Title: "Happy Accidents"
Author: monimala
Fandom: "Alias" (S3)
Rating/Classification: PG-13, future fic, gen, Robin/Other.
Disclaimer: Bad Robot!
Summary: It causes a lot of confusion. People stopping, squinting at her.
Note: This isn't *really* a sequel to "have the lambs stopped screaming?"
but it came from the same strange place in my head.
She really does work in a bank.
That's how she says it. "I really do work in a bank." It causes a lot of
confusion. People stopping, squinting at her, and wondering if they'd
implied otherwise. Sometimes, a person will chuckle, nervously, and ask,
"What do you mean 'really'? People think you're a secret agent or something?"
Yes. Or something.
She spent the first nine or ten years of her life believing Dad worked in
a bank and, as of this past March, he's been the Director of the CIA for
six. She is, she thinks, entitled to her semantics.
It was her brother who decided to go into government service. She
remembers that he looked ungodly handsome and mature when he came to her
wedding in his Marine dress uniform. Not at all like the boy who used to
watch Power Rangers and follow her and her girlfriends around the Beverly
Center.
She met Darrell on the first day of Accounting 221 at UCLA. He asked her to a frat party that weekend. Of course, they never made it there. They
found an all-night diner instead and talked for hours. They traded favorite colors and talked rock bands and around 2 a.m. he asked her when she'd lost her virginity. Only, drunk on too much coffee and intellectualism, he called it "innocence." She toyed, briefly, with telling him, "Technically? Thirteen." Instead, she stared at him until he fidgeted in his seat...and let him off the hook with a quiet, "How's next Saturday for you?" They proceeded to date for the next three years of college and planned on getting married after he got out of law school. A happy accident two months into senior year sped up their time table.
"You passed the background check," Daddy had growled, looking terrible and stern, "so I guess I'll let you marry my little girl. But if you hurt her ...? There won't be enough pieces of you left to cremate."
Darrell still thinks her father was kidding. She'll never corrected that
assumption.
Alanna is three now. She is biased, in that way that parents are, but her baby is the most beautiful, intelligent, child on the planet. And she would kill for her. Without a doubt. She wouldn't blink, wouldn't think twice about shooting anybody who tried to take her away. And she could. Her dad taught her how to use a gun when she was fifteen and she still goes to the firing range at least twice a month just to keep her skills sharp.
But she really does work in a bank.
She has a cozy office with a nameplate on the door, pictures of friends
and family scattered all over the place. A fairly well-tended fern. Whenever somebody comes in to open up a new account or a savings certificate, they always feel at home in the soft leather chairs and tap their feet in time to the unobtrusive jazz playing on her radio.
She always listens to John Coltrane on the drive home. She and Darrell
have a house in Laurel Canyon that used to belong to someone famous and
dead and sometimes she still hears ghosts wandering the halls. Sometimes,
it's just Natalya, their au pair, going to the kitchen for a midnight snack.
"You must have gotten yourself a *really* good home equity loan or
something," Joan, the nosiest of the tellers, has said, often, at the water
cooler.
Yes. Or something.
The draft for 2.6 million dollars was tucked into a gift basket of diapers
and beanie babies she received the day after Alanna was born.
New mothers, new brides, are often too harried to ask questions.
Especially when they all ready know the answers.
Alanna Dixon Williams is the most beautiful, intelligent, child on the
planet. Her skin is the color of honey, her eyes a bright, inquisitive green.
"Oh, girl, she doesn't look like Darrell at *all*. You sure you didn't
sneak around with the milkman or something?"
Or something.
She really does work in a bank.
Of memories.
--end--
March 29, 2004.