Vow
By : Dru
Chapter. 4
Disclaimer : See previous chapters
Words : 2223
A/N : HUGE thanks to ivana derevko from SD-1 . net for helping me with this whole thing with the backstory and such. Thanks to southern cross on SD-1 . net for reading it through and checking it all over for mistakes and stuff. Hugs to the both of you. I hope anyone who reads this likes it and pretty, pretty please leave a reply?
Goes back to watching
FullMetal Alchemist. (when I first typed it up, but lol, found it
missing an ep. and started watching some Firefly)
1.09.2006 : So sorry it took me so long to update but I've been busy with the summer and school starting up again and such. :) But I hope you enjoy. I don't know when I'll update, I kinda don't like the whole fanfiction anymore. I mean, I LOVE reading it but not so muc writing it anymore. Just too uninspired by TV shows today, or no time or spending it on writing other things.
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1914 :
Thora Aslaug was getting ready to leave what had been her home for many years. She was moving from Denmark to Russia, where it had been arranged that she was to marry Vadim Lazarey. Vaguely she recalled being told that he was a cousin of the current tsar of Russia.
Being only 18 years old she was sure he would be much older than her. She at least hoped that he was a decent human being. Many had told her that she had the bluest eyes that they had ever seen. She was proud of the way she looked, but did that mean that she was vain?
She wasn't really Danish, but had ended up living with the Danish royal family. That was just strange, yes, but she had grown to like it. At least it was better than being stuck in Iceland with her...father, Hrafn. She did not even want to think what might have happened if she had been left there.
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"How the hell did you get that here?" Sydney asked her husband, when he came back from getting their dinner for their last night at this house. She would miss the house but, she couldn't wait to get out of there and have at least a facade of a normal life. She was going to have her child, and start the job she had lined up. Thanks to her mom, she had a job as an English teacher waiting for her.
"You know I have connections, it was no problem getting it. I promise not to eat any of it tonight." He told her, grinning (yes, grinning), as he went to the kitchen to get everything on plates and such. It was for a dinner with Rachel, she had no idea what they were serving and so she would be surprised too.
"You have connections that can get you old fish?" She asked him, and put a hand over her nose to block out the bad fish smell. Hopefully, Rachel would still eat it. Sydney couldn't wait to see what her reaction would be to it.
"Well good, because you know what happened the last time you ate some of that vile thing." She told him with a smirk, as Rachel walked out of her room and towards them.
"Damn, what the hell is that smell?" She asked, as she sat down next to Sydney who was at the dining room table. Sark was bringing the food (if that's what you can call it) to the table, putting it far away from Sydney so she wouldn't be pissed.
"Want to taste some? The smell might be awful, but the taste is not that bad. Seriously, just ask blondie." Sydney told Rachel, and smiled her brightest smile at the younger woman. Rachel looked at the white cube with disgust then at Sark who only nodded his head a bit, before using a toothpick to stab one and put it in her mouth. What the hell was she thinking? Nothing at all, brain freeze.
It was only in her mouth for a fraction of a second and then she gagged and went flying for the toilet. She could hear the couple laughing all the way to the bathroom. That was just plain mean, to do something like that to someone.
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2004 :
"You're not going to eat that, are you? I mean, you heard what the man said it was. No sane human would or should eat that." She told her husband, on the second day of their honeymoon.
"I'll give it a shot, and drink this with it, supposed to be one hell of a drink." He told her, as he lifted up a toothpick with a white cube and a little glass of something clear. He's really only doing this to freak her out.
"Don't kiss me! You have rotten shark breath." She told him, and he just smirked at her.
"You're an ass." She told him, and then took a shot of black death, a vile alcoholic Icelandic drink.
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"You two are crazy and mean. Thank god, you are moving out. I don't even want to know what that was." Rachel told them, when she came back from the toilet, eager for a glass of water.
