FIC: Kitchen Full of Knives (Alias)
Title: Kitchen Full of Knives
Author: katjad
Fandom: Alias
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Will/not!Francie, Sark/Allison
Word Count: 3,747
DISCLAIMER: J.J. Abrams’ characters, not mine. Spoilers for a good bit of Season Two.
Summary: She has been living as Francie Calfo for months now. She has had to push Allison Doren out of her life. She can’t, after all, be Francie if she is Allison. Sometimes she wonders which of them she really killed.
Notes: Thanks to actriz_k for looking this over a while back. Some details and one direct quote are from alias.fannesite. Originally published on November 11, 2005.
Kitchen Full of Knives
1.
“You don’t fancy him, do you?” Sark tilts her chin towards him.
She meets his eyes. “Of course not,” she says, and kisses him.
He promises her that he will reverse the gene therapy, that he will bring her back. She tells him that he must. She suspects even then that it might not be possible.
2.
Sark doesn’t seem Russian, although his father is a Russian diplomat. Maybe he would seem Russian if it weren’t for the accent and the looks and the wit. But she has seen the Russian in him. He has endless depths of cruelty behind his too-young British face. He does not shy away from the casual suffering of others, especially when he has inflicted it himself. It isn’t schadenfreude, per se, but he is ruthless and he is brittle and it is often impossible to tell what he is thinking because his face is a mask when he wants it to be, and he wants it often.
Will Tippin could not be further from Sark if he tried. Will, scruffy American journalist with a restaurant-owner girlfriend. With Sark she’d had to wait; the waiting was agony and most of the fun; once they were together, they both knew better than to think anything might come of it. With Will the waiting is over and done by another woman entirely, and she has had to make something of it very quickly. When Francie died, Will never suspected a thing. The sex was good if not magnificent but it improved. She learns rapidly. She has created an intimacy so authentic that she sometimes even believes it herself.
3.
She feels bad about the hypnosis at first.
“Tippin isn’t going to just tell you what you need to know.” Sark paces. He does this when he is arguing a point and knows he is right. He knows she is only being stubborn.
“There are ways to ask questions that he won’t suspect,” she tries. “He’s not trained to recognize deceptive questioning.”
“He’s an investigative journalist, Allison. He’ll recognize it when he hears it. Getting people to reveal things they don’t mean to say is his job.”
“He’ll figure out something’s wrong with him after he’s been under hypnosis.” She isn’t lying: the smart ones do catch on to their inexplicable amnesia after a time. They find the doctors who can explain it, the psychiatrists who can reverse it. The smart ones cause trouble.
“It’s up to you to make sure he doesn’t, then.” Sark fixes her with a smile that isn’t precisely a smile. It means that the discussion is over and that he has won. This is more of the Russian in him.
“How?” She places her hands on his shoulders and looks into his eyes. In this body of hers they are exactly the same height. She has learned the way the world looks from this new angle and she has learned to adjust, but it is still sometimes unnerving.
Sark’s smile is real this time. “Make him forget that he is forgetting.”
4.
Will paces the kitchen sometimes with his right hand to his mouth. He bites the skin over the knuckles of his index finger when he is concentrating intensely. He often does not realize he is doing it. The first time she saw him doing this, she thought: He knows. She’d almost panicked, but what, exactly, she’d thought he knew, she is not sure. That she’s been hypnotizing him? That she’s been pumping him for information? That he is the unsuspected and unsuspecting leak the CIA is looking to stopper up?
There is no way he could know these things, of course. She has been careful. She is good at what she does.
But there are other things that she has not told him to forget. She has not told him to forget that she bought a tie for Vaughn, that she did not recognize the names of Francie’s ex-boyfriends, that she sometimes eats Sydney’s coffee ice cream without thinking. Francie’s genes do not include Francie’s memories, it seems.
She could tell him to forget these incidents if she wanted. It would be no more difficult than telling him to forget that she has used him for information half a dozen times now, maybe more. But she doesn’t do it. She doesn’t say, Forget I slipped. Forget that I act strangely sometimes, that I seem different to you sometimes. Forget that I am anyone other than Francie Calfo.
It isn’t any misguided sense of fair play that stops her, and it’s certainly not that she’s trying to make some sort of a game out of this.
