Fic: A Fairer House than Prose (Alias, Irina Derevko)
I'm pretty sure Saturday evening is one of the worst times to post fic, but I'm feeling impatient. The long-advertised Irina Derevko fic (and the first "real" fic I've written in over a year) is finally as complete as it's going to be, so now seems like as good a time as any.
Title: A Fairer House than Prose
Characters/Pairing: Irina-centric, plus some Irina/Jack
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: through the end of season 4
Summary: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"
Author's Notes: 3700 words. Many thanks, as ever, to the wonderful gabolange for the beta. I should offer the disclaimer that there is a lot of Alias I have not seen, and while I have tried to cover my bases with fact-checking, it's possible that I've flubbed up some canonical details along the way-apologies. Among what I have not seen is season 5, mostly because I prefer to deny its place in Irina's canon. Thus, when this fic ends after the events of "Before the Flood," I like to think of Irina looking at a future that isn't what season 5 offered for her. That said, I don't think this fic rules out season 5, either, so take all of that as you prefer.
**
Professor Laura Bristow was notorious for the assignment she gave on the first day of every new class.
In a letter to his brothers dated December 21, 1817, John Keats wrote the following:
"several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Discuss.
"It's a writing assessment," Irina explained to her skeptical department chair. "I want to know what I'm dealing with."
Most of her colleagues assigned opening day writing assessments that asked students to discuss op-ed pieces on Margaret Thatcher, Brenda Ann Spencer, or SALT II; a significant portion of students defected to those professors' kinder, gentler sections of freshman composition after being faced with Professor Bristow and John Keats. Irina was polite and mildly apologetic to her colleagues, but she held her ground on Keats.
The students who stayed were dismayed to discover that Professor Bristow explained neither the Keats quotation nor her rationale for assigning it; the assessment essays were returned with scrupulous comment on grammar and style, and not a word about their content. Those who were brave enough to sign up for a second or third Bristow class (and many of them did-her reputation among the English majors was "terrifying, but worth it") found the same Keats assignment on the first day of each class, from freshman composition to her upper-level seminars (Religion and Doubt in Victorian Literature; The Works of Thomas Hardy; The Russian Novel in Translation).
After some intrigued floundering with the passage in freshman comp, followed by somewhat more capable grappling with it in Brit Lit Survey II, Nicola Walker had her lightbulb moment in the Hardy seminar. "I've finally got it!" she wrote. "Keats means the poet needs to push aside his own thoughts, opinions, and desires in order to write good poetry, like Shakespeare. A poet who is too fixed in his opinions and sense of self doesn't have the necessary flexibility to write the best poetry." She continued in this vein for the rest of the essay.
Irina circled the "I've" and wrote, "avoid contractions in formal writing," circled "like Shakespeare" and wrote, "modifier placement," circled both "opinions" and wrote, "avoid repetition," and so forth. Then she smiled, broke her own rule, and wrote, "Well done, Ms. Walker" at the bottom of the paper.
Most scholars, when they lecture or write on negative capability, point to Keats's use of the idea as a precondition of good poetry. Some extend the concept to include the larger concepts of empathy and humility: the ability to see multiple points of view without feeling compelled to insist upon the rightness of any one of them is a humanist virtue.
If Irina lectured on the passage (which she never would; otherwise the assignment would lose all pedagogical usefulness, and the students would merely parrot inferior versions of her own ideas back to her, rather than thinking for themselves), she would point out that negative capability is itself a value-neutral quality. Perhaps it can lead to empathy and understanding, but the ability to suspend personal convictions and to imagine oneself in the mind of someone else can be as useful to torturers as it is to poets.
It is also a prerequisite for being a good spy.
The KGB's assessment did not use Keats, but Irina was pulled out of class during her final year of secondary school and sent to meet with a government liaison because she tested particularly well in what she would later think of as negative capability. "Well done, Comrade Derevko," the officer had said, pointing at her test scores.
Over a decade later, Irina sat at her dining room table in California, frowning at the feeble attempts of Nicola Walker's classmates to cope with Keats. Jack stepped up behind her, placing a glass of wine next to the stack of papers and rubbing her shoulders gently.
"Sydney's all tucked in, and with only six repetitions of The Pokey Little Puppy tonight," he said, and Irina could hear the smile in his voice.
"I suppose that's better than twenty-something iterations of 'Keats thinks good poets need to be uncertain and indecisive'-in varying degrees of grammatical aptitude," she sighed, handing Jack the latest red pen-spattered page.
