(no subject)
in the pulse {there lies conviction}
Cryptic words meander
Now there is a song beneath the song
One day you'll learn
You'll soon discern its true meaning
An interesting detachment
A listless poem of love sincere
Desire, despair
Overlapping melodies
And it's not a love, it's not a love
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
Oh now the roots are reminiscing
Recurring dreams of minor chords
Metred time
Muted chimes find the beat
And in the pulse there lies conviction
A steady push and pull routine
The cymbals swell
High notes flail into reach
And it's not a love, it's not a love
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love,
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
~Maria Taylor, Song Beneath the Song
This is my entry for the Alias: Dearly Departed ficathon. I wrote for
kerlin;, who requested Tom's resurrection from Rachel's point of view. :)
Characters: Tom, Rachel, Ensemble
Rating: PG-13/R
Summary: It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
--
sometimes, she thinks of their first date
--
It takes two months for Rachel to be approved for field duty, after the End. It takes two months, but soon enough she and Dixon and Marshall are meeting with the other man-Agent Weiss-in a sterile room in Langley and learning of their new assignments.
Weiss and Marshall are sharing a joke, something about a spork or a mechanical cockroach-Rachel hasn’t been following the conversation.
She looks at Dixon out of the corner of her eye, and he’s trying to hold back his laughter.
After a few more minutes of banter, she excuses herself.
Standing in the Langley bathroom, under the gaze of three different security cameras, she still manages to feel alone.
--
a greek place in santa monica, feta and spinach salad
--
Dixon is appointed as a unit commander, which makes sense, although Rachel’s always seen him as an agent, or backup. This new Dixon-quiet, official Dixon-is unsettling. She pictures him as a coiled jaguar, hiding underneath his suit.
They’ve all moved to Virginia, leaving behind Los Angeles and the APO-sized crater that has been explained to the public as a gas main explosion, and Dixon invites them over for dinner. Agent Weiss is included in the invitation and Rachel smiles at him blankly as he offers to drive.
It’s only once they get there and she sees Dixon wielding a super soaker against his son-Stephen-that Rachel understands. This is where Dixon wants to be. This is what Dixon is meant for. This is it.
Weiss and Marshall take each other on in a poker game, laughing uproariously. Rachel sits on the couch, turns away from the table and its empty space where Tom would have sat, and quietly offers to take Dixon’s daughter shopping for prom dresses.
--
smiling across the table, her gun forgotten in her purse
--
After a few missions, Rachel asks to operate alone.
Her new partner, Jacob-Carruthers-from-Connecticut, is good in the field. He kicks ass and takes names and Rachel struts her stuff in lingerie. Together, they get the job done. He’s not the problem.
He's nice. He tells amusing anecdotes about his parents, at home in Hartford, and once when Rachel’s about to be shot he jumps in front of her and takes the bullet to his chest.
He’s wearing Kevlar, of course, but Rachel doesn’t realize that until ten seconds later.
No, he’s not the problem. With Jake around, she’s safe and their missions are a success.
They fall into bed together one night in Milan, though, and for the next week all Rachel can think about is the last time she had sex (way too long ago, with Sark, pretending to be someone she wasn’t) and the last time she kissed (way too long ago, with Tom, everything feeling right).
Rachel’s never been promiscuous. In college her roommate Deirdre teased her about being a virgin until three nights before her twenty-second birthday. She’d broken up with her last boyfriend when she went to work in Austria (what a good idea that turned out to be), and since then she’d been unattached. Years, now.
But they fall in bed together, and two weeks later Jake is sending her concerned, loving glances and Rachel feels like she can’t breathe. It’s the wrong man, wrong place, wrong time.
“I want to be alone,” she says, dropping her mission report on Dixon’s desk. “Undercover or something, not these missions.”
--
going to her apartment at the end of the night, hand in hand
--
They send her to training for six weeks and she can tell it’s because they don’t trust her on her own.
“You haven’t had that much experience,” Dixon says, but he means “you haven’t had any experience without Sydney on comms or Jake taking bullets for you”.
