Blue
by
Chris AndersonDisclaimer: Alias is the property of other people, including J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot productions.
Written for the Theatrical Muse 'blue' challenge.
---
Blue is the color of the water on the night Laura dies, a deep midnight blue, velvet and ice enfolding her, holding her close. The river is navy shadows and a shimmer of gold as the sun goes down. Blue is the twilight in which she waits.
Blue is the color of Sydney's favorite jacket, left behind in the car's backseat, a jacket she will have to mourn the loss of now along with her mother. Sky blue, bright as a summer day, wool lined fabric keeping her daughter warm.
She wishes, just for a moment, that she could take it with her.
Blue is a feeling, more than the paint color of the Volkswagen one of her contacts arrives to pick her up in, or that of the bus, another Volkswagen (her handler is getting predictable again, dangerous especially for an extraction, but he's not the one the Americans will execute for treason if they're caught, so what does he care?) in which the extraction team waits for her.
They welcome her with smiles and open arms- unprofessional, perhaps, but they have been comrades for years, and this, for them, is the moment of crowning achievement. For years they have watched her steal some of the Americans' greatest secrets; now they are about to help her get away with it.
"Welcome home," they say, and she'll never tell them that home is not where she is going but where she has been, the things she has lost tonight that she will never be able to get back. Home is what Laura Bristow was going home to, and it is a thing the woman who killed her no longer deserves, and will never find again.
"Thank you," she says, because it is what she must say. She has not bothered even to try to dry her hair, and she is glad of it now; river water trailing down her face masks her tears, sweeping the tears along as they fall down her cheeks. Though perhaps it would not matter so much if they did notice her tears.
They would think, of course, that she is weeping for joy at returning home to Mother Russia.
She wishes it were so.
Feedback?