Title: Video Doomed the Government Agent
Author: Dream Writer 4 Life
Rating: Hard PG-13 to soft R for language and mature situations
Genre: Angst. And I mean serious angst.
Spoilers/Timeline: general Season Three spoilers, including what happened during Syd's Missing Years, but Lauren's not evil, so it's AU
'Shippers' Paradise: S/V, V/L
Summary: Lauren makes a discovery, and her assumptions could break the triangle. A Dream Writer Experience.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Period. End of story. Wait, no it's not! Keep reading!

This Chapter: Lauren's POV
Suggested Soundtrack: "Video Killed the Radio Star" by Bugles (hence the title), "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morrisette, "Everybody's Fool" and "Exodus" by Evanescence
Author's Note: I don't know what the hell this is, so if anyone could tell me, that'd be hunky-dory…

Video Doomed the Government Agent

Chapter One: Second Choice

Coming back from the dead you can deal with.

Killing a Russian diplomat you can deal with.

Still being friends with her you can deal with.

This…not so much.

You should not have even found it in the first place. Your penchant for organization and clean surfaces lead you to its discovery. Stupid habit. If only he had not pulled out one of his old Kings' tapes to win a bet with Eric. If only he had not left the cabinet a mess. If only you had not seen the shape he left the cabinet. If only you were not leaning slightly towards the obsessive-compulsive side…

And there it was. Somewhere between "One Hour Photo" and "Pretty Woman", your hand alighted upon the cursed videotape. It was unremarkable, nondescript, and without a label of any kind. Again your obsessive-compulsiveness overwhelmed you, charging like Mel Gibson in "Braveheart". You just had to watch it. You just had to find out what was on it; a place for everything, and everything in its place. And it needed a place, you reasoned.

So you popped it in and sat back on the couch, expecting to see a hockey rink or another bootlegged copy of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" that he could have made after you "accidentally" threw out his old one. The VCR spitting it out three times should have been a clue: you were never supposed to see what's on that tape. After finally swallowing the cassette, the machine chugged along, vibrating so greatly with the effort that the dust practically jumped off the top. You sat back on the couch again with your legs folded under you and the remote in your lap; elbows on your knees and your chin resting on your fists. You could not have been less interested.

And then it happened.

Every moment has an effect on a person however infinitesimally small: ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of them are barely big enough to register as marginally significant. So that means very few leave a lasting impression, explode the foundation of your life.

This was one of them.

This rocked your world, snapped you back to reality, sent you for a loop. It absolutely obliterated every notion — preconceived, assumed, concrete, or otherwise — that you have ever held.

You really thought you might have blacked out, that the affects of that turkey sandwich you'd had for lunch hit you head on, and you instantly keeled over and fell asleep. Until you realized that your eyes were still open, you could turn the light on and off, and it still hurt when you pinched yourself.

When you established that you were not dreaming, you began to question the validity of the scene. Could those just be look-alikes posing as them? That theory was shot to Hell when you heard him moan: that deep, throaty, gravelly, passionate moan you thought only you had the power to evoke. And his toes were curled: another of his signature habits.

Yep, it was them.

Maybe you were stuck in the first stage of grief because you could not tear your eyes away from the screen. You know the five Freudian stages well: in college, your major was psychology with a minor in sociology as a result of your father's nagging. But grief over what? No one had died: in fact, everyone involved seemed to be very much alive. Was it grief over your deteriorating relationship with him? Was it grief over your shattered innocence, the confirmation of your gut's suspicions? No, that does not seem to be the right way to describe how you were — are — feeling about this. You haven't really lost anything.

Except faith. And trust.

What is life without either?

Almost instantaneously the small, cynical voice in the back of your head answers: 'A life spent with a CIA agent.

'That's not entirely true, though,' It continues as sadistic as ever. 'You just happened to fall in love with the CIA agent with the most complicated history possible, throwing you into the Love Triangle of the Century, and you were never very good at geometry. You sure know how to pick 'em, Lauren.'

