A Dark Turn
I Was Made to Love You
Title: Catalyst
Author: Dita
Rating: R (excessive sex, violence, mentions of suicide and drug use)
E-mail: bridgettehwzarska@hotmail.com
Timeline: Very, very much AU. Post-Telling; during Sydney’s missing two years.
Ship: (because I heart my ‘ships) Julia/Simon
Summary: Julia and Simon have a run-in during the infamous missing two years.
Status: Complete. It's a three parter I wrote for a rabid JuSi friend of mine at the German boards a while ago. I recently found it on my computer and was bored and decided...why not translate?? Well, whatever.
Here's part one. Hope you enjoy, somewhat...
ETA: I should mention this fic is a member of the Plot, What Plot? family. After this chapter, it's pretty much... Well, you know.
Part Un: the voices of the dead
~ But aren’t we all dreams, after a fashion? ~
She awoke to the sounds of death.
Her own.
Hazy, half distinguished thoughts floated in and out of her head; sounds she didn’t recognize moved within her, colors and shapes that carried with them the faint scent of blood and the texture of sadness, if sadness had a touch.
Her heart quivered, and skipped a beat. Water rolled down her face, little droplets clinging to the hollows of her cheeks and the ends of her eyelashes.
Pain, she thought. Pain and blood. Pain, yes, but blood… Was she bleeding?
She touched the side of her head and her fingertips came away marked red, bold and bright and all over her hands. Her mouth trembled and she felt her chest rise in a sharp, bitter intake of breath.
Her mind had on repeat: no, god, please… I can’t, not anymore…
“You’re awake.”
Simple, cold. The voice hit a nerve inside of her; the sound of it was a slap, a physical bruising.
“Julia Thorne.”
She flinched, instinctively. The voice had brought up the other name. That was how she referred to ‘Julia Thorne’ inside of herself, how she carefully compartmentalized it so it didn’t touch her other thoughts.
She held it apart…and prayed (prayed like the devout at a Sunday mass) that she wouldn’t become the woman they wanted her to: the black-hearted, passionless killer who used and murdered…and loved it all.
Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth, a red, little rivulet of pain.
A murderer? A killer?
She closed her eyes and whispered, so softly she wasn’t even be sure anyone could hear her: “No.”
She felt her body convulse on the coldness of the cement, completely on its own volition. Her head rapped the ground, cracking sickeningly, and she realized she wasn’t convulsing—they were beating her. Their hands, so many, were hitting her and hurting her and feeling her all over.
But through it all, inside that dark, confused jungle of pain, she clutched at the one, most important thing:
You can call me Julia Thorne, but then why is my name Sydney Bristow, you son of a b****?
“Y-y…” She even tried to say it, a lasting reminder of her truth, but something, a fist maybe, slammed into her mouth. More blood, then, and the sick, frightened feeling in the pit of her stomach multiplied, coiling up into a bed of hissing, writhing snakes.
Oh no, not this… Not the…
A rougher hand, clasped over her bleeding mouth and, dimly, she saw a hand, disembodied in the vastness of space, holding a syringe.
In, out. The small, neat pinprick on her neck was almost a relief.
“You’ll learn,” the voice said, small and far-away in the on-coming darkness.
“Julia.”
***************************************************************
***************************************************************
Six months later, Algiers
Her heart was on the line.
She had known it from the beginning, but now, today, it was particularly crucial.
Today, she would kill an unarmed man.
And she would feel no regrets.
This was her mission, a real one, and not a test. She already passed her trial by gunpoint of the Covenant at the end of her “training” as Julia Thorne: she had, ruthlessly and without provocation, killed a man in the name of self-preservation.
Maybe he hadn’t been completely innocent; maybe, of course, he had. It all went back to something a former colleague at SD-6 had once told her, when they had been casually speaking about enemy torturing methods.
He had been captured by the Vietcong and eaten jungle slugs for ninety-three days in order to stave off starvation. When the VC had asked him to, he’d slit the throat of a three-year old little girl who’d had the bad luck to wander away from her village. She remembered his half wild eyes and twitching hands and his words, burned in her head:
It’s amazing what you’ll do to survive. You’ll do anything. Think about the worst thing, the thing you think you’d never, ever do in a million years.
