Title: Perte
Author: Hillary
e-mail: aliasfanficiton@hotmail.com
classification: angst, Vaughn POV
rating: PG
summary: Vaughn has a life changing revelation
spoilers: none, really. Takes place in the second part of Season one, post "Prophecy" and pre "Masquerade"
feedback: is muchly appreciated
distribution: please ask
He becomes aware – slowly – that he is alive.
This is not a painless realization. For so many weeks, months, years he made attempts to convince himself that his emotions, long unchecked and left to grow, were both useless and expendable.
The day the phone call came is forever remembered. The hospital; calling to inform him that his mother is in a hospital room – 243 – and she is dying.
And as a bystander, a hapless victim of horrible news, he watches the drama of disease unfold all around him. From a corner, not too close but not to far, either, his eyes stay trained on each apparatus, a slow tour that he forces his brain to process and make sense of. His mother is surrounded by a sea of tubes, making her wasted body seem even frailer. Whitewashed walls draw all the color from her cheeks, until her skin sinks into the fabric of the bed, white bleeding into white, the steady beep of machines, her chest moving in and out in rhythmic monotony.
Cancer.
And she had never thought to tell him. Now, when she is made mute by the clear plastic tubing that protrudes from her thin lips, he only remembers the worst memories; the day his father died, the day that she accidentally ran over his cat – what was that cat's name? Spotty, Fluffy, - he can't recall anything but that his mother called it "that damn cat" and he always thought she killed it on purpose. Her voice, raspy, marked with that French accent full of strange vowels and the forced pronunciation of so-called "American words" that she never seemed to get right. And never wanted to, either.
Cancer.
And she never thought to tell him, and now she is dying. The doctors, terse silent creatures running on some sort of tragic clock came to him with pulled down expressions and talked about edema in the lungs and her elevated white count. He asks questions; his voice stuttering over hard phrases like "how much longer" and "is their any hope", and their faces belied the utter lack of optimism. They met inquiries with little detail, giving scraps of information, telling him that she wasn't doing well today, but tomorrow, tomorrow maybe. He doesn't bother to ask them to translate the meaning of the medical jargon; it was enough to know that she is dwarfed in all this white, in the too-loud beep of machines, the harsh sound of a respirator filling the tiny room with the cacophony of medical sounds that remained in his head long after he left that room, left the hospital. It echoed in the elevator, in the parking garage, hot with summer heat, in the cab of his car.
He drives to her house, a tiny two bedroom affair in Southern California that his father's pension check bought her on her fiftieth birthday. A belated gift from her husband's government that served as testimony for his esteemed service. Michael remembers that day as bittersweet, her mother opening the check after years of living in tiny apartments that were sparsely decorated, her tears making her eyes glow electric blue.
Despite the check, it did not alter his mother's convictions that the money had been nouveau blood money, only reaffirming her belief that her husband's life had been swallowed, his death ambiguous and as mysterious as the check that she held in her hand on that sunny November day. He can remember her wedding ring, sparkling in natural light. She had never removed it, and to see it there, shining as she clutched that thin blue rectangle of paper, it had only strengthened his conviction to give answers to all the many questions pertaining to the why, the how; the secrets that had shaped his life since he had been ten years old.
Inside this small house, he maneuvers around the boxes of yet to be recycled cans and magazines, sits down the large pile of mail and newspapers that accrued in his mother's mailbox and on her unkempt lawn. From the recessed shadows of the kitchen he can hear the distinct sound of a cat meowing, and is surprised.
His mother never liked cats, growing up, had run over – damn, that cat's name is somewhere in his memory, buried under the dust of inane facts and superfluous details. She'd even claimed that allergies had caused her dislike for them, her excuse whenever he asked for another. . But still, a cat – black and furry, fur on end, came padding across the linoleum floor and into the kitchen.
With eerie green-yellow eyes it looks at him and meows, a plaintive sound that says 'feed me'. He scrounges through cabinets – notes the piled up cans in a corner - beets, carrots, green beans, and finds a can of tuna fish. These are all symbols of his mother's ill health.
Had he come to visit sooner, he would have known that she was no longer cooking her complex French meals with too many courses for one woman. He would have noticed that she abandoned the use of fresh vegetables and opted for the easier cans. He would have seen her freezer stocked with Hungry Man dinners and the strange smell that pervaded the refrigerator, he would have known. He would have asked questions about the cat and eventually she would have let slip that she had Cancer and was dying. Is dying, her body wasted and…
Old.
