(no subject)
This is my entry for the Alias: Dearly Departed ficathon. I wrote for 
kerlin, who requested Tom's resurrection from Rachel's point of view. :)
Characters: Tom, Rachel, Ensemble
Rating: PG-13/R
Summary: It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
--
his hand sneaking against her thigh under the sheets
--
Ten minutes later she turns away from Sloane and starts to walk out of the tomb, her boots scuffing triumphantly against the rubble-covered floor. Halfway to the door, though, she trips over a rock and lands hard on her knees. The vial goes flying, and shatters against a crumbled pillar in a thousand pieces.
"Not a word," Rachel says, hiding the vestiges of her humiliation with a bit of a snarl. Sloane chuckles silently but the air of his laughter cannot make it into his lungs, half crushed by the boulder, and he gasps for breath.
She smiles a little, makes her way back across the tomb to the blood-red pool, and fills up the small canteen attached to her belt, the only other container around.
“Rachel, wait,” Sloane says, commanding.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rachel says, turning. “Did you think I was serious about your little deal?”
"No, thanks," she says, letting a sarcastic laugh into her voice. She faces him, pulls out her gun, and shoots him in the head for good measure.
He falls silent, and she wrinkles her nose at the blood and gray matter that seeps across the floor.
Moments later it starts to move--back into his skull--and Rachel shudders and sidles back to the stairs.
--
would you like to, scarred eyebrow raised suggestively, smiling
--
She makes it back to Tokyo, and from there she flies to Los Angeles. It’s a stopover on her trip back to Langley for debriefing, but she’s got six hours and the new Rachel can do anything in six hours. Ski down Mt. Blanc, rappel the cliffs in Acapulco, single-handedly save the world.
(Well, almost.)
Rachel has only been back to L.A. twice, to bury two empty coffins and retrieve her things. She hasn’t gone near APO.
There wasn’t much point, after Sydney and her husband left for Mexico and everyone else moved to Langley. L.A. doesn’t feel like home.
When she arrives, finally, she’s surprised to see that the crater is nearly gone. She’d heard that the construction crews had a hard time of it, reconstructing the tunnels from the inside, and that it’s taken ages.
Rachel picks her way through the construction workers, showing the FBI identification card that Dixon had provided. It was so that she could avoid having her briefcase-lying forgotten in the rental car-inspected at LAX. The workers part way for her, like the Red Sea, and Rachel wonders vaguely what happened to give her this sort of presence, unquestionably in control..
Maybe she’s had it all along.
When she gets to the manhole, the only safe way down into the blast site, she takes a hard hat from a nearby truck and descends. The L.A. noontime sun burns a circle of light into the tunnel floor, illuminating the darkness that extends in either direction.
She avoids the third rail, even though it’s bent and twisted-she’s never been quite sure what it does to you, only that it’s dangerous and her cousin Annie swears she saw a rat get electrocuted on it in New York-and walks to the wall, sinking to the floor in front of it.
The remains of the car have been removed. There weren’t many, according to the report-shattered bits of metal and sheet glass, the occasional fiber from the seats.
She knows-knows, fact, science-it will not be enough, but something is pulling at her. Get a grip, Gibson, this prophet stuff is impossible.
She’s about to get up and leave, but then she thinks of Sloane’s left hemisphere, reconstructing itself, and she takes out her canteen.
--
she rolls on top of him, playful, and she would have said yes
--
No one at Langley asks about her detour.
Marshall notices that she’s tired and quieter than normal, and he and Weiss invite her mini-golfing. Weiss plays with a put-upon machismo, elbowing her in the ribs and leaping over the barriers to “accidentally” knock Marshall’s shot from its perfect entry under the windmill. Who da man, he says, and she laughs, which feels strange and new and good, all at the same time.
It would have been almost normal fun, if it weren’t for the gun strapped in her ankle holster and Marshall’s constant analysis of the ballistics involved in each putt.
Weiss drives her home at the end of the night, and she can almost see herself with him. She can see what Sydney’s sister saw in him, what Sydney herself couldn’t have failed to notice. He’s friendly, calm, reliable.
She’s tempted to kiss him goodnight. She hasn’t done anything since the disastrous night with Jake, and she’s tempted, but she remembers Sydney telling her about how Weiss was, after her sister fell into the coma. After her sister died.
He deserves more, Rachel decides, and steps out of the car with a quick thank-you.
--
sometimes she thinks about telling Sydney
--
A week later she’s home to prepare for a mission to Algiers, solo reconnaissance. She takes a nice long shower and shaves her legs and only comes out when the tiles are slippery with steam.
