Chapter Three
Title: True Lies
Author: Puts hand up. Yes me! Aeria, Doona, donna__rose@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Please Read and Review
Summary: Jack and Irina have a chat
Disclaimer: Duh, not mine, Wish they were.
A/N: Yes, I know stupid to try to write a character no one can work out, but I want to try, because I'm bored. So please hate it, love it whatever. I'm not sure I have the characters right, so if you have any suggestions, tell me. Okay, thank you thank you for the reviews, it's the only reason I'm still writing. This is a short chapter, but if I get reviews quickly, I'll start writing and possibly have the next chapter up in two hours.
"Can you blame me?" he was blunt, to the point, he'd stopped playing games by now and was just talking, unrestrained, but still masked.
"No, not really. But what I did shouldn't mean the end of something that could be so good. For both of them. I think what you're doing is unfair." She looked down, allowing her hair to fall, forming a curtain around her face, shielding her face from prying eyes. Taking a shaky breath she continued, "You know it would do her good."
"No I don't," dull, heartless.
"It's a fact," she said, her voice more like Sydney's than it should have been. "You know you were a better agent when we were married. You wanted to work harder, to get home quicker, to get things right."
An explosion that rattled the glass: "We were never married Irina, that wasn't you."
She nodded his voice still resounding off the walls as he glared at her, his lips pursed in self hatred and contempt for her. "This isn't about Vaughn really." She paused, taking her time in picking her words, her eyes still down-turned but her hands moving to tuck her hair up behind her ears in a very Sydney-like way. "Tell me about Laura. Tell me what you loved about her."
Jack's features changed quickly, in the briefest second his face was naked, the confusion, pain and loss all openly unmasked. But then they were covered, still Irina had seen them and it was tugging at her, somewhere inside, hard sharp pulls overlying a growing pain. Jack looked at her in what he thought appeared as pure disgust but unluckily came out as though he had just eaten something tasting similar to tar.
He shook his head before telling her in a low, growling voice, acting as though he wasn't scared of her, as though he didn't care what she knew. "I loved her for the person she pretended to be," Irina's eyes came up and looked at him in raw perplexity, for some reason she resolved not to hide her confusion over his choice in words, so he continued.
"She was ambitious, like me, she knew what she wanted and she got it. Laura was different to most of the women around she was obsessive which only added to her ambition, if she wanted something and she couldn't get it, she wouldn't stop trying. Ever." Jack looked up and saw Irina smiling a little, as though she was reminiscing.
Again he had to wonder why he was acting so unlike what other people saw of him, more like he had acted twenty years ago. But he continued none the less, "She was impulsive, she didn't question things, did them because she felt like it. This clashed with my own behaviour, which," he paused and looked up in a withdrawn sort of way, "Well, it excited me. Laura was gorgeous," he was gone now, Irina knew he wasn't even aware of her listening, it was a type of recollection, probably about something he hadn't thought of for years.
"Beautiful but intelligent at the same time. Something hard to find. Her mind was fast, faster than mine. She could always outsmart me and I never, ever won a game of scrabble or monopoly from her. Something no one at work would believe. But it's true." He stared at her hands through the window.
"You won monopoly once." Irina wanted to kick herself for interrupting but something in her had forced her to do it. Now he was looking at her like a deer caught in an on coming car's headlights. "You did. We were playing one night over wine, on the floor in the lounge. Sydney was asleep and."
He cut across her, interrupting her again, something her employees had been killed for. "I shouldn't have won. I cheated. Sydney was crying and you left for a minute. I stole money from the bank."
Her mouth broke into a smile that spread across her entire face, causing her eyes to glitter and her cheeks to become full and rosier. "Good to see that both of us made mistakes. Go on, about Laura, you were saying she was higher than you intellectually."
"I was not, she was simply quicker than me," he couldn't help a small smile to escape until once again he found himself wanting to tell her everything. "She was strong, back then, not many women were as strong as you." Irina picked up that he was now saying 'you' instead of 'her'. "We used to play fight on the bed. So incredibly not me," he frowned in disbelief as he recalled what he had once been. "She could take me on; you'd beat me sometimes, your strength winning out.
