a_sloane | Entries tagged with nadia

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 just one of the questions they ask to get to know each other, father and daughter, complete strangers, in those days of travel that lead them first to China, then Siena.

"What's your favourite art?" Nadia asks. "Music? Painting? Sculpture? Dancing?"

Arvin looks at her, and wonders what she would want to hear. He's keenly aware that whoever she imagined her father to be during those years in Argentina, whatever she imagined him to be like, there was almost certainly no trait he would share with this fictional portrait. Of course, he could pretend to. That was, after all, their profession. His and hers both. If he could deduce what image she had in mind, he could create a persona to fit it, just for her. It wouldn't be the first time.

"Performance," he replies, and the rueful smile she gives him tells him she understands the joke. Perhaps they can continue like this; shared truths in the guise of jests.

Being someone else to get what they want: it's not the only thing they are both trained in. But he is very careful to think of the other art. It's the past; what done is done. He won't allow it to touch her again.

But it is true, nonetheless, that he always excelled at the art of killing.

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: Westchester

There are some remedies worse than the disease. -Publilius Syrus

Eight months, fourteen days and six hours. Yes, I did count. It had been that long since I had watched, puzzled over or touched any item belonging to or created by Milo Rambaldi when Sydney came in my office to talk about the imposter who had assumed my identity.

"His clothes, his posture, the way he looked at me - it’s the way you look at me," she said, and though I found the very concept offensive, I couldn't resist.

"And how is that, Sydney?"

"Let's just say it is equally disturbing," she said, not to be deterred from her objective, which is of course one of the qualities I love her for. The moment passed, and we were back at what had been plaguing me ever since I learned about the imposter's existence.

When Nadia had returned to me from Argentina, I had made her a promise, which I had kept. (The fact this was also one of the conditions for my pardon agreement was irrelevant; I was long past worrying about keeping my word to institutions. People, a very few people, were another matter.) But in choosing my daughter over Milo Rambaldi, I had, as it was apparent now, created a vacuum into which a whole league of greedy, grasping amateurs had moved. Anna Espinosa, earlier that year; she had nearly cost me Nadia and Sydney both. Elena Derevko, whom neither Jack nor myself had been able to locate, so far. And now, it seemed, someone who was following my own footsteps a little too closely. Or walked ahead of me, taking the path I had abandoned, as the matter might be.

It should be me, I thought, and again felt the sting of betrayal. My own betrayal. Nobody at APO, where everyone was currently still in doubt whether or not I had somehow been idiotic enough first to frame Irina and then leave a highly visible trace, would regard it as such, but: to turn one's back one's faith without having lost the belief first is betrayal. I had turned my back on Rambaldi's legacy, and in doing to had surrendered what I still believed in to others who could not but use it in the wrong way. Having the most recent rival using my own name felt like a well deserved rebuke.

There was an obvious way to remedy the situation, but to take it would mean another betrayal. Nadia had forgiven me twice. She would not do so a third time. And she would not compromise on the matter of Rambaldi.

"Perhaps I should recuse myself from any further involvement," I said to Sydney, and my mind called me a liar, because what I really wanted was to take back what I had given up before it could be irevocably damaged by the unworthy. Nadia, I thought again, and remembered Siena, the cave, the glass splinters which she had pulled out, giving me new life. It is too late for that, another part of me commented. You know what you are. You have always known.

Sydney leaned over my desk, all focus and determination. The last time she had been this intent had been when I had offered her a chance to leave me, and she had rejected it, telling me that she would never forgive me and would see me in the morning, which is Sydney Bristow in one sentence for you. "No, you have to stay in it," she said. "In fact, you may need to go deeper. The coils, the manuscript, your sense of strategy. If your right about this, he has access to everything. CIA files, your psych reports, mission analysis. You may be the only one who can do it - anticipate his next move."

And had I not wanted her to say this? Had I? Was this a game I was playing with Sydney and myself, getting her to give me permission to do what I wanted, or did I want her to save me from that path which I might have been able to abandon once, but not for a second time? I try to remember, and yet, my own motives at the time are coloured by the knowledge of what was to come, and I cannot decide which was true anymore.

"You’re asking me to go back to Rambaldi?" I said slowly. It could not be plainer than this, surely; Sydney, of all the people, had to know what her request truly meant. After all, Rambaldi had chosen her as well.

She looked at me, her brown eyes very serious, and for the first time in a long while without any hostility or distrust.