She has been living as Francie Calfo for months now. She has had to push Allison Doren out of her life. She can’t, after all, be Francie if she is Allison. Sometimes she wonders which of them she really killed. She doesn’t want to tell Will to forget that she is anyone but Francie because then she will know. She has to stay a little bit Allison, so that when Sark undoes the process there will be someone that she can return to being. She has spent months being Allison-as-Francie; she does not want to know what it is like to be Francie-as-Allison. She is still Allison, she tells herself. She can go back to being Allison without a problem, because she is Allison; she has been Allison all along.
If she is truthful with herself, she knows better. She is not Francie, much as she might look and talk and try to act like her, but she is not precisely Allison, either. She cannot be Allison when she has molded herself into Francie and she cannot be Francie when she is still part Allison. She is both and she is neither and she cannot escape from this now that she has started it. She is no one but the woman who loves Will Tippin and she cannot be that woman because that woman does not exist.
5.
Sark is uncannily good at knowing how the CIA will act in any given situation. He says that this is because he has known many of the CIA agents for years. He has worked against them and he has worked with them. He knows how they will act because he has watched them act many times before.
This does not detract from the uncanniness of Sark’s predictions. He cannot possibly know every agent in the CIA; he cannot have been privy to every operation in which they participated. Sark has the devil’s luck and the devil’s instincts and the devil’s way of staying one step ahead of the rest. She does not know if she believes in the devil, but if he exists, Sark could probably outsmart even him.
They won’t suspect that she is the double, Sark tells her, if she ensures that they suspect Will. If she does everything that he tells her to do, they will catch Will and they will find the signs they are looking for.
She does, and they do and they do.
They will take him to a place that their government claims does not exist, Sark says, and they will torture him and he will tell them what they want to hear and if they ever figure out that he is no double, which they won’t, it won’t matter, Sark says, because by then she will be gone.
This doesn’t happen quite as Sark plans.
6.
She is not sure how Will manages to escape when they ambush the DOJ transport. The interceptors tell her that everything is in place, she hears gunfire, she hears silence. Later she hears Sydney say that someone tried to break Will out, that Dixon saw Will shoot into the armored truck. This might, Sydney says, have been self-defense, but there is no way to prove this: Will is the only person who could tell them, and they are unlikely to believe anything Will says after his questioning (her hypnosis was successful, it seems) and Will isn’t going to tell them anything at all because Will is gone.
“What do you mean, gone?” she asks.
Sydney fingers her beer. This is the first time she has ever seen Sydney drink during the day. “After Dixon saw him shoot in the truck he disappeared. Dixon was defending himself against the last hostile. He didn’t see him leave.”
“Oh God. That doesn’t look good for Will, does it?”
“No,” Sydney says, “it doesn’t.” She takes a long sip of beer and does not say anything. Finally: “It just doesn’t make sense, you know? I can’t shake the feeling that he’s being set up but why is he running, then?”
The answer comes soon: he’s scared, Will Tippin. He’s scared and he doesn’t know whom to trust.
He calls Sydney first. She can hear his voice loud over Sydney’s cell phone: “I’m sorry, Syd. I love you but I can’t trust you.” For a moment Sydney’s face crumples but then she folds it back into its proper angles and to look it her it is as if nothing has happened at all. She makes note to remember that Sydney, too, can compartmentalize her feelings like she was born for this.
Sydney rinses out her empty beer bottle and places it in the recycling. “I’m going back to work,” she says. “If you hear from Will, let me know, okay?”
“Of course.”
Will calls not a minute after Sydney leaves. “Francie,” he says, “is Sydney there?”
“No,” she says. “She just left.”
For a moment she is sure he’s going to say, Damn it, I wanted to talk to her, I realized I was wrong, I can trust Sydney, I’m being a fool. But he says, “Thank God. I can’t trust her anymore. Listen, Francie, I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
He is at a gas station southeast of L.A., he tells her. He can’t come back to the house. “Come get me,” he says. “Bring as much cash as you can.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he says.
“Francie.”
“What?”
“Thanks. I’m glad I can trust you.”
She wishes it were true. “I love you,” she says, which is the truth; she wish it weren’t. Everything would be easier if it weren’t.
“Love you too.” He hangs up.
She holds the phone for a long moment before finally she sets it down.
7.
