Absolution- Alias Fanfiction

35) Irina, Sydney & Katya

Music for this chapter (on repeat): I Grieve by Peter Gabriel.

THIRTY-FIVE

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"All right Mom, enough of the suspense. What is this painting?" Sydney asked bright eyed the next morning when she joined everyone in the Throne Room after breakfast carrying the large paper wrapped item.

Irina's eyes immediately lit up with delight as she stood to take the painting from Sydney.

"Pierre said it and I quote, 'is worth more then you could possibly believe...' Are you sure you didn't steal the Mona Lisa?" Sydney smiled, teasing her mother and making everyone else laugh as she took her seat on Vaughn's lap.

"Yes. I'm sure I didn't steal the Mona Lisa but he was right," Her hands softly caressed the paintings edges with fascination and sheer joy, "It means a great deal to me." She turned her eyes up to find Katya's with a smile, "And you too."

Katya gave her a, curious smile in return having no idea what that painting was and Irina's peculiar behavior.

Slowly Irina slid her finger under the flap of brown paper, releasing its glue seal along the edge of the top. She grabbed a corner and again looked up at Katya with an enormous smile before tearing the paper away slowly.

Katya gasped instantly covering her mouth as tears filled her eyes. "You found it."

The woman in the painting was simply stunning.

"Is that um...who I think it is?" Marshall chewed his fingernail nervously looking to Irina and back again at the painting.

"Our mother." She smiled at him and then to Katya who was still too stunned to move.

"Wow." Weiss leaned forward to look closer, "She's so...Wow." He smiled, easily recognizing the woman as Irina's mother their striking looks hard to forget.

"Where did you? How?" Katya moved closer, kneeling down in front of the painting on the floor running her hand over the beautiful wooden frame.

"I finally found it three years ago, in Orleans after spending the last fifteen years looking for it. The owners had inherited it from their uncle who had gotten it from his wife's mother whose first husband was the son of Jean-Michael." She smiled radiantly in triumph looking over the painting and her sister's reaction.

"So, it was missing? And who's Jean-Michael?" Sydney wore a confused smile, just as in awe as everyone else staring at the portrait of Anastasia, 'her grandmother,' she smiled wider.

"Yes. It was missing." Irina shook her head with a smile, relieved to have finally found it. "When our parents fled Russia and moved to France, they lived in a small apartment in Paris."

Irina began the story with a smile, "The man below them, Jean-Michael, was a young struggling artist, who quickly became a good friend." Her smiled grew as she stared into her mother's eyes in the portrait. "He had thought, my mother to be the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen..." She laughed, her eyes dancing, "And told her often. He'd asked for two years if she wouldn't 'please' sit for him, be his muse and let him paint her portrait. She and my father were both nervous about the idea as they were 'in hiding' and no one knew my mother was still alive. She kept telling him she was too shy to sit for a portrait or have anyone see it that is how she had put him off for so long. Jean-Michael had no idea of course, who my mother really was and finally, she agreed to sit for him if he'd promise to never sell the painting. She was doing it for him, as a friend and he agreed. So, in the spring of 1920 my mother sat for this portrait. It was the first portrait she had sat for since Russia and before the Revolution. It was also that last portrait ever painted of her." She smiled warmly and everyone began to see 'why' this painting was extremely valuable; not only for sentimental reasons being Irina and Katya's mother, but because it was the first and last portrait ever painted of the Grand Duchess Anastasia. "It instantly became my father's favorite. He hung in their apartment for the first ten years of their marriage. Jean-Michael became crippled after a bout with polio and could no longer paint. He became very depressed and reclusive. Our mother saw him admiring it at their apartment one day with a smile. It had reminded him that at one point in his life, he was a brilliant painter and that his life had meaning. He had never kept any of his paintings, had sold them all so... my mother gave the portrait back to him as a gift. Our father used to talk about this painting in great detail all of the time when we were little and how 'beautiful our mother' was in this portrait, reminding him of the earlier years of their life together. He had it memorized down to the last detail."