"Time for Keats once more?" Jack asked. "Haven't they figured out yet that it's not about indecision but about accepting and living in a world where there aren't always answers?" Jack had passed the Keats test the first time she explained it, back when they were dating. It was the first time Irina had felt any temptation to tell him the truth-that they were far more alike than he realized.
Jack tugged the elastic out of her hair and began threading his fingers through it; Irina sipped the wine he had brought her, then closed her eyes and leaned back into his touch. "'Being in uncertainties,' she murmured. "No, they're only nineteen. They haven't figured out much of anything yet, least of all how complicated and uncertain life can be."
Irina was nineteen and excelling in both her KGB training and her university studies when they explained to her what the test scores meant. Being an effective undercover agent was about more than learning to speak English with a flawless American accent, or memorizing the details of a false history; many people can be taught these things. But Irina showed an exceptional ability to imagine herself in the minds of others, and to inhabit conflicting realities simultaneously. This was the ability that made Laura Bristow possible.
Irina reached back and caught one of the hands Jack was using to dissipate the tension in her neck. She kissed his wrist, feeling his pulse thrum against her lips for a moment as she thought about everything her nineteen-year-old self hadn't realized. Negative capability, she learned the hard way, did not involve simple alternations between being Laura Bristow and being Irina Derevko. Instead, she didn't always know who taught her classes, made love to her husband, tucked in her daughter, assassinated her targets. She loved Jack and Sydney with a power that terrified her, even as she knew she could not possibly love anyone she was actively betraying so thoroughly. This was living in uncertainty.
"Come to bed, Laura," Jack said.
She was tempted, but she had promised to return the papers the next day-a day with more grading coming in from the comp class, and carpool duty for Sydney's day care, and a lunchtime info drop with her handler, and a Brit Lit II lecture on a poem she'd never taught before. Too early in the semester to fall behind.
"I really need to finish these." The regret in her voice was genuine. "Thank you for putting Sydney down, and for the wine."
Jack squeezed her shoulder before walking back into the living room. Irina returned to her papers, thinking particularly about Nicola Walker, who was starting to understand poetry.
**
Irina didn't falter before, during, or after the car crash. She collected in her mind only the pieces of herself that she thought of as "Irina Derevko, KGB agent" and held them together through interrogation and debrief, through imprisonment and court martial for treason. Summoning all her considerable acting skill, she lied to denounce Jack Bristow as convincingly as she'd once lied to seduce him. She locked away thoughts of Jack and Sydney, and when her second daughter was taken from her while she was still chained to the bed on which she'd given birth, she imagined an Irina who was no one's mother.
Only later, in Katya's kitchen in Moscow, did it all come crashing down.
"Oh, Irishka," Katya murmured as she rocked her sister, "what have they done to you?"
Irina wasn't cleared for field duty and never would be again. She didn't care. Opinions and preferences of any kind were beyond her, so she went to work each day (not going would require a reason) and researched a fifteenth-century Italian inventor in whom the KGB had taken an interest. It was better than most desk work-at least they remembered she was a scholar-but it was a waste of her talents, and even teaching countless sections of freshman English composition had been more fulfilling. Irina knew Elena had recommended her, but whether through kindness or malice she neither knew nor cared. Irina had stopped trying to discern Elena's motivations back when they were girls.
At night she drank too much to help her sleep, and then she dreamed of drowning. Impact of car on water, begin counting as the water rises in the car, patience, deep breath, wait, wait, wait, now go. Sometimes she swam and swam without finding the surface, lungs ready to explode. Sometimes she could hear Sydney in one direction-"this way, Mommy!"-and the feeble cry of an infant in another, and she hung suspended in the water between them, unable to choose. Sometimes she simply stayed in the car, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, and let the water come.
After about six months, during which Katya fretted and fussed while Irina ignored her and everything else, Irina began to understand Milo Rambaldi. For months she had struggled with the manuscript hand, had struggled with the language (an illogical conflation of late-medieval Latin and at least two different fifteenth-century Italian dialects), had struggled with the physics. Then, slowly, the pieces started to fit into place, and Irina understood. It was like breaking the surface of the water and remembering how to breathe.
Rambaldi demanded not just understanding but belief, and Irina, who had never believed completely in anything before-not in patriotism, or duty, or love, or herself-became intoxicated with it.
