Untitled ALIAS ficlet (1/1)
This has been driving me nuts for a little while, because I think that poor Irina's characterisation got no help during the second half of S5. I'm still trying to work out all the implications in my head, and a lot of them are moving me towards the old fairy tales I heard as a child. So. Anyway. It's like thinking, only in fic format.
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Irina is half-convinced that all of life is made of snow-upon-snow, with Rambaldi's neat sloping script across it all, bleeding black ink into the frost. She feels that she has known him all her life, bound in thick furs and staring out into the vast emptiness of the snow-covered plains, listening to her mother tell tales of winter magic. Snow is what binds her to him, to her mother, to home. Russian stories are all about snow: snow children, snow parents, snow keeping you warm and snow burying you alive. Somewhere along the line, her mother's voice and Rambaldi's words bled together until she could not pull them apart.
She knows, now - has always known, in fact - that you are not supposed to love one child more than the other. That's not how motherhood works. At least, that's not how Irina's mother had taught her that motherhood works - but, then, Irina's mother had been dead these many years, and weeds had grown wild on her grave and likely dogs relieved themselves there. Irina had not been back for years, and would have not dared return even if the thought had occurred to her, which it had not. Not when she held her granddaughter in her arms, and wondered if she was doing the right thing.
You're not supposed to love one child more than the other. You love them all equally and if you don't, you hide it as well as you can and do not dwell on it, lest some demon hear of it and bring mischief to your hearth. Irina thinks that maybe this only applies to girls, because she can't quite conceive of loving the son of either Jack Bristow or Arvin Sloane, with his father's eyes and cheeks and God only knew what else. Where Sydney and Nadia took after her, she has no doubt that a son would have taken after his father, and she would have come back one day to find a twenty year old Jack or a fifteen year old Arvin staring at her mistrustfully. Daughters are easier - they tend to have some ideas about motherhood already. What would she have said to a son?
You do not love one child more than the other. You do not. It is inhuman, Irina's mother said, and likely her mother had said before her, wizened with age and with nameless dead newborns wept over and lamented still seen in her lined hands. The sentiment had never sounded quite right to Irina, when all her life she had heard tales of wicked stepmothers sending out wretched girls to die in the cold. Where was maternal love then? Although - and she'd thought this would come as a revelation and was oddly cross when it had not - maybe it's different if it's your own. Maybe you feel it differently.
The truth of it is, she doesn't know. A revelation did not strike her in the middle of the night and turn her into a home-loving babushka, not even when she cradled Isabelle in her arms, thinking of what could be. Instead, she was still trying to convince herself that she does not love Sydney more than Nadia; that her youngest is not a stranger who appeared one day, wearing her own face and looking at her with Arvin's eyes.
At the end of it, perhaps it does not matter, for all that she'd agonised over the merits and penalties of her love: both her children melted back into the snow, ink-black hair streaming behind them and lips like a red, red rose.
*
fin
The fairy tales I was looking at included The Snow Maiden (both versions), Snow White, The Tale of the Dead Princess, Snezhanka and a few others.
*
Irina is half-convinced that all of life is made of snow-upon-snow, with Rambaldi's neat sloping script across it all, bleeding black ink into the frost. She feels that she has known him all her life, bound in thick furs and staring out into the vast emptiness of the snow-covered plains, listening to her mother tell tales of winter magic. Snow is what binds her to him, to her mother, to home. Russian stories are all about snow: snow children, snow parents, snow keeping you warm and snow burying you alive. Somewhere along the line, her mother's voice and Rambaldi's words bled together until she could not pull them apart.
She knows, now - has always known, in fact - that you are not supposed to love one child more than the other. That's not how motherhood works. At least, that's not how Irina's mother had taught her that motherhood works - but, then, Irina's mother had been dead these many years, and weeds had grown wild on her grave and likely dogs relieved themselves there. Irina had not been back for years, and would have not dared return even if the thought had occurred to her, which it had not. Not when she held her granddaughter in her arms, and wondered if she was doing the right thing.
You're not supposed to love one child more than the other. You love them all equally and if you don't, you hide it as well as you can and do not dwell on it, lest some demon hear of it and bring mischief to your hearth. Irina thinks that maybe this only applies to girls, because she can't quite conceive of loving the son of either Jack Bristow or Arvin Sloane, with his father's eyes and cheeks and God only knew what else. Where Sydney and Nadia took after her, she has no doubt that a son would have taken after his father, and she would have come back one day to find a twenty year old Jack or a fifteen year old Arvin staring at her mistrustfully. Daughters are easier - they tend to have some ideas about motherhood already. What would she have said to a son?
You do not love one child more than the other. You do not. It is inhuman, Irina's mother said, and likely her mother had said before her, wizened with age and with nameless dead newborns wept over and lamented still seen in her lined hands. The sentiment had never sounded quite right to Irina, when all her life she had heard tales of wicked stepmothers sending out wretched girls to die in the cold. Where was maternal love then? Although - and she'd thought this would come as a revelation and was oddly cross when it had not - maybe it's different if it's your own. Maybe you feel it differently.
The truth of it is, she doesn't know. A revelation did not strike her in the middle of the night and turn her into a home-loving babushka, not even when she cradled Isabelle in her arms, thinking of what could be. Instead, she was still trying to convince herself that she does not love Sydney more than Nadia; that her youngest is not a stranger who appeared one day, wearing her own face and looking at her with Arvin's eyes.
At the end of it, perhaps it does not matter, for all that she'd agonised over the merits and penalties of her love: both her children melted back into the snow, ink-black hair streaming behind them and lips like a red, red rose.
*
fin
The fairy tales I was looking at included The Snow Maiden (both versions), Snow White, The Tale of the Dead Princess, Snezhanka and a few others.