When that training is over, she can take six men down at once and shoot a Pepsi can with an AK-47 at 300 yards. She wants to leave right away, get out and do something, but they tell her to check in with Dixon back at her unit for instructions.
When she walks in after almost two months gone, Marshall’s whole face lights up, and she wonders if this is what it was like for Sydney.
--
do you want me to come upstairs
--
It begins as a coincidence. Her eighth solo mission is to Japan, and she’s been assigned a host of false identities to get her across any border in the world.
One of them, she notes, used to be Sydney’s. It’s probably a clerical error, Rachel knows, as IDs aren’t supposed to be recycled-but she takes it anyway. The face on the passport has changed, but Rachel’s studied Sydney’s case file-who hasn’t?-and she remembers all of its missions, the reasons behind all of the stamps.
She’s flipping through the pages, waiting to meet up with Weiss for a ride to the good-luck party Marshall had insisted on hosting, when she notices that one of them is dated only seventeen weeks ago.
Seventeen weeks. One week after the End, as Rachel thinks of it. One week after they stopped being APO-they stopped being anything, really, and half of them either died or retired to beach houses on the Baja coast.
Mongolia, the stamp says.
The recovery team hadn’t found Jack Bristow’s remains, but they’d been in there a day after the End and everything had been cleaned up, taken care of. Sydney had buried an empty coffin.
Sydney had buried an empty coffin, and two days later Sydney had used a fake ID to fly back to Mongolia.
--
and she smiles and she would have said yes
--
After Rachel’s grandpa died, when she was in sixth grade, her mom had insisted that the children not see his body at the wake. “They need closure,” Aunt Hannah had argued, but Rachel’s mom had simply shaken her head. Something about remembering Grandpa as he was.
Rachel had stood at the other side of the room and watched Aunt Hannah push her cousins Molly and Tim up to the casket. Aunt Hannah’s hand was violently pale against Molly’s black velvet school-picture dress, and Rachel had shivered and inched back against the wall.
All through her month-long stay as a “foreign-exchange student” in Kyoto, questions burn at the back of her mind. Did Sydney return for closure?
What was left in Mongolia?
Rachel hadn’t been there-only the inner circle, as Rachel thought of them, had been at the Rambaldi tomb-only Sydney, Vaughn, and Jack. And Sloane and Sark, the contingent of evil. Rachel had been sequestered away on tech-and-Peyton duty with Marshall, viewing pieces of it from a shoddy Cold War satellite they’d hurriedly redirected from North Korea.
What else had happened at the tomb?
--
sometimes she thinks about the day he proposes
--
The day before her extraction, Rachel uses her secure sat phone and cancels.
“I feel like I’m making incredible progress, Dixon,” Rachel lies easily. “A few more days and I’ll get a key for the graduate science building, and I can take pictures of the lab.”
Dixon agrees, after conferencing with his superiors, and she’s given free reign.
She feels a little bit guilty-Dixon almost certainly vouched for her to the higher-ups at Langley to get her this job, and she’s not planning to stay in the crap apartment student housing had found for her for one minute more.
The flight to Ulan-Bator is longer than she expected-Rachel’s never been to this part of Asia before, and it’s bigger than she had pictured on the map. Wider. Emptier.
On her second flight west, a hurriedly chartered jaunt in a plane so flimsy Rachel almost regrets it the second she gets on, she begins to recognize the landscape. The Gobi gives way to sand-colored ridges and the beginnings of a mountain range, and finally the pilot lands in Tsagaan-Olom.
From there Rachel manages to rent a jeep-she’d never known, before her six weeks of field school, just how Sydney did it. It turns out that there’s more than a flip of her light blonde hair and a flirtatious smile. There’s the feeling of a gun tucked into the back of her cargo pants, the strangeness of the Mongolian words as they roll off of her tongue, and the wads of cash she hands over without a second thought.
