alternate lifestyle”. Not that I had been tempted to; even if I had not ultimately met and fallen in love with Emily. There were a few experimentations at college, and that was that. It hadn’t been a sacrifice to leave them behind when I got recruited.

Before I met Emily, however, I met Jack. Who in his singular combination of perceptiveness and blindness throughout more than three decades most certainly never had a moment of wondering, fortunately. But of course it had to be his wife. And that was how far it was would ever go.

“What are you thinking about right now?” Judy asked, and there was a touch of sleepiness in her voice which suggested it wasn’t the therapist who wanted to know, but the woman. Though profession and person are inseperable, and it is only a sentimental illusion which makes some of us believe otherwise.

“Still that Larkin poem,” I said. “So life was never better than/ In nineteen sixty-three/(Though just too late for me).”

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Zurich

( Wanting (Spoilers for the s5 finale) )

Current Mood: scared
Current Location: Mongolia

As this will have impact on future posts:

Post-Finale interaction between Jack and Arvin

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Mongolia

If you could do one thing and there would be no consequence to doing it, what would you do?

ooc: ficlet set firmly within the fourth season timeframe, for obvious reasons.

There aren’t any actions without consequences. Being a strategist, Arvin Sloane is more aware of this than most people. At the same time, a mind that runs through alternate scenarios to most events on a routine basis sometimes comes up with interesting impossibilities.

He loves Sydney as a daughter, and has done for a long while. At some point between realizing she and Jack were both betraying him to the CIA and entering one of the most complicated and risky schemes of his whole life, which demanded fooling Alliance and CIA alike, he also had to face the realization that paternal feelings weren’t all he harboured. Being aware of Sydney as a woman carries its own punishments and rewards. He can never quite separate the two.

Finding his own daughter complicates this even more. She and Sydney are sisters, and the pact he made with Jack to protect them both is not just caused by the appearance of Yelena Derevko as a player. Neither of them has ever said anything about this, but Arvin can’t forget the threat Jack made in a cell over shared wine, poison and memories of the same woman.

Whatever you did to my daughter, I’ll do worse to yours.

When he asks Jack to test Nadia, he isn’t quite sure what results he wants, and not in terms of Nadia’s qualifications as an agent. After this test, Nadia starts to show a certain fascination with Jack. Jack, for his part, keeps watching her intently. Strangely enough, it never occurs to him to fear that Jack might do what Arvin did when recruiting Sydney all those years ago: present himself as an alternate father figure to a young woman troubled about the father she already has. No, that is not what occurs to him at all.

The daily routine of going through briefings with the girls comes to resemble a complicated dance. They both have their beaus present more often than not, Vaughn with his perpetual frown and Weiss with his perpetual grin, and watching them together makes for utterly benevolent and paternal feelings. But sooner or later, a point needs to be made. Then the young men might as well not exist. Jack questions Nadia about some mission she undertook, looks over her shoulder at a map she has unfolded on the table, and her long, dark hair brushes Jack’s hands as she shakes her head. Jack does not pull his hands away. Arvin watches this from his position behind Sydney’s chair. He can’t see Sydney’s face, but he feels the warmth of her skin through the thin layer of clothing as he touches her shoulders.

In a world without consequences, a man might make the mistake of confusing prohibition with permission. Of concluding that if something happens to one daughter, it might as well to the other.

Continuing the briefing, Arvin meets Jack’s eyes as they both return to their own seats. It is just as well that neither of them believes in such a world.

Current Mood: restless

There are five basic torture groups, every agent learns. Blunt, sharp, cold, hot and loud.

It is a mystery to me why no one mentioned silence.

( Spoilers for the series finale )

Current Mood: crazy
Current Location: Mongolia

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.

Current Mood: restless

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.

Current Mood: indescribable

Tell us about family - what does family mean to you?

I.

"I've been wondering why you and Emily never had any children," Sydney says to him, and inevitably, he rises from his chair and puts his hands on her shoulders while telling her he always regarded her as a daughter. It is true, and like his best truths, it's a lie at the same time.

Later, after figuring out she needed his fingerprints and knew exactly how to get them, he feels a fierce paternal pride nonetheless.

II.

Judy Barnett, who never stops analyzing him through their short affair, possibly because she needs to for her own self justification, once observes: "Did you ever wonder why you use the term "family" to describe your relationship with the Bristows?"

"Whyever not?" he asks back, amused, expecting her to point out both Jack and Sydney claim to hate him and probably do, in varying degrees, or, if she feels provocative enough, to mention they had been ready to let him die at least once. But Judy surprises him. She does, now and then, which is why he has more than one reason to continue this liason.