Think about it now.
Because you’d do it to survive.
She had a gun concealed under her jacket and a knife strapped to her thigh and thought the irony… The irony was brilliant.
Her eyes moved with the crushing swell of people on the street in front of the small, beaten down café. Life was hard in the former French colony- hard and short and brutal. It had gotten harder in recent times with the continuing revolutions and shaky alliances of power, but… The people still walked by, day after day and year after year. They, like her, did what they had to do in order to survive.
Or they didn’t live to see sunrise.
The thought resonated, inisde her, and in her head she pictured all the people she’d killed in the past few months, all the faces that blended together so not a single one was distinguishable.
A woman, there; a man, here. A scientist, a librarian, a security guard, a professor of literature.
They sat on her shoulder and they watched. And waited.
A shiver up her spine, in the daytime. She traced her bottom lip with her index finger and reminded herself that this wasn’t the day to wax philosophical upon the change in her life situation. Today, there was more killing to do, more lives to ruin, more men to hunt.
The cube, it seemed, was the Covenant’s newest obsession. Rambaldi, again. Fortunately, this assignment had nothing to do with that sadist of a prophet and everything to do with revenge. She couldn’t tell herself how glad she was to have a break in the chain that was Milo Rambaldi, even if it was to carry out the Covenant’s sinister endgame in another fashion.
She stretched out in her chair and thought about her newest contract, the arms dealer who’d messed with the big bad Covenant and wouldn’t, in the end, live to tell the tale.
Armaan ibn Abu Sway, she thought, who had been carelessly informing Interpol of the Covenant’s weapon buying habits. McKenas Cole wasn’t pleased and he’d told her outright to make an “example of the bastard”, presumably for the other haphazards who did their business with terrorists.
No one messed with the Covenant.
And lived to tell the dirty secrets.
It was a tragedy, of course, that this was Armaan’s last day on earth and he’d never have the chance to manufacture another AK-47 again. But it was a hell of a day to be someone’s last: the hot, desert sun was in full radiance and beating down upon the city. The air was still and thick and heavy, like the intake of breath before the scream.
It was too perfect.
She picked up the cracked coffee mug in front of her and took a cautious sip. Her partner was supposed to be in this jumbled, afternoon mass of people on the streets, waiting, hopefully, for her signal. Armaan, it seemed, had a personal physcian on retainer, a Dr. al-Husseini, who he enjoyed visiting at exactly four o’clock every second Tuesday of the month. He abandoned his guards for an hour, leaving a clear sixty minute window of oppurtunity for any prospective assassins.
It was three-fifty-two and she could see the balding head of Dr. al-Husseini through the plate glass windows across the street, waiting for his favorite, little soldier of a patient.
“Abu Sway’s vehicle on the move, heading your way. ETA thirty seconds.” The voice in her ear, from the mike, was British and faintly exotic. A man, then, her partner was. And she liked him already; everything he said sounded vaguely erotic and obscene.
She hadn’t meet her partner, ideally, wasn’t supposed to. He was just back-up for any requisite fall-out that might occur, but she was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary and this would be the rare, clean job.
Walk in, shoot, walk out.
A black armoured car pulled up in front of the good doctor’s office. She watched the short, stout figure of Armaan Abu Sway stretch, then get out with the assistance of two burly guards who looked as if they’d be more at home in a wrestling ring somewhere, pounding the hell out of some unfortunate, then awkwardly guarding a rich arms dealer.
She watched Abu Sway say something to the guards, then laugh at his own, probably, witty remark. He reached up to pat one on the shoulder and they dispersed, disappearing in a million different directions into the endless crowd.
“They may be watching the building,” she said, as casually as she could into her mic. “Be ready to move in at the slightest. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” a pause, “babe. I must say, though, before you go to meet your certain death, that dress looks stunning on you. Really shows off your…actually, quite gorgeous legs.” He said it as if it already a done deal, that she sleep with him.
Men and their f***ing sexual inneundo.
She didn’t even have to feign disinterest. “Going radio silent.”
She smoothly, again as cavalier as possible, got up and crossed the street. She kept her movements innocent and her face blank. Men, after all, especially men in power like Abu Sway, tended to disregard what they considered “the fairer sex”. It didn’t matter if she had an semi-automatic in her jacket with a loaded clip to prove differently. He wouldn’t see her as a threat.
