Untitled ALIAS ficlet (1/1)
1 Dec 2006 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kangeikoThis has been driving me nuts for a little while, because I think that poor Irina's characterisation got no help during the second half of S5. I'm still trying to work out all the implications in my head, and a lot of them are moving me towards the old fairy tales I heard as a child. So. Anyway. It's like thinking, only in fic format.
*
Irina is half-convinced that all of life is made of snow-upon-snow, with Rambaldi's neat sloping script across it all, bleeding black ink into the frost. She feels that she has known him all her life, bound in thick furs and staring out into the vast emptiness of the snow-covered plains, listening to her mother tell tales of winter magic. Snow is what binds her to him, to her mother, to home. Russian stories are all about snow: snow children, snow parents, snow keeping you warm and snow burying you alive. Somewhere along the line, her mother's voice and Rambaldi's words bled together until she could not pull them apart.
She knows, now - has always known, in fact - that you are not supposed to love one child more than the other. That's not how motherhood works. At least, that's not how Irina's mother had taught her that motherhood works - but, then, Irina's mother had been dead these many years, and weeds had grown wild on her grave and likely dogs relieved themselves there. Irina had not been back for years, and would have not dared return even if the thought had occurred to her, which it had not. Not when she held her granddaughter in her arms, and wondered if she was doing the right thing.
You're not supposed to love one child more than the other. You love them all equally and if you don't, you hide it as well as you can and do not dwell on it, lest some demon hear of it and bring mischief to your hearth. Irina thinks that maybe this only applies to girls, because she can't quite conceive of loving the son of either Jack Bristow or Arvin Sloane, with his father's eyes and cheeks and God only knew what else. Where Sydney and Nadia took after her, she has no doubt that a son would have taken after his father, and she would have come back one day to find a twenty year old Jack or a fifteen year old Arvin staring at her mistrustfully. Daughters are easier - they tend to have some ideas about motherhood already. What would she have said to a son?
You do not love one child more than the other. You do not. It is inhuman, Irina's mother said, and likely her mother had said before her, wizened with age and with nameless dead newborns wept over and lamented still seen in her lined hands. The sentiment had never sounded quite right to Irina, when all her life she had heard tales of wicked stepmothers sending out wretched girls to die in the cold. Where was maternal love then? Although - and she'd thought this would come as a revelation and was oddly cross when it had not - maybe it's different if it's your own. Maybe you feel it differently.
The truth of it is, she doesn't know. A revelation did not strike her in the middle of the night and turn her into a home-loving babushka, not even when she cradled Isabelle in her arms, thinking of what could be. Instead, she was still trying to convince herself that she does not love Sydney more than Nadia; that her youngest is not a stranger who appeared one day, wearing her own face and looking at her with Arvin's eyes.
At the end of it, perhaps it does not matter, for all that she'd agonised over the merits and penalties of her love: both her children melted back into the snow, ink-black hair streaming behind them and lips like a red, red rose.
*
fin
The fairy tales I was looking at included The Snow Maiden (both versions), Snow White, The Tale of the Dead Princess, Snezhanka and a few others.
*
Irina is half-convinced that all of life is made of snow-upon-snow, with Rambaldi's neat sloping script across it all, bleeding black ink into the frost. She feels that she has known him all her life, bound in thick furs and staring out into the vast emptiness of the snow-covered plains, listening to her mother tell tales of winter magic. Snow is what binds her to him, to her mother, to home. Russian stories are all about snow: snow children, snow parents, snow keeping you warm and snow burying you alive. Somewhere along the line, her mother's voice and Rambaldi's words bled together until she could not pull them apart.
She knows, now - has always known, in fact - that you are not supposed to love one child more than the other. That's not how motherhood works. At least, that's not how Irina's mother had taught her that motherhood works - but, then, Irina's mother had been dead these many years, and weeds had grown wild on her grave and likely dogs relieved themselves there. Irina had not been back for years, and would have not dared return even if the thought had occurred to her, which it had not. Not when she held her granddaughter in her arms, and wondered if she was doing the right thing.
You're not supposed to love one child more than the other. You love them all equally and if you don't, you hide it as well as you can and do not dwell on it, lest some demon hear of it and bring mischief to your hearth. Irina thinks that maybe this only applies to girls, because she can't quite conceive of loving the son of either Jack Bristow or Arvin Sloane, with his father's eyes and cheeks and God only knew what else. Where Sydney and Nadia took after her, she has no doubt that a son would have taken after his father, and she would have come back one day to find a twenty year old Jack or a fifteen year old Arvin staring at her mistrustfully. Daughters are easier - they tend to have some ideas about motherhood already. What would she have said to a son?