They can run away, she thinks as she drives. They can disappear into a city. Not in America, of course; they will have to leave America, and that will be tricky because the CIA will be watching the airports and the borders. Tricky but not impossible; her training has not been useless. She can call in favors from contacts Sark and Sloane do not know. She can make Will disappear. She herself has begun to disappear already.
They can go to a city. Not in America and not in Russia, but there are other cities. It’s easy to disappear in a city. They can blend into the lights and the noise and it will be as if they were never there at all.
Will will want to know how she knows so well what she is doing. He is trained to ask questions; he won’t relent, and eventually she will have to answer. Maybe, eventually, she will tell him the truth.
But what is the truth? She is Allison Doren, or she was. She is Francie Calfo, or she is trying to be. She started as one and she is working towards the other and just now she is neither and she is both. She is the woman who loves Will Tippin, and she hopes that that will be enough.
8.
Will is waiting for her at the gas station. “I told them my car broke down outside of town,” he says. “The attendant was starting to look at me funny. I’m glad you’re here.”
She kisses him quickly. He leans in for more but there’s no time for that. “We need to get out of here,” she says. “They might’ve called the cops on you.”
“Right,” Will says, and scrambles into the car. He clicks his seatbelt into place as she pulls out of the lot.
“Where to?” She has a dozen ideas. All of them involve avoiding public places where they might be recognized and also losing the car as quickly as possible. Damn Francie for choosing a blindingly red car; hardly the least conspicuous of colors.
“South for now,” Will says. He doesn’t add, Until I think of something, but he doesn’t need to.
They exit half an hour later and pull into the first motel they see. It is small and seedy. The camera above the counter doesn’t actually film anything; she’s almost willing to bet her life on it. She makes Will wait by the car under the pretense of collecting the luggage while she pays for a room. She comes out with a key. Will pulls a box of old restaurant bills and an overcoat out of the trunk, pretends these are their luggage.
They find their room, go inside, lock the door. He is scared, Will Tippin. He does not know who the people were that attacked the DOJ transport. He does not know what the DOJ wants from him or what the others want from him. He does not know how to convince them that he is no double. He has lost a good bit of his memory and he is losing his mind and he is scared.
Nearly all of this is at least partly her fault, but she cannot say so. She tells him that she knows he is not crazy, that she knows he is no double, but she cannot give him certainty and that is what he needs, she can see it. He does not believe her because he is no longer sure that he himself believes he is no double. He does not know what it is to be one person in body and another in mind and both in the heart, which is most dangerous of all. She cannot tell him this and so he is not sure. He does not know what to believe. In this, at least, they are together.
9.
When Will’s name has been cleared and they are home, Will tells her that he was never sure he wasn’t crazy, even after they told him they’d decided he really wasn’t a double, after all. He’d made them show him the DNA samples, the comparison tests, the results.
“I wanted to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake,” he says. “When they told me I didn’t believe them. I needed to see the proof.”
He’s good enough at keeping secrets, Will Tippin, although he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it, but he can do it. Being unsure of his own identity is what he cannot take. It nearly drove him mad. It’s good, he says, to know who he is again.
She wishes she could say the same.
10.
She meets Sark in a parking garage downtown. “Allison…” He pauses, then says, “We can't reverse the process. Markovic's lab was destroyed. But we're doing everything we can to retrieve the lost data. And I'm hopeful that we will find a way to reverse the process.”
“I may have to stay this way?” she says.
“No, no,” Sark says. “We'll get you back.”
She doesn’t doubt that Sark will do everything he can, but she isn’t so sure, all the same.
11.
When Will comes home from work, he goes to the bathroom. He says he has a headache; he wants some aspirin. He’s gone far too long just to be downing pills.
He could be doing any number of ordinary things in the bathroom, of course. This is well and good and perfectly possible, but it does nothing to stop the thought that speeds through her skull: he knows. Will knows.
There is nothing logical to confirm this, nothing but her instincts, and her instincts rarely fail her. She does not want to think about what this means but luckily, she doesn’t have to. They’d started training her at six, identified her again over a decade later, trained her. They’d invested far too much work in her to let emotions get in her way. She was excellent at compartmentalizing, the best, they said, they’d ever seen, and while the cynic in her has always wanted to think they say that to everyone, she knows better: she knows she’s good.