Without warning, something with a grip akin to a vice clamped around your stomach. Bubbling bile rose from your stomach, burning your throat and spewing forth without resistance. You physically could not stand it anymore. You wanted to smash the TV, throw the VCR against the wall, burn the tape, anything! Anything to get rid of the images, the sounds that were playing over and over in your brain like a bad movie whose end just never seems to come. (If you close your eyes now it is still there, branded onto the backs of your eyelids forever.) You have seen the horribly juvenile teen flicks, the action marathons with not plots, the romantic dramas with the opposite problem…And they are all Heaven compared to this.

But instead of causing about a thousand dollars in property damage, you somehow controlled your anger enough so that you could stop the tape, rewind it, and pop it into the VCR in your bedroom. You even managed to clean up your own mess.

'Did it happen here?' You thought suddenly, pausing before sitting down on the edge of your bed. No, it could not have; the rooms were eerily similar, but they were not the same. You sighed out loud in relief; you didn't know what you would have done if that had happened here on your bed.

And that is where you are when he comes back from an 'emergency meeting' at the rotunda. As he bangs around in the kitchen, you cannot help but think if this emergency meeting was really with her in some motel on the outskirts of town. He calls out to you, but you refrain from answering. You hear him striding down the hall and clutch the remote tightly in your sweaty fist, thumb poised shakily over the play button.

Five minutes ago, you had no idea how this scene was going to play out; absolutely none. Now as his footsteps, muffled by the carpet, get almost indiscernibly louder and closer, you scramble for a plan of action like a squirrel in a rockslide. How could you forget the number one rule of being a spy? Your Covert Ops advisor only pounded it into your head about a million times: never go into a situation without one plan for each letter of the alphabet. 'And you don't have any!' Cynical Voice supplements readily. 'You were never very good at improvisation.'

Suddenly there he is; leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest and his head propped against the frame. A smile spreads across his face like honey on a piece of bread. "Hey," He whispers to you, like he used to do when your marriage was in its infancy.

You continue to stare straight ahead at the blank screen, praying to whoever is listening to keep your body from betraying you. Muscles twitch under your skin, but by some miraculous feat, the majority of tremors that threaten to take over your body are kept at bay. Despite maintaining your stoic and unemotional façade, though, your insides could not be more active. By some act of God, your organs have decided to switch places, your heart in your gut and your stomach in your throat; you could not reply even if you wanted to.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see his forehead wrinkles appear as he straightens up in the entryway. Cynical Voice resurfaces again to ask you yet another burning series of rhetorical questions: 'When was the last time she saw those wrinkles, your wrinkles? Was it ten minutes ago? Five minutes ago? And for what reason? Had his face been skewed for a different, more pleasurable cause?' After slapping a muzzle onto Cynical Voice, you return to the present. He has made it across the room somehow, and is looking down upon you with a cocked head and a worried expression. Questions of puzzlement flow across his features with the fluidity of a knife cutting water: they wax and wane like the phases of the moon.

Like the waves of nausea smacking into you at regular intervals.

He lays his hand on your shoulder protectively, gently and silently prodding you to open up. Again you do not answer. Instead your arm raises, points the remote at the TV, and your thumb presses the play button. It takes a moment for the VCR to fire up (it's almost as ancient as the other one), but as he slowly lowers himself onto the edge of the bed next to you, it grinds to life and chugs towards ruining life as you know it.

For the second time today you see that room, the bedroom that looks enough like yours to send up a red flag in your brain. At first there is no activity, but in no time two people — a man and a woman — stumble into the picture, hands roaming all over the other's body. They waste no time in getting down to business, colliding with the bed and tumbling down upon it. He is on top of her, and you know by instinct that they are fumbling with buttons, the strange contraptions foreign to their lust-crazed minds. His is the first shirt to be shed; you can hear the faint pinging of buttons as they scatter to the floor, and his garment soon follows. Clutching her to him, he helps rid her of a floral over shirt, so horribly homely that you passively wonder how he could manage to see anything beautiful underneath. He then lays her back down onto the pillows and dips his head down to a stomach that he is slowly revealing to himself; you can just barely make out his fingers inching her tank top up towards her breasts. Without warning they rise again to their knees, in the process shedding her shirt.