She puts on a tank top and yoga pants that she picked up in Sweden one day when Jake offered to take over surveillance on his own, brushes her teeth, and walks into the hallway.
Before she can reach for the light switch, a hand is crushing her windpipe and she’s shoved up against the wall.
“What did you do,” Jack Bristow hisses.
--
Sydney gasps in surprise and her eyes widen happily
--
She throws her hands up in surrender and he lets go of her neck, still glaring.
“Nothing! I swear!” Rachel says, the shock of it sinking in. Jack. Her house. Alive. “I didn’t-“
“Sloane said that you did,” he says, lowly, and Rachel is profoundly grateful that this man wasn’t her father when she was teenager.
“I didn’t-oh, shit-I fell, okay, coming out of the tomb-it must have-you’re dead,” Rachel finishes, frozen in place.
“You spilled the Rambaldi solution,” Jack says, and exhales, and most of the anger seeps from his face.
“Yeah, it was an-accident-not that I’m not glad you’re-it’s great-“
Jack Bristow. Dead. Coffin. Funeral. Sydney crying. Gunshots to the chest, heroic last stance to see his daughter off, memorialized in Langley as the ultimate black ops agent.
Rachel feels numbness creeping up her legs, and sits down before she can faint. Not anymore.
Jack towers over her and stands, expectantly.
“I’m sorry,” she says, after a few minutes of silence pass and she starts to regain her balance. “I never thought it would work.”
With that, he grabs her wrist, tension and suspicion back in his face. His hair looks different-more silver, and less dull gray-and she didn’t think about that, about the changes.
“You never thought what would work, Rachel?”
“Tom,” she says, faintly, and saying it is harder than thinking about it has been for weeks. “Sloane said he’d tell me how to bring him back, if I let him go,” the words spill out, and she’s been keeping this secret from everyone, but Christ, she’s just brought Jack Bristow back from the dead. “and I never thought it would work.”
“You didn’t let Sloane go,” Jack says, calculating.
“I’m not an idiot,” Rachel snaps back, but it lacks the bite it would have if she wasn’t talking to a dead man.
“That has yet to be determined,” Jack says in return, but something changes in his face and Rachel can tell he’s forgotten about her entirely.
“Sydney,” Jack says, abruptly, harshly, and yet Rachel reels from the raw emotion.
“Mexico. With Vaughn and Isabelle. They bought a beach house in Baja-outside of San José de las Palomas. They’re all fine,” she says.
“Sydney’s mom, though-“ she remembers instantly, and almost stops, because surely it isn’t her place to tell Jack-Bristow-from-the-grave about his wife’s demise.
“Of course,” Jack says, bitterness in his tone. He releases Rachel and offers her a hand to stand up.
“I’m going to Mexico,” Jack says. “I suggest you go to Los Angeles, if you were foolish enough to-“
“For Tom,” she breathes, and it washes into her like a wave to the breakers.
--
do you love him? Sydney smiles, reaching out to take her hand
--
Jack drives her to the airport-mostly because his flight leaves about the same time as hers, but in the moments that she’s not thinking about Tom-about Tom, god, Tom, alive-she entertains the idea that Jack might feel grateful. Lazarus to her Jesus, if she remembers Sunday School correctly. Miracles. He’s going to see Sydney again.
All of the mediocrity, all of the ambivalence, all of the loneliness-all of it is gone. Her muscles are humming with anticipation.
Jack doesn’t walk her to her gate-doesn’t even walk her to her ticket counter. He strides away to check himself in at AeroMexico, walking far more quickly than Rachel imagines a dead man would.
Real, live, walking, talking, breathing, being. Tom.
Rachel beams at the gate agent and fakes a Southern accent to go with her alias, born in Savannah.
--
and she will say yes
--
Rachel thinks about everything on the plane. What happened to Jack? How was he in the tomb? How was he affected by the vial of solution she dropped-was it a slow coalescence, billions of atoms joining together at the most basic level to form a vague shape, sharpening at the edges, an agonizing reconstruction until two men lay underneath the Mongolian desert? What did Sloane do? What did Jack do to Sloane? How was it possible? How could Rambaldi bring men back to life?
What will Sydney say? Rachel imagines Jack parking a rented Land Rover and stepping out of the car into the Mexican sun, the reflection from the Pacific glinting off of the windows. A ring at the doorbell and little Isabelle-walking, now-toddling to it, wanting to be first-and her mother, carefully stepping behind her, twisting the doorknob to see-
And Dixon, Marshall, Weiss, Vaughn-colleagues, friends, insomuch as Rachel thinks Jack Bristow has friends-a call from Sydney, breathless, shock, awe-Rambaldi did it, Rachel thinks.