Whatever she might feel for Will, she cannot afford to be captured. The consequences of her being turned over to the CIA are unimaginable. No matter how long she can withstand interrogation (and it will be a long time: here too she excels) everyone breaks eventually. No matter how swiftly and thoroughly Sark acts, something will slip. The consequences, she knows, are unimaginable. Sparing Will’s life is hardly worth that, no matter how she might feel.
How she does feel. But now is not the time for such things.
12.
She remembers almost nothing of her training at age six, other than that she liked it and it was fun. She remembers vague bits of praise: Good girl, you finished very quickly, now do it again. She also remembers bright flashes of color.
She has since been told-during her second round of training, the training she originally thought was her first-that there was something involving detail recognition in the color test. She does not know what sort of detail recognition they meant, but whatever they were conditioning her for must have worked because in Sydney and Francie’s cluttered kitchen she sees exactly what she needs to see and nothing more: a spool of sturdy twine for trussing poultry, a pair of scissors. She measures quickly, cuts, loops the length of twine around her hands.
13.
She backs up against the wall just beside the door, arms ready at her sides, twine between her fingers. She is good at waiting; she is patient, but killing a person has never meant anything before and she wants to be done with the experience as quickly as possible.
The bathroom door creaks open. Will’s footfalls echo loudly in her ears. Almost, almost-
He comes into the room. He does not look to his left, does not notice her. Patience, she tells herself, patience, wait until it is time. He looks around warily. She can almost hear him thinking: “Oh shit, where’s Francie?”
Patience, patience.
He takes a step backwards, eyes searching the room. Now. She lunges toward him, arms rising up to cinch the twine around his throat. He gags, grapples at her hands. The twin is strong and she is strong but somehow he twists out from her grip, makes for the kitchen. The kitchen full of knives.
Will moves faster than she would have thought. He grabs a butcher’s knife, goes for her stomach. For a moment he has her off her guard. For a moment he might win. He is fast but not fast enough: she wrests the knife from him-she is not thinking, she does not have to-and she drives it into his gut.
He gasps; his eyes unfocus, go wide. Her face is wet; her hands are wet. Tears on one, blood the other, but there’s no difference really. She drives the knife in deeper. “I’m sorry,” she tries to say, “I’m sorry,” but her mouth cannot form the words.
14.
She never understood Romeo and Juliet when she was younger. The star-crossed lovers bit she liked: love at first sight seemed ridiculous but also reassuring in its way. Killing themselves when they thought the other was dead, though, was stupid in her eyes. Maybe they thought there was nothing left to live for without the other, but they still had their families, didn’t they? There would be other lovers.
But here she is, watching over Will’s body in the bathtub. She has a dead lover and no family at all and there is a certain appeal, isn’t there, in a pair of dead lovers? No double suicide, this. She went crazy, they’ll say, crazy and killed her boyfriend. Realized what she’d done and killed herself, too.
She could run, of course. She could call in favors. She could disappear. But then it would be a game: see who’s cleverest, Sydney or Sark or her, and she isn’t in the mood for games, especially those she is almost guaranteed to lose.
Suicide, then. She’s got a gun. If they catch her they’ll ask questions, but a bullet to the temple will stop that as long as she doesn’t fuck it up at the last second, slip and end up a vegetable instead of dead. She won’t, of course.
She’s not afraid of death. She’s come close to dying so many times that the thought of death doesn’t scare her anymore, not really. She has enough enemies that death is almost a constant companion. She sometimes wakes up and thinks, It might be cloudy today. I might die today. This is okay. One day it must happen, after all. She has always known that that day might be soon.
There is nothing really preventing her. Her loyalty to Sark is not so great. She has always fancied him, but fancying someone and loving them are hardly the same… She has no great loyalty to Sark. She is only loyal to herself, it seems. Will is dead and she is not. If she dies, too, maybe it will make things better.
She will always wonder later why she doesn’t do it. Is it her instinct for self-preservation? She has, indeed, always known when to think of herself first. Maybe it is just that she’s never thought her life would end in suicide. There have always been enough people trying to kill her that suicide has seemed unnecessary.
It is not that she is weak or scared. She is perfectly capable of holding a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger.
So why doesn’t she?
Afterwards she does not run. She doesn’t know why. She cleans the blood from the floor, from the carpet. She changes clothes; she makes tea. She adds milk and two sugars, the way Francie likes it. She sits on the sofa. She waits. She does not know what she is waiting for.
