(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.
--
they’re on the beach in santa barbara, no matter how cliché that sounds
--
The drive is long and isolated, and part of Rachel wants to call Marshall, share what is happening, listen to him talk about how he was finally allowed into one of the sixty-three server rooms yesterday and he can’t believe how advanced the CIA tech actually is.
Then she thinks about what he would say. She thinks of the Rambaldi myths and how Marshall, despite his intelligence, trusts every one-he would try to stop her. A coldness creeps into her stomach-you are alone, alone in the truth-and she drops her sat phone back onto the passenger seat.
She settles for rolling down the window and accelerating. The road is a mixture of gravel, dirt, and sand, and stinging particles fly up against her cheeks. She ignores them, squints through her sunglasses, and drives on.
--
he’s looking at her and the ring is glittering and she would have said yes
--
She reaches the tomb site-crater site, she realizes, stepping out of the jeep-around noon, and the sun starts to sear the skin uncovered by her white tank top from her favorite Gap outlet back in L.A.
It looks like the APO crater, Rachel realizes, twin craters on opposite sides of the world. Evidence of Sloane’s insanity. Sydney’s mother’s insanity.
It is topped by a huge slab, split down the center, the circle of the Rambaldi eye cracked cleanly in half.
Rachel stands back for a moment and thinks of the great Stone Table in the BBC version of the Chronicles of Narnia that she’d watched years ago when her little brother had the chicken pox.
Aslan lay on the table, dead, until dawn began to break and, with a rending crack, the stone shattered and Aslan rose again.
Rachel had liked Narnia more before her best friend’s mother had explained that is was a charming little allegory for “our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The sandy-gold dirt at her feet looks untouched-though Jack died here, she knows, and many guards besides. She picks her way over to what she assumes must be the entry to the tomb.
Stones are crumbled in front of it, as though an explosion rocked it from within.
There is a trace of a bootprint left in the hardened mud on the third step down-a small foot, the size of Rachel’s own, climbing up the stairs and out of the tomb. It is tinged red.
Sydney’s boot, Rachel knows. Sydney came, and descended, and climbed out again.
What did she find inside?
--
sometimes she thinks about waking up together
--
Halfway down the stairs, Rachel knows she should turn back.
She knows she should turn back the same way she knew three steps into the trip to the ladies’ room at junior prom that she should turn back and not leave her date alone with Mandy Camarillo.
The same way she knew somehow that she should’ve turned back and not let her new colleague in Vienna take her out for a coffee break. “Trust me,” Kelly had said. “It’ll be a blast! We can have some girl time.”
Her stomach is uncomfortable and her breath is coming in short gasps-that’s probably from hefting the rubble out of her way, the analytical part of Rachel’s mind chimes in.
Rachel knows she should turn back, but that’s never been enough to stop her.
Her burning curiosity lands a right hook on the jaw of her better judgment as she reaches the bottom of the staircase and pauses under the arched entrance of the tomb.
“I KNOW YOU’RE THERE,” the voice says, accusingly, echoing from somewhere inside.
Rachel jumps back and manages to trip over a stone and stub her toe. Swearing under her breath, she hops around for a moment before regaining her composure.
Then, she freezes, recognition flooding into her mind.
“I CAN HEAR YOU,” Arvin Sloane shouts, and Rachel’s muscles refuse to move. Of everything and anything she’d expected, she hadn’t expected Sloane.
She edges against the wall, her breaths coming out in sharp, stifled gasps.
“I CAN HEAR YOU, NADIA,” Sloane yells, and Rachel straightens in shock. This, then-this is different. She can use this.
Before she knows what she’s doing-before she’s even thought it through-she takes a deep breath and walks into the tomb. It’s what Sydney would do-it’s what Sydney did.
“Solitary wearing a little hard on you, Arvin?” Rachel asks. Her voice sounds strange to her ears-hatred, perhaps, scorn, pain-she’s surprised she didn’t hide them, didn’t school herself into neutrality. It reverberates through the stone-littered chamber.
At first she doesn’t see him, although she hears his sharp intake of breath. When she does see him she almost turns away. The old Rachel would have turned away.
Sloane lies pinned under a massive boulder. Only his torso is visible. Rachel breathes in through her teeth-quickly, silently, you can handle this, Gibson-and walks up, next to his head, her gun drawn.
