Title: perdition
Author: Sugar Princess, a.k.a Sunny Daze
Disclaimer: I don't own Alias or the characters therein, I'm just borrowing them.
Summary: Post "The Telling"- an alternate approach to what could've happened.
A/N: This fic would not have been possible without my dear friends Monica, Hannah and Tess. Without their support and awesome beta-skills, this would still be rattling around in my head. Thanks, guys.
It also would've never made it to ff.n without the prodding of my darling Nita.
Enjoy!
perdition.
Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house,
"Let us both go to the law. I will prosecute you.
---Come I'll take no denial; We must have a trial:
For really this morning I've nothing to do."
Said the mouse to the cur, "Such a trial, dear Sir,
With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath."
"I'll be the judge, I'll be the jury," Said the cunning old Fury.
"I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."
-The Mouse's Tail, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
1
She had the maddening habit of being completely aloof, and she could lie on the couch reading, completely oblivious to his obvious disquiet until she chose to address his problems.
"This," he says, "It doesn't work." He doesn't say 'anymore' because it might never have worked to begin with.
She deigns to look at him over her book- a biography, which is all she ever reads now. She has no interest in fantasy any more. She wants facts, life stories behind people she admires or thought beautiful once.
"It doesn't?" she asks, and she has the gall to look surprised and he loathes it, because she's taken on the air of a deposed princess or a belle in exile- condescending, haughty.
"No. We've changed. We're not who we were," and he trips over this simple word- "before."
She doesn't ask the obvious question- before what?- and instead marks her page carefully, sitting up to cock her head, bewildered. "We didn't change, dear. Oh no. People changed, our lives changed- but we're the same. We're us."
He laughs bitterly. "Frankenstein's creation, he can say that. But we're not science experiments; we're not monsters, either. Not always."
She snorts. "You say that with such conviction."
"Look at history, and you'll see."
"We did nothing others wouldn't have done in our situation." she says firmly, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She's barefoot, as she always is around the house, and her toenails are painted candy apple red, and he knows where she bought the nail polish and when she painted her nails and where, and it sickens him.
"We were insane."
"We thought we were dreaming."
"You said we were. I went along with it."
"You didn't need to."
"I had no choice."
"This isn't my fault, don't blame me for everything."
He grits his teeth, sharpening his response in his mind before slashing. "Of course not, you're legally dead. You can't be held accountable for anything."
And this is when he loses himself.
He had entered the dream unwittingly six months ago, and he had spent two minutes outside the door trying to steady his breath before diving back underwater.
He had been treading water for two years now, and he was skilled at it. This might be a false alarm, so he was taking a deep breath in case he was submerged by an unexpected wave of emotion.
And then he opened the door to find himself in Munchkin Land.
It was Munchkin Land in the sense that, like Dorothy, he walked from sepia into vivid color, into palpable life and vitality, and this was all because she was crouched in a corner.
She was hiding in the corner of the room when he arrived, pretending that she wasn't there, attempting to wake herself up from this trippy dream. It was funny, she didn't remember drinking, but something had brought this on, and while she had an impressive imagination, this was way out of her league. Dragons and princes and castles, yes; alleys and scars and stale safehouses, no.
She had once been good at math, but the numbers weren't helping her now. She was using them as a distraction- how long did it take a plane to get to China from California?- so that she would not wonder why she was in China and why there was an ugly scar just above the ridge of her hip.
Fifteen hours. It took a non-stop flight fifteen hours, and he had made it in sixteen.
He entered like a man asleep, trudging his way heavily through reality. She raised her head from her knees, not sure who she was expecting, but too tired to start out fighting. She had succumbed to the idea that she is in a CIA safehouse and that she is tired and that she aches, and she is confused and too wound up to rest.
When she looked up, looking years younger than she was, and he peered into her face, she felt the need to release a gasp and launched herself into his arms, kissing his neck with fervor. He marveled that if this wasn't the real Sydney Bristow that she was a remarkable double, because this one even smelled like her, underneath the smell of cheap detergent and generic shampoo, and under the horrible animal scent of fear, it was her, as fresh and as sweet as he remembered.
He had felt very old when he had gently pried her off to examine her closely- the same latent freckles hardly visible to the naked eye, same dimples, same pattern of the iris. As he searched her face, she drank him in, because she had missed him in some way that she couldn't explain or identify. She took in the new creases and wrinkles that appeared there overnight, and she kindly attributed his haggard appearance to a long flight and worry. What she intended to do was make sure those wrinkles left his face soon and were replaced with smiles, because she had appointed herself to that position.
She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing at all, not even when he told her gruffly that she had better sit down. He had extracted himself from her embrace and was now sitting apart from her, and she knew then that something had broken, maybe the world, it's either that or the sky has fallen, and she resisted the urge to run to the window and check on the sky, just as she resisted the urge to sit on his lap and pat him to assure herself of his reality, because she had missed him, she just didn't know why.
He said things that were so insane that they must be true, because he had a limited imagination and what he said was so fantastic that it could only be reality or some incredibly realistic dream. It was after he'd finished that she saw the glinting symbol of her mortality on his finger, and something inside her snapped, and she swallowed harshly before clamping her hands around her knees and asking him, carefully and concisely in fewer than five words, to explain this new accessory.
It wasn't until he was half-way through his stumbling explanation that she started to cry softly, thinking about how he would have it all, the white picket fence and the tire swings and the minivans and the lazy Sunday mornings and china sets. He stopped talking to watch her wallow in her sorrow and sadistic imaginings before he stretched across the chasm of the past to grip her arm, painfully, with the untainted hand, the right hand, the hand that hadn't betrayed her.
Her breath shuddered to a stop, and he could feel her pulse through his hand, as though he was taking her in by osmosis, and just before he started to remind her to breathe, she whispered insistently that she couldn't remember, not anything, not being gone, but she had missed him, she knew that, because she could feel it. She didn't look at him while she said this, choosing instead to look at his hand on her arm, his hold on her arm palpable and real in what was obviously a dream world. Slowly, he released her, and he sat back in his chair, a chill noticeably shaking both his frame and his composure. Sydney, he said, his voice rusty as though he had hardly spoken while she was gone, while he was living underwater, not a day has gone by where I haven't missed you.
And this she doubted, because one does not get a ring on one's finger by missing someone, but he clarifies. It was her fault that he'd married, he'd missed her, he couldn't live without her, he'd needed someone to replace her, but she didn't, no one could. She accepted the guilt and then asked him steadily what, exactly, he planned on doing.
He was quiet for too long.
This is a dream, she announced, this isn't real. In your dream I've been dead for two years, and in my dream I'm waking up after being gone for two years, but when we wake up, everything will be fine. We can do as we please.
He said her name, weighing both syllables heavily because he had missed saying it, and because what she was saying was insane. He was beginning to shake his head and protest when she caught his eye and said simply that she had missed him and that she would fight for him.
And he didn't have it in him to deny her.
Or himself.
There are several more parts to this- love it? Hate it? Please, drop me a line.
Thank you for reading!