Title: Giac
Characters/Pairing: Kendall, Jack Bristow, Arvin Sloane, Irina Derevko
Rating: T for mild language
Word Count: 1114
Spoilers: Series finale of Alias
A/N: This is my cracktastic response to the jjverse "IN THE END..." challenge on livejournal: how you would like your fandom to end/have ended.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Obviously.
Summary: Kendall knew you couldn't run something like Project Black Hole without learning a thing or two about Milo Giacomo Rambaldi.
MONGOLIA
One thing Kendall knew for sure, as he picked his way through the rubble of the collapsed tomb, was that you can't run something like Project Black Hole—studying prophecy after prophecy, artifact after artifact for years—without learning a thing or two about Milo Giacomo Rambaldi. Not just about Rambaldi the myth or the legend, but about the man. And the man, Kendall had come to know, was amazingly cynical and reckless.
Reckless... that was a pretty good word to describe this little stunt. After the first four or five hundred years, one tends to lose one's excitement, one's fascination, with the wonders of the universe—never dying can do that to a person—and so he was as likely to say, "Aw, screw it! Let's just blow shit up," as anything more rational. Recklessness was the reason Kendall now found himself in the middle of a Mongolian desert, digging through the ruins of an immortal man's tomb.
That phrase alone—immortal man's tomb—was enough to make his head ache. He dragged one more fractured stone away from the pile and sat down on it, drinking heavily from his canteen. He wasn't a field agent for a reason. This digging around in deserts was not in his job description. Unfortunately for him, it currently fell under the header of "Rambaldi" and a promise he had made, so here he was all the same.
"Oh, the things you've gotten me into," he said aloud, and resumed digging.
11 HOURS LATER
"It's about damn time you showed up. Do you know how uncomfortable it is under all this rubble? And how boring?"
"It's your own fault, you selfish bastard," Kendall said, dropping down onto a rock again to catch his breath. He should have uncovered his feet first, then he wouldn't have to deal with the whining. "If you didn't insist on being such a damned drama queen, you wouldn't be in this mess. You could've just wired the place with explosives and blown it all to kingdom come, but no. You just had to have the last word, just had to make a statement."
Kendall peered up at the dark-eyed face surrounded by rubble. "I know it wouldn't hurt you, but did you ever stop to think about how hard it would be for your friend, your mortal friend, to dig you out? I should just leave you there and—"
"YOU DAMNED WELL ALREADY LEFT ME HERE FOR SIX MONTHS!"
"And what is six months to you, a blink? I mean—"
A muffled voice halted Kendall's response mid-sentence. "Jack? Jack, I'm so sorry. Please, Jack, you have to forgive me!"
"What was that?"
"Sloane. Thinks I'm haunting him," Jack said, before he turned his head as far as he could and shouted back, "Be quiet, Arvin, or I'll tickle you with a feather in that place on your ribcage for all eternity!"
Kendall couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdity of the situation.
"What? I had to find some entertainment or I would have lost my mind. Now, will you please get me out of here?"
Kendall went back to work, grumbling all the while. "Arvin Sloane—hell!—all your followers... if they only knew what kind of a sick, devious, whiny son-of-a-bitch you really are, they would never waste so much time hanging on your every word. Oh, you're great for distant prophecies and globe-spanning scavenger hunts and ahead-of-its-time technology, but when it comes to the crunch and the world is on the line, where are you? Trapped under a thousand pounds of rubble."
"What happened with Irina?" Jack asked, and he seemed almost afraid to hear the answer. "Did Sydney—?"
"Oh, Sydney thwarted her, all right, but Irina fell on your damned Sphere of Immortality," Kendall said, wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve. The unspoken "dun dun DUN" hung in the air. "She spent days poking and prodding herself to see if it took, and finally jumped off the roof of my apartment building, just because she could, and broke both her legs. It's lucky you guys heal so much faster than the rest of us or I would have killed myself to get away from her after another week and then where would you be?"
"I suppose having only one person know the truth about me wasn't the best idea in the world."
Kendall shook his head. "You could have told Sydney, at least. You'd have saved her a lot of grief."
"And you would have had help digging me out."
"Yes, there is that."
Once Kendall freed Jack's arms, everything went a lot faster. Jack was on his feet, stretching and twisting to get the kinks out of his joints and muscles, in less than thirty minutes. Kendall flopped down on the sandy floor, exhausted.
After a while, Jack reached down a hand to haul him back to his feet. "Thank you," he said, when Kendall took it, "Now, let's get out of here."
Kendall watched as Jack gathered up the digging supplies and slung them across his shoulders. "What are we going to do about him?" he asked, shrugging vaguely in the direction Sloane's voice had echoed from.
"Leave him. He got what he always wanted."
"Be careful what you wish for and all that jazz?"
"It's not my fault immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be," Jack said, heading for the opening to the cave. Kendall didn't follow.
"But it is your fault it's possible at all. Why go and lay out all those clues if you didn't want people to put them together?"
"Only one person in five hundred years managed to be single-minded enough to piece them together. Not a bad track record."
Still, Kendall hesitated. "He really never suspected? Not once, in all the years he knew you?"
"I don't think so. I was always the skeptic, the 'unbeliever.' He may have wondered how I managed to avoid 'Rambaldi Fever,' but he would never have guessed the real reason. I played my part well."
Kendall nodded, and finally moved to join Jack. They started down the tunnel towards the outside world and daylight, side by side. It was slow going, Kendall too bone-tired to move quickly and Jack out of practice at moving much at all.
"You know, you should keep the beard," Kendall said suddenly, glancing at the six months of growth on Jack's face. "Makes you look like a fifteenth century prophet or something."
Jack shot him a look of combined disgust and fondness, if that seems possible, and ground out, "Shut up."