“Rachel,” Sloane’s eyes slide back into focus, and he smiles.
“Sloane,” Rachel returns, casually clicking the safety off and sitting on a rock about three feet from his head.
“You’ll find that you don’t need the gun,” Sloane says slowly, as though he is coming back to himself.
Rachel brandishes it anyway.
“Sydney shot me-last-the last time,” Sloane says, and Rachel feels unexpectedly gleeful. Sloane can’t keep track of the time. He’s been down here for months, crushed, alone.
It feels right, and Rachel doesn’t stop the smile from spreading over her face.
A few seconds later her emotions slip away and she realizes the implication of what he has said. Sydney was here. Sydney shot him. Sydney didn’t tell anyone-and Sloane didn’t die.
Rachel looks for the bullet casing, and finds it, half-trapped, edging out from beneath Sloane’s shoulder.
“Right,” Rachel says, shaking her head. In all of the craziness that was APO, Rambaldi was definitely the craziest. Bombs and stolen missiles and the end of the world-okay, yeah, that’s not what seven-year-old Rachel thought she’d been doing as a grown-up, but when the James Bond factor kicks in and Rachel can calm down enough to breathe, it’s electrifying.
Rambaldi is a completely different thing. Rambaldi is all of the silly misconceptions Rachel thinks people have about religion, with mass destruction thrown in. Rambaldi is the scientifically impossible idea of seeing into the future.
Rachel doesn’t believe in God. She went to church with her family and wore a cross around her neck until college, but she’d never really bought it. The Big Bang, evolution, the probability of two subatomic particles meeting and forming an atom, a foundation of life-Rachel can grasp that.
The only time she’s felt remotely religious was while sitting next to her college boyfriend and praying with all her might for a pregnancy test to be negative (it was, and he broke up with her the next morning).
Rachel brings herself back to the tomb, back to the crumpled old man on the floor in front of her.
“What the hell did you do?”
“I am immortal now, Rachel,” Sloane says. “Rambaldi has given me his greatest gift. The greatest power.”
“Sydney’s prophecy,” Rachel says, remembering. “Rendering the greatest power unto utter desolation.”
“I guess this is desolate,” she starts, and Sloane’s eyes light up. Rachel’s heart catches hard in her chest at the sight and she feels heat run into her face.
“No, I’m not going to take pity on you,” she snaps, standing up, and she can almost see the angle he’s playing in his eyes. “You killed them. You killed Renee, Tom, Jack-Sydney’s fiancé-Dixon’s wife-everyone. You deserve everything you get.”
Sloane’s eyes widen.
“Weren’t expecting that from me, Arvin? Weak, naïve Rachel Gibson?”
“I never thought you were weak. You were young and talented-your technical skills rivaled Marshall’s-“
“Please,” she says coldly, and she can see with aching clarity how Sloane deceived so many for so long. “Trying to make me sympathetic. You’d like me to think of you as a father, like Sydney or her sister.”
God, Rachel thinks, standing still. Sydney must have treated him like a dad until she found out about SD-6.
She rounds on him, each step of her boot throwing harsh grains of sand against his cheeks.
“I hope you stay here forever. On the day the world ends you can think of everyone you killed and maybe you’ll discover you have a shred of a heart left.”
Her rage is full-blown now, and she’s surprised at herself. She’s not the type to get angry-smoldering eyes and the occasional sharp quip are more her style.
She kneels down next to him.
“And on that day, Arvin,” she whispers, “It will be too late.”
With that she gets up and walks away. Blood is rushing through her veins-Sloane, trapped, as good as dead, only worse.
It’s over.
--
sun streaming through the blinds and warming his shoulders
--
She’s on the first stair.
“Wait, Rachel. Stop.”
She doesn’t turn back. Doesn’t even turn around. She’s read the case reports-one depressing, drunken night two months ago-and this is classic Sloane. The father figure. The sympathy ploy. She’s seen through all of that. This is the last ditch attempt to feign his innocence.
“You said that I killed them all,” he continues, and she’s on the fourth step now, picking her way through the rubble.
“They don’t have to be dead,” he says, almost yelling.
She’s on the sixth step before it hits, and it’s running through her mind in an instant.
Rachel stops.
continue to part three
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.
