Timeline: I started writing this fic back in January, 2004, when I first learned of spoilers concerning a talk between Jack and Vaughn, and wanted to write my own version of their 'backstabbing, betraying wives' conversation. I got caught up in things, and didn't come back to it until much later, after that conversation, and decided I wanted to write the Vaughn/Syd confrontation in here about Lauren's betrayal. And then more things happened, and decided to just keep going. Therefore, timeline wise, I have no idea where this fits, but I'd say everything up to Legacy is fair game.
Lyrics: The first half of this fic was written to 'Halfway Home' by Jason Mraz, though no lyrics from that song appear in the fic. Lyrics used here are from 'King of Silence' by Cibo Matto, and the last half of the story was written to 'Shine' by Muse. Lyrics from both songs are used without permission.
Notes: The opening was reworked into a poem for my college's Poetry Slam, and won me third place out of fifty competitors (and my first check as result of my writing). The tone shifts throughout the piece, but I'd like to think this is my best use of poetics in prose. This reflects my own views on the Syd/Vaughn relationship, as well as Jack's place in said relationship and may not be mainstream. But it was begging to be written down.
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Pathetic Fallacy
by Kira
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(moonlight)
Who cares for the life we've earned?/Someone's sold all the truth you yearned
The drink is an easy crutch.
When discovered by accident, it wasn't surmised the sweet confectionery of wine would become the elite alcoholic's secret. The fermented wheat would become the common man's water. The hard liquors the hobby of the western man's free hours. Society dictated the consumption at celebrations and miserable failures, doing all but pour it down parched throats. Sprung from this love for dulling emotion and remembrances was the crutch, the aching need welled up deep inside to flee the world for as long as possible, to wander off in your own scared psyche alone yet content.
To not remember anything in the morning. For that one fleeting instant when the world was a blur and all that was retained was the drink, the stench of alcohol thick on your breath. That one second in time when it stood still and all that remained was the happy times of contentment and joy and nothing else had happened.
It was gone in an instant. And the drink returns to cracked lips.
Ice clanks against a worn glass, chips out of its thick craftsmanship sending light through the amber liquid at odd, contradicting angles. Like his life at the moment, muddled through a thick fog of uncertainty and unknown alliances, his own emotions a tangled mess of poorly reflected light. Michael Vaughn stifles a dry laugh as he lets the liquid cascade down his throat, the glass cool against his lips.
The rue outside his window is alive with life, light from bouncing clubs and crowded bars streamlining through hastily shut curtains, the thin, cheap fabric of the shady hotel – like so many he'd seen before – doing next to nothing to keep the light out. Each pulse of music rumbles through the floor, traveling up tired limbs to the solitary man seated in a recovered armchair. A piece of ice shifts, hitting the edge of the drink. He takes another swig, sighing as it smoothes his own parched throat.
He suspects his thirst will never be fulfilled.
The tempo downstairs changes and the world seems to stir for just a moment, sweaty bodies busy as they awaken, stunned. But just as soon as it changed, it became the same, the world falling asleep again to a new steady melody.
He remains awake.
The glass rests on his left knee as he stares at the wall, wrapped up in his own mind. He can vaguely make out a reproduction print hanging across from him, in his direct view of sight, but can't be sure. The light dances across the colors as a car passes below, a kaleidoscope of images jumping out at him. Each prompts a flash of memory, and he decides he isn't drunk enough yet.
"Drinking yourself to a stupor won't solve anything."
Vaughn is used to voices speaking to him in this condition, and brushes the statement off with a wave of his hand over his shoulder. He wants to be alone and the voice isn't helping, a nagging conscience that never leaves him be.
His head snaps up from the floor when the carpeting gives way to the old floorboards beneath, the heavy footfalls of another person in the room creaking across them. It dawns on him the voice wasn't contained within his own mind, and he turns to look over his shoulder.
"What do you want?" he groans, raking a hand through mussed hair. He's annoyed, and doesn't do anything to hide it as he usually would.
"I suspected you would do something as foolish as this," Jack Bristow comments, rounding the chair to stand directly in front of his protégé. The word seems to contain more than it had a moment ago, when he'd been standing behind Vaughn. The look etched upon the younger man's face reflecting one Jack had possessed years ago and falls back on like a worn pair of shoes.
"I'd like to be alone, if you don't mind," he growls, refusing to look up at the man towering above him. Refusing to be intimidated. He's more than happy to fall victim to his own internal sorrow and pity, but refuses to take it from anyone else.