Katya wasn't having a word of it. "All this fate and destiny bullshit," she said one evening, pointing her cigarette scornfully at the pile of research that Irina had strewn across the kitchen table. "You're just looking for a way to sleep at night with the things that have been done to you and the choices you've made. You don't want to be a victim, and you don't want to take responsibility for your actions. So you decide that your life had to be this way because a 600-year-old Italian man said so."
Irina threw her out then, and even though it was technically Katya's apartment, Katya went. Irina acknowledged that Katya's accusations would make a certain amount of sense, except that Rambaldi so clearly had seen the future, and had seen her life in particular. There were things Rambaldi needed Irina to do, and she was nearing the end of what she could do from within her KGB desk job. That night, she sat up making plans until the sun rose.
Katya returned the next day, cautiously apologetic. "You know, Irishka, that I'm happy to see you interested in something again. I will continue to have my doubts about the prophetic powers of Milo Rambaldi, if that's okay with you, but you're my sister, and I love you, and that's the most important thing."
Irina wasn't at all sure it was the most important thing, but she forgave Katya anyway. Her plans had little room for love, but she would need allies, and Katya was the oldest and best of those.
**
Many years later, Irina's daughters would wonder about these years, lost to them, when their mother was not their mother. In weaker moments, Sydney imagined the leader of an international crime syndicate going off-grid for a couple of days for a clandestine visit to California, where her daughter performed in the school play or helped her team win the 4x100-meter relay. And even though she knew Irina never did those things, Sydney still would have liked to believe her mother stayed away because remembering Sydney hurt too much.
Nadia understood the way Rambaldi thought, so she wanted to believe she understood how Irina thought, though she could also recognize the inevitable wishful thinking in her attempts to characterize the mother she never knew. Irina was obsessed with Rambaldi, of course, but Nadia imagined it was primarily a means to an end: her daughters. Rambaldi saw Sydney and Nadia, so Irina pursued Rambaldi.
Neither sister would articulate what they both most feared: that their mother thought of them rarely for the better part of eighteen years, and when she sought them again, she saw them only through the eye of Rambaldi.
**
As she escaped one prison and returned to another, Irina was glad of the deafening liminal space of the helicopter. Jack, Sydney, and Vaughn had headsets to communicate with each other and the pilot, but Irina had been denied one of her own. So she sat alone on the narrow bench, pressed between Jack and Sydney, Rambaldi's immortal flower dancing in Sydney's hand.
For too many years she had been harassed by Cuvee, haunted by her husband and daughters, and held in thrall by Rambaldi; to have all these pieces of her life come crashing together, and here, where she had once been most broken, was worse than Irina had planned.
And she had planned it, months of work and gambling and foresight leading, in part, to this moment. Despite the setbacks, everything had gone perfectly, with Jack and Sydney acting and reacting just as she'd needed them to. But she had not planned for the deep surges of pride she felt as she watched Sydney work, or for the alarming comfort she felt in the moments when sparks of the Jack Bristow she had thought long gone emerged after all, or for the solidity of their bodies against her own in the helicopter, distracting her from the bright gold of Rambaldi's blossom.
Irina had spent almost two decades inhabiting one reality and planning for one future: Rambaldi's. As the helicopter turned, causing Sydney to shift the flower out of Irina's peripheral vision and settling a dozing Jack more heavily against her shoulder, Irina felt the single-mindedness of her devotion to Rambaldi's past and future falter.
She imagined a world in which, once upon a time, Laura had told Jack the truth. She imagined Sydney growing up with the sister she didn't know she had. She imagined a future in which she abandoned her carefully-laid plans, cooperating with the American government indefinitely so that she could keep her family. Possibilities-past, present, and future-seemed endless once she allowed herself to entertain them. For the first time in many years, she thought of John Keats and couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
**
After Irina escaped from CIA custody, the two people who knew her longest and best recognized a change in her. For years she had been single-minded in the pursuit of her goals, and even when her methods were too intricate for most observers to follow, her sisters both recognized that Irina's formidable powers were focused in one direction only. But after she had seen Jack and Sydney again, Irina seemed more like the chameleon she'd been as a younger woman. The shift was subtle, but Irina appeared ever so slightly unsure if her own endgame was really what she wanted.
Katya was glad. She had come around to Rambaldi, over the years, and had herself become a force to be reckoned with among the Rambaldi faithful. But her primary allegiance remained to Irina, and she always wanted what was best for her younger sister. The Irina who emerged from those months locked away, even the vengeful Irina ravaged by grief over Sydney's supposed death, was more human than Katya had known her for many years.
