Fic: A Fairer House than Prose (Alias, Irina Derevko)

[pellucid]

I'm pretty sure Saturday evening is one of the worst times to post fic, but I'm feeling impatient. The long-advertised Irina Derevko fic (and the first "real" fic I've written in over a year) is finally as complete as it's going to be, so now seems like as good a time as any

Comments

[pellucid]

Thank you so much!

And finale? What finale? I never watched any finale! ;)

[beccatoria]

Oh. ♥

Honestly, it's been so long since I watched any of Alias, I don't even remember most of the mechanics of the plot, let alone what happened in season five that I ought not to think of and I think I'm glad. This hits all the moments I do remember, and manages to deconstruct Irina while still keeping her cool and mysterious and more than a little terrifying.

And as always, it's absolutely beautifully written.

I love the open-endedness of the final line. For all that she's spent a lifetime living in uncertainty with regard to her own intentions and desires, this is the first time she will have to negotiate living with uncertainty in the world - no KGB, no Rambaldi, no personal goals - balanced, perhaps, finally, by the space to coalesce into a single person within herself.

If I might be so bold as to venture an interpretation, I feel the end is maybe the first time she truly achieves the goals set out by Keats' per Jack's interpretation. Before this, she never had answers, but the world was full of them - even when

[pellucid]

I'm so glad you liked it, despite (or because of?) not remembering the canon so well. Really, it's just the Irina parts that are important (though I admit the entire Spy Family is growing on me considerably).

I feel the end is maybe the first time she truly achieves the goals set out by Keats' per Jack's interpretationOh, I quite like this! I hadn't thought of it in that way, but yes, I think it works. However contradictory the worlds she inhabited, Irina's decisions were always in service of something bigger or outside herself (at least as she framed them? I also think she can be incredibly selfish, but I felt like I couldn't quite make that work in this fic because it's a very subtle and inconsistent kidn of selfishness): she did x to achieve y goal. It's removing the goal--any goal--that changes the game, and I want to think of her finding a sense of complete self in a way she hasn't had for a very long time

[gabolange]

One of the things I love about this story is the theme of negative capability--the way being a good spy or a good poet requires an ability to be completely flexible, to have no opinions at all. And I love that while this enables Irina in so many ways, in the end, it means she really doesn't know herself at all. And as I read this for the fourth or fifth time now, I can't help but wonder about the implied criticism of both Keats and Irina--is being successful in poetry or espionage worth the outcome? And is poetry so different from espionage? ;)

Lovely work!

[pellucid]

The funny thing is that I never meant to criticize Keats because I'd list negative capability pretty high on my list of "ideas I try to live by," at least in the "being in uncertainty" sense. I do think it's tremendously important to be comfortable with ambiguity and to know how to exist in the gray areas, and Keats formulates it as well as anyone I've found. But I've tended to think of it only in the "most scholars, when they lecture or write about negative capability" sense, and it was an interesting thought experiment for me to play with it in this way instead. (I think I said something to you, early in the drafting, that I thought I might be crazy because I was putting one of my most cherished ideals in the hands of a sociopath. Both of which were slight exaggerations--I wouldn't hold too firmly to Keats, per se, and although I think there's an argument to be made that Irina is a sociopath, I've decided that she's not--but still

[pellucid]

Oh, wow, I want to draw hearts around this comment! Thank you, and I'm so very pleased you liked it!

she inhabits all these identities, and each with conviction. She was not just faking.

To me, this feels like one of the most fundamental--and most easily misunderstood--things about Irina. It took me a while to formulate the idea, because she's actually not particularly internally consistent, but she gets angry when people (well, Sydney, mostly) can't see the larger plan, or can't trust that there is one. But she doesn't seem to see that to Sydney, she's contradictory and fundamentally untrustworthy, no matter how much she (Irina) might love Sydney. The trick, I think, is that Irina believes all the contradictory things because they're all part of who she is and are, at least in that sense, true. She loves her daughters, and she believes Rambaldi, even though Rambaldi says one of her daughters will die. She believes Rambaldi even as she worked for years to prevent Elena from acting on her (Elena's) belief in Rambaldi. These things

[violaswamp]

Lovely. Beautifully conceived and written. This is going into my memories.

[pellucid]

Thanks so much! I'm so pleased you liked it.