All the characters of Alias are the property of JJ Abrahms, Mad Robbot, ABC (?) etc. If they were mine do you really think I'd be wondering how the hell I'm gonna pay for college?

Prologue

This is the story of a woman, barely more than a child in fact, who had to make a choice. Or so she thought. But who knows, maybe she did have to. She was ordered to marry a man and have a child with him. She kept telling herself over and over again that this was a job, just a job, that she was not going to grow attached, that she would not love. The child came into the world and she chose her work over her motherhood, her country over her family.

Six years later she had grown, completely shedding the child in her, and she realized that there is something worse than betraying your country: betraying your family. But by now she also knew that betraying them was the only way to keep them alive. In pieces: a man with a broken heart who will take twenty years and her return to learn how to smile again, and a child with a hole in her heart where her mother's love used to be, a hole she will fill up with idealized images until the day she comes back. In pieces, yes, but alive.

And so she left, and so for twenty years, to keep two of the only three people she truly loved alive, she stayed dead. Who is the third one you ask? That is a long story or maybe a too short one: that child is taken away from her at birth and the day she meets her again her daughter falls into a coma, and dies, killed by the man she thinks is her father.

When a time came where she could come back to the two of them she still loved them too much, she was still too used to her solitude and to hurting in that place inside her chest that begged for their touch, their smell, their sound, their presence; that she kept away from them in a habit of protection and love. Fortunately love ended up drawing her back to them. First to her daughter who had to learn to trust her all over again and then to love her; then to her husband in their search for each other.

He hated her because of her betrayal but he hated himself more because he loved her. She loved him too but was so scared of being rejected, of being hurt, again, that she flirted with him and manipulated him to hide and make him angry or at least grow impatient so he could not be cold and break her heart with his indifference. They found a sort of love and trust again but she betrayed them, again. She could hate herself for it if she let herself.

Later their child disappeared, presumed dead. They started their dance again, loaded with new betrayals over the twenty year old ones. Searching for their daughter, working together, seeing the care in each other's eyes, in each other's actions, they started to let down the barriers that would allow their love to reach behind the fresh hurts and find at least some kind of trust in each other. It was hard for both of them to trust the other with the heart he crushed so carelessly twice before. They managed, somehow.

But there was a problem, of course, there is always a problem: she, to stay sane, had found herself an obsession in the works of a man long dead but fond of leaving clues and wild goose chases and treasure maps all around the world. He wrote of her daughters and of her, of their lives, he brought meaning when she needed it. It is hard to get rid of an obsession and even harder to get rid of one that gives answers. She would not, could not, for it promised her so much. She had failed to see that now her family could give her all that and more, she had stopped looking at what she thought was a dead end, a doomed situation. And anyways she could not stop now, so close to discovering what these clues mean, where the wild goose chase is leading, what the maps are showing. So close.

Maybe the man could see the future, maybe he did see her life and all the ones around her. I like to believe that he made the chase, the maps, the clues, to keep her alive, so she would not die of despair in those twenty years. That he wanted to help her through that but that he hoped that then she would have enough sense in her to turn away from the prophecies and the possibilities and come back to what she could have.

At one time she might have been able to, and even though she was strong, very strong, everyone has his breaking point. Hers came in the form of one of her sisters. And so she was too broken, too broken to make new choices, too broken to consider an other life where she could be happy, too broken to let go of the life line that had kept her alive for the last twenty years; even though it was starting to strangle her. And so the obsession took over as her broken mind and heart clung to the choice she had made such a long time ago when she was young and innocent.

This led her to betraying her daughter and her husband, again, and especially to one night where she found herself fighting to the death with the one daughter she had left.

This is where the accounts differ.

Some say, including her daughter when ever you press her for an answer -she doesn't like to talk about it- that she died that night, stupidly, choosing her obsession over her.

But sometimes if you pester her long enough, and hard enough, and if you pay very close attention you will catch a fugitive glint in her eye. And there are those blank postcards sent to complete strangers that sometimes find themselves in the mail. She used to show them to her own daughter when she was a baby, whispering something into her ear, but she has stopped now, even though the cards still arrive like clockwork.

And those few times when the baby was small and her husband was asleep she heard her crying in the middle of the night and quickly calm down as if someone was nursing her. This also happened when she had her son. She'd pray her husband would not wake up just at that moment, and he never did. Those nights she always slept well; and when she went into the nursery in the morning, a faint, reassuring smell still lingered there. When the child got older she told her mother she sometimes dreamt of a beautiful woman coming in her window and watching her sleep, she'd smile and answer: "What a beautiful dream sweetheart, maybe she's your guardian angel."

She told no one of this, never, not even her husband. He wouldn't understand: he had always hated her mother because she had killed his father, she understood that. And her father? Well, he had died that night too.

So yeah, I wrote this as a one shot originally and then it became a prologue but I'm not so sure about posting the rest, but then, yeah, I like the rest. So, thoughts, ideas, you hate it, you love it? Use that pretty little purple button down there. You'll make my day.