Lost Years Fic: Tri-Nan-Og

melange

Cadet
Mostly I lurk on this site, but I've been reading and re-reading and re-editing this fic for like two months now and I couldn't look at it anymore, so I'm thowing it out here

Tir-Nan-Og
BlackDiamond

Disclaimer: I own them ALL!! BWAHAHA!!! *pause* What do you mean that was all a dream?
Rated: R for violent imagery and torture
Timeline: Lost Years
Notes: IMHO, the Lost Years is by far the most intriguing of all the abandoned and unexplained Alias plot lines that cropped up over the years and were ignored at the end. There are many amazing Lost Years fics out there, and many not so amazing. Hopefully this falls somewhere in the middle. Inspired by a Pretender fic by Elliot Silver of the same name.
Summary: In the times before flint and tinder, fire had never been allowed to die out.

~~~

'Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.'
~Philip K. Dick

The first few weeks, when she is still able to keep things like hours and days and sleep cycles straight in her head, when captivity is nothing but darkness and silence and hunger and concrete, when they still allow her sleep, she dreams of the beginning; the pier, the warehouse, a million places and a voice in her ear. Upon waking she feels he is her Sidhe, that he had come from Tir-Nan-Og, land of mists and faeries, where no map can ever lead, just to find her, his human heart, to become complete.

Even though he does not believe she still lives, Sydney will hold his image within her mind for as long as it takes to survive. Vaughn is now her touchstone, her mental shamrock, a shimmering Holy Trinity just out of reach.

* * *

When sleep has been the furthest thing from her mind for so long she can no longer count days, and the amphetamine drip IV has been in her arm so long the vein is growing hard around it, she remembers how her fingernails left faerie ring crescents in his shoulder blades.

She sees him in her sleep deprived hallucinations, sweat on his back, glowing in the moonlight despite the rooms windowless absorbing darkness. He tells her they will find each other, that they have always found each other.

* * *

Months later they have begun to believe that she believes. Looking in the mirror, she no longer sees Syd, friendloverspy, but Julia Thorne, enemypervertassassin. Hair colour is only the tip of the ice burg.

They have taught her what a lifetime learning from Jack Bristow never had: she kills carelessly now, and values her own life above (almost) all others.

She knows they have changed her irrevocably when Syd no longer protests to 'missions', even in her mind. There is nothing she can do to fight, for if they see her adding milk and sugar to her coffee, as Syd drank hers, they will call her bluff.

* * *

He smiles at the pretty thing on his arm, but even after all this time and from fifty feet away she still knows him well enough to see it does not reach his eyes.

Knowing they have not followed her from Rome, she is only slightly surprised to find they are still watching him nine months after her funeral. Thinking on it, she is quite flattered they consider her that good, that devious, and knows it is Julia's thought juxtaposed so nicely to Syd's old life.

Julia, comforted that at least they're both getting laid, gets Sydney safely on a plane back to Kendell before allowing herself to break down, a sobbing beautiful woman nothing new in first class.

She drifts off and dreams of back of beyond; his body moving in rhythm with hers, breath syncopated, tension arching between their spines, caught between earth and air, shining like the sun tinseling water.

* * *

Her days and nights are filled with frackin, killing and running, stealing and double crossing, and so she has no time to wonder if he marked her grave with leabai, the Celtic cairn stone.

Sometimes she wants to shed her too familiar Julia skin as a serpent would and nail it to the door of her home, like Christians hanging the skins of pagans as warning.

She thinks that just to have survived as long as she has, by any name, he must have blessed her, begged his kind for some sort of protection. In the hopeful moments, she will believe in his charm and it's power, and try to return to him, pretty blonde or not.

* * *

The colour of the Algerian heat tastes exactly of the sweat at the small of Simon's back; golden dessert, gunpowder danger, and adrenaline shimmering like a mirage above the horizon.

She finds it morbidly amusing that Rambaldi, his manuscripts and artifacts and prophecies, rule over this new manufactured life as surely as they did her own. A rose by any other name . . .

Turning her back on an assumed corpse, his knife misses slicing the ligaments behind her knee by millimeters, and the lick of steel almost feels like pleasure.

* * *

Slivers of Julia Thorne are being absorbed permanently by osmosis. She can no longer prevent the little things from wearing through.

Sometimes, she catches herself grinning through the barrel of a sniper rifle.

Rome has begun to feel like home, and while drinking espresso at a roadside cafe, she sneers for the first time at an American tourist, who is driving a rental SUV down the narrow, ancient streets while guzzling from a Starbuck's cup (and where do you find a Starbuck's in Rome?), and talking on a mobile. She catches her disgusted How L.A. before it can slip out in a very European scowl.

She finds herself looking forward to the jobs that require an up close and personal touch. A proclivity for, and talent with, edged weapons that Sydney Bristow always tried her hardest to quell, are slowly being allowed free reign as Julia Thorne discovers a certain contentment in the complicated, calculated dance of a blade in each hand.

Dismemberment, immolation, slashed throats and high body counts are becoming synonymous with Julia Thorne. While alone, and only while alone, she smiles, thinking of double agents, the FBI's Most Wanted List, and carte blanche.

* * *

Lazaray is the only target she has not followed through on, and though to the outside world, and her superiors, it appears as though her mission six months before was completed successfully, sometimes she must consciously suppress the raging battle between Sydney and Julia to finish him for good.

Sydney, dedicated CIA agent, almost enjoys the mental exercises required to find excuses to run around the globe looking for keys. Julia, dedicated Covenant assassin, fights her itchy trigger finger.

* * *

The looming angel on her buildings roof centers her in ways she cannot name, and when she is home the skylight is always thrown open to the Rome night. At certain times she cannot help but see it, Tir-Nan-Og, spires and arches of starlight spiraling into the distance. And she cannot suppress thoughts of Michael Vaughn, of another life, another's life. In moments like these, Sydney Bristow still believes in magic.

* * *

She is unsure what is memory and what is dream, and this comforts her.

She feels the differences in herself, and knows the others from before have noticed as well. A dancers grace transformed in twelve easy steps of brainwashing and torture, leaving an appalling predators silence in their wake.

Out of some seeming instinct, she finds herself pulling the trigger before asking questions, killing in anger, guilt free, and holds those she loves so far away. She thinks (and knows not where the thought began) perhaps he is just an earth man, for he has aged in her time away. But no; does not time catch up with Sidhe when they stay away from Tir-Nan-Og, land of the ever-young?

She fights a daily battle to like milk and sugar in her plain coffee, and not drink double espresso, black. Whereas Sydney-before-Julia never carried a weapon, Sydney-after-Julia never leaves her own home without at least a gun and a knife.

Despite Julia Thorne having been physically removed through highly invasive brain surgery, Sydney knows she will never be the same.

* * *

Sydney misses rain, for now she only sees Tir-Nan-Og, land of eternal springtime, through a chill sea mist.

Before the times of flint and tinder, fire had never been allowed to die out. She understands this in a far too personal way, and wishes he had never caught her spark, had never captured her forever by being the only one who truly knew her.

fin
 
Thanx!

I'm workin on a couple right now, but I'm a slow writer, because of obssesive rewrites and edits, so who knows when I'll consider them postable.
 
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