eye_of_a_cat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2007-06-09 01:54 am
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2007-06-09 01:54 am
I wrote Alias fic!
My fic-writing brain is all rusty these days.
Sydney, set late in Season 4 with spoilers right up until then (and I'm only up to the point where we find out who Elena Derevko is so it's definitely set no later than that. No spoilers for later, please, kind people). PG-13 for spy-related professional hazards. 792 words.
---
She gets home some time after dark, to a radio left on somewhere and a distant smell of saffron in the kitchen. Her keys land with a headache clatter on the counter and spin off onto the floor, which is about typical of the day so far, and she lets them stay there next to her kicked-off shoes. Nadia's talking quietly on the phone in the living room - Sydney would guess Weiss from the giggling, but now she's closer she can hear Spanish, so maybe not - and turns around just long enough for a flashed smile and a blink of a wave. Which is probably just as well, Sydney thinks. There are times when even Nadia's best taken in small doses.
She switches the radio for the TV, slumps into an armchair, decides she wants to read a book instead, makes it halfway to the shelves and realises she's kidding herself. Behind her the news goes to commercial, and violins twang in the background as a booming trailer voiceover asks if she believes in life after death.
Ha, thinks Sydney. If only you knew.
In a world like hers, you never assume anybody's dead unless you can risk them getting up again. Too many security guards lurching back to their feet, too many guns and knives and conveniently-located heavy objects that she only saw at the last minute, and wouldn't have seen at all if she hadn't known to look. Not that she hasn't screwed up on that one before; she'll be an old woman before she forgets the sight of Lauren with dust in her hair and blood on her jacket, croaking out numbers as Vaughn took aim. (And sometimes, although she's not proud of herself for it, she thinks Jesus, Vaughn, couldn't you have killed her before she started talking?)
She believed her father would have let Sloane die, waiting calmly and just out of reach as they prepared the injection. She was wrong about it that time, although she's still not sure he wouldn't. She couldn't (couldn't, couldn't) believe she was capable of murdering Lazarey, but somehow she still believed she had, trusting her eyes more than her conscience. Other times, she got it right - she knew she'd saved Vaughn's life by refusing to believe he'd drowned in Taipei all those years ago, and there was still a tiny, buried part of her that niggled and bit when she thought of him giving up on that hope for her. Even on that one, though, you couldn't always win. She spent a long time shielding a childish hope that her mother was coming back, too, and ended up getting Irina Derevko twenty years later in a blessing about as mixed as blessings came.
It's part of the business, part of the life. You don't make it far in a world like hers unless you learn to treat death as a negotiation, and you don't get far with negotiations unless you're prepared to cheat. Mercenary self-interest is its own kind of immortality; she's reasonably sure that after a nuclear apocalypse, there'd be nothing left but Sark and cockroaches.
All she resents, really, is the way it spread, wrapping itself like tendrils around people who shouldn't have been part of that kind of life - or not that diseased side of it, at any rate - in the first place. Vaughn's father, who deserved better than that mockery of hope they'd strung Vaughn along with. Francie, who nobody even knew to mourn, because wasn't she still there walking and talking and singing along out of tune to Syd's Ryan Adams CDs? And Emily, of course, sitting in that office in Tuscany and asking the CIA not to seek the death penalty for her husband, and Sydney never could decide if she hated Sloane more at that moment than she did when she thought he'd killed her.
But this is her world, and she's had a long time to get used to it.
So she turns off the TV, and she waves Nadia goodnight, and she picks up her keys on her way past the kitchen. Her shoes can lie where she left them until morning. It's late, and she needs to get in early tomorrow, because Marshall's reporting back on the computer network he cracked and there's no way she's sitting through that before she has time to get some coffee. She sinks into sleep quickly, and the face that comes into her mind for the first time in months is only there for a moment, but she smiles, all the same. He's not forgotten, exactly; just kept somewhere else in her mind like the photograph she used to keep in an old diary, away, safe, because no matter how stupid she'd been for not taking more care around him than she had, he's the only one of the dead that she knows she doesn't need to worry about now.
Kept you out of it after all, Danny, she thinks.
And she's asleep.
Sydney, set late in Season 4 with spoilers right up until then (and I'm only up to the point where we find out who Elena Derevko is so it's definitely set no later than that. No spoilers for later, please, kind people). PG-13 for spy-related professional hazards. 792 words.
