Title: "Nacimiento"
Author: monimala
Fandom: "Alias"
Rating/Classification: NAC, Jack, angst, sap, second person pov, pre-series.
Disclaimer: Bad Robot!
Summary: For the May 2003 Cover Me challenge. I took the offered first line and ran with it. Every birth is a beginning.
There are a thousand ways to destroy a man, and this, you muse, is but one of them. Holding her. Her soft, pink, weight, swaddled in a wool blanket
that Emily brought to the hospital right after she was born. A blue, striped, blankie. Emily laughed, warmly, because "Every baby needs a blankie, don't they, Jack?" and "Arvin...Arvin was holding out for a boy until the very second you called." It matches her eyes...but the doctors say that may change. You hope that the cloudy wonder when she looks up at you won't shift with the color.
"Sydney," you whisper, testing the sound of it as you balance her in the
crook of your arm and pace the length of the maternity ward. It's not a family name, not tied to old friends or fond uncles, but chosen because Laura was reading "A Tale of Two Cities" during her pregnancy and sometimes she drifted off to sleep murmuring, "It is a far, far, better thing that I do..."
It is a far, far, better thing that you do, than you have ever done.
This...this is nobility and sacrifice.
This is your death, right here before you, trapped in her tiny fists and
the blue-green veins beneath her translucent skin. Your little girl.
You'll kill yourself a thousand times over if it means giving her a bottle
at 3 a.m., walking her to kindergarten on her first day, grilling some unsuspecting idiot boy before he takes her to the junior prom...and seeing her as happy and beautiful on her wedding day as her mother was.
She is so very small, precious, light. Laura is afraid to hold her ...choosing, instead, to walk around the grounds like the nurses told her to so she can build up her strength and be discharged. "When we're both a little hardier, my Sydney and I will take long strolls in the garden," she promised and you can't help but smile as you think of your wife in an oversized straw hat, tending her roses like Emily so painstakingly taught her.
Laura is not a fan of the outdoors. She doesn't like exertion, sweat,
always wrinkles her nose when you come home from training ops and tells you
to shower off six layers of California earth before you kiss her "hello." Buttoned down, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose, the only things that get her blood racing are a comparative paper on Tolkien and turn-of-the-century politics and a good bottle of red wine. And you, of course.
Soon enough, Sydney, too, will number among her passions.
You remember when this...this beautiful eventuality...was flu symptoms. A fever and a green tint to Laura's skin in the mornings. "I can't possibly be pregnant!" and "I beg to differ" and the first stuffed animal you bought to stock the would-be nursery. A dragon with fanciful glittery wings and a toothy smile. It now has a whole menagerie of bears and monkeys and dolls
to keep it company, as it waits for Sydney to grow old enough to slay it.
Until then, you will willingly slay all her dragons.
There are a thousand ways to build a man, and this, you muse, is but one of them.
--end--
May 13, 2003.