Her pulse quickens halfway over the Rockies when she realizes that they will come for her. What did you do, Ms. Gibson? Why did you do it? She will be interrogated and questioned and probably suspended from duty, banned from going off on her own again-and, she realizes as the pilot points out the California border, she doesn’t care.
She can take him home for Thanksgiving. The whole deal, in Minnesota, with her grandma’s Norwegian stuffing and driving out to a tree farm to chop down a tree for Christmas, the setting sun reflected in the snow. He can meet her parents.
The plane touches down and Rachel is off and out of LAX in a matter of minutes. She gets a cab to the explosion site. One of the workers, Manuel, remembers her FBI credentials from weeks earlier and she’s allowed to climb down the manhole.
She stands in the pitch-black of the tunnel and calculates the hours.
Six, since Jack appeared at her doorstep; eighteen more of travel, since he woke up in Mongolia; twenty-three, elapsed on her trip between Mongolia, Tokyo, and L.A., all those weeks ago.
An hour.
If her assumptions are correct-if Rambaldi’s creations are methodical-two explosions, two men killed, same procedure-it should only be one more hour.
She stands still and listens to the rumble of the subway, hundreds of meters away in the new tunnel, roaring past as it delivers people to their destinations.
The minutes pass quickly-too quickly, because she can’t imagine ever being ready for this. There is so much to think of, so much to plan-new clothes, extra bedroom, explanations, children, growing old together.
She’s imagining how Dixon will react when it happens.
It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
The tunnel begins to vibrate, shake, as though it is an earthquake. She runs to the wall and holds on to a pipe, waiting, and then there is a second of blinding light, searing into her bones, and the noise of a thousand worlds bursting through her eardrums and she can’t breathe and the earth is spinning and she lets go and falls to the ground and closes her eyes-
The light fades, her breath catches in her chest and as she coughs up the dust, someone else coughs, sixteen feet away.
His breathing joins with her own, hitching and bewildered, and she isn’t alone, not any more, and in that moment she thinks of the fluid, blood-red and powerful, and how everything, everything, everything has changed.
--
sometimes, she thinks of Rambaldi
--
back to part two
back to part one
kerlin, who requested Tom's resurrection from Rachel's point of view. :)
Characters: Tom, Rachel, Ensemble
Rating: PG-13/R
Summary: It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
--
his hand sneaking against her thigh under the sheets
--
Ten minutes later she turns away from Sloane and starts to walk out of the tomb, her boots scuffing triumphantly against the rubble-covered floor. Halfway to the door, though, she trips over a rock and lands hard on her knees. The vial goes flying, and shatters against a crumbled pillar in a thousand pieces.
"Not a word," Rachel says, hiding the vestiges of her humiliation with a bit of a snarl. Sloane chuckles silently but the air of his laughter cannot make it into his lungs, half crushed by the boulder, and he gasps for breath.
She smiles a little, makes her way back across the tomb to the blood-red pool, and fills up the small canteen attached to her belt, the only other container around.
“Rachel, wait,” Sloane says, commanding.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rachel says, turning. “Did you think I was serious about your little deal?”
"No, thanks," she says, letting a sarcastic laugh into her voice. She faces him, pulls out her gun, and shoots him in the head for good measure.
He falls silent, and she wrinkles her nose at the blood and gray matter that seeps across the floor.
Moments later it starts to move--back into his skull--and Rachel shudders and sidles back to the stairs.
--
would you like to, scarred eyebrow raised suggestively, smiling
--
She makes it back to Tokyo, and from there she flies to Los Angeles. It’s a stopover on her trip back to Langley for debriefing, but she’s got six hours and the new Rachel can do anything in six hours. Ski down Mt. Blanc, rappel the cliffs in Acapulco, single-handedly save the world.
(Well, almost.)
Rachel has only been back to L.A. twice, to bury two empty coffins and retrieve her things. She hasn’t gone near APO.
There wasn’t much point, after Sydney and her husband left for Mexico and everyone else moved to Langley. L.A. doesn’t feel like home.
When she arrives, finally, she’s surprised to see that the crater is nearly gone. She’d heard that the construction crews had a hard time of it, reconstructing the tunnels from the inside, and that it’s taken ages.
Rachel picks her way through the construction workers, showing the FBI identification card that Dixon had provided. It was so that she could avoid having her briefcase-lying forgotten in the rental car-inspected at LAX. The workers part way for her, like the Red Sea, and Rachel wonders vaguely what happened to give her this sort of presence, unquestionably in control..