Elena was less generous. True belief in Rambaldi required absolute devotion; anyone unwilling to give it, unwilling to sacrifice whatever necessary for it, was unworthy of a place in Rambaldi's future. Elena never forgot that Irina was first recruited for undercover work, and that she was one of the KGB's more successful deep cover agents. Irina knew how to hold back while giving the appearance of unwavering commitment. Irina's ability to live in contradictory worlds simultaneously was the foundation of her career; Elena knew it would also be her downfall.
**
When she walked away from Jack in Sevogda, Irina told herself, however untruthfully, that she was leaving for good. She and Jack had settled the score between them, as well as they ever could; they had helped Sydney fulfill her role and save the world. Now they could move on with their separate lives.
"No one can hold on to Irina Derevko for too long," Jack had said, and she had wanted, briefly, to contradict him, to tell him that he had held her longer and more deeply than he'd ever known. But she'd always tried not to lie to Jack when she didn't have to, even when the lies were sometimes true.
She spent the next days trying to make plans.
Katya would be released from CIA custody, and Irina knew they should rendezvous. But she felt raw and weary, and the idea of facing someone who knew her as well as Katya in such a state was unappealing. She trusted Katya more than anyone else, but still not enough to face her like this.
There were Rambaldi artifacts and followers left to pursue, but she had no strong immediate goal, whether to bring Rambaldi's plans to fruition herself, or to thwart others from doing so.
She wanted her husband and her daughters; she wanted to rest and regroup in the care of people who loved and trusted her far more than they should, and far more than they would if they knew her better.
She had known she wouldn't stay away from Jack forever, but she was still a little disappointed in herself when it took her exactly ten days to find her way back into his bed. Ostensibly, she came to Los Angeles to check on Nadia's condition, and because she knew it was the last place the CIA would expect her to be. But when Jack came home to find her in his dark living room, curled up with the cat, she said only, "I'm so tired," as she let him pull her into his arms.
They were gentler with each other than they had been for decades, gentler than they had ever been as these distrustful, battle-scarred, middle-aged versions of themselves. Jack breathed her formal name against her skin as he came, more intimate than anyone who had ever been allowed to call her Irishka or Ira or Laura. She wasn't sure she knew how to be this Irina, but she tangled herself up with him anyway, and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
Jet lag woke her early, as the first hints of morning were starting to illuminate the window blinds. Irina still knew how to slip out of bed without waking Jack, light sleeper though he was, but she chose to stay where she was. The time to leave would come soon enough.
Irina found herself strangely blank. She had died and yet she lived. She thought of all the times Elena killed her, and of being reborn as her daughters pulled her out of a hole in the ground, but the scene imprinted in her mind was instead the grainy surveillance footage of Jack shooting her in Vienna. Of Jack articulating his deepest fear about her: that she had never cared for him or for Sydney at all. Of a woman who wore her face promising not to break his heart again. Even now, as Jack slept with an arm around her and his face pressed against her neck, Irina wondered which parts of that death scene were true and which were false.
She hadn't been without a plan in decades. There had been unexpected setbacks-most recently, the year they thought Sydney was dead, and the year everyone thought Irina herself was dead-but there was always something to fight for. Avenge Sydney, find Nadia, fulfill Rambaldi's plans, stop Elena from perverting Rambaldi's plans.
Her recent imprisonment had all but dashed her faith, only to have a blood-colored horse and battles between sisters bring it back again. (She thought dispassionately and without regret about killing Elena, then almost made herself sick imagining Nadia attacking Sydney with the same lack of feeling.) But her renewed faith had cost Irina the baby girl she scarcely knew, and she was growing weary of trying to balance belief in Rambaldi with love for her family.
Jack's bedroom windows faced east, and the room grew warmer and brighter as the sun rose. She felt Jack wake-breathing too consciously even, body too consciously still, while he assessed the situation-before he moved. She smiled and kissed him.
"Morning," he said lazily, like he hadn't shot her between the eyes in the time since they last woke like this. But that, as the woman who died that day had said, was in another lifetime. In this one, she and Jack might betray each other again, but it wouldn't be today.
"Good morning," Irina replied, stretching.
"Am I allowed to ask what brings you here?" He pushed up on one elbow and began toying with her hair.
"You're always allowed to ask. But I'm not sure I know the answer. I feel adrift and don't know what to do next." She surprised herself as much as Jack with the honesty. She remembered their conversation about fatalism in the ruined streets of Sevogda; Irina found herself all out of plans but unwilling to believe she could make her own future. It was disconcertingly peaceful.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're very resourceful. I have no doubt you'll think of something."
