but that's the thing about loneliness. loneliness begets anger and eventually, the anger gets the best of you. it was never tara's intention to be labeled the "problem child". she only started fights she knew she could finish, she only broke things she knew she could break, it wasn't her fault that no one ever gave her the chance. she never wanted to be the one who was always sitting, waiting for someone to adopt her. hell, she never wanted to be an orphan, but life is a bitch that way.
by the time she was ten, she had already lived in half a dozen different foster homes and been returned to the orphanage just as many times. enter alex and sasha melnyk—a young, bright eyed couple that came waltzing into tara's life just when she'd finally started to think that maybe the powers that be had gotten the picture, that maybe they finally understood that she just wanted to be left alone. most families would get fed up with her attitude, or her penchant for fighting with her peers, or the fact that she had a tendency to try and fix things that weren't broken, but the melnyks were different. they didn't get mad. instead, they consoled her, and enrolled her in classes that would foster her skills and play to her curiosity. they taught her that she didn't have to fight with fists and weapons, that she was smarter than that, that she was better than that and soon, they gave her the most important gift of all: a home and the sense that she didn't need to be alone anymore. for the first time in nearly eleven years, tara tvardovsky felt like she might have had a chance at a normal life. (but if life has taught her anything, it's not to get her hopes up, so she accepts this fact with open arms, but with a wary heart.)
she's eleven when they move into a bigger house and buy a fluffy golden dog, twelve the first time she builds a computer in alex's office from bits of scrap wire and old chipboards, the same year, she rebuilds the engine in her new-father's classic mustang. by thirteen when the men in suits knock on the melnyk's front door (it's then that she realizes that she needs to be better about covering her tracks when she hacks into things she shouldn't be hacking in to) and by fourteen, she's finally starting to actually accept the fact that her life has finally started to turn around. she hasn't been in a fight in four years, and hell, she's even made friends, though it's been hard, considering she's two years ahead of her class and smarter than everyone in her class, but she's happy all the same and for the first time in as long as she can remember, she's looking forward to what's to come.
and so it goes and high school passes in a blur of classes and dances and extracurrliculars and summers spent in the ukraine and russia, learning even then about who she is and where she came from before all the tragedy. there's even been a boyfriend in the mix. (though she has to admit her parents were right when they'd said he was all wrong for her.) her senior year sneaks up on her and she's estatic when she's chosen to spend three months overseas, studying in china and even moreso when she's told she's recieved early admission to boston university. everything is falling into place. now all she has to figure out is what the hell she's going to do with the rest of her life.
of course college is a no brainer. she has a very specific skillset, after all. (she'll be the first to admit that she understands machines better than she understands people.) but that doesn't mean she's got that whole rest of her life thing down pat. still in all, she breezes through without a care in the world other than what test comes next, what odd job she'll work next before she gets bored of it, too or whether or not she'd get the scholarship she needs to be able to go to grad school.
she's only nineteen when she's accepted to MIT's engineering program, a proverbial wunderkind, and for the first time in her life, she's embarking, for her own best interest on her own, because she wants and needs to be that fiercly independant person that the melnyk's had helped her to become. it's strange, going to classes with people nearly a half a decade older than you and helping them when they struggle. there were many times when she wondered what made them choose the path they were on, what they wanted to do when it was all over. would they go on to gain a doctorate and change the world? would they be arrested by the feds for hacking into banks? would they build a robot that would go to space? the possibilities were limitless... and it made it that much harder for her to stop long enough to think about applying for jobs when graduation approached.
the worry is all swept out the window, however, one fateful day in the late winter of 2007, when a then twenty-one year old tara is approached by a man in a suit. (and of course, she has a flashback to when she was thirteen and immeidately begins explaining that she hasn't done that in years, that he code is more elegant now, that she's better at hiding her tracks...) the fbi wants her. it's a startling revelation. she expected to build game consoles or design machines for companies like bergman or diedrich motors, or maybe go work on the super collider or just wind up holed up in a tiny apartment, making a living of hacking into people's private lives. what she never once fatomed was becoming an analyst for the fbi's cyber security team. nevertheless, she doesn't skip a beat, accepting the job without so much as a second thought.
a year later, she finds herself behind a desk. it's routine, it's monotonous. it's not at all what she thought it would be and there's that little gnawing voice in the back of her head that seems to be whispering, you're better than this, you could be doing so much more. she's listened to it countless times, but those jobs hadn't mattered nearly as much. she didn't care about being a barista or that time she worked in the geek squad at best buy (that one had been hellish), but she did like this job. it had purpose, it gave her meaning and direction in a life that had been so chaotic. she just... wanted more. she wanted to be in the field. and so rather than quitting, she enrolled in the fbi academy field training to become an actual agent.
that was more than six years ago and tara is still happy in what she's doing, still excited to go to work every day... even if it can be so stressful sometimes that it makes her want to tear out her hair.