"God help us. Yes."

Current Mood: tempted

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

I.

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

So much for anger.

III.

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

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

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

Current Mood: crappy

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

( Wanting (Spoilers for the s5 finale) )

Current Mood: scared
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

Whether you're losing your religion, or finding your faith again, tell us, about religion.

*Notes written on several sheets, found in the study Prophet Five provided for Arvin Sloane in Zurich*

( Cut for vague Alias finale foreshadowing )

Current Mood: indescribable

This is no world,
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips.
We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,
And pass them current too.

When he sees her looking at him with that familiar expression, the one she wore striding in his office, accusing him of murdering her fiance, he thinks: Sydney. Hardly, Nadia says. You want her to be here, too. Of course you do.

“We can celebrate, Arvin,” the woman looking at him with Sydney’s eyes says. “Sydney Bristow is dead.”

After all, Nadia comments, you got her killed, too. You knew Anna was on her way, and you didn’t even try to warn Sydney, or Jack. You found a way to contact Sark to further your own agenda, but not to save Sydney.

She never called him Arvin. “Mr. Sloane” in the office, naturally, and though he offered her the use of his first name in private one time she was visiting him and Emily, she did not take him up on it, years before she had any reason to resent him. It made her uncomfortable, she confessed, blushing somewhat, and Emily later said it was because she saw him as a father figure. He did not insist on a change, either.

“Does this mean you’re sending me to my room?” she asks and is so utterly Sydney in it that he almost reaches out to touch her shoulder. Next to her, her sister stands, the wound at her throat still raw. Dad, Nadia says, You’re talking to ghosts. Let’s face it, your judgment isn’t stellar right now. But you know, you could at least acknowledge what you’ve done instead of trying to avoid it. She’s dead. We’re both dead. Thanks to you. This is merely another bloody shard, dressed up in her clothes.

****

“Despite everything,” Sydney once asked him, when he told her Anna Espinosa would not be Nadia’s death, “you still believe?”

“I have nothing left but my faith,” he replied. It was not quite true then, though he did not know it. Then, he still had Nadia, and Jack, and even Sydney herself. But it is true now. And yet, Sydney’s life is protected by prophecies as surely as Nadia’s ever was. Anna should not have been able to kill her, either.

Anna didn’t, Nadia says as he sits down opposite of who has to be Anna. You know who got both of us killed, Dad. He was chosen, too.

“How did it happen?” he asks out loud, and the woman uses Sydney’s voice, cool and precise, to tell him.

“Sydney wasn’t a martyr or a legend. She was just a person. Who deserved nothing more than to be shot in the back. And so she was. The Chosen One. She died, just as easy as anyone.”

His judgment is impaired, but not utterly broken. It is time to stop wishing. If this is true, if this can happen, then this counterfeit will be able to retrieve what faith tells him only Sydney could. But then, her purpose will be over. Before she went on her mission to Nepal, he had vague ideas of how to use Anna Espinosa. He had already started by bringing the doubt in her heart about Prophet Five’s future plans with her out in the open. Now he doesn’t have the patience for mind games any more, especially if they involve puppets staring at him with Sydney’s tilted lips and her murder on their hands. The world has changed, his world at least, and his time is running out.

There isn’t even a question of method. He knows exactly how he’ll kill her.

****

Bringing death to Nadia at the hospital, when he believed it would be just for half a minute, so that the conditions for the cure would be met, he had a white cloth to protect her face from his direct touch. Not for Sydney.

“Sydney deserved better,” he says after having tasered her killer and feels her throat under his bare hands. Strangulation was really Jack’s favourite method, not his. Given that most of the death he dealt out was for business reasons, CIA business, Alliance business, his own, it felt far too personal. But this is different. Maybe he would have dealt with Anna through a bullet or poison if she had not worn Sydney’s shape, would not look at him with Sydney’s eyes even now. There is a nakedness in strangling someone, an intimacy that removes any pretensions about the nature of the act.

Nothing less would do.

The alarm interrupts them. It feels like blasphemy. “I don’t die that easily,” she says, and the alchemy of revelation changes his rage into wonder. They regard each other for a moment when the guard comes in, and he knows.

“Sydney,” he thinks, and this time there is no shape of daughters dead or alive to tell him otherwise.

Current Mood: infuriated

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

„Habits,“ my instructor at Langley used to say, „make you predictable. A target. So do yourself a favour and don’t start getting them.”