"Perhaps you've forgotten we're here for a reason."
"I haven't," Vaughn retorts sharply. "But I will, in about ten minutes."
"I thought you'd overcome this particular weakness when you ran off and got married. Apparently, I was mistaken," Jack baits him. It works, Vaughn springing out of his chair, drink forgotten as it falls from his knee and cascades to the floor in a shower of misplaced memories.
"It won't work," he hisses, inches from Jack's blank face. "I already live with the full implications of my mistakes. Bait a man who has something to lose."
"You have everything to lose, Mr. Vaughn. Your own short-sidedness prevents you from seeing this."
Vaughn gives him a sly grin and shakes his head. He moves to the window, stumbling as he crosses the floor, a hand flying to the wall to steady himself. It smacks against canvas and he looks up, eyes drawn to the painting now, seeing it clearly. The irony of its placement hits him and he laughs shallowly.
"What do I have, Jack?" he asks almost rhetorically, crossing his arms in defense once he finally reaches the window. It's so alive below it sickens him, but he can't be sure if it's that or the alcohol. He's cast in darkness as the traffic dies down for a bit, profile weak. Jack wonders if it's always been like that, or has dwindled in the last few years. "You seem to be an expert on the subject, so enlighten me."
Jack looks to the chair and thinks it appears quite inviting. It can't hurt to take a seat, but as soon as he does, his eyes are drawn to the bottle, fingers drawn to it. He takes it in his hand and plays with the neck, the lightness giving him a clue as to how much Vaughn has had already. His eyes drift back to Vaughn, the man playing idly with the wedding ring he still wears on his left hand, spinning it around as if it will burn his finger if left still. Perhaps it will. Or maybe it already has, the burning spread throughout his frame quelled only by the liquor he uses to abuse his body.
"Have you heard the saying," Jack starts, the urge too great, his hand reaching out for a glass of his own. Vaughn turns at his question slightly, taking a step forward with the clinking of fresh ice. "'It is better to have loved and lost, than to never loved at all'?"
Vaughn laughs. It is hollow and empty, the chortle of a man with no joy in his life to put behind it. Jack's own had sounded like that in earlier days, but even then, he had the love of a daughter to give it some roundness. Had he the ability to be apathetic, Jack would have felt the urge to reach out to him.
"Clichéd, much, Jack?" he bites out. "If I wanted the tirades of romantic novels, I would have turned on the television."
Jack takes a drink, the sensation too familiar to him. He swallows with a satisfied grin, mind too willing to fall back into old habits.
"It's a bunch of crap," Vaughn continues, hitting the bed with the grace of a fallen giraffe. "Sentimental notions created as a crutch for the weak-hearted."
Jack's eyes widen as he swirls his drink around his glass, surprised at how much his daughter's former lover sounded like him. For all he wished Vaughn would mature and grow some kind of backbone, the raw truth lying on the other side of the room frightens him.
"Do you believe it?" Jack presses on, a strategist to the end, the methods ingrained in his very being. Vaughn sighs and traces watermark patterns on the ceiling with his eyes.
"No."
It's a surprise, to say the least. For all he'd seen, Vaughn had been a romantic at one time in his life. A believer in love and faith, in good winning over evil no matter what the odds. Yet now, he seemed crushed by the fleeing of his idealistic desires and perspectives of the world, lost without the base he'd worked so hard to defend.
Jack lets the proclamation hang in the air and falls into a comfortable silence, finishing his drink and aching for more. The bottle lays empty upon the table, knocked to the side by Vaughn stumbling over to refill his drink, the urge too great to be denied by the presence of another person. The bottle falls to the carpeting below, thudding against it before rolling to hit a nearby wall, the remains inside spilling out to stain in a dark color remains of blood.
Vaughn crosses the room and retrieves it from the floor with no remnants of drunkenness in his lanky frame, scooping up the bottle and re-depositing it on the table with a quick smile. He downs the contents of his own glass in one large drink and slams it down on the tabletop, triumphant.
"You're drunk," Jack observes wryly, nursing his own crutch.
"When I look at you," Vaughn replies evenly, "all I can think of is your daughter." He pauses, closing his eyes against an onslaught of white hot tears. "So no, I'm not drunk. Not yet."
But he does leave the room, grappling for the doorframe to the dark black hole he knows is the bathroom, his head falling to rest on his outstretched arm as he swallows a lump resting in his throat. He turns, shifting as if he'd been cut in half by a failure of a magician, the bottom half of his body stationary, rooted to the floor.
