In the last five years, Irina has been to hell and back several times. Seeing Sydney and Jack again, despite the circumstances, had been worth it. Later, in losing her daughter, she had regained her husband, and she had wished things could be different.

But she had come back from the dead before, and so did Sydney, but before Irina saw her again she found herself in a hell of her own sister's making. She was prepared for death, but Elena wasn't that merciful.

Turns out Elena lost in the end, Irina thinks with a sad smile. Despite her scheming and her betrayal, she is the dead one and Irina is still alive. And not just alive, but in her husband's arms. She has held both her daughters, whom she thought lost to her; she has forgiven and been forgiven; she has seen the fulfillment of a prophecy she tried to prevent but she has not lost hope.

"You're too thin," Jack says as his hands skim over her back. "You're not eating properly."

"I've put on five kilograms in the last week. Just how fat would you like me to be?" She smiles, and silently acknowledges the truth in his words. Though she looks less like the skeleton Jack pulled out of that hole in the ground, she is still little more than skin and bone.

"I'm not leaving until I think you're healthy enough."

"Sydney needs you, too," she says. "And Nadia."

"Sydney has Vaughn and Nadia has a whole team of doctors of looking after her. You have no one."

"They need their father."

"You need your husband."

Irina is not used to needing anybody. As she looks at Jack now, she recognizes the stubborn light in his eyes, and decides that this is an argument she doesn't mind losing.

Jack's fingers lightly brush her cheek. "I keep thinking you're going to disappear on me," he says.

She smiles. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Even if you do, I'll find you."

"Promise?"

He nods solemnly, still caressing her face. There is more emotion in that simple gesture than in any words he could say and Irina feels tears prick her eyes. She has lost the mask of control she wore so well all her life, but she thinks that Jack is possibly the one person in the world she doesn't mind being weak with.

He brushes her tears away, and she is undone by his gentleness.

"I'm not going to lose you again," he says.

She has spent her life running in circles and right now she feels that she's come home. She's too tired to run anymore, and she realizes from the way Jack is looking at her that she no longer needs to run anywhere.

"Do we really have a chance?"

His lips quirk; not quite a smile. "We've survived this far."

The past is another country, Irina thinks; one she has no desire to revisit. So she smiles at her husband, and chooses to believe.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the windowpanes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

-- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The End.