On Friendship
by
Chris AndersonDisclaimer: Alias is the property of other people, including J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot productions.
Written for the Theatrical Muse 'friendship' challenge.
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Hers is a life that does not lend itself easily to friendship of any sort. Even in childhood she did not have friends. The closest thing she ever had were her sisters, and they were rivals and occasional allies far more than they were anything else. Today that is more true still.
Laura Bristow had friends; Irina Derevko does not. Laura's friends were, she thinks, true ones, as nearly as she can judge such things, but they were true friends to Laura. Only Emily Sloane, of all Laura's old friends, ever even knew Irina existed, and perhaps they were friends of a sort, she and Emily, in the short time they had between Irina's return and Emily's death.
She had been able to see Emily as a friend because Emily was not any threat to her. Intelligent, but hardly dangerous; a part of Irina's world only peripherally, initiated into the secret world only a short time before her death. By contrast, Emily's husband Arvin had always been a threat, and never a friend, although in the old days Laura would have said, as a matter of course, that both Arvin and Emily were her friends, and Jack's.
It was not true then, it is less true now, and if Arvin Sloane is the closest she has ever come to a friend of the opposite sex, she cannot say that, for herself, such a friendship would ever be possible.
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