Author: katjad
Fandom: Alias
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Will/not!Francie, Sark/Allison
Word Count: 3,747
DISCLAIMER: J.J. Abrams’ characters, not mine. Spoilers for a good bit of Season Two.
Summary: She has been living as Francie Calfo for months now. She has had to push Allison Doren out of her life. She can’t, after all, be Francie if she is Allison. Sometimes she wonders which of them she really killed.
Notes: Thanks to actriz_k for looking this over a while back. Some details and one direct quote are from alias.fannesite. Originally published on November 11, 2005.
Kitchen Full of Knives
1.
“You don’t fancy him, do you?” Sark tilts her chin towards him.
She meets his eyes. “Of course not,” she says, and kisses him.
He promises her that he will reverse the gene therapy, that he will bring her back. She tells him that he must. She suspects even then that it might not be possible.
2.
Sark doesn’t seem Russian, although his father is a Russian diplomat. Maybe he would seem Russian if it weren’t for the accent and the looks and the wit. But she has seen the Russian in him. He has endless depths of cruelty behind his too-young British face. He does not shy away from the casual suffering of others, especially when he has inflicted it himself. It isn’t schadenfreude, per se, but he is ruthless and he is brittle and it is often impossible to tell what he is thinking because his face is a mask when he wants it to be, and he wants it often.
Will Tippin could not be further from Sark if he tried. Will, scruffy American journalist with a restaurant-owner girlfriend. With Sark she’d had to wait; the waiting was agony and most of the fun; once they were together, they both knew better than to think anything might come of it. With Will the waiting is over and done by another woman entirely, and she has had to make something of it very quickly. When Francie died, Will never suspected a thing. The sex was good if not magnificent but it improved. She learns rapidly. She has created an intimacy so authentic that she sometimes even believes it herself.
3.
She feels bad about the hypnosis at first.
“Tippin isn’t going to just tell you what you need to know.” Sark paces. He does this when he is arguing a point and knows he is right. He knows she is only being stubborn.
“There are ways to ask questions that he won’t suspect,” she tries. “He’s not trained to recognize deceptive questioning.”
“He’s an investigative journalist, Allison. He’ll recognize it when he hears it. Getting people to reveal things they don’t mean to say is his job.”
“He’ll figure out something’s wrong with him after he’s been under hypnosis.” She isn’t lying: the smart ones do catch on to their inexplicable amnesia after a time. They find the doctors who can explain it, the psychiatrists who can reverse it. The smart ones cause trouble.
“It’s up to you to make sure he doesn’t, then.” Sark fixes her with a smile that isn’t precisely a smile. It means that the discussion is over and that he has won. This is more of the Russian in him.
“How?” She places her hands on his shoulders and looks into his eyes. In this body of hers they are exactly the same height. She has learned the way the world looks from this new angle and she has learned to adjust, but it is still sometimes unnerving.
Sark’s smile is real this time. “Make him forget that he is forgetting.”
4.
Will paces the kitchen sometimes with his right hand to his mouth. He bites the skin over the knuckles of his index finger when he is concentrating intensely. He often does not realize he is doing it. The first time she saw him doing this, she thought: He knows. She’d almost panicked, but what, exactly, she’d thought he knew, she is not sure. That she’s been hypnotizing him? That she’s been pumping him for information? That he is the unsuspected and unsuspecting leak the CIA is looking to stopper up?
There is no way he could know these things, of course. She has been careful. She is good at what she does.
But there are other things that she has not told him to forget. She has not told him to forget that she bought a tie for Vaughn, that she did not recognize the names of Francie’s ex-boyfriends, that she sometimes eats Sydney’s coffee ice cream without thinking. Francie’s genes do not include Francie’s memories, it seems.
She could tell him to forget these incidents if she wanted. It would be no more difficult than telling him to forget that she has used him for information half a dozen times now, maybe more. But she doesn’t do it. She doesn’t say, Forget I slipped. Forget that I act strangely sometimes, that I seem different to you sometimes. Forget that I am anyone other than Francie Calfo.
It isn’t any misguided sense of fair play that stops her, and it’s certainly not that she’s trying to make some sort of a game out of this.