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The Next Day (Thursday):
It's 6 in the morning and Rachel hears a knock on her front door. Deciding to ignore it, she hopes whoever it is will go away eventually. But after 5 minutes of knocking, she's fully awake and grumpy when she finally goes to the door. When she found out what she ate last night her stomach hadn't taken kindly to it, even after she had thrown it up.
"What! For crying out loud, it's 6 in the damn morning. If you're selling something I'll kill you." She yelled to the person who had been knocking on her door for the last five minutes.
"I assure you, Ms. Nichols, I'm not selling anything. I just have one question. Where the hell is my daughter?" Jack Bristow asked a ghost white Rachel.
"Uh, I don't know." She told him, after swallowing the big lump that had formed in her throat when she found out that she had just threatened Jack Bristow.
"When I got back from my mission I was informed that my daughter had resigned from the CIA." Rachel felt smaller than ever before.
"So? She's about to have a baby and her fiancé is dead. Maybe she didn't want to work at a place that reminded her of him." She kept looking at anything but his eyes. Biggest mistake she could make right now would be to look in his eyes.
"Then she must be here. Where else would she be? Go wake her up." He looked behind her into the apartment, trying to see if his daughter's bedroom door was open.
"She's a real deep sleeper. I won't be able to wake her up." Damn, bad mistake, real bad mistake. She had lied, and Jack eyed her, a stern look on his face.
"Her car is gone, she's obviously not here. Why would you lie about her being here?" He asked her, as he started backing her up against a nearby wall.
"Her car missing does not mean that she's not here. Maybe someone borrowed it or something." She told him, a bit of a crack was heard in her voice.
"Then since you say she's here and you won't wake her up. I'll go and do so." He told her, as he pushed past her and went for Sydney's bedroom. Rachel ran after him, yelling.
"She needs all the rest she can get. Don't do it, Mr. Bristow." She trailed after him, with a panicked voice.
He doesn't listen and opens the bedroom door. What smacks him in the face is a room stripped of everything personal. Empty closets, a bed with a mattress but no linens, empty everything. Except one photo he find in one of the closets. On the back it says 'Honeymoon.10.12.2004.Iceland.' He turns it around and looks at the actual photo.
It's Sydney in a knit wool sweater, but someone is hugging her and she's laughing like she's having a great time. Looks like one of them had taken it, just had that look to it. You know, all crooked and just more alive than if they were posed.
"What the hell is this?" He asked Rachel, who had curled up on the bed and was half-asleep. The mattress was nice, even just on it's own. She was so moving into this bedroom and making it her own, the mattress was too good to be left unused for who knows how long.
"It looks like a photograph." She told him, he grabbed her up of the bed (strong for an older man) and pushed her up against the wall next to the door. Her eyes must have showed that she was terrified. Who wouldn't be?
"I know it's a photo, but what is the meaning of what it shows?" He asked her and she looked at it again. She looked at it like she hadn't been shown it before, just last night in fact, with a whole bunch of others from the same time-frame.
"Um, I don't know. Looks like Sydney and someone having a bit of fun." She tells him, and his eyes squint at her. She was about to crack, it was just unavoidable. It was fate.
"I know you know who this someone is. You ran into him in Brazil on your first mission out in the field for us. In fact, I do believe you slept with him." Jack said, adding a mean smile with that last comment. Ouch, yeah, please remind her of that big mistake.
"No need to remind me of past mistakes. It won't happen again. She'd kill me." She told him, before her eyes went wide and she realized that she'd fed up now.
"Who would kill you?" He asked her, and she was speechless.
"Do you mean Sydney? My daughter, Sydney?" He nearly yelled at her, veins throbbing and pulse going insane from what she could feel. Loosing control? Him? Doesn't happen. Shit.
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Next Day (Russia):
When Irina walked into her living room, after a week away, she saw Jack Bristow sitting in one of her good chairs. Why did this not surprise her? Nothing surprised her anymore about him. This was probably about Sydney and Sark. They were safe, that's all she needed to know but he would need more.
"What do you want now, Jack?" She asked him, hands on her hips and a smile on her face.