The material slides over her head to reveal the face of Sydney Bristow. She smiles indulgently as they gaze at each other with reckless abandon and says so quietly the tape barely picks it up, "You have no idea how long I've waited for this moment."

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, the man caresses her cheek and replies in a whisper, "Yes I do. It's been almost two years, but it seems like a decade." She smiles again, her dimples appearing as black circles, and she wraps her arms about his neck, bringing their lips together in a boiling kiss. They crumble back onto the bed, rolling over and over the sheets like a schooner in a tempest, connected by their locked lips and wherever their hands happen to roam.

Apparently tiring of their game, she flips them so that he lies on his back and she is lording over him, her knees on either side of his hips. His head is initially in shadow, but as the man's hands glide up her stomach to palm her modest breasts, she arches her back, and his face is cast into the light.

It is none other that the man sitting next to you: Michael Vaughn.

You see him sit up straighter in recognition — realization? Guilt? Shock? — and you figure that this is a good time to stop the tape: each moan of ecstasy will only bring you closer and closer to both blubbering like a baby and going to the kitchen for a knife to kill the cheating bastard. The thumb that was so shaky not ten minutes ago now steadily taps the stop button, plunging the screen back into blackness. Taking a deep breath you turn towards your husband, folding a leg underneath you and subconsciously squaring your shoulders. Before you can begin with some dry remark like, 'Does the defense have anything to say before we move on to sentencing?' or 'Insert explanation here,' he steals your thunder.

"Where'd you get this?"

You were not expecting that.

Maybe an 'It's not what it looks like' or 'We were drunk' or even and 'I'm sorry.' But 'Where'd you get this?'

'He's so guilty,' Cynical Voice contributes, forcing in its two cents again. 'Well this is what you get when you block the path of true love.'

"What does it matter where I got it from?" You spit back, raising one corner of your mouth in a sneer. "All that matters is I've got it. Now—"

"Where did you get this?" He repeats dangerously, standing and looking down his nose at you.

You instantly do not like his tone; neither does Cynical Voice. Feeling that it is gearing up to say something scathing, you beat it to the punch by pressing the issue, "What does it matter? Does more than one copy exist? Does she have another copy for those lonely nights when you're home with me? Or doesn't she need one, because I'm only your second choice?"

"Jack gave you this, didn't he? The sick bastard. Or was it Dixon? He has access to the files…" He is frantic now, beginning to pace the floor on your side of the bed. His hands are clasped behind his back, and his gaze is trained towards the ceiling.

'It's all a bluff,' Cynical Voice concludes harshly. 'He knows that you know. He's just dragging this out for your benefit; you know, twist the knife in your back just one more time.'

"Jack or Dixon didn't give it to me," You reply, still sitting on the bed and watching him pace. "I found it in the cabinet in the living room." He stops pacing so quickly that you think he is going to fall flat on his face. He does not look at you but stares straight ahead at the wall, boring holes into it with sheer willpower. "Were you hiding it from me? Did you think I'd never find it? God, what was running through your head, Michael?"

Continuing to glare at the wall he answers blandly, "Lauren, you don't understand—"

"You're right: I don't understand!" You rise and cross to him in an attempt to get him to look at you. "I'm your wife. Why did you have sex with Sydney Bristow? When? Where? How many times?"