She has been living as Francie Calfo for months now. She has had to push Allison Doren out of her life. She can’t, after all, be Francie if she is Allison. Sometimes she wonders which of them she really killed. She doesn’t want to tell Will to forget that she is anyone but Francie because then she will know. She has to stay a little bit Allison, so that when Sark undoes the process there will be someone that she can return to being. She has spent months being Allison-as-Francie; she does not want to know what it is like to be Francie-as-Allison. She is still Allison, she tells herself. She can go back to being Allison without a problem, because she is Allison; she has been Allison all along.
If she is truthful with herself, she knows better. She is not Francie, much as she might look and talk and try to act like her, but she is not precisely Allison, either. She cannot be Allison when she has molded herself into Francie and she cannot be Francie when she is still part Allison. She is both and she is neither and she cannot escape from this now that she has started it. She is no one but the woman who loves Will Tippin and she cannot be that woman because that woman does not exist.
5.
Sark is uncannily good at knowing how the CIA will act in any given situation. He says that this is because he has known many of the CIA agents for years. He has worked against them and he has worked with them. He knows how they will act because he has watched them act many times before.
This does not detract from the uncanniness of Sark’s predictions. He cannot possibly know every agent in the CIA; he cannot have been privy to every operation in which they participated. Sark has the devil’s luck and the devil’s instincts and the devil’s way of staying one step ahead of the rest. She does not know if she believes in the devil, but if he exists, Sark could probably outsmart even him.
They won’t suspect that she is the double, Sark tells her, if she ensures that they suspect Will. If she does everything that he tells her to do, they will catch Will and they will find the signs they are looking for.
She does, and they do and they do.
They will take him to a place that their government claims does not exist, Sark says, and they will torture him and he will tell them what they want to hear and if they ever figure out that he is no double, which they won’t, it won’t matter, Sark says, because by then she will be gone.
This doesn’t happen quite as Sark plans.
6.
She is not sure how Will manages to escape when they ambush the DOJ transport. The interceptors tell her that everything is in place, she hears gunfire, she hears silence. Later she hears Sydney say that someone tried to break Will out, that Dixon saw Will shoot into the armored truck. This might, Sydney says, have been self-defense, but there is no way to prove this: Will is the only person who could tell them, and they are unlikely to believe anything Will says after his questioning (her hypnosis was successful, it seems) and Will isn’t going to tell them anything at all because Will is gone.
“What do you mean, gone?” she asks.
Sydney fingers her beer. This is the first time she has ever seen Sydney drink during the day. “After Dixon saw him shoot in the truck he disappeared. Dixon was defending himself against the last hostile. He didn’t see him leave.”
“Oh God. That doesn’t look good for Will, does it?”
“No,” Sydney says, “it doesn’t.” She takes a long sip of beer and does not say anything. Finally: “It just doesn’t make sense, you know? I can’t shake the feeling that he’s being set up but why is he running, then?”
The answer comes soon: he’s scared, Will Tippin. He’s scared and he doesn’t know whom to trust.
He calls Sydney first. She can hear his voice loud over Sydney’s cell phone: “I’m sorry, Syd. I love you but I can’t trust you.” For a moment Sydney’s face crumples but then she folds it back into its proper angles and to look it her it is as if nothing has happened at all. She makes note to remember that Sydney, too, can compartmentalize her feelings like she was born for this.
Sydney rinses out her empty beer bottle and places it in the recycling. “I’m going back to work,” she says. “If you hear from Will, let me know, okay?”
“Of course.”
Will calls not a minute after Sydney leaves. “Francie,” he says, “is Sydney there?”
“No,” she says. “She just left.”
For a moment she is sure he’s going to say, Damn it, I wanted to talk to her, I realized I was wrong, I can trust Sydney, I’m being a fool. But he says, “Thank God. I can’t trust her anymore. Listen, Francie, I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
He is at a gas station southeast of L.A., he tells her. He can’t come back to the house. “Come get me,” he says. “Bring as much cash as you can.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he says.
“Francie.”
“What?”
“Thanks. I’m glad I can trust you.”
She wishes it were true. “I love you,” she says, which is the truth; she wish it weren’t. Everything would be easier if it weren’t.
“Love you too.” He hangs up.
She holds the phone for a long moment before finally she sets it down.
7.