Until she shot his head off, that was.
She manuevered her way through the human traffic of the street, trying to be as inobtrusive as possible. When she reached the doctor’s door, she slipped in like a ghost she was and was greeted by dingy beige walls and crudely done artwork of flowers, most likely strategically placed to hids scouring holes.
A receptionist, pert and pretty with black hair done in an intricate bundle of braids she had always associated with Scandanavia rather than the heart of Africa, was talking cheerfully on the phone, no doubt to a personal relation Dr. al-Husseni would frown upon if he were present and accounted for.
When the recpetionist saw her, she put a hand over the end of the phone and said in perfect English, “Excuse me, Miss, the Doctor is with another patient right now-”
She ignored the receptionist and kept walking, right into the examination room. She unholstered the gun and cradled it possissively like a child against her chest.
She waited a long beat- one, maybe two heartbeats.
Then, she kicked the door in.
He did keep guards with him, she saw, when the wooden door splintered open. Two to be exact. Maybe they were the doctor’s and maybe Armaan wasn’t as f***ing idiotic as previously thought.
Whatever the case, she aimed for Armaan’s bewildered, good-natured face, frozen in a half-laugh.
Bang, bang. You’re dead.
She had the unique “pleasure” of watching the top half of the little arms dealer’s head slid off and splatter against the wall. She felt sick, inside, but used her instincts to duck low under the examination table as the bodyguards recovered from the shock of seeing their boss’s head become plastered to the dirty walls.
She heard the return volley of gunfire echo past where her head had been a moment ago and she took the oppurtunity to shoot the visible kneecap of thug number one. He crashed to the floor with a muffled scream, clutching the shattered bone and she pulled the trigger just as his head came into view.
One more down.
Still low, she half-crawled over the bleeding body of the downed guard and got a swift kick in the head for her trouble. Thug number two aimed and pulled the trigger, but the bullet whizzed past her without hitting anything, mainly because at the last possible second she moved and shot him low in the side, causing him to fall with her on the floor.
Both panting, both tired, one of them screeching in agony, neither remembered the good Doctor, paralyzed and whimpering against the wall above them. She didn’t want to have to kill him, but…
She aimed for his chest and pulled the trigger. After a short, stunted shriek of surprise, he slumped unceremoniously down to the floor alongside her and the screaming guard, whining like a kicked dog the entire way.
Mission accomplished.
Along the way, she’d rolled in someone’s blood; she was covered in it- her legs, her hands, her face, her hair… Add telekinetic powers and she might as well have been Carrie at the prom.
Thug number two, however, probably wouldn’t have understood the subtle humor of her thoughts; he was still screaming and crying, now, tears were rolling down his big, reddened face. It might have sounded trivial, but being sideshot was nothing to dismiss lightly. From experience, she knew it hurt like the goddamned devil itself.
The difference between her and the thug, of course, was that the thug would never get the chance to heal.
She looked into his eyes (green, a deep mossy green that reminded of a fairytale forest) and pulled the trigger for the sixth time that day.
She walked out of the examination room and didn’t give the receptionist a glance. She was sure the girl, if she had any wits about her at all, had already called the police and was hidden far from sight.
Whatever. She didn’t care. She walked out of the glass doors and to the red, topless jeep that was waiting outside with a sunglass-clad, dark-haired man sitting at the wheel. She didn’t focus on him, though, she focused on getting in the jeep and buckling her seatbelt: all the little things.
“Let’s go,” she said, without looking at him.
Obligingly, he shifted the jeep into gear and sped them the hell out of dodge, but not before making one, pithy comment.
“Christ,” he’d said. “You look like a bloody, f***ing mess.”
She waited until they were out of the city, into the country and well on their way to the safe house before she leaned over the side of the jeep to wretch, until she felt absolutely empty inside.
And thought: ain’t that the truth.
~ It's a long way to fall. And I'm falling... I don't want to die. I don't want to fall. I tell myself it's not the fall, falling doesn't hurt... It's when you stop. ~
***************************************************************
***************************************************************
Quotes are from "Brief Lives" by Neil Gaiman.