And there’s not being afraid, Rachel realizes. That’s how Sydney did it.
part two
part three
Cryptic words meander
Now there is a song beneath the song
One day you'll learn
You'll soon discern its true meaning
An interesting detachment
A listless poem of love sincere
Desire, despair
Overlapping melodies
And it's not a love, it's not a love
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
Oh now the roots are reminiscing
Recurring dreams of minor chords
Metred time
Muted chimes find the beat
And in the pulse there lies conviction
A steady push and pull routine
The cymbals swell
High notes flail into reach
And it's not a love, it's not a love
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love,
It's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
It's not a love, it's not a love, it's not a love song
~Maria Taylor, Song Beneath the Song
This is my entry for the Alias: Dearly Departed ficathon. I wrote for
kerlin;, who requested Tom's resurrection from Rachel's point of view. :)
Characters: Tom, Rachel, Ensemble
Rating: PG-13/R
Summary: It happens quickly. For all of her theorizing about the slow, painful slime of merging fluid, it happens in a matter of seconds. Rambaldi is merciful, she thinks later. There is no pain.
--
sometimes, she thinks of their first date
--
It takes two months for Rachel to be approved for field duty, after the End. It takes two months, but soon enough she and Dixon and Marshall are meeting with the other man-Agent Weiss-in a sterile room in Langley and learning of their new assignments.
Weiss and Marshall are sharing a joke, something about a spork or a mechanical cockroach-Rachel hasn’t been following the conversation.
She looks at Dixon out of the corner of her eye, and he’s trying to hold back his laughter.
After a few more minutes of banter, she excuses herself.
Standing in the Langley bathroom, under the gaze of three different security cameras, she still manages to feel alone.
--
a greek place in santa monica, feta and spinach salad
--
Dixon is appointed as a unit commander, which makes sense, although Rachel’s always seen him as an agent, or backup. This new Dixon-quiet, official Dixon-is unsettling. She pictures him as a coiled jaguar, hiding underneath his suit.
They’ve all moved to Virginia, leaving behind Los Angeles and the APO-sized crater that has been explained to the public as a gas main explosion, and Dixon invites them over for dinner. Agent Weiss is included in the invitation and Rachel smiles at him blankly as he offers to drive.
It’s only once they get there and she sees Dixon wielding a super soaker against his son-Stephen-that Rachel understands. This is where Dixon wants to be. This is what Dixon is meant for. This is it.
Weiss and Marshall take each other on in a poker game, laughing uproariously. Rachel sits on the couch, turns away from the table and its empty space where Tom would have sat, and quietly offers to take Dixon’s daughter shopping for prom dresses.
--
smiling across the table, her gun forgotten in her purse
--
After a few missions, Rachel asks to operate alone.
Her new partner, Jacob-Carruthers-from-Connecticut, is good in the field. He kicks ass and takes names and Rachel struts her stuff in lingerie. Together, they get the job done. He’s not the problem.
He's nice. He tells amusing anecdotes about his parents, at home in Hartford, and once when Rachel’s about to be shot he jumps in front of her and takes the bullet to his chest.
He’s wearing Kevlar, of course, but Rachel doesn’t realize that until ten seconds later.
No, he’s not the problem. With Jake around, she’s safe and their missions are a success.
They fall into bed together one night in Milan, though, and for the next week all Rachel can think about is the last time she had sex (way too long ago, with Sark, pretending to be someone she wasn’t) and the last time she kissed (way too long ago, with Tom, everything feeling right).
Rachel’s never been promiscuous. In college her roommate Deirdre teased her about being a virgin until three nights before her twenty-second birthday. She’d broken up with her last boyfriend when she went to work in Austria (what a good idea that turned out to be), and since then she’d been unattached. Years, now.
But they fall in bed together, and two weeks later Jake is sending her concerned, loving glances and Rachel feels like she can’t breathe. It’s the wrong man, wrong place, wrong time.
“I want to be alone,” she says, dropping her mission report on Dixon’s desk. “Undercover or something, not these missions.”
--
going to her apartment at the end of the night, hand in hand
--
They send her to training for six weeks and she can tell it’s because they don’t trust her on her own.