"Laura, she was strong, but at the same time she was somehow," he looked up, probing for the right word, "graceful and elegant. She was always so fluent." Irina ducked her head a little, wanting to see his face but unable to as he had suddenly turned back to looking at the ground. "I don't know though, all of these character traits, they were all just extras, I loved Laura because she was untamed, a challenge. She was so wild and carefree and so unlike the girls in the office that would flirt with me because of my reputation. Back then I was proud of my work and happy to have them flirt, but none were going to keep me challenged.
"But Laura, Laura was different. You were intense and passionate." Laura held my gaze, never looked away. She had fire; that was what I loved about her." It was a grand speech and more like the Jack Irina had known than anything he had done since she had returned.
She nodded slightly, bringing his eyes back up to hers. Biting her lip she pressed on in her interegation, "What about me? Who do you think I am?"
He looked at her. "Why do you bother to ask? You know my answer." The corner of his mouth turned down in distaste.
"Do I?" She blinked and adopted a cold look of indifference to his answer.
"I think you are a murdering, lying, black-mailing bitch." Jack swallowed what he was going to put on the end when he thought he heard the sound of an intake of air too fast to be a normal breath.
Irina nodded, sadly almost. "Right. But what about me? My personality? Not based on my...past actions."
"You expect me to be completely honest?" Jack almost laughed at the idea of this woman's self-centred assumption. But all she would do in response was shrug. He sighed, throwing caution to the wind in the hope of escaping this conversation by shocking her. He told the truth: "I think you are highly motivated, compulsive, far too smart for your own good, tough, powerful, refined, though that might be fake," she laughed a little as his guess, the sudden interruption putting him off for a moment. "You appear to be beautiful but someone in your position has that illusion, you are of course mysterious, overly zealous and quick possibly the most evil woman I have ever met."
Her face went blank, quickly slipping into an almost neutral look before she came back to life with a number of blinks and a smirk that forced Jack's eyes into slits of caution. "The last bit, you don't believe that. And you shouldn't, I don't think it's true. How am I different from Laura?"
The penny dropped, he'd anticipated an attack like this, the exact question had even crossed his mind, but faced with it he was stuck, because he had no false answer ready, he would, again, tell the truth, something he wasn't used to doing. Not to anyone.
"You're stronger, physically and mentally. Far more manipulative, far worse and the enemy. It doesn't matter; I'm not stupid enough to fall in love again. I don't think I was ever in love, I couldn't have been really; it was all an illusion." He gulped, he was unravelling, his own thoughts were distorting into something, some ultimate truth he didn't want to know. He wished he could just get up and leave but knew that if he did, Irina would be of little use to the CIA from then on. She wasn't going to co- operate unless he allowed her to and to leave right now would be saying that they had nothing left to talk about.
He continued to stare at her, her brows creased, hard, small lines, a result of both age and torment, appeared on her forehead and she turned slowly in her chair to face a wall again, her face in perfect profile for Jack to watch. She visibly swallowed, as though she was having trouble keeping her composure. Jack continued to watch as she stood up and walked again to the back wall.
Swallowing again, now sure that Jack couldn't see her, Irina put a hand against the wall and put some of her weight against it. She tried to blink away the salty water that she felt pooling in her eyes her only result being two drops, full, round and large, dripping precariously down her cheeks: undoubtedly leaving trails. She hoped that Jack wasn't watching as they continued to flow, one after the other until the weight became too much and they began to fall to the hard cement floor.
Irina wasn't used to loosing it like this, she rarely cried and until a couple of weeks ago it had always been because the situation called for it. And now, her daughter and her ex-husband were pulling them from her, one after the other, quickly and accidentally. Neither of them even realised the effect they were having and she couldn't really explain it.
Her inference that Jack hadn't noticed was proved a couple of seconds latter when she heard his chair scrap back from the window across the floor and his body move into a standing position. As discrete as she could possibly be, Irina lifted a hand to her face and wiped the tears away roughly before dragging her hand up through her hair, pulling at the knots that were gathering as the day proceeded.
"You, only walk away when you aren't sure of your self. I know that, for sure. So, I'm forced to come to the conclusion that you're not exactly sure of what I'm talking about: you don't understand love." He nodded behind her, Irina's body still relying on the one hand for support as he continued his assault. "But, then, I don't know why I ever believed that you could. You don't have a bone of good will, a cell of justice. Nothing, you hate everyone, everything so of course when someone talks about love you're going to either show you don't understand or turn away." His voice was loud, shaking a little, but thunder upon her ears.
