Insertion.
Title: Insertion
Date posted: 12-11-06
Fandom: Alias
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Spoilers: The fate of Jack and Nadia.
Notes: This kinda/sorta follows my fic "Only to Survive", based on the alias500 challenge "keys."
Jack misses the weight of keys.
It's a trivial thing, he knows, and stupid to miss something so mundane. Car ignitions are now started by the insertion of a small, thick bar and the press of a button, and home doors are opened by a card swipe.
(There are so many more important things to miss: his daughter, his grandchildren, his home, his work, even his wife. Instead, he quietly fixates on other things: the loss of keys, the elimination of lamps for specially lit walls, regimes that burn books because they hinder the progress of the electronic age, the end of pencils, and, most egregiously, the eradication of classical instruments.)
Nadia likes the difference in this case- she didn't like the smell of metal that keys left on her hands. She was a nervous key jingler- jangling them as she waited for him by the door, or when waiting in line at a coffee shop, and the elimination of keys got rid of one of her tells.
(The other is something much harder to control, and Jack when notices it's very uncomfortable. She picked up the habit from Sydney, tucking her hair back behind her ear, who had picked it up from Laura all those years ago. He pretends not to see, and the chill that comes between them makes her want to push her hair back more. In the grand scheme of things, the few moments of silence mean nothing.)
She teases him for missing keys, says that it's his male ego that's injured to have such a phallic symbol eradicated, but when they move to London, where keys have been obsolete for at least five years, he sees the dismay she shows with every new invention that erases something that they had once known so well.
Date posted: 12-11-06
Fandom: Alias
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Spoilers: The fate of Jack and Nadia.
Notes: This kinda/sorta follows my fic "Only to Survive", based on the alias500 challenge "keys."
Jack misses the weight of keys.
It's a trivial thing, he knows, and stupid to miss something so mundane. Car ignitions are now started by the insertion of a small, thick bar and the press of a button, and home doors are opened by a card swipe.
(There are so many more important things to miss: his daughter, his grandchildren, his home, his work, even his wife. Instead, he quietly fixates on other things: the loss of keys, the elimination of lamps for specially lit walls, regimes that burn books because they hinder the progress of the electronic age, the end of pencils, and, most egregiously, the eradication of classical instruments.)
Nadia likes the difference in this case- she didn't like the smell of metal that keys left on her hands. She was a nervous key jingler- jangling them as she waited for him by the door, or when waiting in line at a coffee shop, and the elimination of keys got rid of one of her tells.
(The other is something much harder to control, and Jack when notices it's very uncomfortable. She picked up the habit from Sydney, tucking her hair back behind her ear, who had picked it up from Laura all those years ago. He pretends not to see, and the chill that comes between them makes her want to push her hair back more. In the grand scheme of things, the few moments of silence mean nothing.)
She teases him for missing keys, says that it's his male ego that's injured to have such a phallic symbol eradicated, but when they move to London, where keys have been obsolete for at least five years, he sees the dismay she shows with every new invention that erases something that they had once known so well.