I was young then, and quite sure to be able to follow his advice, but of course we all aquire habits. Mannerisms that set our environment at ease because they make us familiar and predictable to them. Or, conversely, disquiet them on an ongoing basis. I have found both factors useful. Even now, when I am, in the more important sense of the word, no longer alive.

I died when she did, four days ago. The rest is a play I find myself observing almost from the outside. There are two or three possible outcomes, and all include my death. I definitely intend to accomplish at least two rather important things before that point. But I am a dead man walking, more than I ever was in prison, and strangely enough, habits are all I have to establish myself to the fellow players, to become what I need to in the last of all games.

The habits of Arvin Sloane, then, the ones he finds hard to break. I am still wearing Emily’s wedding ring and my own. It used to be a common custom for widows and widowers in my youth, but hardly anyone follows it any more. Such a small thing, a ring; it hardly seems to impact the flesh at all, and yet when you take it off, the marks it leaves are deep. Almost two years ago, when I believed I was about to be executed by the state, I had to pull them off. Jack was thoughtful enough to hand them back to me later, something probably made easier by the fact they were in an envelope addressed to him. You could say I felt naked without them; not quite myself. There is little point in the habit, I suppose. Emily is gone, and it does not matter to her. And yet I cannot part with either ring. When I press my fingers against each other, a mannerism that I originally developed to appear older in an agency which at the time was dominated by age and then, when I myself aged into it, used to project a certain image to my employees, I hardly feel the metal, but it is there. I cannot do without it.

“Know when a habit becomes really lethal?” my instructor said. “When you don’t know you have it.”

The wearing of rings is somewhat inescabable to the attention. But there is another habit I did not realize I had, not until I saw her falling into the glass as I had done in Siena, felt the blood on my hands as Emily’s had been. “I betrayed everyone I ever loved,” I told another dead man walking who does not know what he is yet, and yet that is just a part of it. I kill them. Twice over. I should have known. Faking Emily’s death for the Alliance had required her drinking the same drug Jack later gave me, and I held her seemingly dead body in my arms just as I did her real corpse a year later. When they told me I would have to stop Nadia’s heart for thirty seconds, I should have known. But that long-dead man was right. We’re blind to our most lethal habits. I felt her shudder and die under my hand and did not know, I saw her come to life again as Emily had done and did not understand. Not until it was too late.

I died then. But breathing, too, is a habit one has to consciously get rid off.

Current Mood: indescribable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But why pretend this?" Nadia asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never talked with anyone about ghosts again.

Current Mood: guilty

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

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

Passion is such an overused term, and quite often misapplied for some of the hormonal pecadillos people find themselves in which peter out in a few months, or one or two years, or to more or less endearing hobbies, like Marshall's fondness for - what was the name again - well, some computer game or the other. Not that I deny Marshall actually ispassionate about things - about his work, for example, which is why I hired him to begin with, and about his family - but the game of uncertain name does not truly deserve the term.

On the other hand, it would be foolish to ignore the power of true passion. It can be overwhelming, and no matter how much one prides oneself on one's rationality, all-consuming. I have witnessed passion, and experienced it myself, but not necessarily about what people might expect. Last year, the less than thrilling encounter with a poor fool who had been brainwashed into impersonating me brought that into sharp relief. One of his henchmen, surrounded by Rambaldi artifacts, told me, when I asked him whether he knew true meaning of Rambalid's heritage, that it was immortality, of course. That this was what they had been promised. I could see it all very clearly at that moment: a crimelord with philosophical pretensions and his goons on a quest that was a poor imitation of an Indiana Jones film. And yet, was not it not this what others would see if they looked at me?

"No," I said. In fact, I said a few more things, and certainly in a passionate manner. I believe this was one of the few times when I killed someone for irrational reasons, and in a completely irrational manner. Nadia certainly seemed to think so when she found me with his blood covering my face. But contrary to what she might have assumed and feared, my action had not been driven by my faith in Rambaldi. It was not that ignorant dilettante with his babbling about immortality I was truly furious with, you see.

There are few passions more powerful than hatred, and only one more powerful than hatred directed at yourself.