--
they’re on the beach in santa barbara, no matter how cliché that sounds
--
The drive is long and isolated, and part of Rachel wants to call Marshall, share what is happening, listen to him talk about how he was finally allowed into one of the sixty-three server rooms yesterday and he can’t believe how advanced the CIA tech actually is.
Then she thinks about what he would say. She thinks of the Rambaldi myths and how Marshall, despite his intelligence, trusts every one-he would try to stop her. A coldness creeps into her stomach-you are alone, alone in the truth-and she drops her sat phone back onto the passenger seat.
She settles for rolling down the window and accelerating. The road is a mixture of gravel, dirt, and sand, and stinging particles fly up against her cheeks. She ignores them, squints through her sunglasses, and drives on.
--
he’s looking at her and the ring is glittering and she would have said yes
--
She reaches the tomb site-crater site, she realizes, stepping out of the jeep-around noon, and the sun starts to sear the skin uncovered by her white tank top from her favorite Gap outlet back in L.A.
It looks like the APO crater, Rachel realizes, twin craters on opposite sides of the world. Evidence of Sloane’s insanity. Sydney’s mother’s insanity.
It is topped by a huge slab, split down the center, the circle of the Rambaldi eye cracked cleanly in half.
Rachel stands back for a moment and thinks of the great Stone Table in the BBC version of the Chronicles of Narnia that she’d watched years ago when her little brother had the chicken pox.
Aslan lay on the table, dead, until dawn began to break and, with a rending crack, the stone shattered and Aslan rose again.
Rachel had liked Narnia more before her best friend’s mother had explained that is was a charming little allegory for “our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The sandy-gold dirt at her feet looks untouched-though Jack died here, she knows, and many guards besides. She picks her way over to what she assumes must be the entry to the tomb.
Stones are crumbled in front of it, as though an explosion rocked it from within.
There is a trace of a bootprint left in the hardened mud on the third step down-a small foot, the size of Rachel’s own, climbing up the stairs and out of the tomb. It is tinged red.
Sydney’s boot, Rachel knows. Sydney came, and descended, and climbed out again.
What did she find inside?
--
sometimes she thinks about waking up together
--
Halfway down the stairs, Rachel knows she should turn back.
She knows she should turn back the same way she knew three steps into the trip to the ladies’ room at junior prom that she should turn back and not leave her date alone with Mandy Camarillo.
The same way she knew somehow that she should’ve turned back and not let her new colleague in Vienna take her out for a coffee break. “Trust me,” Kelly had said. “It’ll be a blast! We can have some girl time.”
Her stomach is uncomfortable and her breath is coming in short gasps-that’s probably from hefting the rubble out of her way, the analytical part of Rachel’s mind chimes in.
Rachel knows she should turn back, but that’s never been enough to stop her.
Her burning curiosity lands a right hook on the jaw of her better judgment as she reaches the bottom of the staircase and pauses under the arched entrance of the tomb.
“I KNOW YOU’RE THERE,” the voice says, accusingly, echoing from somewhere inside.
Rachel jumps back and manages to trip over a stone and stub her toe. Swearing under her breath, she hops around for a moment before regaining her composure.
Then, she freezes, recognition flooding into her mind.
“I CAN HEAR YOU,” Arvin Sloane shouts, and Rachel’s muscles refuse to move. Of everything and anything she’d expected, she hadn’t expected Sloane.
She edges against the wall, her breaths coming out in sharp, stifled gasps.
“I CAN HEAR YOU, NADIA,” Sloane yells, and Rachel straightens in shock. This, then-this is different. She can use this.
Before she knows what she’s doing-before she’s even thought it through-she takes a deep breath and walks into the tomb. It’s what Sydney would do-it’s what Sydney did.
“Solitary wearing a little hard on you, Arvin?” Rachel asks. Her voice sounds strange to her ears-hatred, perhaps, scorn, pain-she’s surprised she didn’t hide them, didn’t school herself into neutrality. It reverberates through the stone-littered chamber.
At first she doesn’t see him, although she hears his sharp intake of breath. When she does see him she almost turns away. The old Rachel would have turned away.
Sloane lies pinned under a massive boulder. Only his torso is visible. Rachel breathes in through her teeth-quickly, silently, you can handle this, Gibson-and walks up, next to his head, her gun drawn.
