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Topic 6: What would you kill for?
Jan. 29th, 2006 08:39 pmThe question has a certain naive charm, as it assumes being willing to kill for someone or something requires extraordinary effort. In truth, it's far easier than most people assume, and far more common. It is just a matter of incentive. To ask "what would you be willing not to kill for, no matter how much you desire it?" would bring far more intriguing results, in my opinion.
But to answer the mundane question actually posed. In my youth, the usual mixture of patriotism and ambition did the trick. Later on, you could say my ambitions changed, and that strange and yet powerful idea, "my country", was no longer quite powerful enough. It also became a question of pragmatism. Oddly enough, hatred and vengeance as a cause did not enter the equation until rather late in my life, and yet I did not hate the person whose death came due to vengeance on my part; I hated someone else for causing me the same loss. It became one of the few deaths I genuinenly regret; ultimately, it did not help anyone, and was an entirely futile gesture on my part.
Sometimes, lethal action is required to keep certain people one cares about alive, but then, we all have those weaknesses; people named Bristow are mine. As for my late wife and Nadia, well, that is self-evident.
Perhaps the most surprising reason I ever had, though, came in what was undoubtedly the worst moment of my life. I did not kill anyone that day, actually, but it was not for lack of intent. Ever since discovering that Rambaldi's prophecy about a fight between the Chosen One and The Passenger during which one of them would kill the other related to Sydney Bristow and my daughter Nadia, I had tried to find a way to prove it has been interpreted wrong, or decyphered wrong. I could not assume Rambaldi was wrong; he never is. But when the event finally came to pass, against both their wishes, with Nadia no longer in control of her actions, neither killed the other.
I shot Nadia.
I had to; and not because it was a choice between Nadia and Sydney. Sydney is very dear to me, but Nadia is my daughter. No, if I had let Nadia proceed, the Muller device would have unleased madness over the entire world, and not in a small part due to my own previous actions. And thus I, who had abandoned such things for a long, long time, found myself aiming at the person I loved most to save this harsh, mundane world.
To this day, with Nadia in her coma and the world continuing, I wonder whether that was not the worst reason, and the worst choice of all.
Muse: Arvin Sloane
Fandom: Alias
But to answer the mundane question actually posed. In my youth, the usual mixture of patriotism and ambition did the trick. Later on, you could say my ambitions changed, and that strange and yet powerful idea, "my country", was no longer quite powerful enough. It also became a question of pragmatism. Oddly enough, hatred and vengeance as a cause did not enter the equation until rather late in my life, and yet I did not hate the person whose death came due to vengeance on my part; I hated someone else for causing me the same loss. It became one of the few deaths I genuinenly regret; ultimately, it did not help anyone, and was an entirely futile gesture on my part.
Sometimes, lethal action is required to keep certain people one cares about alive, but then, we all have those weaknesses; people named Bristow are mine. As for my late wife and Nadia, well, that is self-evident.
Perhaps the most surprising reason I ever had, though, came in what was undoubtedly the worst moment of my life. I did not kill anyone that day, actually, but it was not for lack of intent. Ever since discovering that Rambaldi's prophecy about a fight between the Chosen One and The Passenger during which one of them would kill the other related to Sydney Bristow and my daughter Nadia, I had tried to find a way to prove it has been interpreted wrong, or decyphered wrong. I could not assume Rambaldi was wrong; he never is. But when the event finally came to pass, against both their wishes, with Nadia no longer in control of her actions, neither killed the other.
I shot Nadia.
I had to; and not because it was a choice between Nadia and Sydney. Sydney is very dear to me, but Nadia is my daughter. No, if I had let Nadia proceed, the Muller device would have unleased madness over the entire world, and not in a small part due to my own previous actions. And thus I, who had abandoned such things for a long, long time, found myself aiming at the person I loved most to save this harsh, mundane world.
To this day, with Nadia in her coma and the world continuing, I wonder whether that was not the worst reason, and the worst choice of all.
Muse: Arvin Sloane
Fandom: Alias
