The Starting Line
Spies spend their entire lifetime running.
Annie Walker is no exception.
She runs from her past and her future, her fears and her wants - herself. She is a living, breathing manifestation of all her flaws, and she carries them with her like anchors on her soul - penance for what she tells herself are sins. Her existence is an impossibility in itself, the fact that she is still walking, still breathing, still alive, is a constant reminder of how many times she has escaped the inescapable. Inevitability follows in her wake, a constant shadow of all the ghosts that haunt her. It becomes a game to see how long she can stay ahead of it, how long she can survive against the odds that have constantly been stacked against her.
The cost of her sanity becomes a small price to pay for the falsehood of an invincible soul.
And for a while she can pretend. She can pretend that her sacrifices are enough to save her loved ones from suffering. She can pretend that fate and chance are things that are made to scare cowards into coming to terms with their nightmares and monsters. She can pretend that the lies are just as good as the truth. She can pretend that she can keep running.
Until she realizes she can't.
Running has always been an escape, and she's good at it. Despite the progression of the years, it's the one thing that remains the same, an involuntary and integral element of who she is. It's existence in motion, something that never actually exists for someone like her, except in these rare moments. The solitude it gives her becomes a form of salvation, as temporary as it may be.
She never makes it to the airship after leaving Hong Kong, and she evades the CIA spotters that follow her to Turkey. It's the very thing she's spent all these months fighting to achieve: justice, exoneration. The truth is supposed to set you free, but even that vindication seems nothing more than numbing, a hallow victory. Henry Wilcox may be dead, but a part of her is dead too it seems. She expects the decision not to go back to torment her, like all the other decisions before it. She expects to feel guilty, to feel gutted, knowing that there are people who care, a life that is hers, waiting for her to return.
She doesn't feel anything.
The pounding of Annie's feet match the pounding of her pulse. The steady rhythm of her breathing crescendos as she flies down the beach on the island of Fatu Hiva, the place she's called home the past few weeks. The sunrise chases her and a hundred yards away the ocean crashes against the shore, the air heavy and heady with salt - the sea and sweat. Her hair is mostly blonde again, the remnants of Jessica Matthews hiding in the lowlights, and the loose strands of her pony tail cling to her neck. Her lungs sting, her legs are numb, and she sprints faster and faster until she's almost certain her body is spiraling further out of control than her mind.
And that's when it happens.
First it feels like floating.
Then it feels like a knife being shoved into the back of her neck.
She stumbles, her legs ceasing to function, and the ground races towards her. The palms of her hands and her knees dig into the sand, flattened by the tide, and catch her fall. Electric, jolting pain seizes her arms on impact, spreading to her chest. The pain tightens like a vice, paralyzing, and it morphs into excruciating agony. Her vision swims, blackens, ceases.
She gasps for air, but there is none.
She wants to scream, but she's suffocating.
Annie has always been dangerously close to the edge of panic, but time and time again she always managed to catch herself before it was too late.
This time she's not sure she can.
She goes to Eyal because she knows she can't go to anyone else, she knows deep in the knotted, nauseated pit of her stomach that something is terribly, horribly wrong. The entire time on the flight to Tel Aviv she replays that morning on the beach over and over again in her head, the sensation of her heart being strangled, her lungs seizing. It's finally enough to send her to the bathroom where she dry heaves, choking back tears, sickened more by the realization that this is what panic feels like.
Annie trusts Eyal, and because she trusts him she convinces herself to trust Avram. She has no other options, and after some persuasion the Haifa doctor agrees to keep his examination off book, his justification being because he owe's Eyal. It seems everyone owes the Mossad agent, and it never ceases to amaze her the manor of favors her friend has hidden up his sleeve. Annie knows she'll owe him for an eternity and then some - he's saved her life more times than she can count.
She almost laughs when the final results reveal her broken heart. It doesn't surprise her, after everything. Her heart has always doomed her from the start, it was only a matter of time.
The scar tissue from Lena's gun shot wound and the resulting surgery has left residual inflammation: myocarditis. Manageable, but not without it's complications. It's spread to her mitral valve, affecting the cardiac muscle in the walls of her heart, resulting in the arrhythmia that caused her tachycardia, and sent her into atrial fibrillation on the beach in Fatu Hiva.
Eyal sits quietly in the background as the diagnosis unfolds. He watches the devastation on her face as their eyes meet, watches it change into anger. Annie feels cold, dizzy, and numb. They both know what this means for her, what she'll lose because of it.
Eyal tries to compel her, tries to give her a way out.
"This is life or death, Neshema."
She could have died.
Part of her wishes she had.
Her and Eyal talk for a long time, long into the night, and time seems to stop at least for a little while. Breathing doesn't seem so hard. He manages to make her laugh - a sound she's almost forgotten.
Even so, her smile is still forced, her thoughts still racing, her eyes not quite bright enough. There's a darkness that wasn't there before.
Annie is determined to convince herself that this is something she'll be able to conquer, Eyal argues that it's a chance to leave the unconquerable world her life has been tethered to for so long. It seems impossible though, and she tells him so, because both she and Eyal know that spies are like moths drawn to the fire. How long would it take before the sirens call tried to pull her back again? It makes her furious, the unfairness of it all, that after everything fate would be so cruel make her own body the very thing that betrayed her.
She tries to fall asleep in the early morning hours afterward, long after the rest of the household has gone to bed. She imagines what life would be like if she took Eyal's advice. The idea of freedom is almost tempting, the idea of living a life for herself, and not for what she is. What if this is her blessing, what if she took this as an out, as an escape?
What if she ran one last time?
A/N: I haven't wrote anything in forever... So this is going to be an on going character study of Annie for S5. We've seen so much emotion from her this season, and I really love that. This will probably end up being Annie/Ryan because, yes, I love him. I hope you guys forgive me. xoxo
Edit: also, on Annie's heart condition, I made myself crazy researching it, and for the sake of all our sanity I am taking some liberty with the myocarditis diagnosis.