Author: Dita
Rating: R (excessive sex, violence, mentions of suicide and drug use)
E-mail: bridgettehwzarska@hotmail.com
Timeline: Very, very much AU. Post-Telling; during Sydney’s missing two years.
Ship: (because I heart my ‘ships) Julia/Simon
Summary: Julia and Simon have a run-in during the infamous missing two years.
Status: Complete. It's a three parter I wrote for a rabid JuSi friend of mine at the German boards a while ago. I recently found it on my computer and was bored and decided...why not translate?? Well, whatever.
Here's part one. Hope you enjoy, somewhat...ETA: I should mention this fic is a member of the Plot, What Plot? family. After this chapter, it's pretty much... Well, you know.
Part Un: the voices of the dead
~ But aren’t we all dreams, after a fashion? ~
She awoke to the sounds of death.
Her own.
Hazy, half distinguished thoughts floated in and out of her head; sounds she didn’t recognize moved within her, colors and shapes that carried with them the faint scent of blood and the texture of sadness, if sadness had a touch.
Her heart quivered, and skipped a beat. Water rolled down her face, little droplets clinging to the hollows of her cheeks and the ends of her eyelashes.
Pain, she thought. Pain and blood. Pain, yes, but blood… Was she bleeding?
She touched the side of her head and her fingertips came away marked red, bold and bright and all over her hands. Her mouth trembled and she felt her chest rise in a sharp, bitter intake of breath.
Her mind had on repeat: no, god, please… I can’t, not anymore…
“You’re awake.”
Simple, cold. The voice hit a nerve inside of her; the sound of it was a slap, a physical bruising.
“Julia Thorne.”
She flinched, instinctively. The voice had brought up the other name. That was how she referred to ‘Julia Thorne’ inside of herself, how she carefully compartmentalized it so it didn’t touch her other thoughts.
She held it apart…and prayed (prayed like the devout at a Sunday mass) that she wouldn’t become the woman they wanted her to: the black-hearted, passionless killer who used and murdered…and loved it all.
Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth, a red, little rivulet of pain.
A murderer? A killer?
She closed her eyes and whispered, so softly she wasn’t even be sure anyone could hear her: “No.”
She felt her body convulse on the coldness of the cement, completely on its own volition. Her head rapped the ground, cracking sickeningly, and she realized she wasn’t convulsing—they were beating her. Their hands, so many, were hitting her and hurting her and feeling her all over.
But through it all, inside that dark, confused jungle of pain, she clutched at the one, most important thing:
You can call me Julia Thorne, but then why is my name Sydney Bristow, you son of a b****?
“Y-y…” She even tried to say it, a lasting reminder of her truth, but something, a fist maybe, slammed into her mouth. More blood, then, and the sick, frightened feeling in the pit of her stomach multiplied, coiling up into a bed of hissing, writhing snakes.
Oh no, not this… Not the…
A rougher hand, clasped over her bleeding mouth and, dimly, she saw a hand, disembodied in the vastness of space, holding a syringe.
In, out. The small, neat pinprick on her neck was almost a relief.
“You’ll learn,” the voice said, small and far-away in the on-coming darkness.
“Julia.”
***************************************************************
***************************************************************
Six months later, Algiers
Her heart was on the line.
She had known it from the beginning, but now, today, it was particularly crucial.
Today, she would kill an unarmed man.
And she would feel no regrets.
This was her mission, a real one, and not a test. She already passed her trial by gunpoint of the Covenant at the end of her “training” as Julia Thorne: she had, ruthlessly and without provocation, killed a man in the name of self-preservation.
Maybe he hadn’t been completely innocent; maybe, of course, he had. It all went back to something a former colleague at SD-6 had once told her, when they had been casually speaking about enemy torturing methods.
He had been captured by the Vietcong and eaten jungle slugs for ninety-three days in order to stave off starvation. When the VC had asked him to, he’d slit the throat of a three-year old little girl who’d had the bad luck to wander away from her village. She remembered his half wild eyes and twitching hands and his words, burned in her head:
It’s amazing what you’ll do to survive. You’ll do anything. Think about the worst thing, the thing you think you’d never, ever do in a million years.
Think about it now.
Because you’d do it to survive.
