Fic: A Fairer House than Prose (Alias, Irina Derevko)
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
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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 only make sense if Irina is seriously unhinged (which is possible, I guess, but not very interesting), a complete sociopath (a more plausible explanation: one I considered and the thing, I think, that Jack most fears in the times he's been less able actually convince himself of this), or that she's got a really complicated relationship to truth, belief, and identity that is both the product of the life she's led and the thing that enabled her to lead such a life in the first place. And because I believe that she really does love her family, despite everything and even when she's actively hurting them, I come down on the third option.
Though I can see an argument that this is a meaningless distinction, it seems significant to me
I agree, and I might even go so far as to say that it's the difference between indecision and being in uncertainties. Indecision leads to paralysis, whereas to be in uncertainty still allows action. Irina is not going to stay passive or paralyzed; the question is just about how she's going to act and which parts of herself she's going to decide to be.
From the mouths of babes!
English majors are occasionally an insightful bunch! ;)
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