"Perhaps," she mused, "I'll become a poet."
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments. Comment here or there.
Title: A Fairer House than Prose
Characters/Pairing: Irina-centric, plus some Irina/Jack
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: through the end of season 4
Summary: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"
Author's Notes: 3700 words. Many thanks, as ever, to the wonderful gabolange for the beta. I should offer the disclaimer that there is a lot of Alias I have not seen, and while I have tried to cover my bases with fact-checking, it's possible that I've flubbed up some canonical details along the way-apologies. Among what I have not seen is season 5, mostly because I prefer to deny its place in Irina's canon. Thus, when this fic ends after the events of "Before the Flood," I like to think of Irina looking at a future that isn't what season 5 offered for her. That said, I don't think this fic rules out season 5, either, so take all of that as you prefer.
**
Professor Laura Bristow was notorious for the assignment she gave on the first day of every new class.
In a letter to his brothers dated December 21, 1817, John Keats wrote the following:
"several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Discuss.
"It's a writing assessment," Irina explained to her skeptical department chair. "I want to know what I'm dealing with."
Most of her colleagues assigned opening day writing assessments that asked students to discuss op-ed pieces on Margaret Thatcher, Brenda Ann Spencer, or SALT II; a significant portion of students defected to those professors' kinder, gentler sections of freshman composition after being faced with Professor Bristow and John Keats. Irina was polite and mildly apologetic to her colleagues, but she held her ground on Keats.
The students who stayed were dismayed to discover that Professor Bristow explained neither the Keats quotation nor her rationale for assigning it; the assessment essays were returned with scrupulous comment on grammar and style, and not a word about their content. Those who were brave enough to sign up for a second or third Bristow class (and many of them did-her reputation among the English majors was "terrifying, but worth it") found the same Keats assignment on the first day of each class, from freshman composition to her upper-level seminars (Religion and Doubt in Victorian Literature; The Works of Thomas Hardy; The Russian Novel in Translation).
After some intrigued floundering with the passage in freshman comp, followed by somewhat more capable grappling with it in Brit Lit Survey II, Nicola Walker had her lightbulb moment in the Hardy seminar. "I've finally got it!" she wrote. "Keats means the poet needs to push aside his own thoughts, opinions, and desires in order to write good poetry, like Shakespeare. A poet who is too fixed in his opinions and sense of self doesn't have the necessary flexibility to write the best poetry." She continued in this vein for the rest of the essay.
Irina circled the "I've" and wrote, "avoid contractions in formal writing," circled "like Shakespeare" and wrote, "modifier placement," circled both "opinions" and wrote, "avoid repetition," and so forth. Then she smiled, broke her own rule, and wrote, "Well done, Ms. Walker" at the bottom of the paper.
Most scholars, when they lecture or write on negative capability, point to Keats's use of the idea as a precondition of good poetry. Some extend the concept to include the larger concepts of empathy and humility: the ability to see multiple points of view without feeling compelled to insist upon the rightness of any one of them is a humanist virtue.
If Irina lectured on the passage (which she never would; otherwise the assignment would lose all pedagogical usefulness, and the students would merely parrot inferior versions of her own ideas back to her, rather than thinking for themselves), she would point out that negative capability is itself a value-neutral quality. Perhaps it can lead to empathy and understanding, but the ability to suspend personal convictions and to imagine oneself in the mind of someone else can be as useful to torturers as it is to poets.
It is also a prerequisite for being a good spy.
The KGB's assessment did not use Keats, but Irina was pulled out of class during her final year of secondary school and sent to meet with a government liaison because she tested particularly well in what she would later think of as negative capability. "Well done, Comrade Derevko," the officer had said, pointing at her test scores.
Over a decade later, Irina sat at her dining room table in California, frowning at the feeble attempts of Nicola Walker's classmates to cope with Keats. Jack stepped up behind her, placing a glass of wine next to the stack of papers and rubbing her shoulders gently.
"Sydney's all tucked in, and with only six repetitions of The Pokey Little Puppy tonight," he said, and Irina could hear the smile in his voice.
"I suppose that's better than twenty-something iterations of 'Keats thinks good poets need to be uncertain and indecisive'-in varying degrees of grammatical aptitude," she sighed, handing Jack the latest red pen-spattered page.
