Title: Fighting with Monsters
Summary: Sydney reflects on her turbulent and dangerous relationships with Sark.
Author: Brighteyes88
Rating: PG-13-R
She lies in bed gasping and sweating. Her breath is ragged and her brow is drenched. Rolling over, she sees him lying there, as he quickly drifts off into a serene sleep. She sometimes thinks him passive, his chest rising and falling as he dreams. She used to wonder if a person such as him could even dream, but she knows better now. He sometimes calls out to her in his sleep and she knows that he must dream.
Does he dream of her and him together? Does he dream of their happiness, although they both know that the path they have chosen leads to inevitable doom. But that is why it's called a dream. She wishes that she could dream so peacefully, like him. She doesn't. She dreams terrible things. She dreams of cold steel pressed to her temple as he holds her at gunpoint. She dreams of his words, cutting her like a knife...
"We can never be together, don't you see? This is our fate. You are my weakness, and I cannot afford to have a weakness."
In her dreams his eyes are colder than ever, cobalt and icy. They are pools of pain and suffering, the eyes of a man with far more life experience that he. In the scheme of life, he is but a child, merely 23. In her dream, she looks up into those eyes, as the steel gun barrel on her forehead presses harder and harder into her delicate skin, she is sure that it is causing a bruise with all the intensity that he conveys.Then, as his eyes fill with tears, of regret or sorrow, she never knows, he pulls the trigger, and she wakes up in a cold sweat, reaching for him. She desperately tries to hold onto her sanity.
The dreams that scare her even more are the ones where she holds the gun. She is always running down a dark hallway, on a mission she supposes. That's when they meet. Guns drawn at one another they stand, staring down the barrels of one another's weapons. She is always the one to pull the trigger. And then she is always met with one of the most disturbing images she has ever seen. He lies on the floor, bleeding and coughing, and clutching his chest, where the bullet punctured his flesh. She runs to him, sobbing. How could she? How could she do this?
As she draws closer she notices that the wound is fatal, he has been shot in the lung. He coughs, the most horrible sounding cough she has ever heard. He can barely speak, but does manage to get out only one word, her name. He calls her name as blood seeps from his chest.
"Sydney."
She strokes his brow, runs her fingers through his sweat matted hair. She cries, her tears staining his cheeks, as she presses her head to his, kissing his face. She does love him, she never meant to. Her heart begins to beat more frantically as she hears his breath grow weaker, becoming almost a wheeze as he struggles to breath. She did this to him, to them, she killed him.
"Hold on Sark, you're gonna be fine." She sobs, "Stay with me."
He closes his eyes and she knows that he will not be able to stay with her. He is leaving her and she knows it, but that doesn't stop her from pleading with him.
"Please don't leave me."
Then he just stops breathing, and his eyes grow dark, and she knows that he is no longer there. Her hands strokes his forehead one last time before she passes out, only to find out it was just a dream, as she wakes up in her own bed.
It's sick irony to her. They had hated each other for at least a year, after all the times that they had tried to kill one another. She had though of him as the bane of her existence. A thorn in her side that no matter what would never go away. There was always an unspoken attraction between the two of them , and at those times, she bit her tongue and begged her mind to stop thinking of him. She suffered inner turmoil for a long time, dreaming of him in her sleep and in debrief, just fantasizing about what it would feel like to have his hands on her skin.
She laughed it off, telling herself that it was merely physical attraction, nothing more. She was just reacting the way any normal woman would after seeing him. God he was gorgeous. And she hated to admit it but she loved running into him on their missions, because it was the only time when she ever truly felt challenged. They were a perfect match in the field. He was and would always be the only person she had ever encountered that could match her moves so well.
Sitting in bed, she looked over at him and remembered their first encounter in the field. She was posing as a French singer with bright red hair, pale skin, and a skin tight black corset. She sang for him that night. He was so handsome, but he was also so full of himself. She had once described him as "That guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer."
The more they met in the field, the more they became personally acquainted with one another. And she soon learned that his mouth ran a mile long stretch of smart ass. Every time they saw one another he would give her a sarcastic comment that made her want to smack that smile off his crooked mouth. But instead of doing just that, she snapped a sardonic remark right back at him. Boy could they bicker, in the field and elsewhere. Their banter was sometimes annoying and said specifically to get under one another's skin, but on rare occasions, he would give her a snide remark to make her laugh or cheer her up.
