On the wings of Madame Butterfly

Author's note: This is my very first story. I started writing it a couple years ago, but never thought it was worth posting. Now, though, it's grown so much that I'd like to know what you guys think of it. Oh, I guess I should also mention that English is not my first language. I deeply apologize for all the mistakes I'm sure I made.

Basic plot: think about it: what if during Sydney's missing years Vaughn had been ordered by the CIA to infiltrate the Covenant and marry one of its top operatives in order to gather information from her? What if this operative was Julia Thorne? In this story, Sydney is a double agent working for the CIA; she was never brainwashed; she knows everything. Vaughn doesn't. He believes the woman he once loved has become the enemy. She will also become his wife. And the line between pretense and reality is fading, as thin and light as butterfly wings.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my cat. "Alias" belongs to JJ Abrams and "Madame Butterfly"… well, I guess "Madame Butterfly" belongs to Puccini – or at least did.

Prologue

I enter the house at six pm, my usual time. Some delicious smell comes from the kitchen, where Hannah, the so said maid, must be finishing dinner preparations. (We're having pasta tonight, I guess.) Walking across the hall and into the living room, I overhear the voices of my husband and his best friend talking in the library. Through the window I get a glance of the garden, where only a few roses bloom here and there in the early Italian fall. I love this moment of my day: its calmness, its normalcy, its innocence. I seize it, devotedly looking around my home, recognizing every piece of furniture I myself chose to fill these rooms, the ornaments on the tables, the picture frames on the piano. Smiling, I lightly touch the curtains. Those are the permanent and only source of disagreement between my husband and me. He claims to hate them when I know they are just his taste; that his frequent silly complaints about their fabric, their pattern, their color are just a pretense he has to lead, having to play this character who is not actually him, as I have to be someone I am not as well.

I shake this thought away, though, because arriving in this house every evening, I can feel, at least for a moment, like a normal person, a beloved wife coming home from work. And although this is a lie I carefully tell myself, it's a cherished lie that makes me happy in the present and that will keep me company in a lonely future. Soon, I know, I will need the memory of this beautiful dream in which I live in this pretty home with a loving husband – a world and a man that, unfortunately, do not belong to me, not for real or not anymore anyway.

Interrupting my silent thoughts, Vaughn (but for now he is Christopher) emerges from the library, followed by Weiss (Fred, Fred, I force into my mind), and greets me with a smile and a kiss. Weiss repeats his fake apology of at least three nights a week: "I didn't have anything at home and I love Hannah's cooking…" As always, I say politely but in a distant tone that of course he is welcome to join us for dinner. I'd like to hug my dear friend and tell him how much I actually appreciate his being here, but I can't let him know that, just like I can't let my husband realize that I love him more than anything in the world. So I return his kiss – this gesture I wait for all day long – with such coldness that it bothers him, despite everything.

More than anything in this job, I hate to act like this towards Vaughn and Weiss, but I need to. I can't be the girlfriend and the friend they used to love, I can't be their Sydney. She died three years ago, literally or not, it doesn't matter. For Vaughn, for Weiss and for the whole world, I have to be Julia Thorne: not the CIA agent, not Jack Bristow's daughter, not the asset who fell in love with her handler like in a spy-world fairy tale; I have to be this terrible person: a terrorist working for the Covenant, an assassin, someone they attentively watch and discreetly despise, someone incapable and undeserving of real love.

When Vaughan and Weiss came to Rome, sent by the CIA to infiltrate the Covenant, posing as Christopher Bailey and Frederick Peterson, I had been here for a little more than a year. By that time, almost two years ago, the leaders of the organization believed to have me brainwashed into thinking I was Julia Thorne. This was – has been – of course, a façade. I've always known very well who I am; for me, Julia is just an alias, a character I must play to get into the inner circle of the Covenant and, hopefully, dismantle the group sometime soon, as I did the Alliance. Only then I had Vaughan by my side; now, although he is here with me, married to me, he doesn't take me as his ally, but as his enemy. My handler, Kendall (who would've guessed that?), decided to keep my loyalty to the CIA and my double agent status highly classified information even within the Agency. This way, nowadays all my former colleagues think I am their opponent and the man who once protected and loved me take me as the means to a mission he has to accomplish: "For the good of the country you must marry this dangerous terrorist and gather information from her." I knew the truth of his intentions by the time he asked me out for the first time (as Julia, of course), but I missed him so much and I wanted to be with him so much that I chose to believe the lie and live the dream, be almost happy for a while. So he pretends to cherish me and I am his mission; and I pretend to ignore him and love him with all my heart.