Email: agent47achavez@hotmail.com
Category: drama, angst 'Ship: Sydney/Sark
Spoilers: "the watch scene" from passage 1
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Alias and all related characters are not mine.
Notes: Cover Me November Challenge elements included.
Summary: Sydney remembers Vaughn, but follows in her mother's footsteps.
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Salvation is unattainable.
There were so many maybes that crossed my mind in the last three years, but what could I do about that? Maybe got me nowhere. Only absolutes were tangible. And I was absolutely in love with him. Even then, Vaughn couldn't possibly be absolutely right for me…
But I fell in love with him over a prolonged embrace and a simple, careless gesture of tucking strands of hair behind my ear. All the little things he did for me -- arguing on my behalf in front of Kendall, standing up to my father, telling me the truth… those days that seem so long lost, disappeared into the horizon like my youthful dreams of becoming a teacher.
I reached the point of no return the moment I pulled that trigger. I can remember it so vividly, it seems that it was only yesterday or moments ago. The dingy lighting of the room, six floors beneath the Credit Dauphine building, and the eerie hum of the underground generator providing SD-6 with it's power. The smell of decay seeping through the walls – someone forgot to clean the mortuary floor again – and the air thick with tension of the hunter and the hunted.
"There are only two kinds of people in this world," Agent Weiss once told me over coffee in the break room. It was one of those rare moments when he chose to give me advice. "Those who chase and those who hunt. Which are you?"
I never could answer that question. I don't really think I ever fully understood it's meaning, which hindered my answering it. Which am I?
But in the moments preceding the crucial climax of the drama in my life, I found myself asking the question: "Who am I?" instead.
Ultimately, I was going to find the truth. I am my mother's daughter.
Leaning up against the wall, fear lodged in my throat, I listened for signs of my attacker's approach. She was coming to get me… it was only a matter of time. Closing my eyes briefly, I whispered a quick prayer and took a silent breath before spinning on my heel and racing to the end of the hallway. I looked over my shoulder once and when I turned back to turn right, I found him.
Vaughn, slumped over and resting on his elbow, was unconscious. A small lateral laceration graced his upper right eyebrow and a small stream of blood tainted his cheek. I wanted to check on him, but I couldn't spare the time. A moment of weakness could cost me my own life.
So I took his weapon and hurried down to the elevator. I slammed on the button, took one last glance over my shoulder and grew impatient with the machine until it signaled its arrival. The door slid open and I collided with a figure. My mother.
She shoved her elbow into my gut and when I doubled over, she took one of my weapons and hit my spine hard with the butt of her rifle. I fell to the floor and reacted by executing a spinning kick that put my mother out on her ass. Regaining my stance, I dodged a bullet and sailed to my right, using the remaining weapon. I had only two shots left, I couldn't miss! The first shot nailed her in the shoulder as she was trying to stand and sent her back to the ground. My shoulder came into hard contact with the closing elevator door, and I fired off the last round, aiming for her heart.
When I landed, I suspiciously eyed her unmoving body. Could it be? Did I really kill my own mother? Oddly enough, my hands were steady and my mind calm. I expected to react the way I had when I found Danny murdered or when I killed Noah. There were no tears this time, no cries of anguish. Instead, there was a perverse sense of retribution and pride. Suddenly aware of a stinging pain in my left upper arm, I found that her bullet had grazed my skin. This, too, made almost no difference. I slowly stood to my feet and walked over to study her sprawled figure.
However, instead of finding a neat bullet hole with an exit wound and a spreading pool of blood beneath her, the bullet had hit the center of her sternum, the force of it careening through her chest area, shattering bones and undoubtedly hitting either her lungs or heart. There were no gasps for breath or ragged breathing escaping from between the lips of the woman I used to run to for bandages whenever I fell and scraped my knee. Even the small crinkles at the sides of her eyes that showed whenever she was upset with Dad, concentrating on grading papers, or smiling about the corny jokes on Saturday Night Live weren't visible. Instead, she was this… corpse.
"Sydney?" the pounding of footsteps neared. Weiss, maybe. Or Sloane. Or Dad… no, not Dad. Mom killed Dad two days ago in SD-6's own torture chamber… she had somehow reversed their positions, torturing him for information instead of the other way around. There were no cameras in the room, which explained why no one knew until hours later when his body was admitted into the SD-6 underground mortuary. I didn't know until today.
