Author: Rhythm
Summary: Vaughn makes a tiny mistake during a countermission with Sydney. Unfortunately, tiny mistakes tend to snowball…
Disclaimer: It's painful, but I'm slowly resigning myself to the fact that Vaughn is not now and will never be mine. (Oh yeah, same goes for everything else about the show – I don't have the wicked cool gadgets, the budget or even Sydney's B.A. in English…yet. But my spin sidekicks are better than Sydney's. So ha.)
Archive: Probably - but ask me first, just in case.
Feedback: You only have to send feedback if you read the story...
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Love Letters and Kalashnikovs
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The man with the AK-47 is starting to fidget, and I wonder how much time I have left. I made a mistake today, just one tiny mistake, put just one foot wrong after Sydney and I split up during the countermission, but little mistakes can snowball appallingly fast. The result of today's little mistake was capture, a quick but painful beating, and now this little room in a Brazilian drug lord's compound with a guard at the door. When he and the others muscled me in here and tossed me to the floor, he told me that I was a security threat and he was going to shoot me in about five minutes, then asked sneeringly if I had a final request.
Now, final requests are pretty useless things; there's only one thing you really want – for them not to kill you – and that's the one thing they're not gonna go for. I didn't even ask for that, just requested a piece of paper and a pen to write a letter; surprisingly, he gave them to me, and lumbered back out to guard the door.
It's dark, with just a few streaks of light from holes in the roof; the only other thing in the room is a folding table. I pull the table awkwardly over to the biggest spot of light and kneel on the floor in front of it.
It's going to be hard to write with my hands tied together. Even handcuffs would have been better than this annoying itchy rope, which feels like steel wool against my wrists. Uncomfortable, but I can make it work. Except, as I start to write Sydney's name, my hands stop – what do I say to her?
I look around the room. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor except a water puddle from the leaky corrugated iron roof. Most of the holes in the roof are small ones from storm damage – I can see branches sticking down through a few of them – but there are bullet holes too. The one window is boarded over. Outside the barred door, the guard is checking his gun in the hallway; the sounds of metal on metal echo a little. In here there is only silence as I stare back down at the table. Just me, in a little cell in a third world country, with about four minutes until I die.
I should probably tell Sydney that I was ok as I wrote this, that I wasn't in pain or too frightened. I can write that – it's an easy lie to tell – but some blood from the cut on my forehead has dripped down onto the paper, and that's going to hurt my credibility some.
She explained to me once that the quality of paper depended on the cotton content. I'm a reasonably sophisticated and knowledgeable fellow, I'm told, but I never knew anything about what makes good paper until Sydney came along. I guess it's partly a guy thing, and partly because only my old-fashioned French grandmother writes actual written-out letters any more. Now, as I stare down at the page, I irrationally wish that my last letter to Syd were going to be written on really classy paper. Under the circumstances, I suppose I should be glad I'm not having to write on my shirt.
I do know something about pens, though. The right kind of pen can make almost any handwriting look good, and every once in a while you're lucky enough to find one that writes well and won't explode in your breast pocket. When someone asks you for a pen, what you hand them can give them a lot of clues about the kind of guy you are. Motivated, tense, snobbish, important, careless? All there, if you know what to look for. A good pen is important, and this one is definitely not up to snuff. It's cheap and plastic, with smudgy ink; left-handers like me really hate smudgy ink. I briefly ponder knocking on the door and requesting another pen.
I don't, though; I may be sentenced to die, but I'm not suicidal.
But I am avoiding the problem at hand. There are just a few minutes left to figure out what I really want to tell Sydney. A few minutes to formulate friendship, admiration, history and love into a few sentences and write them down on this piece of paper. Suddenly the page looks very intimidating.
Do I say I'm sorry? I am sorry, sorry for getting caught after we triggered the alarm, sorry I wasn't strong or fast enough to get away, sorry that there are some things you can't talk your way out of. I'm sorry that she's going to cry when she gets this, no matter what I write.
Weiss asked me once if Sydney was worth the hassle. She's a pretty high maintenance agent, what with all the countermissions and the prophecies and the dysfunctional family relationships, and I can see why he asked me that. But he doesn't get to see what I see; the evening briefs at the warehouse, where she manages every time to screw up the courage for a new and dangerous assignment; the surreptitious meetings in the park or at the grocer's or at the gas station, where I get to sneak quick sideways glances at her, like little snapshots that I can flip through until the next time; he doesn't get to see how easy it is to read her when her game face isn't on, how quickly her expressions change; serious-thoughtful-regretful-pleased-matter-of-fact and a tiny bit sad all in a minute. I take credit for quite a few of the pleased looks; I try to be responsible for those on a regular basis.
But I don't want to be responsible for the look on her face when she gets this letter.
I want to tell her I love her; but that's not really fair, is it? To say hey, I'm about to die, just wanted to say I'm nuts about you, even though you'll never see me again. Besides, I only have one sheet of paper and about two minutes left. Is it possible to tell someone how much you love them in two minutes? I'm not sure even two years would do it; letting a person know how much they mean to you has always struck me as a lifelong process, not a simple statement. At any rate, there is way more I love about her than I can write out in such a short time.
I catch myself staring vacantly at the page again, and I tighten my grip on the pen as I shake myself back to attention. Looking closer at it, I realize I can't tell in this light what color ink it has. Dark, definitely, but it could be blue, black, or even purple. Perfect. It would be just my luck, sending Sydney a letter written with purple ink.
They sell fake pens on the Internet and in weapons magazines, pens that are actually knives if you take the top off. The idea, of course, is to make them think you've just got a pen, and then you stick it somewhere painful before they catch on, like their eyes or their ears or their stomach. I don't think I could ever jam anything into someone else's eye – I'm not squeamish, but that's just gross, I don't care what anyone says. The eyes are definitely off limits…but…
I give a sharp glance to the fellow outside the door; he looks like he's about to get moving, and I'm about out of time. As I look down at my letter, the guard unlatches the door, and I hurriedly fold the paper into thirds, ready for an envelope. Pen and paper in hand, I pull myself clumsily to my feet.
The guard is asking me something, in Portuguese this time, and although I don't speak the language I can tell from the way he's holding his hand out that he wants the letter before he executes me. After a long second, I hold it out, and he takes it from me and starts to put it in his pocket.
It's when his hand is all the way in his jacket that I stab the pen point-first into his throat.
He lets out a gurgling howl, and as I yank the pen back out, grabs his rifle and tries to aim it at me. I catch hold of the gun and, despite my bound hands manage to smack it into his face. The guard staggers backward, and brings his hand up to his neck wound, which is starting to pump blood like crazy. Going with him, I pull the strap of the gun over his head and shoulder, and I back up, pointing the gun at him.
Unfortunately, AK-47s are big and ungainly and weigh about nine pounds even without ammunition, and with my hands tied together I can't get a good enough grip to shoot. The guard lunges forward with a haymaker that spins me face-first into the wall. He tries for the gun, but I sidekick him in the knee, and shift my grip to the barrel of the gun as he drops. Swinging hard, I crack the butt of the gun against the side of his head, putting him out cold on the floor.
I don't shoot him; after all, he did grant me both of my last requests, both the one I said I wanted and the one I really did.
Red lights are flashing and distant voices are shouting as I slip out into the hall; somehow they know I'm free, and my day's not over yet. But as I race down the corridor, AK-47 in hand, I feel up for anything; I should have been dead, and a desperate love letter with my blood on it should have been on its way to the one woman I want the most never to hurt. The thought of that letter, so painful to me five minutes ago, now makes me grin as I sprint for freedom.
Screw last requests – I'm going to tell her myself.
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End
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