Maybe she’s had it all along.
When she gets to the manhole, the only safe way down into the blast site, she takes a hard hat from a nearby truck and descends. The L.A. noontime sun burns a circle of light into the tunnel floor, illuminating the darkness that extends in either direction.
She avoids the third rail, even though it’s bent and twisted-she’s never been quite sure what it does to you, only that it’s dangerous and her cousin Annie swears she saw a rat get electrocuted on it in New York-and walks to the wall, sinking to the floor in front of it.
The remains of the car have been removed. There weren’t many, according to the report-shattered bits of metal and sheet glass, the occasional fiber from the seats.
She knows-knows, fact, science-it will not be enough, but something is pulling at her. Get a grip, Gibson, this prophet stuff is impossible.
She’s about to get up and leave, but then she thinks of Sloane’s left hemisphere, reconstructing itself, and she takes out her canteen.
--
she rolls on top of him, playful, and she would have said yes
--
No one at Langley asks about her detour.
Marshall notices that she’s tired and quieter than normal, and he and Weiss invite her mini-golfing. Weiss plays with a put-upon machismo, elbowing her in the ribs and leaping over the barriers to “accidentally” knock Marshall’s shot from its perfect entry under the windmill. Who da man, he says, and she laughs, which feels strange and new and good, all at the same time.
It would have been almost normal fun, if it weren’t for the gun strapped in her ankle holster and Marshall’s constant analysis of the ballistics involved in each putt.
Weiss drives her home at the end of the night, and she can almost see herself with him. She can see what Sydney’s sister saw in him, what Sydney herself couldn’t have failed to notice. He’s friendly, calm, reliable.
She’s tempted to kiss him goodnight. She hasn’t done anything since the disastrous night with Jake, and she’s tempted, but she remembers Sydney telling her about how Weiss was, after her sister fell into the coma. After her sister died.
He deserves more, Rachel decides, and steps out of the car with a quick thank-you.
--
sometimes she thinks about telling Sydney
--
A week later she’s home to prepare for a mission to Algiers, solo reconnaissance. She takes a nice long shower and shaves her legs and only comes out when the tiles are slippery with steam.
She puts on a tank top and yoga pants that she picked up in Sweden one day when Jake offered to take over surveillance on his own, brushes her teeth, and walks into the hallway.
Before she can reach for the light switch, a hand is crushing her windpipe and she’s shoved up against the wall.
“What did you do,” Jack Bristow hisses.
--
Sydney gasps in surprise and her eyes widen happily
--
She throws her hands up in surrender and he lets go of her neck, still glaring.
“Nothing! I swear!” Rachel says, the shock of it sinking in. Jack. Her house. Alive. “I didn’t-“
“Sloane said that you did,” he says, lowly, and Rachel is profoundly grateful that this man wasn’t her father when she was teenager.
“I didn’t-oh, shit-I fell, okay, coming out of the tomb-it must have-you’re dead,” Rachel finishes, frozen in place.
“You spilled the Rambaldi solution,” Jack says, and exhales, and most of the anger seeps from his face.
“Yeah, it was an-accident-not that I’m not glad you’re-it’s great-“
Jack Bristow. Dead. Coffin. Funeral. Sydney crying. Gunshots to the chest, heroic last stance to see his daughter off, memorialized in Langley as the ultimate black ops agent.
Rachel feels numbness creeping up her legs, and sits down before she can faint. Not anymore.
Jack towers over her and stands, expectantly.
“I’m sorry,” she says, after a few minutes of silence pass and she starts to regain her balance. “I never thought it would work.”
With that, he grabs her wrist, tension and suspicion back in his face. His hair looks different-more silver, and less dull gray-and she didn’t think about that, about the changes.
“You never thought what would work, Rachel?”
“Tom,” she says, faintly, and saying it is harder than thinking about it has been for weeks. “Sloane said he’d tell me how to bring him back, if I let him go,” the words spill out, and she’s been keeping this secret from everyone, but Christ, she’s just brought Jack Bristow back from the dead. “and I never thought it would work.”
“You didn’t let Sloane go,” Jack says, calculating.
“I’m not an idiot,” Rachel snaps back, but it lacks the bite it would have if she wasn’t talking to a dead man.
“That has yet to be determined,” Jack says in return, but something changes in his face and Rachel can tell he’s forgotten about her entirely.
“Sydney,” Jack says, abruptly, harshly, and yet Rachel reels from the raw emotion.