He travels down the hallway, noting the dust accumulating on the exposed surfaces, takes into consideration the messy folds of her bed and the way the light in this house doesn't seem to reach the corners of the room. Shades and draperies falling in soft folds around the carpeted floor lock out the evidence of daylight, and when he flicks on the light overhead, all he can see is the shift of dust that flows through the air.
There is no surprise when he sits on her bed and finds it sinking in the middle, uncomfortable and lumping. He lies back in the pillows and tries to recall the pleasant scent of his mother, forever locked in childhood– not this stuffy smell of death and dying that hangs everywhere. Her bedside table is a mess of pill bottles, of a clear yellow plastic divider marked with the days of the week, the lids up until Thursday, which is filled with the unused pills that are colorful and too numerous for him to count. He cries then – sobs that fill his chest and make him feel even weaker.
Cancer
And she never thought to tell him. It didn't matter that the last time he saw her was Christmas – when he pressed a kiss into her leathery cheek and told her that he loved her, in French – always in French. And that he could not remember the gift he gave her, nothing fancy, not nearly nice enough, nothing she really deserved. That present should have been better, he should have been more conscientious, have been a better son. But he isn't. He'd gotten consumed with his own affairs and the particulars about his life and forgot about his mother, believing she would live forever, eating fresh vegetables and cooking complicated meals and not letting a cat in her house.
The tears – riding on wave after wave of guilt, stop suddenly when his cell phone rings. With shaking fingers he answers, careful to conceal the emotion in his voice.
"Hey, Mike. How is she?" Eric's voice at the opposite end, colored with concern. He takes a moment before answering in a stilted tone:
"She's dying. It's cancer."
And that is all there is to say.
*
Standing on the threshold of her hospital room, he becomes dully aware of his heartbeat, strong and thudding in his chest, relentlessly tasking to fill his veins with fresh blood, with oxygen, the nutrients that make up a person's survival. It roars in his ears, the sound of mechanized function within his body, he breathes: in and out, he sees his mother, still so minuscule in the folds of her bed covers. She is a breathing ghost, a vestige of her former self.
Visiting hours ended thirty minutes ago, and he is told that he needs to leave, to let her rest. She's not opened her eyes in days, closed down peach lids with tiny eyelashes that have gone white with age. He holds her hand when he can, finds it greasy with lotion that the nurses work into the skin when visiting hours are over. She smells like antiseptic. The nurses watch him (them) and frown.
Death is coming, he's sure. The doctor told him today that the Cancer has officially ravaged her body, and now the only thing that keeps her alive is the surrounding automation. Her lungs would drown her if given the chance; her heart is faulty and has lost its power to pump. There is nothing anyone can do, and so he stands, face pressed against the glass, and watches her.
It would be good to say something when morning comes, when visiting hours re-begin, he can tell her he's sorry. Even though she can't hear, not really, he can say it and in the very least it might make him feel somewhat better. He could tell her he loved her, that he is so sorry. (je suis désolé, mere) He could ask why she never thought to even tell him, which still angers him. It makes him sad. He wants to know why she thought he would be burdened with the particulars of his own mother's health. He wants to understand the factors that made that true, that he was burdened, and here at the last minute, a victim of his own narcissistic self absorption.
For a moment, when the nurses ask him to stand aside so they may go in and inject various things into his mother's tubing, he thinks of Sydney. His hands curl around the cell phone in his pocket and he gets the urge to call her, if only for the briefest of moments, and tell her that his mother will be dead tomorrow. But he stops himself, looks up to the clock on the wall that reminds him of school days, thick black round the rim with numbers stark and large, and tells himself that it is too late.
*
Her funeral is on a Tuesday. It seems to him that it ought to rain, but of course, it doesn't. The sky is perfect, unmarred by clouds, an azure that irritates him to no end. It's raining somewhere, he'd seen it on the weather channel, before the doctor came out two days before and said with feigned sympathy, "she's gone."
It's strange that he should still be living, voice alive enough to call and arrange a headstone to be marked with his mother's name, nowhere near where his father was buried. Not even the same cemetery. The woman at the opposite end of the line says she has a plot with a nice tree, "for shading", she explains. It seemed to make sense at the time, but now, now, watching the men dig the remaining piles of dirt for her grave, he does not believe that it has been all that logical. What shading did a dead person need?
