sunday_reveries: If hell is in the details, babe I'm a microscope....
sunday_reveries : "Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre. Also for
yetregressing .
It’s a game, a sick, twisted little game that masquerades as real life. He does what he’s told (kill, steal, lie, cheat, blackmail) and the benefits outweigh the costs to the point that the costs don’t look like costs anymore. Freedom’s an illusion- an alias for servitude so elegant and precise that it looks like you wanted that all along (and didn’t you want it?). He pretends that there’s nothing wrong with this picture, ignores the indicators that show that he’s not a faithful lieutenant so much as a pampered hunting dog (sit, stay, heel- good boy), but it’s obvious to everyone else where the truth lies. Dogs are only useful for so long- eventually they outlive their usefulness, if they live that long at all.
He should have known all of this from the beginning.
He didn't.
*
He paces the cell, counting the steps it takes to walk the length of it, memorizing dimensions and wondering if Irina did the same thing while she was here- searching out weaknesses, looking for a way to get him out when the time came (surely, this is what she planned to do the whole time), but months pass with no sign and his head realizes he’s been abandoned long before his heart does. Hope is abandoned and he crawls on his belly to his captors, even as he’s giving the illusion of a complicity not given lightly with lofty arrogance and cheap insults thrown over the interrogation tables, just waiting to see if he can bait one enough to snap. That, however, is a facade and at least one of his captors sees it for what it is.
Jack Bristow whispers the words in his ear with stunning calm as he pinches a nerve cluster somewhere in his back so hard that he nearly bites his tongue in two in an attempt to choke back an agonized howl. When Jack gets to this point, the cameras are always turned off. “Hide behind that front all you like, Mr. Sark. The truth is, you already know you’ve lost.”
Bristow’s been testier than usual. Something about Sydney being missing.
Sometimes all he gives are insults, even when he knows what comes next. He doesn’t want them to think him cowed- he’s cooperative, but not their dog to order to speak. The more they press, the less information he gives, but they haven’t caught onto that yet or maybe they have and they’re trying to break what little fighting spirit he has left. He knows the halls by heart, knows the men that get sent in to work him over when no one will let Bristow near him (he’s too invested in the case, they say, or maybe it’s because Daddy’s falling apart without his little girl and one by one his clearances are being stripped away). It’s predictable, all of it.
Sometimes, however, he walks into the room and all he does is list off intel in a dry, bored tone of voice, his eyes heavy-lidded from a lack of sleep and sometimes half-closed from all the bruises, like he’s reciting facts from some mental spreadsheet. He gives them just enough that they won’t try to extract more right away, but not enough that they feel he doesn’t have more to offer.
There’s no one too untouchable for him to sell out right now. He’s never getting out of here. Irina won’t come back for him. It was naive of him to believe she would, even for a second.
A year passes, and then another, and then...
*
"His only value is as a commodity in trade."
Bob Lindsay doesn't care if prisoners overhear things like that, especially when they're going to die one way or another. The minute Sark hears those words, he wonders if that's really all his life has come down to. Irina sentenced him to die a slow death in captivity and got away scot-free with whatever it was her endgame had come down to. He really wasn't anything to her at all and it's taken him until now, after he's already ripped apart every piece of her organization that he knows enough about to tear into, to fully realize it. The worst part is he doubts the information is any good- Irina would have anticipated this. He can't even call it revenge, because it all makes no difference in the long run. Hell, Lindsay's probably gunning to trade him because none of his information has been any good.
A barking dog can only bark for so long until it's silenced.
*
In the end, the part that bothers him the most about this- Irina's betrayal, the CIA selling him to the highest bidder in the hopes that they'll put a bullet in his head, and everything in between- is that he should have anticipated this from the beginning.
And he didn't.
Muse: Julian Sark
Word Count: 805