“Mexico. With Vaughn and Isabelle. They bought a beach house in Baja-outside of San José de las Palomas. They’re all fine,” she says.
“Sydney’s mom, though-“ she remembers instantly, and almost stops, because surely it isn’t her place to tell Jack-Bristow-from-the-grave about his wife’s demise.
“Of course,” Jack says, bitterness in his tone. He releases Rachel and offers her a hand to stand up.
“I’m going to Mexico,” Jack says. “I suggest you go to Los Angeles, if you were foolish enough to-“
“For Tom,” she breathes, and it washes into her like a wave to the breakers.
--
do you love him? Sydney smiles, reaching out to take her hand
--
Jack drives her to the airport-mostly because his flight leaves about the same time as hers, but in the moments that she’s not thinking about Tom-about Tom, god, Tom, alive-she entertains the idea that Jack might feel grateful. Lazarus to her Jesus, if she remembers Sunday School correctly. Miracles. He’s going to see Sydney again.
All of the mediocrity, all of the ambivalence, all of the loneliness-all of it is gone. Her muscles are humming with anticipation.
Jack doesn’t walk her to her gate-doesn’t even walk her to her ticket counter. He strides away to check himself in at AeroMexico, walking far more quickly than Rachel imagines a dead man would.
Real, live, walking, talking, breathing, being. Tom.
Rachel beams at the gate agent and fakes a Southern accent to go with her alias, born in Savannah.
--
and she will say yes
--
Rachel thinks about everything on the plane. What happened to Jack? How was he in the tomb? How was he affected by the vial of solution she dropped-was it a slow coalescence, billions of atoms joining together at the most basic level to form a vague shape, sharpening at the edges, an agonizing reconstruction until two men lay underneath the Mongolian desert? What did Sloane do? What did Jack do to Sloane? How was it possible? How could Rambaldi bring men back to life?
What will Sydney say? Rachel imagines Jack parking a rented Land Rover and stepping out of the car into the Mexican sun, the reflection from the Pacific glinting off of the windows. A ring at the doorbell and little Isabelle-walking, now-toddling to it, wanting to be first-and her mother, carefully stepping behind her, twisting the doorknob to see-
And Dixon, Marshall, Weiss, Vaughn-colleagues, friends, insomuch as Rachel thinks Jack Bristow has friends-a call from Sydney, breathless, shock, awe-Rambaldi did it, Rachel thinks.
Her pulse quickens halfway over the Rockies when she realizes that they will come for her. What did you do, Ms. Gibson? Why did you do it? She will be interrogated and questioned and probably suspended from duty, banned from going off on her own again-and, she realizes as the pilot points out the California border, she doesn’t care.
She can take him home for Thanksgiving. The whole deal, in Minnesota, with her grandma’s Norwegian stuffing and driving out to a tree farm to chop down a tree for Christmas, the setting sun reflected in the snow. He can meet her parents.
The plane touches down and Rachel is off and out of LAX in a matter of minutes. She gets a cab to the explosion site. One of the workers, Manuel, remembers her FBI credentials from weeks earlier and she’s allowed to climb down the manhole.
She stands in the pitch-black of the tunnel and calculates the hours.
Six, since Jack appeared at her doorstep; eighteen more of travel, since he woke up in Mongolia; twenty-three, elapsed on her trip between Mongolia, Tokyo, and L.A., all those weeks ago.
An hour.
If her assumptions are correct-if Rambaldi’s creations are methodical-two explosions, two men killed, same procedure-it should only be one more hour.
She stands still and listens to the rumble of the subway, hundreds of meters away in the new tunnel, roaring past as it delivers people to their destinations.
The minutes pass quickly-too quickly, because she can’t imagine ever being ready for this. There is so much to think of, so much to plan-new clothes, extra bedroom, explanations, children, growing old together.
She’s imagining how Dixon will react when it happens.
It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
The tunnel begins to vibrate, shake, as though it is an earthquake. She runs to the wall and holds on to a pipe, waiting, and then there is a second of blinding light, searing into her bones, and the noise of a thousand worlds bursting through her eardrums and she can’t breathe and the earth is spinning and she lets go and falls to the ground and closes her eyes-
The light fades, her breath catches in her chest and as she coughs up the dust, someone else coughs, sixteen feet away.
His breathing joins with her own, hitching and bewildered, and she isn’t alone, not any more, and in that moment she thinks of the fluid, blood-red and powerful, and how everything, everything, everything has changed.
--
sometimes, she thinks of Rambaldi
--
back to part two
back to part one