Sydney/Vaughn
Season 3
At times, late at night, when she couldn't sleep, she'd get sick of lying in bad, waiting for the sleep to come. So she'd get up, and walk around the house looking for things to do.
She'd end up in the kitchen sometimes, liking the chocolate ice cream she had found in her fridge. Other times, she'd end up on the treadmill, running and running, or on the floor, doing hundreds of sit ups and push ups and all kinds of crunches. One time, she found a blank notebook, and began to write.
From the moment on, when she couldn't sleep, she'd simply write.
Writing didn't come out of nowhere. Sure, she had wanted to be an English teacher because of her mother, but not only.
On those cold, lonely nights, she got to explore the world she turned away from. And she'd write.
She wrote about cheerful young women, who graduated from college and married their soon-to-be-doctors boyfriends. She wrote about lifelong friendships, that somehow, always - she couldn't help it - ended with betrayal. She wrote about perfect families, with perfect parents and perfect little girls with pink ribbons in their hair, and she wrote about parents who couldn't work things out and got a divorce, and girls and boys who got two houses, two bedrooms, two sets of clothes and thousands of birthday presents.
She wrote about lovers - always happy endings - and once, only once, wrote about a cheating boyfriend. Many times she wrote of loved ones dying and loving ones being left behind, and never, not even once, made the dead come back to life.
She wrote about rich young people, who took each other to see the world - Rome, Vienna, London, Paris, Taipei. They always took the time to sightsee, travel, buy presents and take pictures and laugh. Laugh.
She created characters named Michael and Anne once, and wrote them to hell. They suffered lies, deceits, plots, prophecies, danger, danger, danger. But in the end, she made it about love, made them redeem each other and ride their horses into the sunset. She made them happy.
She kept Michael and Anne, but gave them new things to do. First, he was a hockey player and she, a high school teacher. Then he was the teacher, and she was a singer. They went to France, the teacher and the singer, and had the bestest time.
She made them jog a lot - wanted them to be healthy, in shape - and she made them share special moments in different places - piers, deserted houses, libraries, bloodmobiles, antique shops, train stations. They couldn't be apart for long, Michael and Anne, and made sure to live each day to the fullest, because nobody knows what might happen next.
She made them fight - only once - but not each other. They fought together against greater power, and when she realized what she had done, she ripped the paper out of her notebook and threw it into the fire in rage, not moving until there were no remains left.
As time passed, she began to write not only on insomniac nights, but on mornings, lunch breaks, during commercials. It became the escape she had always looked for, the escape she never had before.
At some point, she wrote about a perfect blonde who made men all over the world fall for her. She blinded them and tricked them into marriages that wore nothing - nothing - but a decoy. When she reread it, she half snorted and half hated herself, because she knew exactly what made her write that and she knew she wasn't being fair. But in her world, a world nobody else knew about, she was sometimes allowed to be unfair. It only made things more fun.
Vaughn saw her writing once, and looked over her shoulder. She closed the notebook quickly, and he asked what she was writing on those none CIA papers. She didn't answer, just waved him away, and in her heart, wished for a time when they're close enough - again - for her to share that wonderworld of hers with him.
Thanks to some ring and some blonde, it wasn't going to happen soon, so she made Anne a published writer who dedicated her first novel to Michael, who smiled and told her he loved her and they lived happily ever after, or, at least, until the next story.