a_sloane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He won't let it fade, either.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dearest Sydney,

when your sister died, I assumed, in as much as I did anything at that moment, that we would not meet again, safe once. Of course, you then proved me wrong, as I should have known you would, so I hesitate to make the same prediction now. And yet, how can I not? At the very least, we shall not see each other for a very long time. I shan't make my continued existence known to you, hard as this will be, for you are, and always have been, one of the brightest stars of my life, and my life has never been darker. Still, the certainty of my death is one of the few presents you will accept from me, and it should not be used up too soon. I write this letter quite convinced I shall never send it, but I do miss talking to you. I miss your anger, your fury, and those rare moments you were at peace in my presence. A man rarely has the opportunity to look back and find the exact moment in time when he should have, if not perished, then at least withdrawn from everyone around him. In my case, the moment in question stands out to me quite clearly; it was when you brought your daughter to see your sister. The three of you were happy, three beautiful graces in the spring sun, and I remember watching you and being quite aware that whatever I had done to contribute to this situation, it was over now; there was nothing more either Nadia or yourself needed of me, and given that you had greeted me without the slightest bit of resentment in your eyes, there was no more forgiveness to be obtained.

Of course, I did not die then. Life is rarely so convenient, isn't it? Instead, I returned to what ultimately caused the path of destruction that followed.

My dear, you judge yourself without any of the mercy you show to others, and so I have no doubt you feel guilty about not having killed me sooner, or at the least left me in prison. Allow me to point out that I would have left the custody of the US goverment in any case, given Prophet Five's interest in me and my conviction I was not of use to anyone, least of all Nadia, behind bars. As for the other... I always knew you would be the one to kill me, Sydney, you or your father, but I was rather possessive about the timing, and not just for the reason you would assume if you knew what happened in that cave later. You once told me, when you pretended to be Anna Espinosa, that you did not believe in destiny, so it would probably be futile to use the word. But you do believe in people, and for the situation in question to arise, all other hope had to fade first for me.

In the last decade, we told each other many lies and truths, and it seems fitting that the last lie you told me was the one of your own death, and the last one I told you was to enable you to believe in mine by your very capable hands. And yet I can think of more things to say. Let us not talk of regrets; I have so many that it would fill a library, let alone a letter, and I do not wish to bore you by becoming maudlin. But I do not believe I ever thanked you. For the years when you were an eager young agent, brave and inventive, and the daughter Emily and I did not have; for the years you were a challenge, one of my most able opponents and yet still an instrument against my enemies; for the years you were my favourite version of justice, condemming and accepting in equal measure. I shall never be able to listen to Strauss without thinking of you, my darling, and that is another thing I am grateful for: the certainty that due to the enduring popularity of the Blue Danube, you will think of me quite often as well. Perhaps your eyes will darken, perhaps you will just press your lips together for a moment in residual anger, but you will. It is a thought that will never cease to make me happy; call it the vanity of old age.

One of the things I told you during that last decade was that I loved you. Being your father's daughter, you could never quite decide whether this was a truth or a lie, and thus it bears repeating. But this, too, is something I am grateful for: that you never loved me. It probably saved your life. And a world without you in it, Sydney, would be so infinitely poorer that I cannot bear to think of it.

Yours in perhaps too many ways,

Arvin Sloane

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.

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.

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.

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

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.