He sighs heavily and turns towards the opposite wall: away from you. "It's not like that, Lauren—"

"How is it like, then, Michael? Give me something to go off of!" You pause for the shortest of moments, but before he can say anything you continue, "Isn't anything sacred to you anymore? The vows we took mean nothing to you, do they? Just…just words said because you didn't want to be alone anymore, to be suffocated by the presence of your dead girlfriend. And now that she's back, alive and relatively well, you decide to ditch the ol' ball and chain and go running back into her arms — or should I say, into her bed."

"Listen, Lauren—"

"No, you listen to me," You demand loudly, getting into his face again, commanding not only his eyes by his full attention. You do not get it; you can tell when he's looking at you and when he's looking at you. And he's not looking at you. You'll settle, though, because you are on a roll now, and you cannot afford to lose your forward momentum for fear of coming apart at the seams. "I am sick of this! Not only do I have to watch what I say and do around her, but now I have to worry about keeping you on a tight leash as well? That is not the way I envisioned our marriage, Michael—"

"Me neither, Lauren, but—"

"—So I think it should stop."

That effectively steamrolls him. He is left speechless for an entire minute — and restarts his pacing. His hands are shoved into the pockets of his dress pants, rippling slightly as he clenches and unclenches his fists to the rhythm of his strong strides. "What needs to stop? Your insane jumping to conclusions? Your crazy preconceived notions about anything and everything pertaining to Syd—"

"How 'bout us?" You supply quietly, eyes trained on him to detect even the slightest sign that he is affected by what you are saying. He does stop, but only turns his back on you yet again, replacing your eyes with the walls you two painted not two carefree months ago. Stepping closer to his solid back, your voice remains at the same volume as you continue. "This—" Your hand flutters in the space between your bodies regardless of the fact he cannot see you "—has got to stop. This relationship can't exist without trust; I won't let it. And right now…I—I just don't trust you."

He turns around, so slowly that you can almost swear he is really standing still, and looks at you for the first time in a long while. His eyes even lock with yours and when they do, you are positively blown away with the emotion loaded within them. A staggering amount of pain saturates his green orbs; memories are etched like scars upon a tree trunk into his facial features. And tears…tears are actually brimming his eyelids. You have never seen him cry, never in the year or so you have known him; sure you've heard sobs from the bathroom once in a while, but he's never done it in front of you. Now they are rolling down his cheeks, slow at first like the first rain of the new spring, and then faster until his entire face looks wet and glistens with them.

"Listen to me."

There is a tremor in his voice that unnerves you, disarms you, throws you off your high horse. Immediately you realize that it has been present the entire time, but you weren't even paying attention to him until he began looking at you. Immediately you feel guilty, feel regret at your total and complete lack of sensitivity towards him. Hoping to seem more sympathetic, you grip his arm, but he shrugs it away.

"I can't believe this," He starts slowly and thickly, the emotions in his tone vying for dominance. "If you can't trust me to have a valid explanation — If you can't give me the time to give a valid explanation then this—" He makes the same gesture you did with a hint of scorn, planting a seed of doubt in your mind as to whether he actually did see you "—really is over." He averts his tear-stained face as he inhales a shaky breath, possibly because he's regretting the decision to let his guard down in front of you. His lower lip begins to quiver noticeably before his teeth clamp down on it, intent on stabilizing not only it but also his emotions. It obviously did not work, because as soon as he resumes talking it practically vibrates. "We didn't film that, Lauren. God, it's not even recent!

"Were you ever briefed on something called Project: Helix?" You shake your head, too emotional to recall your own birthday at the moment. "The short story is that it could double people. She'd just gotten back from Poland; she'd destroyed it with the help of Agent Jim Lennox, who'd been doubled himself. That night we were at her apartment, she was cooking, and we…took our relationship to the next level. What we didn't know at the time was that there was a second double, another person who'd been duplicated. That person turned out to be her roommate. She'd planted bugs all over the apartment, including Syd's bedroom. She taped us the first night we made love," His voice cracks, a sound you've definitely never heard before. He is struggling to control himself, forcing his feelings back down into his stomach and away from his eyes and throat. He's losing the battle horribly. He closes his eyes against the onslaught of tears, hoping to keep them in but only succeeding in forcing them out. They squeeze between his impossibly long lashes and glide down his already slick skin.