She wasn't sure why, but it was too loud to bear. The attack unfair as she hadn't expected it and so perhaps he was right. The only times she ever faltered was when love was involved and she didn't fully understand it. But he had no right in saying that. Mad at herself and at Jack she turned around and stalked back to the window with long, measured strides. "You can't attack me like that."
"I can, because you're the bad guy and I'm the good guy, you're in a cell and I'm a free man. So I can say exactly what I want." He was completely unlike he had been for the past twenty years, full of passion, fire and it was exciting.
"This is America; I can say what I want as well. You are an ill- tempered, grumpy old man with no ambition other than to wreak revenge on the woman that ruined your life. You haven't been anything since I left and you'll never be anything again." She was shouting at him, her hands once again on either side of the brown surface as she let the words flow out of her mouth without bothering to check them for basis, reason or fact.
He stared back for a moment. "What I had with you," his voice rose even louder as she tried to over ride him but failed as he got even more upset. "What I had with you wasn't real. Anything real is more than something fake."
"Oh no, no that's not the problem. I'm back now and you can't see the difference," her voice dropped into a whisper as she went in for the kill. "You loved Laura Bristow and now a woman who looks just like her and acts very much the same is back and it's your job to hate her. But you can't; you still can't tell the difference."
"That is not it," louder, impossibly louder. "I can tell the difference, a million things to distinguish." He looked at her, his face younger for a moment as his passion continued to grow. "I know it's you."
She wanted to grab him, to rip him apart just to find the answer to the question. "Then what?"
"I know who you used to be, I can guess who you are right now. I know," his voice rose and fell through out the speech. "I know that you're not Laura but somehow I want you." The damage was done; he may as well, say it properly, "More than ever."
A look of unrefined shock crossed both faces simultaneously and each slumped back in their chairs with looks of confusion, frustration, uncertainty jumping from one side of the glass to the other. Irina opened her mouth to speak and her voice came out as a hollow rasp.
Title: True Lies
Author: Puts hand up. Yes me! Aeria, Doona, donna__rose@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Please Read and Review
Summary: Jack and Irina have a chat
Disclaimer: Duh, not mine, Wish they were.
A/N: Yes, I know stupid to try to write a character no one can work out, but I want to try, because I'm bored. So please hate it, love it whatever. I'm not sure I have the characters right, so if you have any suggestions, tell me. Okay, thank you thank you for the reviews, it's the only reason I'm still writing. This is a short chapter, but if I get reviews quickly, I'll start writing and possibly have the next chapter up in two hours.
"Can you blame me?" he was blunt, to the point, he'd stopped playing games by now and was just talking, unrestrained, but still masked.
"No, not really. But what I did shouldn't mean the end of something that could be so good. For both of them. I think what you're doing is unfair." She looked down, allowing her hair to fall, forming a curtain around her face, shielding her face from prying eyes. Taking a shaky breath she continued, "You know it would do her good."
"No I don't," dull, heartless.
"It's a fact," she said, her voice more like Sydney's than it should have been. "You know you were a better agent when we were married. You wanted to work harder, to get home quicker, to get things right."
An explosion that rattled the glass: "We were never married Irina, that wasn't you."
She nodded his voice still resounding off the walls as he glared at her, his lips pursed in self hatred and contempt for her. "This isn't about Vaughn really." She paused, taking her time in picking her words, her eyes still down-turned but her hands moving to tuck her hair up behind her ears in a very Sydney-like way. "Tell me about Laura. Tell me what you loved about her."
Jack's features changed quickly, in the briefest second his face was naked, the confusion, pain and loss all openly unmasked. But then they were covered, still Irina had seen them and it was tugging at her, somewhere inside, hard sharp pulls overlying a growing pain. Jack looked at her in what he thought appeared as pure disgust but unluckily came out as though he had just eaten something tasting similar to tar.
He shook his head before telling her in a low, growling voice, acting as though he wasn't scared of her, as though he didn't care what she knew. "I loved her for the person she pretended to be," Irina's eyes came up and looked at him in raw perplexity, for some reason she resolved not to hide her confusion over his choice in words, so he continued.