"I didn't mean – "Vaughn cuts himself off and sighs, his head falling to hit the doorjamb. The thud is loud, but alcohol drowns more than the pain of the mind, and tomorrow he'll have a bruise. For now, he feels nothing but wishes for another drink. "Hell, I don't know what I mean anymore."
His voice is nothing more than a pale whisper spoken to the spot of spilled alcohol just under his bare feet. He moves his toes, wondering for a moment if alcohol is one of those substances that can be taken in through the skin, and if it is, where he can find a pool of it to jump into. For now, though, he moves his toes back and forth through the dirty carpeting while contemplating his next move.
Jack remains stoic, a statue seated upon his throne overlooking the ruins of his kingdom from his position of idolism.
Vaughn hits the doorframe with his hand and is swallowed up by the black hole knowing all too well what effect turning on the bright light will do to his already aching head. He fumbles, disoriented, shifting here and there in the darkness, unable to find his way. His hands brush against the wall, across foreign objects that confuse him even more, and he has the sensation that he's drowning in air. He finally latches onto the sink, a hand firmly griping each side of the molding ceramics placed centuries before. His face causes him to wince but the face in the mirror staring back at him is far from a stranger; a distant cousin who hasn't come to visit in a while. The invitation to a wedding had scared him away to the farthest recesses of the mind where he huddled afraid until the walls started caving in on him.
"What the hell are we doing here, Jack?" His gaze leaves the mirror only at the end of his inquiry, unable to stand the face of the man he's become any longer.
Jack shifts out of his stoic state of frozen ice and puts on is game face. "To make sure the intel – "
"I know why we're here – "
"Then why did you ask?"
Vaughn groans, frustrated, and pounds his hands against the cool porcelain of the sink. "I know why we're here. I know why you're in a room down the hall, and Syd's a floor away. I know that. But why are you here?" He pauses. "Come to see me hit rock bottom? I hope you're enjoying the show, watching me get what I deserve, right?" His tone is bitter, words directed at the pale reflection in the mirror and not the man sitting out in the room drinking his liquor. Anger directed more at himself than anyone else brings him to grasp the glass sitting on the edge of the sink, and with a sharp flex of his arm, hurl it at the mirror.
The crash awakens those slumbering in neighboring rooms, and pounding is heard from the wall behind the empty bed, coupled with garbled insults. Vaughn pays them no mind as he ventures out into the room in search for another drink in which to drown the pain from flecks of glass stuck in his skin. The shards hurt, but that means he's still alive, still breathing and he wants to forget that for awhile.
"You're bleeding," Jack observes.
Vaughn chortles as he slops more into his dirty glass, leaving some to run down the sides and drip onto the table. "Thank you, I hadn't noticed." He wanders towards the window, but battles some unseen demon on the way, waving his arms wildly in the air though in offense or defense, it can't be seen. The demon wins, and he falls to the floor, back slamming against the wall.
Jack hopes he's passed out, though if for the boy's sake or his own, he doesn't know. The room passes in silence, cars zooming by on the unseen street with loud music and even louder annoyances. Light plays through the room, dancing an enticing dance of memory and forgetfulness until the moonlight spreads its soothing hand over Vaughn's face and its then Jack sees his eyes are still open and chest is heaving.
Moonlight cannot hide tears anymore than a parent can quell fears.
Jack watches and wonders if that's what he looked like. Lost in his own skin, distrusting and destroyed by the one thing he'd thought was his salvation. They say love is blind, and in this case he's inclined to believe that to be so, lest the deception wouldn't have lasted as long. Yet perhaps the love the shattered man sitting against the wall under the painting felt was not that of true love for a woman, but love for stability. For escape and yearning. A play of his own life in which he plays the tragic hero, doomed from the first words to follow blindly along until the curtain falls and raises to a dead man.
"I'm sorry."
The words catch the older man off-guard, and he blinks to clear his vision.
"I shouldn't have...I should....you were right. God damnit, I was blind!"
Jack shifts again. "I won't be part of some recovery process, Agent Vaughn."
"You were right," he continues as if Jack spoke not a word, "there were signs I should have seen. Clear as day. Right there in front of me and I missed them all." The glass from his hand clanks onto the dresser top above him, and he hisses as he works at the shards in his skin. "What kind of man does that make me? I thought...thought if I followed in my father's footsteps, did what he did, had his morals, I could be as good as him. A noble man like the one in all those stories I heard when I joined the CIA. Sure, he had his mistakes, but he always had integrity to fall back on. He was worth something."
