justprompts: Sometimes it's not enough time...
justprompts : "Didn't Know I'd Love You So Much" from Repo! The Genetic Opera
He's bleeding out in a desert and all he can think about is a little girl he had to learn to raise on his own who grew into a woman he never expected her to be, despite how much he's failed her. Here he lies, the absent father, the one she felt abandoned and forsaken by, the one who betrayed her a hundred times over, suddenly coming to the realization that everything hadn't turned out so badly after all. Sydney grew up fine without him.
Life's little miracles.
And, oh, she'll save the world one last time, he knows that much. He thinks he might have liked to have seen her as a real mother- not a woman who has a child and a life that she never asked for, but an honest mother. The sort that Laura pretended to be. He'll settle for knowing she's alive and knowing that she'll be fine when the smoke clears, because Sydney is always fine.
She has to be.
He won't be so lucky, but he's been waiting for this moment for a long time, really. Agency men don't have a long life expectancy when they refuse to vacate the field to let the younger agents have their fun, all because getting stuck behind a desk is liable to drive them to homicide. He's smart enough to consider his wounds and estimates the amount of time it'll take him to bleed out- it's long enough that he doesn't intend to wait. Sydney deserves this much. If he did nothing else for her as a father, he could say he bought her time, destroyed the enemy he knows she'll never defeat. Her mother, she can handle.
Sloane's always been a different animal entirely.
Some men, he thinks as he trudges towards the cavern where they last left Sloane, buy their daughters ponies. Jack Bristow would topple a thousand criminal organizations, torture a hundred terrorists, and kill anyone who got in his way for his. As wide as his gestures of love have been, he knows Sydney would have preferred the goddamn pony. If he could turn back time, he might have left the CIA when he intended to and devoted all of his time to raising his daughter, taking solace in her to detract from the anguish, rather than driving himself crazy wondering how the hell Irina had deceived him.
Amazing how being near death puts everything into perspective.
But that's not how it happened and for all that he and Sydney have reconciled at long last, he still knows that there will never be enough time to make up for everything he's done to her, whether she forgives him or not.
He'll just have to take whatever time he has left and hope what he does with it will suffice.
Muse: Jack Bristow
Word Count: 460