She gets home some time after dark, to a radio left on somewhere and a distant smell of saffron in the kitchen. Her keys land with a headache clatter on the counter and spin off onto the floor, which is about typical of the day so far, and she lets them stay there next to her kicked-off shoes. Nadia's talking quietly on the phone in the living room - Sydney would guess Weiss from the giggling, but now she's closer she can hear Spanish, so maybe not - and turns around just long enough for a flashed smile and a blink of a wave. Which is probably just as well, Sydney thinks. There are times when even Nadia's best taken in small doses.
She switches the radio for the TV, slumps into an armchair, decides she wants to read a book instead, makes it halfway to the shelves and realises she's kidding herself. Behind her the news goes to commercial, and violins twang in the background as a booming trailer voiceover asks if she believes in life after death.
Ha, thinks Sydney. If only you knew.
In a world like hers, you never assume anybody's dead unless you can risk them getting up again. Too many security guards lurching back to their feet, too many guns and knives and conveniently-located heavy objects that she only saw at the last minute, and wouldn't have seen at all if she hadn't known to look. Not that she hasn't screwed up on that one before; she'll be an old woman before she forgets the sight of Lauren with dust in her hair and blood on her jacket, croaking out numbers as Vaughn took aim. (And sometimes, although she's not proud of herself for it, she thinks Jesus, Vaughn, couldn't you have killed her before she started talking?)
She believed her father would have let Sloane die, waiting calmly and just out of reach as they prepared the injection. She was wrong about it that time, although she's still not sure he wouldn't. She couldn't (couldn't, couldn't) believe she was capable of murdering Lazarey, but somehow she still believed she had, trusting her eyes more than her conscience. Other times, she got it right - she knew she'd saved Vaughn's life by refusing to believe he'd drowned in Taipei all those years ago, and there was still a tiny, buried part of her that niggled and bit when she thought of him giving up on that hope for her. Even on that one, though, you couldn't always win. She spent a long time shielding a childish hope that her mother was coming back, too, and ended up getting Irina Derevko twenty years later in a blessing about as mixed as blessings came.
It's part of the business, part of the life. You don't make it far in a world like hers unless you learn to treat death as a negotiation, and you don't get far with negotiations unless you're prepared to cheat. Mercenary self-interest is its own kind of immortality; she's reasonably sure that after a nuclear apocalypse, there'd be nothing left but Sark and cockroaches.
All she resents, really, is the way it spread, wrapping itself like tendrils around people who shouldn't have been part of that kind of life - or not that diseased side of it, at any rate - in the first place. Vaughn's father, who deserved better than that mockery of hope they'd strung Vaughn along with. Francie, who nobody even knew to mourn, because wasn't she still there walking and talking and singing along out of tune to Syd's Ryan Adams CDs? And Emily, of course, sitting in that office in Tuscany and asking the CIA not to seek the death penalty for her husband, and Sydney never could decide if she hated Sloane more at that moment than she did when she thought he'd killed her.
But this is her world, and she's had a long time to get used to it.
So she turns off the TV, and she waves Nadia goodnight, and she picks up her keys on her way past the kitchen. Her shoes can lie where she left them until morning. It's late, and she needs to get in early tomorrow, because Marshall's reporting back on the computer network he cracked and there's no way she's sitting through that before she has time to get some coffee. She sinks into sleep quickly, and the face that comes into her mind for the first time in months is only there for a moment, but she smiles, all the same. He's not forgotten, exactly; just kept somewhere else in her mind like the photograph she used to keep in an old diary, away, safe, because no matter how stupid she'd been for not taking more care around him than she had, he's the only one of the dead that she knows she doesn't need to worry about now.
Kept you out of it after all, Danny, she thinks.
And she's asleep.
Nice work!
Re: Nice work!
no subject
You don't make it far in a world like hers unless you learn to treat death as a negotiation, and you don't get far with negotiations unless you're prepared to cheat.
Also Sydney not knowing whether she hated Sloane more when she thought he killed Emily or after when finding out he didn't, and Emily asked for his life.
Oh! With you having reached this point of the show, I must, of course, pimp fanfic o' mine which you can now read:
Facets (Four times Arvin Sloane fell in love, and one time he didn't)
Secret Keepers (Dr. Barnett portrait)
Sacrificium (backstory, Sloane and Jack on a mission back in the day)
no subject
no subject
Here's another (short, it was a prompt ficlet) take on how the Arvin/"Laura" affair might have started and ended:
Goodbye Drug
and a less serious meme result:
Five ways it could have gone if Sloane had been Irina's assignment