The Retribution Game
by
Chris AndersonDisclaimer: Alias is the property of other people, including J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot productions.
Written for the Theatrical Muse 'comeuppance' challenge.
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She has made an art and a science out of retribution.
Moreover, she understands when it is truly called for. She has an appreciation for a worthy adversary. Jack Bristow has been that, and they have played the retribution game out to its end time and time again. Her feint and his dodge, his strike and her parry...
She approves of the way Jack plays the game, the way that her daughters play it, even the way that her sisters play it. Those like the Covenant, who have made the mistake of getting in her way, crossing the lines she has drawn, touching what is hers- They are not adversaries so much as they are annoyances, something to be pushed aside when they get in her way, and if they should be injured in the process, well, she will shed no tears for shedding their blood. Perhaps she'll take the time to twist the knife just a bit as she brushes past- this for Sydney, this for the two years suffered by those who loved her...
Retribution.
The word crosses her mind, brushes along her senses, burns her eyes and tangles in her hands, and it is Arvin Sloane she remembers when she cannot shake the thought aside.
Arvin Sloane, who has been over the years her lover, her ally, her enemy... Arvin Sloane who, for all his intelligence, for all his cunning, has never really truly understood her. Arvin who is foolish enough to think that their goals are the same, that they have always been so, when in fact they have never been the same.
He believes her own betrayals excuse his, that she cannot cast stones. But she can. She can, for Sydney's recruitment, the death of her fiancé, the death of her best friend... and for Nadia. Nadia whom she has spent so many years hiding and hiding from, so many years of running from her youngest daughter instead of running to her, because it was the only way to keep her from the hands of those who would use her for their own ends, use her, take what they needed, and never understand, never care- for who and what Nadia is, for how perilous, how frail...
She has never forgiven Nadia's father for becoming one of those people.
For Arvin the lure of Rambaldi and his mysteries overshadows blood, and this is a crime for which Irina can never, will never, absolve him of guilt. That guilt screams to her in the night with Nadia's voice, begging, pleading, not to be given the next injection...
The thought of it is enough to send Irina into a fury so cold that ice forms in the wake of her footsteps. She has killed in moods such as this, killed for the slightest gesture or word spoken out of place- a lack of control that she normally does not allow herself. But this fury, this rage at Sloane, freezes every thought of stepping back. This fury robs her of any restraint, and her nature is such that she requires that restraint. Without it she is not the slender and implacable dagger she has formed herself into over the years, but the broadsword, violent, unwieldy, a danger to everything and anything.
It cannot happen; she cannot allow it to happen.
She knows Arvin has been to death's doorway and back; this pleases her, but it is not enough. He must be taken to that doorway again, and he must not return from it. She plots this meticulously, as she does all things, movement by movement, instant by instant. She knows precisely how long it will take her to kill him, how long she will have to savor each drop of blood as it falls.
She knows exactly how and and when he will learn that between them, the retribution game is not a game at all.
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