The responsibilities of death are overwhelming, he finds, for it is hard to stand here. Hard when his Aunt Trish puts a hand on his shoulder and says nothing, harder when Eric does the same, later, after the soft earth is replaced over her coffin, and the priest says "Ashes to ashes..."
He has a house to disassemble, clean and sell. He has a will to hear, his mother's will, leaving him old cans of food and frost- bitten TV dinners. He has obligations, and they frighten him, because now he is alone. No family. Hardly any friends.
He surveys the small crowd that gathers around her grave. They all wear black, some outfits better than the others, some shoes more polished, hair more in place. He glances at the sky – no rain clouds, just endless blue. Walks forward and lays a rose, careful to let it fall aside the rest of the bouquet that makes the air smell sickly sweet. He says goodbye, (au revoir) in French - always in French, and walks slowly to the car.
There is chatter as he passes, of course, of the people offering condolences and that reaffirm his hatred of funerals. Tired of death, and he wants the pageantry of it all to end. Before he gets in the driver's side door he hears a voice, familiar but unexpected.
"Vaughn." Then, as an afterthought, halting and off key "Michael?"
He clutches the keys in his hand, unmoving, suddenly dumb by the weight of what he has heard. When he turns he sees she is wearing black, a long dress that hugs her curves and makes her look fragile. A trick of the eye, yes, for she is not fragile. She's the opposite of fragile. He stares.
"I'm sorry about your mother" she says, and then steps forward, concern in her eyes and a near wrinkle on her forehead. He is overcome by this gentleness, by this unplanned visitation. He wants to walk into her arms but doesn't. Instead, sotto voce he says "Come with me?"
A stupid request, misleading in its simplicity. There is a brief flicker in her eyes, a quick look in either direction before she nods, steps over, and takes the keys from his hand.
"I'll drive." There's a commanding forcefulness in her tone that he does not want to dispute. Instead, he follows her lead and crosses around the car, hoping Eric is not lurking in a corner, set to watch him, observe, and later comment on the fact that he should not go anywhere with her, anytime, unless it was mandated by the agency.
She starts his car, the purr of the engine filling his ears and making him feel suddenly empty. His mother had been buried, moments before he'd tossed down that final flower, and he is now sitting opposite Sydney Bristow, her well defined arms clutching the steering wheel.
"Where to?" she asks, gently, giving a vague smile in his direction.
"Just drive."
Outside of this car, there are obligations: duty to pack up his mother's things and marvel over what he finds precious and the things that can be donated to the Salvation Army. He has a cat to find a home for and a house he'll have to sell. But for the moment obligations seem more daunting than anything else, and he wants to feel the wind on his face, hear tires turning on pavement, wants to pretend - if only an afternoon, that the life outside this one, the life he's lived so long, will cease to exist.
She drives; they sit in silence, a quiet comfort that he's immediately sucked into. After a long while, when she pulls onto the interstate, cars whizzing past them, he opens his mouth and speaks.
"She never told me." His tone is mournful, catching on an emotion closely related to guilt.
"I'm so sorry, Vaughn." She's reverted back to using his last name. He liked the way she said "Michael" – liked the almost exotic way it sounded coming from her lips.
"Why are you here?" Asked with wonder, this question. For a moment the danger creeps in, the fears of being followed and watched and how they should never be seen together.
"I called. Weiss told me what was up, after I grilled him a half hour. I have a mission planned for SD-6 and when I couldn't get in touch with you, I sort of panicked."
He blinks "I haven't been at the office for days. I'm sorry." There's bitterness in his tone, resentment aimed towards the CIA and the life it makes him lead.
"Don't apologize, I understand. It's going to be okay, Vaughn" She gives him a look- tender and comforting all at once.
"Is it? Really, Sydney? My mother is dead because I was too self -absorbed to even pick up the phone and call her. She died without me saying anything to her that she could hear. Is that okay?"
She remains silent, worrying her lower lip between her teeth and eyes fixed on the road ahead of her. An uneasy pause lingers between them.
"Take this exit," he says, and she complies. He gives directions until they pull in front of the squat little house that had been his mother's home for over a decade.
"This was her house," he says, and she nods.
"Can I come in with you?" She asks in a small voice, and he looks over at her briefly before tersely nodding his approval towards her request.