She had a gun concealed under her jacket and a knife strapped to her thigh and thought the irony… The irony was brilliant.
Her eyes moved with the crushing swell of people on the street in front of the small, beaten down café. Life was hard in the former French colony- hard and short and brutal. It had gotten harder in recent times with the continuing revolutions and shaky alliances of power, but… The people still walked by, day after day and year after year. They, like her, did what they had to do in order to survive.
Or they didn’t live to see sunrise.
The thought resonated, inisde her, and in her head she pictured all the people she’d killed in the past few months, all the faces that blended together so not a single one was distinguishable.
A woman, there; a man, here. A scientist, a librarian, a security guard, a professor of literature.
They sat on her shoulder and they watched. And waited.
A shiver up her spine, in the daytime. She traced her bottom lip with her index finger and reminded herself that this wasn’t the day to wax philosophical upon the change in her life situation. Today, there was more killing to do, more lives to ruin, more men to hunt.
The cube, it seemed, was the Covenant’s newest obsession. Rambaldi, again. Fortunately, this assignment had nothing to do with that sadist of a prophet and everything to do with revenge. She couldn’t tell herself how glad she was to have a break in the chain that was Milo Rambaldi, even if it was to carry out the Covenant’s sinister endgame in another fashion.
She stretched out in her chair and thought about her newest contract, the arms dealer who’d messed with the big bad Covenant and wouldn’t, in the end, live to tell the tale.
Armaan ibn Abu Sway, she thought, who had been carelessly informing Interpol of the Covenant’s weapon buying habits. McKenas Cole wasn’t pleased and he’d told her outright to make an “example of the bastard”, presumably for the other haphazards who did their business with terrorists.
No one messed with the Covenant.
And lived to tell the dirty secrets.
It was a tragedy, of course, that this was Armaan’s last day on earth and he’d never have the chance to manufacture another AK-47 again. But it was a hell of a day to be someone’s last: the hot, desert sun was in full radiance and beating down upon the city. The air was still and thick and heavy, like the intake of breath before the scream.
It was too perfect.
She picked up the cracked coffee mug in front of her and took a cautious sip. Her partner was supposed to be in this jumbled, afternoon mass of people on the streets, waiting, hopefully, for her signal. Armaan, it seemed, had a personal physcian on retainer, a Dr. al-Husseini, who he enjoyed visiting at exactly four o’clock every second Tuesday of the month. He abandoned his guards for an hour, leaving a clear sixty minute window of oppurtunity for any prospective assassins.
It was three-fifty-two and she could see the balding head of Dr. al-Husseini through the plate glass windows across the street, waiting for his favorite, little soldier of a patient.
“Abu Sway’s vehicle on the move, heading your way. ETA thirty seconds.” The voice in her ear, from the mike, was British and faintly exotic. A man, then, her partner was. And she liked him already; everything he said sounded vaguely erotic and obscene.
She hadn’t meet her partner, ideally, wasn’t supposed to. He was just back-up for any requisite fall-out that might occur, but she was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary and this would be the rare, clean job.
Walk in, shoot, walk out.
A black armoured car pulled up in front of the good doctor’s office. She watched the short, stout figure of Armaan Abu Sway stretch, then get out with the assistance of two burly guards who looked as if they’d be more at home in a wrestling ring somewhere, pounding the hell out of some unfortunate, then awkwardly guarding a rich arms dealer.
She watched Abu Sway say something to the guards, then laugh at his own, probably, witty remark. He reached up to pat one on the shoulder and they dispersed, disappearing in a million different directions into the endless crowd.
“They may be watching the building,” she said, as casually as she could into her mic. “Be ready to move in at the slightest. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” a pause, “babe. I must say, though, before you go to meet your certain death, that dress looks stunning on you. Really shows off your…actually, quite gorgeous legs.” He said it as if it already a done deal, that she sleep with him.
Men and their f***ing sexual inneundo.
She didn’t even have to feign disinterest. “Going radio silent.”
She smoothly, again as cavalier as possible, got up and crossed the street. She kept her movements innocent and her face blank. Men, after all, especially men in power like Abu Sway, tended to disregard what they considered “the fairer sex”. It didn’t matter if she had an semi-automatic in her jacket with a loaded clip to prove differently. He wouldn’t see her as a threat.
