Title: Minor Chords
Author: Jennifer N (jennifer_n97@hotmail.com)
Summary: "Meanwhile, he is on the other side of the world, waiting with baited breath to hear her voice in his ear, to listen as she winds the music box and plays the song Rambaldi has prepared for them." Sydney, Vaughn, and Spyfam. 1/1
Category: Angst
Spoilers: 2.03, "Cipher"
Rating: PG
Distribution: CM, SD-1, ff.net
Disclaimer: Sadly, Alias does not belong to me. The text in italics is taken directly from the episodes "Parity" (1.03) and "Cipher." Also not mine.
A/N: I can't even blame the DVDs for this one. This plot bunny literally appeared out of nowhere while I was visiting the plot point graveyard over in the TWOP forums. I was reading and nodding and agreeing with all of the posts, when suddenly, this appeared. Very bizarre (kinda like this fic).
Thanks to the usual suspects for looking this over.
Minor Chords
Base ops, this is Freelancer, do you copy?
Read you loud and clear, Freelancer.
He was six and a half—practically seven, as far as he was concerned—when his world almost fell apart.
He had been at his best friend's house, which was conveniently next door to his, climbing trees and jumping off the tire swing when he heard the news. His mom had been in a car accident on her way home from the grocery store. Words floated around him, many going over his young mind, but the message was clear—this was going to take more than a few Band-Aids to fix.
His dad had hugged him good-bye nine days earlier and told him he was the man of the house. To protect his mother and lift her spirits while he was away for six weeks. His reward was a weekend with just his dad sometime before school started again.
He kicked the sand in the sandbox around with his bare feet as he let the news settle. His mom was in the hospital. He had failed his father.
He didn't know then that that was only the beginning.
I found the music box. It looks intact. Stand by, I'm going to enter the code my mother gave me.
She was six—six and a half if you rounded up, which she liked to do—when her world shattered.
She woke up in the middle of the night, which was not that unusual for her; it seemed that almost every night she had to go to the bathroom or needed a drink of water or had a bad dream that would send her running for her mommy and daddy's room. But on this night, she woke up with a strange feeling in her tummy, a feeling that something was not right.
A feeling that only grew as she crept down the stairs, a worn stuffed bunny in her hand, and saw her daddy talking to police officers.
She blinked. What was going on here? Didn't they know that her daddy was a good grown-up, not a bad man? She watched, wide-eyed, until a clap of thunder rumbled loudly, and she screamed. Only then did they turn and see her sitting on the third to last stair.
Only then did she see that her daddy had been crying.
"Where's Mommy?" she asked innocently, not comprehending the sympathetic looks shared, the way her daddy swallowed hard.
She was scooped up into familiar arms and an equally familiar lap, a place where she always felt safe from everything—only to have her safe place violated. "An accident," he told her as he brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, then froze. "Mommy is an angel now," he said as she clung to him, the tears wracking her body.
She didn't know that this was only the beginning of her misery.
Every musical note has a corresponding frequency. Middle C, for example, vibrates at two hundred and sixty-one hertz. Which means any piece of music can be expressed as a series of numbers.
They still wouldn't let him see his mother.
He was too young, they explained. He could be carrying a virus or a really bad germ and not even realize it. They couldn't take the risk.
He pouted, looking all the more like a boy of six and a half years. Whoever they were, he thought to himself, were crazy. All he wanted to do was see her, hug her, make sure that she was really okay. But she was still in a place in the hospital that was named after a bunch of letters, and its number one rule was NO KIDS ALLOWED.
He decided he officially hated the hospital, even if the doctors and nurses were fixing his mother and making her all better again.
After two days of watching and worrying, begging and pleading, one of his father's friends came to talk to him. There was a new summer camp not far from there, he explained, and it started tomorrow. He could make lots of friends—boys his own age, girls too—and then his mother wouldn't worry so much about him. And after all, did he really want his poor mother who was already in the hospital to be worrying about him?
His forehead wrinkled in concentration as he debated this offer. It did sound cool, but he couldn't go back on his word to his father. He was opening his mouth to tell that to the nice man in front of him—Art or Arv or something—when the man smiled and said that his father thought this camp was a great idea.
His worries immediately vanished. If his father thought it was a good idea . . . he nodded eagerly.
He couldn't wait to attend camp.
Sark is looking for a music box designed by Rambaldi. The box plays a unique tune. Encoded within the tune there's an equation.
For what?
Zero point energy—a fuel source. The military applications alone would be unlimited.
First her mommy left her, and now her daddy was gone too.
Ever since that horrible night a year ago, she had been afraid to go to sleep, afraid that she would wake up and someone else would turn into an angel.
And then one day her daddy went away, but he wasn't an angel. He was just gone.
She wasn't sure if she'd ever get to see him again.
Or if he missed her. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he had never loved her.
She ordered herself to stop thinking like that. Her daddy loved her; he was just . . . away. Somewhere. For now.
Finally, after what was at least a hundred million years, her daddy returned. And she was happy—very, very happy.
But he was not. He was sad, and tired—and mad? But why? He never would tell her why.
He didn't sing songs with her anymore. He didn't pull her in his lap and read stories with her anymore. He wasn't like her old daddy; he was like a brand new one.
And then one day this new daddy asked her if she'd like to play pretend. Her eyes lit up and she nodded eagerly; it was one of her favorite games. He told her they were going to pretend she was at summer camp, even though it wasn't summer, she pointed out to him. And at summer camp you get to do special things.
He smiled at her—a real smile—and she smiled back. Playing pretend had never been better.
She couldn't wait to go to summer camp.
We've got audio.
Looking back on his childhood as an adult, he was surprised to learn he had attended a summer camp when he was six. He remembered his mom's car accident—a ruptured spleen, a few broken bones, bruises everywhere—and that the hospital staff refused to let him visit her. He remembered that she looked significantly better when he finally got to see her.