No pause to deliberate, she turns off the car. Stepping out of the driver's side door, he watches the glint of sunlight in her hair, the way the dress falls around her legs, the way she moves. He condemns the fact that he finds her so distracting and lovely despite everything that has occurred, that he had just left his mother's funeral and yet he could still feel for this unattainable woman.
He'd left the light on in the kitchen, and it falls on the dirty floor, on the dishes still in the sink, on the piles of mail and debris that litters her counters. Sydney wears a pained expression, taking in her surroundings.
The cat finds them, coat full and black with white whiskers. She meows at Sydney's feet and gives her knowing glances that are directed at the tuna fish in the cabinet.
"What a pretty cat."
"Want to adopt her? My dog, Donovan, happens to hate cats."
Kneeling, she strokes the cats back and looks up at him, brown hair falling around her shoulders, an innocence written on her features that makes him feel more than he wants to at the moment.
"Sure. I think Francie and I could use a cat. What's her name?"
"Snowball," he says, as the name of the long dead cat comes to him suddenly. Snowball, underneath his mother's tires…it had rained that day, the day that cat had died.
"Cute," scooping the cat into her arms, she kisses the top of its head and grins. "Hi, Snowball."
Snowball jumps from her arms onto the floor soundlessly, padding down the hall. Sydney watches her for a moment and then speaks her voice low. "She lived here alone, huh?"
"Yeah." He begins to fiddle with piles of paper. "She bought this place with my father's pension check. Her sister offered to move in with her after he died, and she refused. She was always so confident, you know. So unerringly self-sufficient."
Sydney moves from the kitchen into the dining room, past the table topped with lace- lace that his mother's mother had made as a wedding present. He follows her quietly, feet making a slight squeak on the floor as she progresses down the hallway to the living room. Her fingers trail an ancient piano – a piano that he'd learned Bach and Mozart and Chopin on.
"Is this you?" She smiles into a picture, holding it up. Grade school, a scowl on his face, powder blue button down shirt and navy tie.
"That is indeed me."
"You're adorable." Laughing, she points at his expression. "That look is very dignified."
"Reformatory school all about instilling dignity, and I believe they did a wonderful job." Sydney has become distracted by other photos that rest on the piano. Her fingers cup around and gingerly lift an oxidized brass frame.
"Is this your parents?" She asks.
"It was." He replies mournfully. His mother is in her wedding gown, staring up at her new American husband who looks down at her with unmasked adoration. Her hand curls around his bicep, face lit with a secret smile, eyes locked for eternity in black and white.
"I remember when my mother died. I remember her funeral. I didn't cry for days, Maybe it was because I was young, but I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that she was gone, forever. Forever was the time you waited for Christmas. Forever was the year in between birthdays. It wasn't as fixed then, the concept of eternity was too hard to face. It wasn't until a week later when I woke up from a nightmare, crying, and I wanted my mother. And she wasn't there. I went to my parent's bedroom and it was dark, empty. My dad was out somewhere, drowning his sorrows in bourbon and I was completely alone. And it scared me so bad that I understood, finally, what forever really meant."
Her monologue comes as a surprise, and there are tears in her eyes when she turns to him, "I'm sorry Vaughn, so sorry."
He's hugging her before he thinks, arms wrapped around her lithe body and his head buried in her hair. She returns the embrace with her own arms looping around his shoulders, finding places to rub as they stand in his mother's living room. He can hear himself, speaking nonsense about how he is stupid and negligent and that it is all his fault. And despite the unreality of this situation, of her standing here and him hiccupping and talking nonsense, it remains. She doesn't disappear when he squeezes his eyes shut and reopens them, she doesn't stop the soft wave of consolations.
"Thank you," he whispers into her hair, scented like springtime. She smells wonderful, so much better than the smell of death and decay and dying.
He becomes aware - slowly- that he is alive.
This is not a painless realization, nor is it expected. For so long he has managed to fabricate everything, to convince himself that unreality is actually very real. And if this admittance, this granting of life were to be permanent, he is suddenly willing to comply. Despite his desire to reverse things, to make the past more flexible in his mind and to see clearly the rights and the wrong, the fact remains that he is standing here.
And he is not alone.
*the end*
a/n : while this certainly is a departure from my regular style and function, it is a story I really needed to tell right now. I hope you enjoyed it- let me know.
*special thanks to jess and fred for the stellar betas. you two are phenomenal!