They can run away, she thinks as she drives. They can disappear into a city. Not in America, of course; they will have to leave America, and that will be tricky because the CIA will be watching the airports and the borders. Tricky but not impossible; her training has not been useless. She can call in favors from contacts Sark and Sloane do not know. She can make Will disappear. She herself has begun to disappear already.
They can go to a city. Not in America and not in Russia, but there are other cities. It’s easy to disappear in a city. They can blend into the lights and the noise and it will be as if they were never there at all.
Will will want to know how she knows so well what she is doing. He is trained to ask questions; he won’t relent, and eventually she will have to answer. Maybe, eventually, she will tell him the truth.
But what is the truth? She is Allison Doren, or she was. She is Francie Calfo, or she is trying to be. She started as one and she is working towards the other and just now she is neither and she is both. She is the woman who loves Will Tippin, and she hopes that that will be enough.
8.
Will is waiting for her at the gas station. “I told them my car broke down outside of town,” he says. “The attendant was starting to look at me funny. I’m glad you’re here.”
She kisses him quickly. He leans in for more but there’s no time for that. “We need to get out of here,” she says. “They might’ve called the cops on you.”
“Right,” Will says, and scrambles into the car. He clicks his seatbelt into place as she pulls out of the lot.
“Where to?” She has a dozen ideas. All of them involve avoiding public places where they might be recognized and also losing the car as quickly as possible. Damn Francie for choosing a blindingly red car; hardly the least conspicuous of colors.
“South for now,” Will says. He doesn’t add, Until I think of something, but he doesn’t need to.
They exit half an hour later and pull into the first motel they see. It is small and seedy. The camera above the counter doesn’t actually film anything; she’s almost willing to bet her life on it. She makes Will wait by the car under the pretense of collecting the luggage while she pays for a room. She comes out with a key. Will pulls a box of old restaurant bills and an overcoat out of the trunk, pretends these are their luggage.
They find their room, go inside, lock the door. He is scared, Will Tippin. He does not know who the people were that attacked the DOJ transport. He does not know what the DOJ wants from him or what the others want from him. He does not know how to convince them that he is no double. He has lost a good bit of his memory and he is losing his mind and he is scared.
Nearly all of this is at least partly her fault, but she cannot say so. She tells him that she knows he is not crazy, that she knows he is no double, but she cannot give him certainty and that is what he needs, she can see it. He does not believe her because he is no longer sure that he himself believes he is no double. He does not know what it is to be one person in body and another in mind and both in the heart, which is most dangerous of all. She cannot tell him this and so he is not sure. He does not know what to believe. In this, at least, they are together.
9.
When Will’s name has been cleared and they are home, Will tells her that he was never sure he wasn’t crazy, even after they told him they’d decided he really wasn’t a double, after all. He’d made them show him the DNA samples, the comparison tests, the results.
“I wanted to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake,” he says. “When they told me I didn’t believe them. I needed to see the proof.”
He’s good enough at keeping secrets, Will Tippin, although he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it, but he can do it. Being unsure of his own identity is what he cannot take. It nearly drove him mad. It’s good, he says, to know who he is again.
She wishes she could say the same.
10.
She meets Sark in a parking garage downtown. “Allison…” He pauses, then says, “We can't reverse the process. Markovic's lab was destroyed. But we're doing everything we can to retrieve the lost data. And I'm hopeful that we will find a way to reverse the process.”
“I may have to stay this way?” she says.
“No, no,” Sark says. “We'll get you back.”
She doesn’t doubt that Sark will do everything he can, but she isn’t so sure, all the same.
11.
When Will comes home from work, he goes to the bathroom. He says he has a headache; he wants some aspirin. He’s gone far too long just to be downing pills.
He could be doing any number of ordinary things in the bathroom, of course. This is well and good and perfectly possible, but it does nothing to stop the thought that speeds through her skull: he knows. Will knows.
There is nothing logical to confirm this, nothing but her instincts, and her instincts rarely fail her. She does not want to think about what this means but luckily, she doesn’t have to. They’d started training her at six, identified her again over a decade later, trained her. They’d invested far too much work in her to let emotions get in her way. She was excellent at compartmentalizing, the best, they said, they’d ever seen, and while the cynic in her has always wanted to think they say that to everyone, she knows better: she knows she’s good.