"She was ambitious, like me, she knew what she wanted and she got it. Laura was different to most of the women around she was obsessive which only added to her ambition, if she wanted something and she couldn't get it, she wouldn't stop trying. Ever." Jack looked up and saw Irina smiling a little, as though she was reminiscing.
Again he had to wonder why he was acting so unlike what other people saw of him, more like he had acted twenty years ago. But he continued none the less, "She was impulsive, she didn't question things, did them because she felt like it. This clashed with my own behaviour, which," he paused and looked up in a withdrawn sort of way, "Well, it excited me. Laura was gorgeous," he was gone now, Irina knew he wasn't even aware of her listening, it was a type of recollection, probably about something he hadn't thought of for years.
"Beautiful but intelligent at the same time. Something hard to find. Her mind was fast, faster than mine. She could always outsmart me and I never, ever won a game of scrabble or monopoly from her. Something no one at work would believe. But it's true." He stared at her hands through the window.
"You won monopoly once." Irina wanted to kick herself for interrupting but something in her had forced her to do it. Now he was looking at her like a deer caught in an on coming car's headlights. "You did. We were playing one night over wine, on the floor in the lounge. Sydney was asleep and."
He cut across her, interrupting her again, something her employees had been killed for. "I shouldn't have won. I cheated. Sydney was crying and you left for a minute. I stole money from the bank."
Her mouth broke into a smile that spread across her entire face, causing her eyes to glitter and her cheeks to become full and rosier. "Good to see that both of us made mistakes. Go on, about Laura, you were saying she was higher than you intellectually."
"I was not, she was simply quicker than me," he couldn't help a small smile to escape until once again he found himself wanting to tell her everything. "She was strong, back then, not many women were as strong as you." Irina picked up that he was now saying 'you' instead of 'her'. "We used to play fight on the bed. So incredibly not me," he frowned in disbelief as he recalled what he had once been. "She could take me on; you'd beat me sometimes, your strength winning out.
"Laura, she was strong, but at the same time she was somehow," he looked up, probing for the right word, "graceful and elegant. She was always so fluent." Irina ducked her head a little, wanting to see his face but unable to as he had suddenly turned back to looking at the ground. "I don't know though, all of these character traits, they were all just extras, I loved Laura because she was untamed, a challenge. She was so wild and carefree and so unlike the girls in the office that would flirt with me because of my reputation. Back then I was proud of my work and happy to have them flirt, but none were going to keep me challenged.
"But Laura, Laura was different. You were intense and passionate." Laura held my gaze, never looked away. She had fire; that was what I loved about her." It was a grand speech and more like the Jack Irina had known than anything he had done since she had returned.
She nodded slightly, bringing his eyes back up to hers. Biting her lip she pressed on in her interegation, "What about me? Who do you think I am?"
He looked at her. "Why do you bother to ask? You know my answer." The corner of his mouth turned down in distaste.
"Do I?" She blinked and adopted a cold look of indifference to his answer.
"I think you are a murdering, lying, black-mailing bitch." Jack swallowed what he was going to put on the end when he thought he heard the sound of an intake of air too fast to be a normal breath.
Irina nodded, sadly almost. "Right. But what about me? My personality? Not based on my...past actions."
"You expect me to be completely honest?" Jack almost laughed at the idea of this woman's self-centred assumption. But all she would do in response was shrug. He sighed, throwing caution to the wind in the hope of escaping this conversation by shocking her. He told the truth: "I think you are highly motivated, compulsive, far too smart for your own good, tough, powerful, refined, though that might be fake," she laughed a little as his guess, the sudden interruption putting him off for a moment. "You appear to be beautiful but someone in your position has that illusion, you are of course mysterious, overly zealous and quick possibly the most evil woman I have ever met."
Her face went blank, quickly slipping into an almost neutral look before she came back to life with a number of blinks and a smirk that forced Jack's eyes into slits of caution. "The last bit, you don't believe that. And you shouldn't, I don't think it's true. How am I different from Laura?"
The penny dropped, he'd anticipated an attack like this, the exact question had even crossed his mind, but faced with it he was stuck, because he had no false answer ready, he would, again, tell the truth, something he wasn't used to doing. Not to anyone.