Another fleck of glass hits the floor.
"What am I worth? An enemy agent shares my bed for a year and I suspect nothing. I even, damnit, defended her to the one person I should have listened to!"
"And you think your father never regretted the choices in his life?" Jack questions. "You believe him to be a great man, but you forget great does not mean good."
He pauses long enough to hear Vaughn growl from his corner.
"Yes, your father was a good man, and yes, he was moral. But Bill was anything but perfect. We are all prone to deception, to devious plots and a life of lies. But perhaps you should look at this as a chance to learn a lesson and move on."
"Move on," Vaughn snorts. "To what? You said I see nothing of what I have. I say you're wrong. I have nothing left, no morality, no integrity or trust - "
"And every time you meet someone, you'll immediately suspect them, believe them to not be who they seem. You'll spend your nights wondering who will be the next to betray you and your days investigating each movement you see for that small tell. Because you missed them before," Jack interrupts.
"Yeah."
It's a pathetic sound, small, nothing more than a breath of air exhaled through a word. But there is substance behind it, clarity. And for the first time since he entered the room, Vaughn looks up at Jack and studies his face for any sign of duplicity. His mind screams at him to grab the drink from above and down it until he can no longer see, but part of him holds off. Tells him there's more than just the foggy view of the world and comfort of a stiff bed beneath weary bones.
There is much unsaid in the span of a few minutes, when each sit and study the other. The streets explode outside the window as lights click off and the booming music dulls into the snores and slumber of the world. Vaughn wonders if his heart can keep beating without the steady rhythm to remind it to do so, but his lungs continue to expand simply because they can.
"What do I do, Jack?" he suddenly asks. He has no father, and the man across from him seems the only substitute. "Do I just go on and pretend nothing happened, go about my days unfeeling? Or what? I....don't know anymore. Everything used to be so clear, so easy. We were going to take down SD-6 and life would return to how it used to be. Normal. Couples in the park on a work day playing Frisbee."
"You get up," Jack supplies in the best way he can. His words are short and clipped, advice disguised as an order. "Every day. You get up. Perhaps I was mistaken when I suggested Sydney didn't awake each day for those meetings with you."
"She's stronger than I'll ever be."
The pile of shards on the floor grow, the moonlight caught in their bloody remains. They sit, passive, and soon he can see his reflection in them as he flicks out the last piece and lets it fall to the floor unceremoniously.
"She is."
"Then how can I even...."
"She gave me strength when I was lost," Jack finally relents. "Let her do the same for you."
The drink clanks down from atop the dresser and in seconds, is empty. "Get real, Jack," Vaughn hisses as alcohol blazes a trail down his throat. "If there's anyone I've betrayed, it's her. She's undeserving of such a man."
"If that's what you believe..."
"It is," came Vaughn's hard, scratchy voice. "There's nothing else. I didn't just marry someone when I should have waited, nor did I act right when she came back. I defended her. Defended what I thought was true to those I should have trusted." He paused, waiting for the ice in his empty glass to melt. "Including myself."
"You had doubts?"
Vaughn snorts. "Of course. Not of my marriage, but of my feelings. Sydney said she felt as if a day had gone by, and if I said I didn't, I'd be lying." His words slur together, blending to say nothing with words but with the tone of his voice. "But that's gone. It's all gone."
He slumps against the side of the dresser and closes his eyes. "Go," he whispers into the darkness.
Jack pauses but complies, standing from his seat where he fell into comfort with one last glance in Vaughn's direction. The man doesn't move.
He takes the bottle from the table as he leaves.
(sunbeam)
Close your eyes and lean your head on me.
The first rays of morning are streaming through the windows when the door clicks open, and she wonders if this is a bad idea.
The hotel is already awake, the hallway a constant stream of sleep-addled guests struggling into their soiled garments on the way to the elevators. Here and there women chat in wooden doorways, and she hates that this is the kind of place they need to stay in. Anonymity has its price, but she ponders if that cost is more or less than what the blond smoking near the window charges on a nightly basis. Her smoke curls past her ashen face to escape out the cracked public window into the alley below just as Sydney's sure the woman would like to do. But smoke is no more than memory, and neither completely escape through the window.