"Time for Keats once more?" Jack asked. "Haven't they figured out yet that it's not about indecision but about accepting and living in a world where there aren't always answers?" Jack had passed the Keats test the first time she explained it, back when they were dating. It was the first time Irina had felt any temptation to tell him the truth-that they were far more alike than he realized.
Jack tugged the elastic out of her hair and began threading his fingers through it; Irina sipped the wine he had brought her, then closed her eyes and leaned back into his touch. "'Being in uncertainties,' she murmured. "No, they're only nineteen. They haven't figured out much of anything yet, least of all how complicated and uncertain life can be."
Irina was nineteen and excelling in both her KGB training and her university studies when they explained to her what the test scores meant. Being an effective undercover agent was about more than learning to speak English with a flawless American accent, or memorizing the details of a false history; many people can be taught these things. But Irina showed an exceptional ability to imagine herself in the minds of others, and to inhabit conflicting realities simultaneously. This was the ability that made Laura Bristow possible.
Irina reached back and caught one of the hands Jack was using to dissipate the tension in her neck. She kissed his wrist, feeling his pulse thrum against her lips for a moment as she thought about everything her nineteen-year-old self hadn't realized. Negative capability, she learned the hard way, did not involve simple alternations between being Laura Bristow and being Irina Derevko. Instead, she didn't always know who taught her classes, made love to her husband, tucked in her daughter, assassinated her targets. She loved Jack and Sydney with a power that terrified her, even as she knew she could not possibly love anyone she was actively betraying so thoroughly. This was living in uncertainty.
"Come to bed, Laura," Jack said.
She was tempted, but she had promised to return the papers the next day-a day with more grading coming in from the comp class, and carpool duty for Sydney's day care, and a lunchtime info drop with her handler, and a Brit Lit II lecture on a poem she'd never taught before. Too early in the semester to fall behind.
"I really need to finish these." The regret in her voice was genuine. "Thank you for putting Sydney down, and for the wine."
Jack squeezed her shoulder before walking back into the living room. Irina returned to her papers, thinking particularly about Nicola Walker, who was starting to understand poetry.
**
Irina didn't falter before, during, or after the car crash. She collected in her mind only the pieces of herself that she thought of as "Irina Derevko, KGB agent" and held them together through interrogation and debrief, through imprisonment and court martial for treason. Summoning all her considerable acting skill, she lied to denounce Jack Bristow as convincingly as she'd once lied to seduce him. She locked away thoughts of Jack and Sydney, and when her second daughter was taken from her while she was still chained to the bed on which she'd given birth, she imagined an Irina who was no one's mother.
Only later, in Katya's kitchen in Moscow, did it all come crashing down.
"Oh, Irishka," Katya murmured as she rocked her sister, "what have they done to you?"
Irina wasn't cleared for field duty and never would be again. She didn't care. Opinions and preferences of any kind were beyond her, so she went to work each day (not going would require a reason) and researched a fifteenth-century Italian inventor in whom the KGB had taken an interest. It was better than most desk work-at least they remembered she was a scholar-but it was a waste of her talents, and even teaching countless sections of freshman English composition had been more fulfilling. Irina knew Elena had recommended her, but whether through kindness or malice she neither knew nor cared. Irina had stopped trying to discern Elena's motivations back when they were girls.
At night she drank too much to help her sleep, and then she dreamed of drowning. Impact of car on water, begin counting as the water rises in the car, patience, deep breath, wait, wait, wait, now go. Sometimes she swam and swam without finding the surface, lungs ready to explode. Sometimes she could hear Sydney in one direction-"this way, Mommy!"-and the feeble cry of an infant in another, and she hung suspended in the water between them, unable to choose. Sometimes she simply stayed in the car, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, and let the water come.
After about six months, during which Katya fretted and fussed while Irina ignored her and everything else, Irina began to understand Milo Rambaldi. For months she had struggled with the manuscript hand, had struggled with the language (an illogical conflation of late-medieval Latin and at least two different fifteenth-century Italian dialects), had struggled with the physics. Then, slowly, the pieces started to fit into place, and Irina understood. It was like breaking the surface of the water and remembering how to breathe.
Rambaldi demanded not just understanding but belief, and Irina, who had never believed completely in anything before-not in patriotism, or duty, or love, or herself-became intoxicated with it.
Katya wasn't having a word of it. "All this fate and destiny bullshit," she said one evening, pointing her cigarette scornfully at the pile of research that Irina had strewn across the kitchen table. "You're just looking for a way to sleep at night with the things that have been done to you and the choices you've made. You don't want to be a victim, and you don't want to take responsibility for your actions. So you decide that your life had to be this way because a 600-year-old Italian man said so."