But he had somehow forgotten that he attended camp for four weeks in between "Be good next door while I run to the grocery store" and "I've missed you so much, sweetie."
While helping his mother clean out the attic he found a postcard he had mailed her. The entire left half of the card was taken up by his large, scrawled message. "I LOVE CAMP. MICHAEL XOXO" Someone with much neater—and smaller—handwriting had carefully addressed the card and added the stamp.
Now, more than twenty years later, he runs his fingers over the postcard, trying to remember. He has vague images of people and places floating through his brain, but nothing specific. His eyes widen slightly. And a song. There was some song they played every night as they were going to bed . . .
Okay, that's it. Confirm you've got the recording.
The time after her mother died became a blur to her—a halcyon of hazy memories, vague impressions. Nothing solid that she could hold onto, cling to.
Maybe it was better that way.
She had a few memories—fragments really—of the era of her perfect childhood, before a careening car and an icy road destroyed everything. Images of a dark-haired woman, always smiling. Images of books everywhere and a fire in the fireplace and music, always music . . .
There is one song she has tried for so many years to recall, a song that is permanently on the tip of her tongue. No words, only a melody that sometimes haunts her in her dreams, a melody that disappears as she wakes.
She thinks that it was on one of the thousands of records that her parents owned, but she doubts she would find it now; most things that reminded her father of her mother were either boxed up or given away years ago. But in her dreams she is four or five again, tiptoeing down the stairs, watching and listening as her mommy sits on her daddy's lap, as they both stare at the stack of papers on his desk, as he points to the small table where a record player and a box sit. She silently stares as they listen closely—for what, she never knows. Never thinks to ask them the next morning.
She seems to be destined to have the song always but not quite there in her mind, playing on a continuous loop in her subconscious, only making its presence known when she is unable to tape herself humming it, unable to pound out the notes she hears on her mother's baby grand, unable to sing it to someone, anyone, and beg and plead for them to help her track down the title or the composer or something.
In the last twenty-one years, she's often longed for an opportunity to go back in time and see her mother, a chance to briefly resurrect her and meet this woman who shaped her now that she is an adult, not a young girl. For all the questions she has, she thinks she might ask first if she remembers a haunting ballad.
So then, who designed it?
A man named Milo Rambaldi.
Never heard of him.
It seems that Rambaldi was a prophet.
Back in the sixties, when most government officials were trying to keep their leaders alive, others began to make covert plans to train their successors. It was given an innocuous title, one that would lead people to think of home and family and the spirit of giving.
It was, as one might suspect, far more insidious than that.
One man was chosen to lead this study; another took the results and ran, testing it on innocent children before it was sanctioned by the government. They never knew, of course, that the testing took place.
The music box took care of that.
This man, the agent who foolishly tested and trained unknowing victims, was not a true patriot. Even then, as the old decade turned the page to a new era and the government changed hands once more, he was traveling on a downward spiral. His ultimate betrayal was yet to come.
But for now, at this juncture in time, he stole information from one investigation and used it in his testing of another. The music the children heard blasted over the speakers at camp was courtesy of an old music box—so old that most people laughed at him, doubting it would even work—that he had uncovered in a recent mission. He couldn't be certain, but he had great faith in the music. More importantly, he had great faith in its creator.
A man named Milo Rambaldi.
In the years to come, he would become an expert of sorts on this man. He would study his designs, the things he produced, the things he developed centuries before his time.
None of that had happened yet. He knew only this—the music contained in this box was powerful. A delicate, haunting tune—a tune that they were using to help children forget who they were and where they were during their short stay.
To the best of his knowledge, it was the only music box of its kind. If he ever discovered a second one, he would not hesitate to extract it using whatever means necessary.
I'm ready to destroy the music box.
Affirmative. We've got the recording.
Seasons continue to change, governments continue to rise and fall, and children grow into adults. He still worries about his ability to protect a woman he loves, and she still spends much of her time playing pretend—but the stakes are much higher now. Higher than six-year-olds could ever imagine. even in a hundred million years
They are no longer strangers on opposite ends of the same land, although they are still unaware of all the ways that they are inexplicably bound. They will know soon enough.
For now, they are colleagues, united in their quest to bring down one man and his study of all things Rambaldi. She is preparing to fly to another remote corner of the world and track down an elusive music box—he fails to tell them it is a second music box—using information that her mother gave her. It still jolts her to think that, for it was not too long ago that she learned her mommy really wasn't an angel; in fact, she's more like a devil. Meanwhile, he is on the other side of the world, waiting with baited breath to hear her voice in his ear, to listen as she winds the music box and plays the song Rambaldi has prepared for them.
And then she does.
The music plays quickly—too quickly, and all too soon it is over. Each is brought out of their own reverie, not saying aloud what they are screaming inside.
It is not that they have heard that specific tune before, although they will each listen to it repeatedly while it is being analyzed. What causes both of them to be on alert is that it is so unfamiliar and yet familiar at the same time, reminding them both of . . . their childhoods? But that makes no sense to them, they reason in a dark, cold warehouse. They continue to search for an answer, even as it lies right in front of them.
Perhaps someday all the pieces of the puzzle will finally fall into place. He will go through his mother's things and find a second journal his father kept, one that tells of an explosive fight with a colleague who may have put his son's life in danger. She will turn back the pages of time and realize that neither of her parents was as innocent as she thought they were. They will play the tune from the second music box enough times that memories will begin to unspool, questions will be raised, answers will finally be found.
But until that happens, they will take a moment to close their eyes and let the minor chords play their haunting tune. For they know that somewhere within themselves lies the answer.
~~~fin~~~