Whatever she might feel for Will, she cannot afford to be captured. The consequences of her being turned over to the CIA are unimaginable. No matter how long she can withstand interrogation (and it will be a long time: here too she excels) everyone breaks eventually. No matter how swiftly and thoroughly Sark acts, something will slip. The consequences, she knows, are unimaginable. Sparing Will’s life is hardly worth that, no matter how she might feel.
How she does feel. But now is not the time for such things.
12.
She remembers almost nothing of her training at age six, other than that she liked it and it was fun. She remembers vague bits of praise: Good girl, you finished very quickly, now do it again. She also remembers bright flashes of color.
She has since been told-during her second round of training, the training she originally thought was her first-that there was something involving detail recognition in the color test. She does not know what sort of detail recognition they meant, but whatever they were conditioning her for must have worked because in Sydney and Francie’s cluttered kitchen she sees exactly what she needs to see and nothing more: a spool of sturdy twine for trussing poultry, a pair of scissors. She measures quickly, cuts, loops the length of twine around her hands.
13.
She backs up against the wall just beside the door, arms ready at her sides, twine between her fingers. She is good at waiting; she is patient, but killing a person has never meant anything before and she wants to be done with the experience as quickly as possible.
The bathroom door creaks open. Will’s footfalls echo loudly in her ears. Almost, almost-
He comes into the room. He does not look to his left, does not notice her. Patience, she tells herself, patience, wait until it is time. He looks around warily. She can almost hear him thinking: “Oh shit, where’s Francie?”
Patience, patience.
He takes a step backwards, eyes searching the room. Now. She lunges toward him, arms rising up to cinch the twine around his throat. He gags, grapples at her hands. The twin is strong and she is strong but somehow he twists out from her grip, makes for the kitchen. The kitchen full of knives.
Will moves faster than she would have thought. He grabs a butcher’s knife, goes for her stomach. For a moment he has her off her guard. For a moment he might win. He is fast but not fast enough: she wrests the knife from him-she is not thinking, she does not have to-and she drives it into his gut.
He gasps; his eyes unfocus, go wide. Her face is wet; her hands are wet. Tears on one, blood the other, but there’s no difference really. She drives the knife in deeper. “I’m sorry,” she tries to say, “I’m sorry,” but her mouth cannot form the words.
14.
She never understood Romeo and Juliet when she was younger. The star-crossed lovers bit she liked: love at first sight seemed ridiculous but also reassuring in its way. Killing themselves when they thought the other was dead, though, was stupid in her eyes. Maybe they thought there was nothing left to live for without the other, but they still had their families, didn’t they? There would be other lovers.
But here she is, watching over Will’s body in the bathtub. She has a dead lover and no family at all and there is a certain appeal, isn’t there, in a pair of dead lovers? No double suicide, this. She went crazy, they’ll say, crazy and killed her boyfriend. Realized what she’d done and killed herself, too.
She could run, of course. She could call in favors. She could disappear. But then it would be a game: see who’s cleverest, Sydney or Sark or her, and she isn’t in the mood for games, especially those she is almost guaranteed to lose.
Suicide, then. She’s got a gun. If they catch her they’ll ask questions, but a bullet to the temple will stop that as long as she doesn’t fuck it up at the last second, slip and end up a vegetable instead of dead. She won’t, of course.
She’s not afraid of death. She’s come close to dying so many times that the thought of death doesn’t scare her anymore, not really. She has enough enemies that death is almost a constant companion. She sometimes wakes up and thinks, It might be cloudy today. I might die today. This is okay. One day it must happen, after all. She has always known that that day might be soon.
There is nothing really preventing her. Her loyalty to Sark is not so great. She has always fancied him, but fancying someone and loving them are hardly the same… She has no great loyalty to Sark. She is only loyal to herself, it seems. Will is dead and she is not. If she dies, too, maybe it will make things better.
She will always wonder later why she doesn’t do it. Is it her instinct for self-preservation? She has, indeed, always known when to think of herself first. Maybe it is just that she’s never thought her life would end in suicide. There have always been enough people trying to kill her that suicide has seemed unnecessary.
It is not that she is weak or scared. She is perfectly capable of holding a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger.
So why doesn’t she?
Afterwards she does not run. She doesn’t know why. She cleans the blood from the floor, from the carpet. She changes clothes; she makes tea. She adds milk and two sugars, the way Francie likes it. She sits on the sofa. She waits. She does not know what she is waiting for.