"My daughter. She's gone off somewhere with your former lapdog, Mr. Sark. I found this.." He handed her the photo he had found back at Sydney's place.
"Ah, so sweet." The only thing she said when she looked at the photo and brushed her fingers over their faces. She had seen a few pictures from the honeymoon, but this one was perfect. Like one of those ads that have nothing to do at all with the product they are advertising.
"Cut the crap, Irina. I know you know where they went." She put away the photo and looked at him again. He was so serious all the time. He needed to lighten up a bit, if he even remembered how to.
"If you ruin this for our daughter or Julian, I won't hesitate to kill you." All the feelings from earlier (there had been some, just had to dig a little.) gone from her eyes.
"What is the connection between you and Mr. Sark? Why do you care so much him?" He needed to change the subject and he had always been curious about their relationship. Had it been Professional, sexual, etc.?
"I made a promise. To my mother, to his mother, to my grandmother. Our families have been connected together by friendship since 1914. When Julian's great grand-mother, Thora, got married to Vadim Laarey. He was a nephew of Maria of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who married Vladimir, brother of Alexander III." Standing, she walked towards him and she kept talking.
"Nicholas II was Julian's great-great-uncle. My mother, Helena, made me promise to take care of him. Valeriya, his mother, made me promise so also. It's been like that since Thora met my great-grandmother, Akilina at court. I'd never go back on that promise. It'd be a disgrace to my family." She had sat down next to him and reached for something around her neck and didn't find it.
"Did you loose something?" Jack asked her, as she seemed to be in another world or at least a faint memory of the past. He wondered what she had thought she would find around her neck, but didn't.
"What? Oh, no. I just forgot that I gave it away." Then she smiled at him her 'Laura' smile. The one she used to smile all the time when he didn't know who she really was or that she would ultimately stab him in the back.
"Well, I want this damn thing annulled." He then told her, and she just looked at him all smiles again and shakes her head so her loose hair went into a soft circle around her head.
"Jack, just shut up and kiss me." Before she took matter into her own hands and kissed him. All worries and annulment plans went out the window for a minute or ten.
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1936 :
Helena's mother, Akilina, had just recently died but not before securing her 20 year old daughter's promise to visit Thora. That woman, Thora Aslaug, had been her mother's best friend for more than 22 years. When she got there, the woman had given her the most beautiful pendant she had ever seen in her short yet long life.
It was made entirely of pure gold and diamonds. Helena had called it the bee egg pendant. Shaped like an egg, it was white with lines of gold and diamonds. On one side there was one little golden bee and that was the reason why she called it her 'bee-egg' pendant. One day, one of her children would get this. That's what Thora had said, that it was an heirloom and was supposed to pass between generations.
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To Be continued...
From Wikipedia : Þorramatur consists of many different types of food, such as sour ram testicles, rotten shark, burned sheep heads, sheep head jam, blood pudding and dried fish (often cod or haddock), served with butter.
Chef Anthony Bourdain, who has travelled extensively throughout the world sampling local cuisine for his Travel Channel show No Reservations, has described shark þorramatur as "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he has ever eaten.
Off course, people only eat it to scare tourists. lol. Okay, so some actually seem to like it, but mostly it's just for show now. lmao.
And the thing that Sark drank with it is what's below called Black Death :
From Wikipedia : Brennivín is an Icelandic schnapps, considered the country's signature alcoholic beverage. It is made from fermented potato pulp, and flavoured with cumin, caraway seeds or angelica. It is sometimes called "black death". Also at times it is drunk as a "chaser" after sampling "hákarl", which consists of putrified shark meat, to mask the meat's taste. The word brennivín literally translates into English as 'burning wine'. Despite its unofficial status as national beverage, many Icelanders do not actually drink it, and a majority of the ones who do, drink it only when feeling patriotic or when trying to impress foreign visitors.
This general distaste for the drink can be attributed partly to its strong taste and high alcohol content (37.5 ABV) and partly due to its reputation.
Probably means because it's so cheap it's the only thing that the drunks can afford sometimes.