In the beginning she thought he was heartless and cold. He was, on the outside. He was cold as ice, unbreakable, unmovable, and unswayable. He appeared to have no feelings, no weakness, but she learned better. He did have a weakness, her.
In the beginning, when he had voiced his attraction to her in many disguised forms, she shrugged it off, thinking it was just another method to get under her skin and make her squirm. But it wasn't. And the more and more they met face to face, the more she saw just how serious he was.
This scared her though, to think that she, a goody two shoes, could have attracted the attention of a seriously lethal mastermind. The thought of them ever being together used to terrify her. How could she, a model citizen and servant of her country ever accept the advances of a criminal terrorist? It turned out to be much easier than she thought.
After the phase of fear, she went through one of longing. After regarding the situation as criminal and ghastly for so long, she began to want it. She wanted them to happen, and soon the though made her blush rather than cringe. The idea that she, being as stark white as she was, and him, being midnight black, could somehow shield all else out and make a form of gray was enticing.
Soon thoughts turned into actions and one thing led to another. She remembered it well, they had been in Havana for a mission that SD-6 had sent them on. They were going to be partners. After entering the club where they were to make the Rambaldi exchange with Marik, she could feel the pressure and tension weighing her down like a rock tied to her thoughts and heart. She knew that there was no avoiding it anymore, and she was right.
It was a beautiful hotel room, his if she remembered correctly. They had been sitting together looking at he artifact, and then it happened. In a flash there were clothes flying, buttons ripping, zippers sliding. Soon, she could feel her insides building up as his hands set her body on fire, his mouth making a fiery trail down her bare skin. Hands roaming, lips pressing, breath mixing, she felt like she was going to explode. He kissed her over and over again as they moved together. Moans building, pants increasing, screams escalating, they collapsed onto one another.
The next day she was very soar, but also very pleased. Her whole body still tingled from his touch. She had so much to think about. The night before, she had been both happy and scared, excited and fearful, and most of all confused. She felt dirty in the sense that she had done something so very wrong, so very illegal and shocking. She wondered how Vaughn, her handler, or her father would feel if they knew that she had slept with Sark. She knew they would never look at her the same again, and when she thought about it, she may never look at herself the same again either.
How could she, Sydney Bristow, a perfect agent and U.S. citizen, suddenly turn her back on all that was right all for her own pleasure? She sure as hell didn't know, but she had done it all the same, so what did the reason matter? She remembered being scared at first. Why do all girls have a thing for bad boys? She didn't know the answer to the question, but she did know that she had started a chain reaction that she couldn't stop, one that she knew was leading her into the hands of death, either emotional or physical.
As time passed them by, ticking like a time bomb for their sanity and secrecy, their liaison built to an epic proportion. There was no way things would ever be the same. Neither of them could ever go home at night with a free conscience, not that she could imagine he would have before she came along. Nor could they go on a mission without worrying about confronting one another in the field.
This was all torture for Sydney, but as time passed, she realized that it became a more regular thing for her. Her heart didn't beat a mile a minute at the thought of what she had done. She could come home some nights with a completely clean conscience. She could even look those she loved in the face and deliberately lie to them about where she had been and who she had been with. She felt a tinge of his darkness rubbing off onto her sometimes, but it was nothing severe, for she knew that some of her righteousness had rubbed off on him, just a little.
Hearing Sark roll over in bed was enough to snap Sydney from her trancelike state. She looked at him with eyes filled with love and yet also sorrow. She had realized just now, as she reflected upon her sins, that she always longed to possess what was far too dangerous to have. He was that item of her lust and yet also her love. As she watched him sleep soundly she though again that she could never dream like him. Never would her thoughts be filled so carelessly with pleasantries.
"Sweet dreams." She whispered more to herself than him as she watched his eyes dart back and forth under their lids.
Laying her head down onto her pillow, she remembered a saying that her English professor had taught her in college. The quote seemed so fitting to her that it was frightening. She whispered it aloud as she stared into the darkness, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for so long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you ."