After Two Years
by
Chris AndersonDisclaimer: Alias is the property of other people, including J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot productions.
Written for the Theatrical Muse 'best 24 hours' challenge.
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Words on the screen, so simple and yet, for what they symbolized, so much more than that.
Our daughter is alive.
What must he have felt as he typed them? All of their struggle, all of the efforts they made to learn the truth- and all of the consequences for that effort, leading, little though they had known it, to this moment, these words.
She knows, for her part, how she felt upon reading them, as if the ground has fallen out from under her feet, and she is falling- but is was a glorious sort of fall.
She remembers two years of pain and struggle and grief, two years of searching for answers, for someone to blame. Two years of desperation and fury, two years of chasing every clue, every shade of a hint that might- might!- have led somewhere.
Two years after Jack came to her, making deals with the devils of his past, facing her, agreeing to work with her, because she was the only one in all the world who, like him, would go to any lengths to learn what had happened to their daughter.
A year after they began, a contact betrayed them, and when she was not able to reach Jack in time to warn him, he was caught and sent to prison. Again, because of her. A fact she does not wish to dwell upon, but lamented fairly often regardless. And if he had not been as "innocent' this time as the last, his crimes had been of the sort that any grieving parent, as they had been then, ought to have more than excused.
Irina had not stopped when they had taken Jack; she redoubled her efforts, enraged at the loss of her partner, her lover, a man who was still, in some curious legal tangle, her husband... (A knot he certainly had the ability to untie if he so chose... and yet he never had.)
She worked tirelessly for that year alone- but it was Jack who found her, or rather Sydney who went to him. And when she threatened and cajoled and applied a combination of force and blackmail her mother could have been proud of to arrange his release- When Sydney had done all of that, Jack risked every bit of his newly-won freedom to reach her, to find her again, to tell her their daughter was alive.
It was the first she had heard from him in over a year. The knowledge that he was free again would have been more than enough, but what he had said instead...
She would have given anything to hear him say the words aloud, to see him as they were spoken. But in the end it was enough that they were.
Alive. Their daughter, the best that had ever come of the two of them- she was alive.
My god, Irina remembers typing in reply. How is she?
A true child of the old Soviet Union, Irina has never believed in God.
But she believed in everything then.
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