Irina threw her out then, and even though it was technically Katya's apartment, Katya went. Irina acknowledged that Katya's accusations would make a certain amount of sense, except that Rambaldi so clearly had seen the future, and had seen her life in particular. There were things Rambaldi needed Irina to do, and she was nearing the end of what she could do from within her KGB desk job. That night, she sat up making plans until the sun rose.
Katya returned the next day, cautiously apologetic. "You know, Irishka, that I'm happy to see you interested in something again. I will continue to have my doubts about the prophetic powers of Milo Rambaldi, if that's okay with you, but you're my sister, and I love you, and that's the most important thing."
Irina wasn't at all sure it was the most important thing, but she forgave Katya anyway. Her plans had little room for love, but she would need allies, and Katya was the oldest and best of those.
**
Many years later, Irina's daughters would wonder about these years, lost to them, when their mother was not their mother. In weaker moments, Sydney imagined the leader of an international crime syndicate going off-grid for a couple of days for a clandestine visit to California, where her daughter performed in the school play or helped her team win the 4x100-meter relay. And even though she knew Irina never did those things, Sydney still would have liked to believe her mother stayed away because remembering Sydney hurt too much.
Nadia understood the way Rambaldi thought, so she wanted to believe she understood how Irina thought, though she could also recognize the inevitable wishful thinking in her attempts to characterize the mother she never knew. Irina was obsessed with Rambaldi, of course, but Nadia imagined it was primarily a means to an end: her daughters. Rambaldi saw Sydney and Nadia, so Irina pursued Rambaldi.
Neither sister would articulate what they both most feared: that their mother thought of them rarely for the better part of eighteen years, and when she sought them again, she saw them only through the eye of Rambaldi.
**
As she escaped one prison and returned to another, Irina was glad of the deafening liminal space of the helicopter. Jack, Sydney, and Vaughn had headsets to communicate with each other and the pilot, but Irina had been denied one of her own. So she sat alone on the narrow bench, pressed between Jack and Sydney, Rambaldi's immortal flower dancing in Sydney's hand.
For too many years she had been harassed by Cuvee, haunted by her husband and daughters, and held in thrall by Rambaldi; to have all these pieces of her life come crashing together, and here, where she had once been most broken, was worse than Irina had planned.
And she had planned it, months of work and gambling and foresight leading, in part, to this moment. Despite the setbacks, everything had gone perfectly, with Jack and Sydney acting and reacting just as she'd needed them to. But she had not planned for the deep surges of pride she felt as she watched Sydney work, or for the alarming comfort she felt in the moments when sparks of the Jack Bristow she had thought long gone emerged after all, or for the solidity of their bodies against her own in the helicopter, distracting her from the bright gold of Rambaldi's blossom.
Irina had spent almost two decades inhabiting one reality and planning for one future: Rambaldi's. As the helicopter turned, causing Sydney to shift the flower out of Irina's peripheral vision and settling a dozing Jack more heavily against her shoulder, Irina felt the single-mindedness of her devotion to Rambaldi's past and future falter.
She imagined a world in which, once upon a time, Laura had told Jack the truth. She imagined Sydney growing up with the sister she didn't know she had. She imagined a future in which she abandoned her carefully-laid plans, cooperating with the American government indefinitely so that she could keep her family. Possibilities-past, present, and future-seemed endless once she allowed herself to entertain them. For the first time in many years, she thought of John Keats and couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
**
After Irina escaped from CIA custody, the two people who knew her longest and best recognized a change in her. For years she had been single-minded in the pursuit of her goals, and even when her methods were too intricate for most observers to follow, her sisters both recognized that Irina's formidable powers were focused in one direction only. But after she had seen Jack and Sydney again, Irina seemed more like the chameleon she'd been as a younger woman. The shift was subtle, but Irina appeared ever so slightly unsure if her own endgame was really what she wanted.
Katya was glad. She had come around to Rambaldi, over the years, and had herself become a force to be reckoned with among the Rambaldi faithful. But her primary allegiance remained to Irina, and she always wanted what was best for her younger sister. The Irina who emerged from those months locked away, even the vengeful Irina ravaged by grief over Sydney's supposed death, was more human than Katya had known her for many years.