Until she shot his head off, that was.
She manuevered her way through the human traffic of the street, trying to be as inobtrusive as possible. When she reached the doctor’s door, she slipped in like a ghost she was and was greeted by dingy beige walls and crudely done artwork of flowers, most likely strategically placed to hids scouring holes.
A receptionist, pert and pretty with black hair done in an intricate bundle of braids she had always associated with Scandanavia rather than the heart of Africa, was talking cheerfully on the phone, no doubt to a personal relation Dr. al-Husseni would frown upon if he were present and accounted for.
When the recpetionist saw her, she put a hand over the end of the phone and said in perfect English, “Excuse me, Miss, the Doctor is with another patient right now-”
She ignored the receptionist and kept walking, right into the examination room. She unholstered the gun and cradled it possissively like a child against her chest.
She waited a long beat- one, maybe two heartbeats.
Then, she kicked the door in.
He did keep guards with him, she saw, when the wooden door splintered open. Two to be exact. Maybe they were the doctor’s and maybe Armaan wasn’t as f***ing idiotic as previously thought.
Whatever the case, she aimed for Armaan’s bewildered, good-natured face, frozen in a half-laugh.
Bang, bang. You’re dead.
She had the unique “pleasure” of watching the top half of the little arms dealer’s head slid off and splatter against the wall. She felt sick, inside, but used her instincts to duck low under the examination table as the bodyguards recovered from the shock of seeing their boss’s head become plastered to the dirty walls.
She heard the return volley of gunfire echo past where her head had been a moment ago and she took the oppurtunity to shoot the visible kneecap of thug number one. He crashed to the floor with a muffled scream, clutching the shattered bone and she pulled the trigger just as his head came into view.
One more down.
Still low, she half-crawled over the bleeding body of the downed guard and got a swift kick in the head for her trouble. Thug number two aimed and pulled the trigger, but the bullet whizzed past her without hitting anything, mainly because at the last possible second she moved and shot him low in the side, causing him to fall with her on the floor.
Both panting, both tired, one of them screeching in agony, neither remembered the good Doctor, paralyzed and whimpering against the wall above them. She didn’t want to have to kill him, but…
She aimed for his chest and pulled the trigger. After a short, stunted shriek of surprise, he slumped unceremoniously down to the floor alongside her and the screaming guard, whining like a kicked dog the entire way.
Mission accomplished.
Along the way, she’d rolled in someone’s blood; she was covered in it- her legs, her hands, her face, her hair… Add telekinetic powers and she might as well have been Carrie at the prom.
Thug number two, however, probably wouldn’t have understood the subtle humor of her thoughts; he was still screaming and crying, now, tears were rolling down his big, reddened face. It might have sounded trivial, but being sideshot was nothing to dismiss lightly. From experience, she knew it hurt like the goddamned devil itself.
The difference between her and the thug, of course, was that the thug would never get the chance to heal.
She looked into his eyes (green, a deep mossy green that reminded of a fairytale forest) and pulled the trigger for the sixth time that day.
She walked out of the examination room and didn’t give the receptionist a glance. She was sure the girl, if she had any wits about her at all, had already called the police and was hidden far from sight.
Whatever. She didn’t care. She walked out of the glass doors and to the red, topless jeep that was waiting outside with a sunglass-clad, dark-haired man sitting at the wheel. She didn’t focus on him, though, she focused on getting in the jeep and buckling her seatbelt: all the little things.
“Let’s go,” she said, without looking at him.
Obligingly, he shifted the jeep into gear and sped them the hell out of dodge, but not before making one, pithy comment.
“Christ,” he’d said. “You look like a bloody, f***ing mess.”
She waited until they were out of the city, into the country and well on their way to the safe house before she leaned over the side of the jeep to wretch, until she felt absolutely empty inside.
And thought: ain’t that the truth.
~ It's a long way to fall. And I'm falling... I don't want to die. I don't want to fall. I tell myself it's not the fall, falling doesn't hurt... It's when you stop. ~
***************************************************************
***************************************************************
Quotes are from "Brief Lives" by Neil Gaiman.
or I could just slip into a little disguise :disguise: