a_sloane

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.

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.

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.