Now completely Jossed, but I still wonder if we got the whole story about those two years Sydney was missing between Seasons 2 and 3. I really do. Fill in the Blank by C. L. Kamnikar copyright 2003 Her favorite poet is Emily Dickinson. She can dance the tango as well as any apache dancer in Brazil. She prefers Valentino to Versace, Dior to Lacroix, and Wang to both. She can load a 9mm in under fifteen seconds and hit anything she aims at for 200 yards. She has no memory of being a child. Ever. (You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing- Luis Bunuel) She knows she was not born Julia Thorne. But she is now more Julia than the woman who was lost, so as names go, it'll do. She knows that her loss of memory was deliberate, calculated, mapped and induced. But to what degree it was controlled by those she escaped from, instead of instilled by trauma, a last- ditch effort to protect herself, she is not sure. She wonders if her escape was, to a point, allowed; but she believes that if it was, then at least she is not conforming to the agenda they had laid out for her. But it is impossible to be completely certain. (Steven Wright said, "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." Her worst nightmares are of knowing precisely what she is about to lose, of knowing she is about to break and be erased, panic rage hopelessness agony whiting out everything else except her name, and that name is not Julia.) She takes sleeping pills to avoid the dreams of a man with sad sky-blue eyes. She thinks there is more than one of him, more than one man out there who is mourning her, somewhere; but she can never see enough of his face to identify him, and does not really want to. It would do no good to pass him by on the street, when she doesn't know herself, much less him. Not when she doesn't know if the dreams of betrayal were caused by his actions or her own. (Who did I kill who died who left me alone who didn't save me) She fills her days when she is not working with shopping, books, food, day trips, fast driving, dancing, sex. She does not reflect on her condition in her leisure time if she can possibly help it. She does not let herself consider the canyon in her mind that starts less than a year ago. She lives in the second of bliss, of chocolate bursting on her tongue, roses brushing her cheek, Coleridge and Yeats echoing a dream from a life that wasn't hers. Focuses on the brush of a hand on her hip as she grinds on the dance floor, the wind whipping her hair across her face, the light on the Mediterranean at sunset. Writes it down, memorizes what's real, because this is what she has, and they will not take it away from her again. (From the DSM-IV: "Dissociative amnesia is characterized by an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.... The reported duration of the events for which there is amnesia may be minutes to years.... Some individuals with chronic amnesia may gradually begin to recall dissociated memories.") A Christmas tree. A children's book. A voice in a train station, recalling the places he'd looked for her before he'd found her. Laughing with a woman whose face shifts and melts from different angles, listening to jazz music in a nightclub. The touch of a hand, holding a jeweled pin. An office, a feeling of rage, and a man saying, "You're like a daughter to me." All these images fade around the edges from being examined, shaken like the presents under a tree, until they are smudged with fingerprints and stretched and worn with handling, over and over, in small increments. A meaningless vision will sometimes surface from the break in her consciousness, of running, running, running; of a giant red ball, glowing and dangerous; of an older woman behind bars, looking at her with hungry eyes. Meaningless. Pointless. She only hauls her memories out when she is working, waiting, watching her prey, needing to keep her intent off her face and her muscles ready to act. It gives her the right air of helplessness, lowers her level of threat, makes her seem-- normal, for a moment. Not the feral thing she knows she is, scrabbling for food-warmth-touch-life-feeling, mad with longing, never full, never complete. Empty, except for what little she knows for sure. Concentration on work can fill her mind to a point where she can bear to look at these fragments without them cutting into her; can keep her occupied enough to stay sane when she looks at the past. She looks good in black. She loves French champagne. She speaks Italian with an accent from Rome, not Tuscany, but prefers country cooking and warmer air. She is very good at killing people. (In an attempt to assert control... victims will attempt to (as outlined in the DSM-IV): repress memories; avoid thoughts, places, or activities that remind them of the incident; hypercontrol their emotions; limit their expressions of emotion and affection; and cease activities that once caused them emotional or physical pleasure. This intense effort to hypercontrol their own minds and to avoid this fearful physiological reactivity will result in sleep problems because what they deny in the day will confront them in their dreams. They will experience hypervigilance and exaggerated startle reactions. Their emotions, forbidden to trickle out in a steady flow, will come out in bursts of rage and anger. - Dave Grossman, "Resistance to Killing") The first two jobs were done in an effort to conceal her condition, because it was expected from her, because it almost felt normal, to stalk and observe the target, close in, take control. The killing itself was over so quickly that it was only later that she realized it made her ill, terrified, brought up memories --- (sliding down a wall blood everywhere where is he what did you do to him when did you kill her when heat fire noise pain God pain dying pain and the well of grief and betrayal doesn't have an end) --that eluded her recall even as they showed up at night, in her dreams. Just the emotions, leaving her shaking in bed, afraid of the dark, hugging herself, trying to imagine anyone who would hold her and tell her it was all right, and coming up blank. Empty. Alone. When she realized they all knew, that they were watching her, that they'd always known that Julia was a lie, the recognition of the betrayal was so familiar it required no effort to conceal. Everyone lies, everyone uses, everyone was her enemy, and everyone knows this, no one says this, and it's only a matter of how well you live the lie. The next three jobs were even easier, ways to give vent to her rage, and those people she killed (gun. dagger. broken neck) didn't, couldn't matter anyway, not if she was going to survive. She passed up her first chance to escape, knowing it was a trap, a test, and knowing she couldn't fail. Passed up her second, because the circumstances weren't optimal. Passed on the third, because she could see the ways in which she could be caught-- --and left after her seventh murder, did not report back, vanished the way her old life had vanished, somewhere back beyond the divide in her memories, the gap in her life. She still kills. She chooses the targets now, though, after researching them, making sure their removal will cause her no nightmares, no nebulous, sourceless shame. She has other talents too, for theft and persuasion, seduction and destruction, which delight her when she can use them. She is ready for anything, she tells people, and time and again finds that this true: she knows the language, the strategy, the mode of attack for any danger she faces, and never flinches with normal fear. Julia watches for the face that recognizes her, the slip of the tongue, the eyes that light up, and waits. Waits for a clue, a key, a code for herself. Waits for a name to spark a fire. Waits for payback, for hope, for the moment when she will take back her own. She can think in English or Russian, but does not know which is her native tongue. She swims well, with perfect form, and is able to hold her breath for up to four minutes underwater. She runs in the mornings past the Trevi Fountain, one of the few who do. She does not allow herself to look over her shoulder for someone she knows isn't there. ("We must remember what happened in order to keep it from happening again. But we must forget the feelings, the emotions, that go with it. It is only by forgetting that we are able to go on." - Rwandan official, quoted in Three Contrasting Approaches for 'Dealing with the Past' (CCTS#18)) *~* Author's Notes: I still think Alias could do a lot more with the Julia Thorne storyline; as it is, this story is now AU. But when Sydney knew what she knew... that's still an open question.   Back to Random Fandom Fanfic / Back to the Chaos Horizon Alias and all associated characters are property of Bad Robot, ABC, and others, and are used here for entertainment purposes only. Stories are copyright to the author; do not repost or redistribute without author's permission.