Elena was less generous. True belief in Rambaldi required absolute devotion; anyone unwilling to give it, unwilling to sacrifice whatever necessary for it, was unworthy of a place in Rambaldi's future. Elena never forgot that Irina was first recruited for undercover work, and that she was one of the KGB's more successful deep cover agents. Irina knew how to hold back while giving the appearance of unwavering commitment. Irina's ability to live in contradictory worlds simultaneously was the foundation of her career; Elena knew it would also be her downfall.
**
When she walked away from Jack in Sevogda, Irina told herself, however untruthfully, that she was leaving for good. She and Jack had settled the score between them, as well as they ever could; they had helped Sydney fulfill her role and save the world. Now they could move on with their separate lives.
"No one can hold on to Irina Derevko for too long," Jack had said, and she had wanted, briefly, to contradict him, to tell him that he had held her longer and more deeply than he'd ever known. But she'd always tried not to lie to Jack when she didn't have to, even when the lies were sometimes true.
She spent the next days trying to make plans.
Katya would be released from CIA custody, and Irina knew they should rendezvous. But she felt raw and weary, and the idea of facing someone who knew her as well as Katya in such a state was unappealing. She trusted Katya more than anyone else, but still not enough to face her like this.
There were Rambaldi artifacts and followers left to pursue, but she had no strong immediate goal, whether to bring Rambaldi's plans to fruition herself, or to thwart others from doing so.
She wanted her husband and her daughters; she wanted to rest and regroup in the care of people who loved and trusted her far more than they should, and far more than they would if they knew her better.
She had known she wouldn't stay away from Jack forever, but she was still a little disappointed in herself when it took her exactly ten days to find her way back into his bed. Ostensibly, she came to Los Angeles to check on Nadia's condition, and because she knew it was the last place the CIA would expect her to be. But when Jack came home to find her in his dark living room, curled up with the cat, she said only, "I'm so tired," as she let him pull her into his arms.
They were gentler with each other than they had been for decades, gentler than they had ever been as these distrustful, battle-scarred, middle-aged versions of themselves. Jack breathed her formal name against her skin as he came, more intimate than anyone who had ever been allowed to call her Irishka or Ira or Laura. She wasn't sure she knew how to be this Irina, but she tangled herself up with him anyway, and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
Jet lag woke her early, as the first hints of morning were starting to illuminate the window blinds. Irina still knew how to slip out of bed without waking Jack, light sleeper though he was, but she chose to stay where she was. The time to leave would come soon enough.
Irina found herself strangely blank. She had died and yet she lived. She thought of all the times Elena killed her, and of being reborn as her daughters pulled her out of a hole in the ground, but the scene imprinted in her mind was instead the grainy surveillance footage of Jack shooting her in Vienna. Of Jack articulating his deepest fear about her: that she had never cared for him or for Sydney at all. Of a woman who wore her face promising not to break his heart again. Even now, as Jack slept with an arm around her and his face pressed against her neck, Irina wondered which parts of that death scene were true and which were false.
She hadn't been without a plan in decades. There had been unexpected setbacks-most recently, the year they thought Sydney was dead, and the year everyone thought Irina herself was dead-but there was always something to fight for. Avenge Sydney, find Nadia, fulfill Rambaldi's plans, stop Elena from perverting Rambaldi's plans.
Her recent imprisonment had all but dashed her faith, only to have a blood-colored horse and battles between sisters bring it back again. (She thought dispassionately and without regret about killing Elena, then almost made herself sick imagining Nadia attacking Sydney with the same lack of feeling.) But her renewed faith had cost Irina the baby girl she scarcely knew, and she was growing weary of trying to balance belief in Rambaldi with love for her family.
Jack's bedroom windows faced east, and the room grew warmer and brighter as the sun rose. She felt Jack wake-breathing too consciously even, body too consciously still, while he assessed the situation-before he moved. She smiled and kissed him.
"Morning," he said lazily, like he hadn't shot her between the eyes in the time since they last woke like this. But that, as the woman who died that day had said, was in another lifetime. In this one, she and Jack might betray each other again, but it wouldn't be today.
"Good morning," Irina replied, stretching.
"Am I allowed to ask what brings you here?" He pushed up on one elbow and began toying with her hair.
"You're always allowed to ask. But I'm not sure I know the answer. I feel adrift and don't know what to do next." She surprised herself as much as Jack with the honesty. She remembered their conversation about fatalism in the ruined streets of Sevogda; Irina found herself all out of plans but unwilling to believe she could make her own future. It was disconcertingly peaceful.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're very resourceful. I have no doubt you'll think of something."
"Perhaps," she mused, "I'll become a poet."
Crossposted from DW, where there are
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