Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Prompt #1: And if ever fate should choose to smite you, stand your ground, never walk away – "Lullaby", Assemblage23
He stands completely still; some part of his brain registers shock that it's come down to this, but there's another part of him that's known this was coming. It was inevitable: the moment he heard the words, "Your wife's real name was Irina Derevko," he's known that he would kill her. (Despite what the CIA told him, he'd known she was still alive, laughing at him somewhere out in the world, and he'd vowed she would not get the best of him.)
She looks up at him, her lips twitching as if she wants to smile, as if, even now, she knows something he doesn't, something important.
He crouches at her side, raising the hand she'd pressed to her stomach to stem the bleeding, and calmly looks at the wound. The smell of gunpowder is thick in the air surrounding them.
"You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this."
"Twenty years?" she gasps, and now she does smile. "Do you know-" another gasp"-how many times I – I was tempted to kill you while you slept?"
"Maybe you should have."
She coughs, and there's blood on her lips. Something about that gives Jack pause, and doubt gnaws at the edges of his conscience.
"Tell me, Irina, you're such a big believer in fate; do you think it was destined to happen this way? If you hadn't betrayed me – betrayed Sydney – maybe we would have had a different ending."
Her eyelids flutter closed, she grabs Jack's wrist when he tries to stand, and her grip is surprisingly strong. ". . . destroy each other anyway . . ."
And suddenly there's a knife in Jack's gut, and Irina's laughing—
Jack jerks upright in his bed, his hand automatically moving to his stomach before he realizes he's been dreaming again. In the first few months after he'd been released from CIA custody, he'd dreamed every night about killing Irina.
Now she's back in his life, and so are the dreams.
In the morning, after he arrives at the task force building, he watches Irina on the monitors. She's motionless, sitting in the centre of her cell, and Jack wonders if she knows he's watching her.
He wonders, if given the opportunity, whether he'll have the courage to kill her.
(He wonders what he would have done if, twenty years ago, she had come to him with the truth.)