He has built the history slowly.

There are the things he knows, pieced together over the years. As a child, Daddy was missing, and then he was dead, and he wasn't coming home. Then more, slowly, from his mother as he grew older. What his father's job had been. What that job had done to his father.

A need, then, to add to the history. And a desire to understand the job, to serve the country that had been important enough for Dad to die for.

More history, there at the CIA. Names and dates and places in a case file. One simple phrase to take from them — assassinated by an unknown foreign agent. Pictures, horrible pictures — black and white in an autopsy bay — and stars on a wall. Things that made him desperate for more. But there was no more.

The need lessened, and he resigned himself to the pieces he had. Told himself he didn't want any more, that the history would never replace a life. And then Sydney Bristow, years later, with her books and their cipher codes. Her own history, and more pieces to add, eventually, in that conference room.

Her mother, his father. More history than he'd wanted. He'd built her, then, out of the horrible pictures, bits and pieces of Sydney, grainy old photographs, and his own hate.

Startling, to find that the real Irina Derevko looks nothing like his abstraction. Cold, calculating, beautiful, and closer to Sydney than his version. Deliberate, careful in her delivery. A sniper with words.

He doesn't compartmentalize, can't do it — doesn't really even know what it is, he realizes. Holds it back instead, forces himself to focus. Sydney needs him, now, and this was all for her, anyway — even if she never realizes it.

He will wait. Wait until the op is clear and she is safe and he can go home. Leave this building where her mother stalks her cell like a wild animal. A caged nightmare.

He will walk inside his tiny apartment and threw his keys on the counter. Sit on the couch and try not to look at the pictures over the fireplace. Take the phone off the hook on the off chance his mother might call.

He will sit, and contrast her beautiful Sydney face with the horrible pictures. Remember the first time he saw them, the way his hands shook and he had to look away. Not an option with her standing there, searching for weakness. Prying for pain, knowing already the hole in his life.

He will see her eyes, observing, as she asks the final questions, in the final moments. Not sure if he remembers his father well enough to know what he would have looked like, how he might have sounded as he responded. But he knows her, now. Her hand wrapped around the gun and her finger pulling the trigger, again and again and again.

He will realize what he's known, somewhere, all along. That she was not just doing a job, not just serving her country. That she would not have destroyed him so completely if she was merely on the other side of some global game.

He will wonder if he would do the same to her, given the chance. If he could.

He will think about that first piece of history, at eight years old. About Sydney's history, the one that shifts and twists and turns, violently. Her, at six. The mother she thought was dead, but was something else entirely.

Maybe he could.

He will run through all the pieces. Through his mother's wavering voice and the marble on the wall with the stars and the clank of the metal bars as they trapped him in front of her.

He will lay his head in his hands and let everything go, just for a little while.

This is too much history.