Pravda
Title: Pravda (*)
Author: Thorne (akathorne@hotmail.com)
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Almost Thirty Years
Archive: Credit Dauphine. Anyone else, please ask.
Summary: Sydney confronts her mother.
Disclaimer: Alias belongs to ABC, JJ Abrams, and Co.
Thanks to: Robin, for her kindness and her beta skills.
Special lurve: Lara, for the smacking (and patiently talking me off that ledge), and her beta skills as well.
Published: 8-26-02
I am sitting, cuffed to a chair, suddenly conscious of my mother's scent. I recognize her smell before her face, before her form. When she speaks, I know her voice, even through the years, through my anger.
"I have waited almost thirty years for this moment," Mom (no, not Mom, she's Irina now) murmurs. ("It's ok, baby, Mommy's here. Go back to sleep…")
Thoughts burn through me, caustic fury wells inside me. (Waited? For what? Where have you been, Mom? Why did you leave?)
She steps into the light, and the world tilts sickeningly. She has changed, but not so much that I can't see the woman who packed my lunch and sent me off to school twenty-two years ago.
My mother (my mother is dead; that is Irina), paces toward me, slowly, her eyes hungrily studying my face.
I am so afraid of this woman.
She stands before me, unmoving, letting me look at her. She knows me still. Knows me better than anyone ever has; knows I have to look. She shaped me, left her mark all over my life.
She is older, certainly, my mother (Irina). Still beautiful, her dark eyes (my eyes) clear and bright as amber. Her dark hair (darker than mine) threaded with silver, pulled back into a ponytail (like I wear my hair on my days off). She looks strong, slender, and fit (like me).
I wonder what she thinks of her baby now.
My black mesh top, leather collar, vinyl pants, and Windex-blue hair are not what most mothers would consider appropriate. But I don't know what she thinks – we never had those normal mother/daughter discussions. No driving lessons, no prom night jitters, no arguments over curfew. None of that in the Bristow house.
As I stare at her familiar (unfamiliar) face, she slowly, deliberately tilts her head to the side, studying me with the same thoroughness I used on her.
After I blurted out my initial horrified (hopeful), "Mom?" I had promised myself that I would stay silent. I'm not the one who needs to explain my actions. And if I start screaming now, I'm not going to be able to stop. I have too many new reasons to hate her now.
She didn't just abandon me and Dad.
She isn't just a murderer.
My mother is not just a simple traitor to my family, to my country.
She kidnapped my best friend.
She forced me into betraying both the C.I.A. and SD-6 to save him.
She murdered C.I.A. agents. Over a dozen of them.
She killed William Vaughn, setting his son on a path that intersected with mine, and then ended in a flooded hallway.
She took too much from me (Everything).
I'm shocked from my reverie by the coolness of her palm, cupping my cheek. I had closed my eyes, overwhelmed, but her soft touch cuts through it all like a hot knife through ice. I'm shaken by the unexpectedly light maternal contact. (What could she possibly want from me? Forgiveness? Fury?) I'm suddenly tired, too tired to fight any longer. Tears spring to my eyes, and that makes me angry, because I know tears will only be misunderstood.
(I don't want this – I thought I did, I came looking for it, looking for her – so sure that she held the answers. But she has no answers, Dad was right. There is only a Pandora's box of questions, and she is waiting for me to unlock it.)
I'm shaken by the realization that I want to return to the relative simplicity of my former life. Will, unaware of who he had befriended. Vaughn, unharmed by his association with me. Dad, certain in his resolve. I'm so stupid. My desire to be here - in this room, with this woman - has taken all of that from me.
The tears I'm struggling to contain spill over, and my mother (not my mother, Irina) wipes them from my face with the pad of her thumb, as she has a thousand times before. I am transported to a time before I knew what pain really was. This is the game, then - the trap. I can see it, and it's still a temptation. (I missed you so much, Mom.)
She smiles down at me, and she's my Mommy again. The transformation takes my breath away, and for a moment, I teeter on the edge between rage and elation (it's her, she is here, and she's alive). Her fingers are gentle in my hair as she loosens the itchy blue wig.
"Sydney," she murmurs, her voice all soft, motherly concern. "I've missed you so much." She tucks my hair back behind my ear, untangling a knot as she pulls all the pins free.
"Don't," I break my self-imposed silence with one stiff word. Her fingers are instantly still, and Mom (Irina) pulls away from me. She sighs, holding the wig tight in one fist.
"What are you doing here, Sydney?" her voice is so quiet that I almost miss the question.
"What am I doing here? What are you doing here?" my voice is shaking as the words explode out of me.
She looks at me (my eyes in 20 years), and I know suddenly, whatever her answers are, it doesn't matter. I can see the truth in her. I didn't know, when I became a spy, what it would cost me. She didn't either. No one does. I lie every day of my life, to everyone I know. I have to, my survival depends on it. I followed in my mother's footsteps, without even knowing it.
(Will I have to "die" to be free of SD-6?)
She is a liar.
I am a liar.
This is the truth between us.
*pravda – russian; truth