You do not love one child more than the other. You do not. It is inhuman, Irina's mother said, and likely her mother had said before her, wizened with age and with nameless dead newborns wept over and lamented still seen in her lined hands. The sentiment had never sounded quite right to Irina, when all her life she had heard tales of wicked stepmothers sending out wretched girls to die in the cold. Where was maternal love then? Although - and she'd thought this would come as a revelation and was oddly cross when it had not - maybe it's different if it's your own. Maybe you feel it differently.
The truth of it is, she doesn't know. A revelation did not strike her in the middle of the night and turn her into a home-loving babushka, not even when she cradled Isabelle in her arms, thinking of what could be. Instead, she was still trying to convince herself that she does not love Sydney more than Nadia; that her youngest is not a stranger who appeared one day, wearing her own face and looking at her with Arvin's eyes.
At the end of it, perhaps it does not matter, for all that she'd agonised over the merits and penalties of her love: both her children melted back into the snow, ink-black hair streaming behind them and lips like a red, red rose.
*
fin
The fairy tales I was looking at included The Snow Maiden (both versions), Snow White, The Tale of the Dead Princess, Snezhanka and a few others.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-12-02 06:06 am (UTC)Two things: the central idea made me think of the bit in the season 4 finale (aka the one where everyone's characterisation makes sense) where Jack and Irina tell Sydney they can't wait or go back for Nadia (who is under zombie attack). While this was the correct choice in view of the larger picture - as far as they knew, they were the only ones willing and able to stop Elena - I don't think either Jack or Irina would have made it if it had been Sydney under zombie attack. So that image - Sydney stretching her hands out to Nadia and both sisters being pulled back (by Irina and Jack, by the zombies) always had a fairy tale quality to me, and specifically a resonance with Nadia as the one being deserted and Irina, no matter how brief, being forced to make that choice.
On a very different note, it's odd to think that Alias really wouldn't work if either Sydney or Nadia were male. The way the three First Gen Spies relate to them would be very very different. (Witness Sark and his claims to have been an ersatz son for Irina which he might have been from his pov but I don't see much evidence for it from hers...)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-02 08:57 pm (UTC)Thank you!
I don't think either Jack or Irina would have made it if it had been Sydney under zombie attack.
I agree completely. Poor Nadia isn't 'second best', she's worse in some respects - she's an ideal, a concept that Irina is still searching for. I think that Irina does still love the baby that was taken from her, but it's a leap to go from loving the baby to loving this whole, complete adult who has as much in common with her father as with her mother. I do think that she feels she ought to love her, but I don't think that they knew each other for long enough to have a real connection of any kind.
On a very different note, it's odd to think that Alias really wouldn't work if either Sydney or Nadia were male. The way the three First Gen Spies relate to them would be very very different.
I agree. I think that all three would be more willing to sacrifice their children if they were male - there is something peculiarly "Daddy's Little Girl" about both Jack and Arvin's attitudes to their daughters - something very, I don't know, Sicilian? I'm thinking of the Godfather here - but a boy's loss could be accepted because boys are traditionally more at risk. Girls would have been dependent on their daddies to look after them, especially after the mother deserted them, and I do think that both Jack & Arvin feel that they have failed their daughters in that respect, and that failure influences and informs their actions later on. I don't think that they would have felt the same level of personal connection and responsibility with sons.
Likewise, I don't see the Derevko line as having an overly strong emphasis on sons. This could be my own fanon reading of it, but three strong, powerful sisters would be more likely to come from a female-strong family than a male-strong one - plus we have Mother Russia, another strong female archetype - and a son would be just a bit too, I don't know, prosaic for them? Fine as a baby, but difficult to bring around to their way of thinking as a man.
Again this is my own experience coming through, but with the men so often absent - especially if they were in the armed forces - it was the women who ruled the household, and the girls who were focused on. The boys were slightly indulged and pampered - a blessing to the house, to be sure, but you wouldn't trust them with any real work. Their job was to bring a daughter-in-law to the household who knew how to handle herself and those around her.
This could be just my own personal background *g* but my grandfather was always mild-mannered and calm, and it was my grandmother who enforced discipline when the gradnkids visited. My father was in the navy, so my mother organised our tower block for cleaning and taxes etc. And I was the one who had to look after the house, not because my brother was younger but because he was a boy and couldn't be trusted to do it properly. I know, I shouldn't over-project, but given that we have next to nothing about Irina's background... *ponders*