“You haven’t had that much experience,” Dixon says, but he means “you haven’t had any experience without Sydney on comms or Jake taking bullets for you”.
When that training is over, she can take six men down at once and shoot a Pepsi can with an AK-47 at 300 yards. She wants to leave right away, get out and do something, but they tell her to check in with Dixon back at her unit for instructions.
When she walks in after almost two months gone, Marshall’s whole face lights up, and she wonders if this is what it was like for Sydney.
--
do you want me to come upstairs
--
It begins as a coincidence. Her eighth solo mission is to Japan, and she’s been assigned a host of false identities to get her across any border in the world.
One of them, she notes, used to be Sydney’s. It’s probably a clerical error, Rachel knows, as IDs aren’t supposed to be recycled-but she takes it anyway. The face on the passport has changed, but Rachel’s studied Sydney’s case file-who hasn’t?-and she remembers all of its missions, the reasons behind all of the stamps.
She’s flipping through the pages, waiting to meet up with Weiss for a ride to the good-luck party Marshall had insisted on hosting, when she notices that one of them is dated only seventeen weeks ago.
Seventeen weeks. One week after the End, as Rachel thinks of it. One week after they stopped being APO-they stopped being anything, really, and half of them either died or retired to beach houses on the Baja coast.
Mongolia, the stamp says.
The recovery team hadn’t found Jack Bristow’s remains, but they’d been in there a day after the End and everything had been cleaned up, taken care of. Sydney had buried an empty coffin.
Sydney had buried an empty coffin, and two days later Sydney had used a fake ID to fly back to Mongolia.
--
and she smiles and she would have said yes
--
After Rachel’s grandpa died, when she was in sixth grade, her mom had insisted that the children not see his body at the wake. “They need closure,” Aunt Hannah had argued, but Rachel’s mom had simply shaken her head. Something about remembering Grandpa as he was.
Rachel had stood at the other side of the room and watched Aunt Hannah push her cousins Molly and Tim up to the casket. Aunt Hannah’s hand was violently pale against Molly’s black velvet school-picture dress, and Rachel had shivered and inched back against the wall.
All through her month-long stay as a “foreign-exchange student” in Kyoto, questions burn at the back of her mind. Did Sydney return for closure?
What was left in Mongolia?
Rachel hadn’t been there-only the inner circle, as Rachel thought of them, had been at the Rambaldi tomb-only Sydney, Vaughn, and Jack. And Sloane and Sark, the contingent of evil. Rachel had been sequestered away on tech-and-Peyton duty with Marshall, viewing pieces of it from a shoddy Cold War satellite they’d hurriedly redirected from North Korea.
What else had happened at the tomb?
--
sometimes she thinks about the day he proposes
--
The day before her extraction, Rachel uses her secure sat phone and cancels.
“I feel like I’m making incredible progress, Dixon,” Rachel lies easily. “A few more days and I’ll get a key for the graduate science building, and I can take pictures of the lab.”
Dixon agrees, after conferencing with his superiors, and she’s given free reign.
She feels a little bit guilty-Dixon almost certainly vouched for her to the higher-ups at Langley to get her this job, and she’s not planning to stay in the crap apartment student housing had found for her for one minute more.
The flight to Ulan-Bator is longer than she expected-Rachel’s never been to this part of Asia before, and it’s bigger than she had pictured on the map. Wider. Emptier.
On her second flight west, a hurriedly chartered jaunt in a plane so flimsy Rachel almost regrets it the second she gets on, she begins to recognize the landscape. The Gobi gives way to sand-colored ridges and the beginnings of a mountain range, and finally the pilot lands in Tsagaan-Olom.
From there Rachel manages to rent a jeep-she’d never known, before her six weeks of field school, just how Sydney did it. It turns out that there’s more than a flip of her light blonde hair and a flirtatious smile. There’s the feeling of a gun tucked into the back of her cargo pants, the strangeness of the Mongolian words as they roll off of her tongue, and the wads of cash she hands over without a second thought.
And there’s not being afraid, Rachel realizes. That’s how Sydney did it.
part two
part three