I came, Daddy. I came to save you…
But I can't even save myself. Salvation is unattainable for me. I can never be free. Look what I've done. I've killed my own mother. Perhaps one day, I too will kill the one I love. I glanced at Vaughn just down the hall and I sat across from my mother, just watching her. I know my eyes are glazed over, and I'm mentally replaying the scene over and over.
I don't hear him when he comes. I didn't even look up when he held out his hand and helped me to stand.
"Destiny has a strange way of coming to pass." He said.
I said nothing as he took my hand and brought it to his lips. But my eyes filled with tears and I tried to make them go away. She wasn't someone to cry over, she wasn't worth my tears. But she was my mother. And I was her murderer.
He drew me close and buried his face in my hair, stroked my back lazily with one hand. I couldn't bring myself to hug him back, in fact… I couldn't even wonder why I was letting him hug me in the first place. I knew he was studying what I had done to her, but he didn't want me to think that. So he caressed my cheek with one finger and leaned back.
"You okay?"
I barely nodded before I looked away. This was impossible too. Maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe it was absolute truth. He pursed his lips together and dropped his head in order to meet my eyes.
"It's going to be okay. We're destined, you and I." He reached over and tucked some of the loose strands of my ponytail behind my ear. Where did he learn that? Why did he do that? "Let's get out of here."
Linking his fingers with mine, he led me down the hall, past the corpse I called Mother and past the man I swore I loved. I stopped at his feet and the tears returned. I could never form the words and spit them out verbally. I. Love. You.
But that's my secret and I'll have to die with it. So I bent down and felt his pulse just to remind myself that he was alive and real. I lifted a hand and wiped away some of the blood on his face.
"God, I'm sorry." I said. "I'm so sorry, Vaughn. I'm sorry that we'll never get to see that hockey game, and I'm sorry that we're never going to that little restaurant in Rome. I'm sorry I can't visit France with you and walk around your town in Normandy. I'm sorry that I can't go to the Louvre and study the Mona Lisa with you. I'm sorry that I'm leaving you here alone. One day you'll understand… one day you'll see… I have a specific destiny. I'll remember you, Vaughn. I'll remember you."
Standing again, I followed the other man to the stairwell and back up to level three, where we slipped out through a hidden corridor. And three years later, I still find myself empty and devoid of emotion. Sure, we walked away that day, left the world behind and said goodbye to Irina Derevko, but we're both still dead. Rambaldi and all his damn prophecies ultimately were right in some twisted way. My world is destroyed, and no one else's is quite the same.
Except maybe his.
For him, death was simple. He only had to separate the good and the evil and make no distinction between the two – a habit he began when he was a young British associate of "The Man". But for me, every day brings a new death. Each time I see myself in the mirror, I see the dichotomy of my mother and my father united and warring within me. So I changed.
Sydney Bristow is dead.
In her place stands this farce of a woman, with boyishly cut hair and green eyes to remind me of the love I left behind. He doesn't know that, but I sometimes wish he knew that I still thought of him… that I still loved him. I once passed him in the streets, sunglasses on, platinum blonde wig spread out in outrageous curls and baggy street wear. I looked like any other teenager out there with slumped shoulders, various pins all over my shoulder bag, and smoking a Black and Mild cigar.
He didn't notice or didn't care. But he didn't look happy, and that bothered me. Even if I was gone and dead, I wanted him to be happy. I'm not happy, but I'm content. I live my life as I was destined. Extortion is not below my standards of operation, and blackmail is a modus operandi on a daily basis. My partner in crime accomplishes each new assignment just as well as I complete mine… and when it's all over and done with, the stress of the days and months lands us tangled up in bed again like we are now.
But I remember you, Vaughn. I remember you.
Lifting the Black and Mild from my lips, I put it out on my left wrist. I've gotten so used to the burning pain that I don't even feel it anymore. But even that small ritual is done in remembrance of the man I loved. He once told me that his father had given him a watch he could set his heart by, and the day we met, it stopped working. So in honor of him, I burned myself where that clock face would have been… in remembrance of my salvation lost…
…because you were all I had. You were my salvation, and now… you're unattainable… and I'm dead.
But I remember you, Vaughn. I remember you.