"You're stronger, physically and mentally. Far more manipulative, far worse and the enemy. It doesn't matter; I'm not stupid enough to fall in love again. I don't think I was ever in love, I couldn't have been really; it was all an illusion." He gulped, he was unravelling, his own thoughts were distorting into something, some ultimate truth he didn't want to know. He wished he could just get up and leave but knew that if he did, Irina would be of little use to the CIA from then on. She wasn't going to co- operate unless he allowed her to and to leave right now would be saying that they had nothing left to talk about.
He continued to stare at her, her brows creased, hard, small lines, a result of both age and torment, appeared on her forehead and she turned slowly in her chair to face a wall again, her face in perfect profile for Jack to watch. She visibly swallowed, as though she was having trouble keeping her composure. Jack continued to watch as she stood up and walked again to the back wall.
Swallowing again, now sure that Jack couldn't see her, Irina put a hand against the wall and put some of her weight against it. She tried to blink away the salty water that she felt pooling in her eyes her only result being two drops, full, round and large, dripping precariously down her cheeks: undoubtedly leaving trails. She hoped that Jack wasn't watching as they continued to flow, one after the other until the weight became too much and they began to fall to the hard cement floor.
Irina wasn't used to loosing it like this, she rarely cried and until a couple of weeks ago it had always been because the situation called for it. And now, her daughter and her ex-husband were pulling them from her, one after the other, quickly and accidentally. Neither of them even realised the effect they were having and she couldn't really explain it.
Her inference that Jack hadn't noticed was proved a couple of seconds latter when she heard his chair scrap back from the window across the floor and his body move into a standing position. As discrete as she could possibly be, Irina lifted a hand to her face and wiped the tears away roughly before dragging her hand up through her hair, pulling at the knots that were gathering as the day proceeded.
"You, only walk away when you aren't sure of your self. I know that, for sure. So, I'm forced to come to the conclusion that you're not exactly sure of what I'm talking about: you don't understand love." He nodded behind her, Irina's body still relying on the one hand for support as he continued his assault. "But, then, I don't know why I ever believed that you could. You don't have a bone of good will, a cell of justice. Nothing, you hate everyone, everything so of course when someone talks about love you're going to either show you don't understand or turn away." His voice was loud, shaking a little, but thunder upon her ears.
She wasn't sure why, but it was too loud to bear. The attack unfair as she hadn't expected it and so perhaps he was right. The only times she ever faltered was when love was involved and she didn't fully understand it. But he had no right in saying that. Mad at herself and at Jack she turned around and stalked back to the window with long, measured strides. "You can't attack me like that."
"I can, because you're the bad guy and I'm the good guy, you're in a cell and I'm a free man. So I can say exactly what I want." He was completely unlike he had been for the past twenty years, full of passion, fire and it was exciting.
"This is America; I can say what I want as well. You are an ill- tempered, grumpy old man with no ambition other than to wreak revenge on the woman that ruined your life. You haven't been anything since I left and you'll never be anything again." She was shouting at him, her hands once again on either side of the brown surface as she let the words flow out of her mouth without bothering to check them for basis, reason or fact.
He stared back for a moment. "What I had with you," his voice rose even louder as she tried to over ride him but failed as he got even more upset. "What I had with you wasn't real. Anything real is more than something fake."
"Oh no, no that's not the problem. I'm back now and you can't see the difference," her voice dropped into a whisper as she went in for the kill. "You loved Laura Bristow and now a woman who looks just like her and acts very much the same is back and it's your job to hate her. But you can't; you still can't tell the difference."
"That is not it," louder, impossibly louder. "I can tell the difference, a million things to distinguish." He looked at her, his face younger for a moment as his passion continued to grow. "I know it's you."
She wanted to grab him, to rip him apart just to find the answer to the question. "Then what?"
"I know who you used to be, I can guess who you are right now. I know," his voice rose and fell through out the speech. "I know that you're not Laura but somehow I want you." The damage was done; he may as well, say it properly, "More than ever."
A look of unrefined shock crossed both faces simultaneously and each slumped back in their chairs with looks of confusion, frustration, uncertainty jumping from one side of the glass to the other. Irina opened her mouth to speak and her voice came out as a hollow rasp.