Hate often gets dismissed as something one has to overcome, as some primitive urge, which of course it can be; but more often than not, it can be the one lifeline that keeps you going, the one weapon that never fails you. Take Sydney, for example. Only a few years ago, she was a charming, splendid young woman with a gift for disguises and improvisiation, but her potential had barely been scratched. I dare say I do not flatter myself when pointing out it was her hatred for myself and what I represented to her that changed Sydney into the warrior she became, and which enabled her to survive through incredible odds. This of course had not been what I had meant to happen; I never wanted Sydney to hate me. She is one of the few people whose opinion I actually care about. But the fact remains that the mild fondness she might have felt when visiting Emily and myself at our house or telling me about her experiences abroad after the official mission debriefings were over before the unfortunate incident with her fiancé was nothing compared to the passion she showed afterwards. There was something pure and unique in her hatred for me, unrelenting and unchanging when her grief for her fiance had long faded into her new infatuation for the hapless Michael Vaughn, something that bound us together as surely as any bloodtie. After I had deduced that she had become a double agent, working for my downfall, I gave her several opportunities to leave, and she never took a single one. I used to believe it was Jack who would one day be the death of me, but after Sydney had started to hate me, I was no longer sure. I still am torn on this matter. But it surely be one of them; there is no one else I would grant the privilege to.

And yet hatred is not the strongest of the passions, as I said. Sydney, taking my hand when I asked her to dance with me while she wished to eviscarate every organ from my body was beautiful, and I will never forget the sight of her that night, but when I saw her pregnant with her child, that memory was surpassed. For this is the greatest, most terrible and most beautiful of all the passions: the feeling a parent has for his or her child. Look at Jack. He is eternally swaying between love and hate for Irina, but when he came to believe she posed a threat to Sydney, he killed her, or who he believed to be her, and that was not the first time he had organized her demise for that reason. As for myself... I loved my wife. Through thirty years, I loved her, and seeing her suffer was always a greater torture than anything any expert could ever come up with, whether it was through the loss of Jacquelyne, or through the horrors cancer inflicted on her defenseless body. And yet, when I had a choice last year, when I could have been with her and the past as I wished it to be in the safe happiness the mind offers when it closes of from reality, it was not Emily I chose. It was Nadia. My child.

My daughter, whom I had wronged twice after finally finding her. I could not fail her a third time. And so I made myself into something which I am not, because the father she deserved was not the father she had been given. What I made myself into still is not enough, but it will have to accomplish its purpose. She called me, and it was then that I knew. There was nothing rosy or comforting about the realisation. I would rather have stayed where I was; though I could not have predicted what was to occur very soon, I knew that to return would bring more harm than happiness. But Nadia told me she wanted me to come back to her, and I knew that everything, Rambaldi, that lost past I will never have again, and even Emily was secondary to this.

To call it love or passion almost seems an attempt to render it harmless.

Current Mood: restless

There were worse ways to pass one's time than to open up business negotations with a woman of mystery. Sloane had dealings with Wolfram and Hart before, mostly concerned with the Credit Dauphine cover for SD-6, but he himself, as a private person, had never been a client. Huge and ruthless organisations he could not control were not exactly trustworthy.

On the other hand, any lawyer serving for Wolfram and Hart would know their business, or would be dead. Lilah Morgan appeared to be very much alive, and rather intriguingly not listed as a lawyer acting in any current case, something which he had checked out, using the APO access to the relevant databases without hesitation. She had been head of the Los Angeles special projects department, as she had mentioned, but no activity was listed since. All of which opened up a can of interesting possibilities.

Arvin Sloane had no intention of telling a stranger just what he had in mind, but he decided some preliminary dealings, perhaps involving some of his less traceable bank accounts from his time with OmniFam, would be a good way to find out whether Lilah Morgan was the right person for what he privately termed "the project".

His pardon agreement banned him from any Rambaldi research, unless, he thought cynically, said research would be to the government's advantage. Well, there were other ways. Nadia's current state was due to a Rambaldi formula Elena had injected her with. It stood to reason that somewhere, in some manuscript by the Master which Sloane had somehow not managed to get hold on so far, there might be a clue for a cure. Of course, he had tapped all resources known to him by now. Except one. Wolfram and Hart was rumoured to have the greatest collection of manuscripts and artifacts known to man. And he needed something - or someone - to open that collection to him.

If Lilah Morgan turned out to be the wrong person, well. Then he would still have spent some hopefully agreeable hours dining at Orris with what a vague memory told him was an attractive brunette, and what her comments so far had shown to be an intelligent woman.

There were, indeed, worse ways to spend one's time.