The very sight — his vulnerability exposed — makes a drop escape from your own cache.

Your boiling anger has reduced itself, its fires quelled by his multitude of tears. In its place is a dull, hollow feeling that you've never had in your life. You do not like it one bit. Suddenly you yearn for the fiery, aggressive Lauren filled with adrenaline and rage, that knew what she wanted to say and was not afraid to say it.

Cynical Voice must have gotten a real smackdown by Conscience. But with its dying breath, it somehow connected itself with your brain and forced your mouth to inquire, "But why the hell did you keep it?"

His eyes narrow to slits and he whispers dangerously low, "You have no idea what it feels like to be completely alone, do you? To feel like you're the only person left? To feel like your purpose — your reason for breathing — is gone? I kept this tape because, in some sick and twisted way, it made me feel whole again. Like she was still here. It was my solace, Lauren. I'd pop it in the VCR whenever I needed to see her, to feel her.

"After a while, though, I began to need it less and less, and it got pushed to the back of the cabinet. I honestly forget I even had it anymore." His voice cracked again and he had to pause in order to swallow his excess of emotions. "But that doesn't give you the right to jump to conclusions about Syd and me. What it comes down to is faith. If you had faith in me — If you trusted me, you would have come to me in a rational manner, or at least given me time to explain everything."

You know what is coming, but fight it all the same. Shaking your head vigorously, you try to close the ever-widening chasm between the two of you, but he backs up cautiously, twitching his head as well.

"No. Don't come near me. Right now, I need to be as far away from you and your accusations as possible." He zooms to the closet, extracts an old ratty backpack, and begins to stuff it with clothes, throwing random articles inside and not caring where or how they land.

You want to stop him, feel the imperative need to desperately. But you can't. You are rooted to the spot by the invisible tendrils of Fate. 'Oops,' Cynical Voice hisses in your ear, causing you to roll your eyes internally. 'Guess you pressed the issue too far. You just succeeded in cementing what you accused him of: running into the willing arms/bed of Sydney Bristow. Nice job, Lauren.'

Refusing to concede defeat, you glare harshly at the back of his powder blue Oxford shirt, one that you dutifully ironed just last Saturday. You cannot keep the hurt from cracking your voice as you practically whimper, "What are you saying?"

He springs up from the floor, faces you, and zips the backpack with resolve and determination. "I'm saying that I think we need a break. From each other. From this…shit. You need to reevaluate your point of view on this relationship. I just…I need to get away from you." He hesitates for a moment as if unsure whether to soften his blow with a quick good-bye kiss on the cheek or squeeze of the hand. Obviously he decides against either as he adopts sure, quick strides towards the door and out of the room.

You hear him rattle about in the kitchen, gathering up the belongings from work he had just deposited on his way in.

You hear the apartment keys clink as he drops them on the counter.

You hear him slam the door shut, making even the picture frames in your room jump.

Finally regaining control of your body, you collapse onto the bed and cover your mouth, afraid that if you let even one sob through your lips, you would never be able to stop the rest of them. But by now your strength is nonexistent, and the first of many wails tumbles off your tongue and between your fingers followed by another, and another, and another, until you're not breathing anymore: you are just crying.

Abruptly, Cynical Voice rises up from the corner of your mind to mass in front of you. It congeals into an indistinguishable mass, but then through your tears you see it reshaping, taking the final form of Sydney Bristow. She smiles sardonically, slowly and painstakingly, as if she is drawing poison from a wound. Then her lips part and she speaks over the racket you are making:

"You lose, Lauren. And I win."

With a last wink she disappears, disintegrating into the time, space, and Cynical Voice from whence she came, leaving you to cry like a baby over the shambles of a life you have reduced yourself to.

TBC...