My little rant about my favorite character on this show, Irina Derevko. I refuse to believe she's entirely evil so naturally I had to give her some motive. Hope you all like it.

She wasn't just a sole monster. She was so much more than that. She was a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a sister. But she had to keep all of that at a distance in order to do what she did best and that was being a spy. Obsessed with Rimbauldi and his works, she was consumed with the thought of immortality, consumed with the thought that she, a woman spy, could acquire it. It blew her other fantasies of what her life could be like out of the water.

She did anything and everything she could to get into a position where people could start trusting her with Rimbauldi artifacts. She did her training in Russia, working up the ranks of the KGB fast and with ambition. She showed potential even then. Killing was easy once she removed the emotional aspect from it. Torture was nothing to her after she got used to it. Lying was her specialty though, Irina could lie better than any of her sisters and she never got caught. The physical part of the job was easy; Irina had always been limber and fast. It wasn't until she was assigned to marry a CIA officer that Irina's job got hard. And that was because of Jack and Sydney. Irina, no matter how hard she tried not to, got too close with them, too close than she should have… and when you get too close, too involved with someone it's even harder to pull away. But she couldn't help it. She wasn't a robot, she was a woman and more importantly a human being with feelings and emotions and attachments.

Irina loved them both but that love faded everyday due to the nature of her ambition and loyalty to her job. When she left them, she hadn't cried. She just up and left without a single word. Jack knew though, Irina felt it within her bones that he knew. She could feel his betrayal, his anger, his hatred of her grow with each day that she did not come back to him and Sydney.

Ultimately she mentally forced herself to forget them, forget them both for her mission's sake. She focused on Rimbauldi and his works in order to heal the wounds from leaving them behind.

In that time, Irina Derevko developed into the cruel, soulless monster she ended as. Driven by her ambitions she lied and betrayed her way into the CIA and into Sydney and Jack's heart. Though some of the things she had said were true, most were lies. She was like a knife's edge, leaving scars behind in her path. The deepest, and probably the cruelest scars were the ones she gave Sydney and Jack. But in Irina's mind, it had to be done. She was Sydney's mother and she was Jack's wife but she wasn't focused on them, they were just a small part in a much bigger picture that included Rimbauldi. She betrayed their trust and their loyalty to her. But they should have known better… they should have known by now that they couldn't trust her.

When Nadia came into the picture, nothing was different. She kept up the same act as she had with Sydney, leaving scars here and there but none of them unintentional. She had crushed both Nadia's and Sydney's imaginings of whom their mother would be. She was not a typical mom, with the soccer van and the great cooking. She was a killer, a ruthless agent of the KGB, a liar, a spy, and above all a disappointment to them both time and time again.

Part of her felt bad about it, about all of the pain and suffering she had caused those who she had once loved but as a follower of Rimbauldi Irina realized that she couldn't have been a loving mother to Sydney or a dutiful wife to Jack even if she had wanted to. Fate, as Rimbauldi once said, is predetermined, already written in the stars. We can't change it nor alter its effects.

She couldn't have been good even if she had wanted to be…

THE END