“Rachel,” Sloane’s eyes slide back into focus, and he smiles.
“Sloane,” Rachel returns, casually clicking the safety off and sitting on a rock about three feet from his head.
“You’ll find that you don’t need the gun,” Sloane says slowly, as though he is coming back to himself.
Rachel brandishes it anyway.
“Sydney shot me-last-the last time,” Sloane says, and Rachel feels unexpectedly gleeful. Sloane can’t keep track of the time. He’s been down here for months, crushed, alone.
It feels right, and Rachel doesn’t stop the smile from spreading over her face.
A few seconds later her emotions slip away and she realizes the implication of what he has said. Sydney was here. Sydney shot him. Sydney didn’t tell anyone-and Sloane didn’t die.
Rachel looks for the bullet casing, and finds it, half-trapped, edging out from beneath Sloane’s shoulder.
“Right,” Rachel says, shaking her head. In all of the craziness that was APO, Rambaldi was definitely the craziest. Bombs and stolen missiles and the end of the world-okay, yeah, that’s not what seven-year-old Rachel thought she’d been doing as a grown-up, but when the James Bond factor kicks in and Rachel can calm down enough to breathe, it’s electrifying.
Rambaldi is a completely different thing. Rambaldi is all of the silly misconceptions Rachel thinks people have about religion, with mass destruction thrown in. Rambaldi is the scientifically impossible idea of seeing into the future.
Rachel doesn’t believe in God. She went to church with her family and wore a cross around her neck until college, but she’d never really bought it. The Big Bang, evolution, the probability of two subatomic particles meeting and forming an atom, a foundation of life-Rachel can grasp that.
The only time she’s felt remotely religious was while sitting next to her college boyfriend and praying with all her might for a pregnancy test to be negative (it was, and he broke up with her the next morning).
Rachel brings herself back to the tomb, back to the crumpled old man on the floor in front of her.
“What the hell did you do?”
“I am immortal now, Rachel,” Sloane says. “Rambaldi has given me his greatest gift. The greatest power.”
“Sydney’s prophecy,” Rachel says, remembering. “Rendering the greatest power unto utter desolation.”
“I guess this is desolate,” she starts, and Sloane’s eyes light up. Rachel’s heart catches hard in her chest at the sight and she feels heat run into her face.
“No, I’m not going to take pity on you,” she snaps, standing up, and she can almost see the angle he’s playing in his eyes. “You killed them. You killed Renee, Tom, Jack-Sydney’s fiancé-Dixon’s wife-everyone. You deserve everything you get.”
Sloane’s eyes widen.
“Weren’t expecting that from me, Arvin? Weak, naïve Rachel Gibson?”
“I never thought you were weak. You were young and talented-your technical skills rivaled Marshall’s-“
“Please,” she says coldly, and she can see with aching clarity how Sloane deceived so many for so long. “Trying to make me sympathetic. You’d like me to think of you as a father, like Sydney or her sister.”
God, Rachel thinks, standing still. Sydney must have treated him like a dad until she found out about SD-6.
She rounds on him, each step of her boot throwing harsh grains of sand against his cheeks.
“I hope you stay here forever. On the day the world ends you can think of everyone you killed and maybe you’ll discover you have a shred of a heart left.”
Her rage is full-blown now, and she’s surprised at herself. She’s not the type to get angry-smoldering eyes and the occasional sharp quip are more her style.
She kneels down next to him.
“And on that day, Arvin,” she whispers, “It will be too late.”
With that she gets up and walks away. Blood is rushing through her veins-Sloane, trapped, as good as dead, only worse.
It’s over.
--
sun streaming through the blinds and warming his shoulders
--
She’s on the first stair.
“Wait, Rachel. Stop.”
She doesn’t turn back. Doesn’t even turn around. She’s read the case reports-one depressing, drunken night two months ago-and this is classic Sloane. The father figure. The sympathy ploy. She’s seen through all of that. This is the last ditch attempt to feign his innocence.
“You said that I killed them all,” he continues, and she’s on the fourth step now, picking her way through the rubble.
“They don’t have to be dead,” he says, almost yelling.
She’s on the sixth step before it hits, and it’s running through her mind in an instant.
Rachel stops.
continue to part three
back to part one