"Because," she says, "you call them the most important people in your life. And you never attached any similar importance to your blood relations. I'd have thought you consider family as something you can discard."

His smile falters, for just a second. Then he remembers she has not the slightest idea about his search, let alone that painful secret Emily made him promise never to talk about. She has to mean his parents, whom he has described to her as perfectly lovely people he did not have much in common with and indeed rarely thought of in the decades since they were gone.

"Let us just say I consider family a matter of choice," he says quietly, and very aware that it never is.

III.

Family makes the best leverage. He is quite glad so many people feel the need to procreate; it simplifies his life a good deal. One man has a daughter whose indiscretions, caught on film, allow Arvin Sloane to access the Echelon system. Another has a wife and child and hence can be persuaded to provide the crucial intel to build Il Dire. And then, of course, there is Jack, who tells Ariana Kane that he believes the reason why Sloane recruited Sydney for SD-6 behind his back was to ensure Jack would never leave. Sloane can never make up his mind as to whether or not Jack was lying for Kane's benefit or using a truth. He doesn't think about it very often. It would lead to a question he would rather not face. The knowledge of family as the most powerful weapon anyone could wish for never leaves him, though.

When a pack of upstarts uses his daughter's comatose state to make him do their bidding, he cannot but admire the elegance of fate.

IV.

"I am a monster," he tells his daughter, feeling the safety of memories threatening to leave him again. "And monsters should not allowed to exist in this world. Let me go."

On one level, he knows what he's doing, and that it is not real. But it might as well be; and in any case, who can argue that this is better? Living inside his head with his memories of Emily and the child that never was, instead of living with his very real daughter from another woman whom he has hurt in the past and undoubtedly will hurt again. It will be a living death, with his body continuing for however long the state will bother. There is a justice here, surely.

"You were a good man," Nadia says, raw grief in her voice. "And you can be again. I believe in you. Dad."

She called him a man of faith once. Faith means belief in the impossible. There is nothing he can do but to open his eyes, for never before has she been more his daughter.

V.

"Jacquelyn," he says finally, ending the teasing, and Emily, glowing, happier than even when they were first falling in love, laughs and agrees. They'll call their baby Jacquelyn. He puts his hand on Emily's belly, feels the movement and imagines telling Jack. He hasn't so far; Jack is in prison following the revelation of the late Laura Bristow's identity as Irina Derevko, KGB agent, but that ridiculous and cruel interlude will be over soon. Then Arvin will tell him, and they'll celebrate together, just as they did Sydney's birth. They'll ask Jack to come and live with them here, in Italy. Sydney and Jacquelyn will grow up as sisters. This is a miracle child, coming to them after all the doctors declared Emily could never carry a pregnancy to full term, and it means everything will get better now.

A month later, Emily lies in agony in a hospital bed. He has just seen the dead body of his child and thought that was the worst, but it turns out he was wrong again. The worst is Emily going through hell, and for the first time in their marriage shutting him out. The worst isn't him losing Jacquelyn, the worst is Emily losing her and losing her alone. He holds Emily, desperately, but she turns away from him, sobbing, and then she says:

"Never say that name again. Promise me, Arvin. Never say her name again."

The worst is something only family can do to you.

Current Mood: moody

Twenty years from now, I shall be dead. I do not need a prophecy or a judge to tell me this. After all, I am an old man now, and I do not live in the safest of professions or circumstances. Contrary to what certain people believe or at least believed, the prospect of eternal life has never appealed to me; certainly not after the loss of my wife. I can’t think of a harsher fate than surviving while watching those I love die, again and again.

As for the world…. There was a time when I had quite firm ideas about what the world should look like a few years hence. I was sure, so sure that all the Rambaldi manuscripts and formulas I had pursued pointed towards one thing, something only a man weary to his bones of human folly repeating itself again and again would dream of: a change of human nature itself.

Rambaldi himself could not have done it. For all his genius, he was limited in the resources available to him at the time. But I believed I could.

I believed. Are not those the words that usually come before any fatal annoucement?

More recently, Jack asked me whether I still wished for that world. “It is of no consequence,” I replied. “And impossible now. At any rate, I stopped working for it when I made my promise to Nadia, and even if I had not, the use Elena made of the formula means it probably never was possible in the way I had intended to begin with.”

“You didn’t answer the question, Arvin,” Jack said, and I raised my glass to him and saluted him.

“No, Jack, I did not.”

