Trop Tard-Alias, PG13-Sydney
Peregrine
Alias is owned by ABC, Touchstone and is the creation of JJ Abrams and Bad Robot Productions.
Time Frame: Post-Telling
Summary: It's all about picking up the pieces.
******The dream always starts the same way.
Forever night.
Acid-washed puddles chasing gas rainbows.
The careful click of stealthy heels.
A halo of sodium vapor that catches him at the cross walk.
My arms, opening wide, silent lips forming his name.
Shock etching his chiseled face when he spots me.
And the cold, hard reality when the dream is ripped from my grasp.
*****It never ends. It's never resolved, this thing between us. It hangs in the air, coloring our every interaction.
Torsion, with a frisson of sexual tension for good measure.
We both remember how it was. I see it in his eyes when he thinks I'm not looking, watching him from under my lashes as I pretend to write.
I hear it in his voice when we're alone, that husky note that cuts through the cool professional mask he's erected for my benefit.
He still loves me.
It should make me feel better on some level, but it makes it worse. The knife twists a little further, ratcheting up the guilt that has become my daily bread.
I see the pictures on his desk. Alice, cradling the wrinkled fruit of her loins.
Their son.
William Charles Vaughn.
I remember those dead eyes staring back at me from the yellowed creases of 25 years.
And I see his screaming namesake, passed around by the usual cooing bevy that brings the office to a grinding halt.
I peer at them from a safe distance, arms folded against the draft that never fails to finds its way down my back, smiling absently as Weiss cracks his usual jokes.
"So what do you think?" he asks suddenly.
"What?"
Eric jabs his finger toward the throng and I shrug my shoulders, keeping my silence.
What am I supposed to say? Should I say that I'm happy for them? Can I muster up the strength to offer false congratulations? And will Vaughn accept the phony smile that I practice every morning in the bathroom mirror?
"I can't come between them."
"Really?" Weiss sees right through me. "But you already have."
Another shrug. "Maybe."
*****It all comes to a head in Taipei.
The place where this…madness all started.
Me, with my blue hair and fishnet body stocking.
Vaughn, all grizzled and leathery.
But I digress.
We're here on a hunch that Irina's in town. Ordered here by Director Kendall, who cares nothing about our past history.
We play the game so well. A perfectly matched set of spies.
The music works its magic and I am suddenly in his arms, weaving sinuously through the crowd, bodies perfectly meshed.
"Don't do this," I say through clenched teeth, aware that his hands have slipped far too low.
"There she is," he whispers sharply, pulling me in his wake.
"I don't see her."
And then I know. She was never here.
"This way," Vaughn beckons.
We duck through a curtain and he is on me. Lips hard against mine, forcing my mouth open as he steals my breath away, kissing me in that head-spinning way that he's always had.
My knees collapse and he catches me.
Shattering me into a million fragments.
Then I feel his mouth moving against my ear.
"Il est trop tard."
His hands drop to his sides as he walks away.
And the dream ends.
Too late for us.
The End