Be that as it may, the world as I have once dreamed it to be will not be there in twenty years. There will not be global peace brought by an alteration of human DNA. If anything, there will be more wars. I would like to imagine Sydney at the English Department at some university, as she had planned to be before discovering the truth about Irina, but I rather doubt it. She is too much the daughter of her parents and, dare I say it, too much the woman I had some hand in forming to manage a civilian life in a time of universal bloodshed, especially now that she is about to become a mother herself. Wishing to save the world is a powerful drug, and never more so when one wishes to save it for one’s child. As for Jack, I always said he would outlive us all, and so he will, accidents notwithstanding. I do not think an errant bullet will ever find Jack Bristow. It would not dare. If Irina is still alive, which she just might be, he will either be in the midst of a quarrel or yet another reconciliation with her.

Nadia I can imagine free of what I suppose you could call the family business. But it does not matter, as long as she is healthy again, and alive. She will have inherited various places in the world I own, or maybe she will sell them and donate the money to charity; in any case, I would like to think of her travelling. Even in a war-torn world, there are still wonders to explore, and I believe that she enjoyed at least this part of our brief time together: the myriad of places and people we saw before we came to Siena.

And then there is the child, Sydney’s child. A girl; for some reason I cannot imagine it not to be. She will another name, but for the purpose of this little exercise, let me indulge a fancy and call her… Jacquelyn. There will, I hope, be no burdens of the past casting their shadows on her while she grows up, and she will reduce Jack to the most sentimental of displays on a regular basis. (Having observed him with Sydney as a baby, I am in a position to know.) With no slight intended to the late Michael Vaughn, I am quite sure that the Bristow and Derevko heritage will be on display strongest in her features, which will recall both her mother and her grandmother, as well as a drawing made centuries before her birth.

When she is nineteen, after the best childhood and adolescence various devoted family members can provide, she will find herself on a quest. A quest to change the face and the fate of humanity, which will be more urgently needed than ever, through the works of a dead prophet, and without the terrible flaws earlier efforts have had.

It will be her destiny.

Current Mood: determined

Ah. Well, a man in my profession usually tries to change the circumstances, thus ensuring it will not be, in fact, his last hour. This does demand creative thinking and a certain self discipline, whether involving the sacrifice of bodily limbs or the application of logic when your best friend drags you to the men's room and demands explanations with a gun in his hand.

However, I take it the question refers to circumstances which are indeed unalterable. I faced this situation, too, and found it quite maddening. Not because I was convinced I would die in an hour - which in a certain way did happen - but because of the reason, and the timing. I would not have minded nearly any other situation leading to my demise as much. The hour in question was spent sharing a bottle of wine and some acerbic conversation with the earlier mentioned Mr. Bristow. I also composed my death speech entirely in his honour, because really, what the other witnesses thought about my fate was quite immaterial to me. (Though I will admit I found it oddly touching when Dixon stopped me on the way to the execution chamber to tell me he had prayed for me. To this day, I wonder whether he expected me to ask him for forgiveness in return. Now that is something which I definitely do not intend to do during any amount of time before my death. There are reasons why I would regard it as a quite distateful thing to do on two accounts.) As Jack had stated certain intentions in regards to my then unknown daughter, I was indulging in a last exercise in rethorics to ensure he would not carry them out.

Now, obviously I survived. And many things have changed since then. But when I find myself contemplating a repetition of circumstance - which is not out of the question currently - I must admit I could not think of anything better to do with those last sixty minutes. No, I would not wish to spend them with Nadia, even if Nadia were awake and conscious once more. She has seen too much death in her life, and I do not want her to witness mine, or even the immediate prelude. Sydney, now Sydney would be an option, as she is one of the two people I always assumed would one day be my death anyway, but I find that her pregnancy has changed this for me. Ideally, I would wish her to be elsewhere with her child, celebrating life instead.

Jack, though. We faced death so many times together, from virtually every perspective there is, that I am afraid I would rather insist on his company. As conversation and wine are two things I have always treasured, it would be my choice this time as well.

I have no doubt I will get them again, you know. Jack has always been accomodating that way.

Current Mood: devious

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

Current Mood: thoughtful

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July 2010

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Entries tagged with jack

FM prompt January: Ten Things

September Topic: Scars

Topic 51: Holiday Shopping

Topic 48: What is one thing you've learned from your parents?

Topic 42: Write about your best friend

Topic 40: Protection

Topic 39: Jealousy

Topic 38: Write about your Arch-nemesis

Topic 34: Desperate Measures

Topic 28: Sex

Topic 25: How far would you go to get something you really wanted?

ooc: continuity link

Topic 24: Without Consequences (Ficlet)

Topic 23: Pain

Topic 20: Three Passions (Ficlet)

Topic 18: Tell us about your number one regret (ficlet)

Topic 15: Family (Ficlet)

Topic 14: Twenty Years Hence

Topic 9: One Hour To Live

Love (Topic 8)