Sydney leaves her behind and resists the urge to give a reassuring smile over her should before disappearing into the quiet room, but finds it hard to pass on faith she herself doesn't have. She closes the door behind her and lets her eyes readjust to the low light inside the room, ears keen to the sounds on the rue below and the daily bustle of exploring tourists. Her eyes catch on a spot of sparkling light playing across the pale tan ceiling and she follows the fallen star like a wide-eyed infant, the ever-changing sun letting the light play upon stucco until she grows up and searches for the source.
There's a moment, just a pin prick in time, when she feels her heart leap from her chest onto the pile of broken glass on the floor. It's short-lived, a jump of the stomach from kicking high on a swing in the heat of summer, and she feels equilibrium as the horizon evens out and she charts her course.
"Oh, God..." she trails off, crouching at his side. "Vaughn," she whispers, fingers brushing across the skin of his cheek, pot marked by cuts long since crusted over with blood. He doesn't stir as she's used to, but she doesn't know what to expect from him anymore. She'd like to think he hasn't changed in the time she no longer remembers, but knows everyone changes. The years have certainly carved their mark on his face, now that she has the chance to truly study him as the sunlight streams more steadily through the drawn curtains.
His forehead is more etched from months of worry and dismay, though the laugh lines near his eyes seem shallower than she remembers. Her memory searched for the last time she saw him smile -- truly smile -- and reverts to a time before time when the world glowed in color and ice cream was the coldest thing she encountered.
His neck will ache when he awakens, but that's far off, and she finds her eyes wandering to the painting above his head, a laugh escaping solemn lips despite the silence. It's not a masterpiece, nor the reproduction of one she's seen in her own room transplanted from the glass covered walls of the Louvre. Instead, it's a simple piece -- Juliet and Romeo, for to say it any other way would be clichéd, in that one instant as he lays dying as she awakens, when both know death is hovering above them with his sharp sickle yet have eyes for nothing but each other.
She lets her hands run over his face, one on either side to rock it away from the dresser, and shifts oddly on the carpeting to lean against the wall beside him. He moves easily like the dolls she owned as a child, his head falling easily against her chest. She pulls him closer, arm wrapped around his shoulders, body as pliable as his head and she feels like a puppeteer -- for once, in control of fate and life. It's an odd sensation, one she's not used to, but she dives into it. Moves his hands, his legs, and wishes she could reach inside him and resurrect his soul to move it as well.
In the end, he's wrapped around her, head resting below her breastbone on the pillow of one of her breasts, legs stretched along hers with bare toes catching just the right angle of the sun. He's ticklish there, something she discovered when first exploring him, and ponders running a finger over his big toe to the bottom of his foot but decides against it. The glass is still too near and he doesn't need any more cuts scratched into his skin.
Its when she brushes his lips lightly with her own that he awakens like a slumbering princess from a fairy tale, his arms unconsciously tightening around her as he pulls himself up from a pool of alcohol-induced slumber. His eyes open, his head twists, but he says not a word.
"Morning," she tries to smile down at him. A hand comes to rub an errant eye, but he replaces it as soon as it finishes its task.
"Hi," he croaks. His voice is old and leathery like his insides, a victim of his self-medication. The oddness of the scene unnerves him, but his body is slow to awaken despite screaming inside his skull; a shouting voice left from the night before yelling from the bottom of his discarded glass across the floor telling him she shouldn't be there. That after all that has happened, after each mistake he made, she floated farther away, her presence a formality in the parting of ways.
His stomach twists, and he shoots from her arms before she can say a word. If he can keep her from speaking, he can keep her from leaving.
The bathroom no longer seems an impossible black hole, though there is little light within the small cubicle caked with years of sin. His eyes have only a second to catch on the shattered mirror, and he's glad he doesn't have to face his reflection for the first time in too many yesterdays. He's long since lost count of the days since his own image sickened him, but he's sure it wasn't too long ago -- or was it? Time ceases to exist as he collapses next to the toilet, his fingers playing idly with rusted fixtures attached to the ground as his stomach finally rejects the alcohol of the previous night's transgressions.
Coolness leaks down his neck, and in a moment of forgotten frailty he looks up at her hand as she presses a cool rag to the back of his neck. The water pools for a moment, though he's not sure if he's seeing things correctly as the room turns wavy and his stomach churns on him once again.
He doesn't realize she's speaking to him until he hears her crying in choked sobs.
But her face is dry.
A dry heave catches in his throat punctuated by a sharp cough that echoes off the walls as the water whooshes counterclockwise down the drain, spiraling until it disappears, and he wishes he could go with it.
"Vaughn," she sooths, now kneeling before him. She brushes a thumb over his face, a quick swipe that spreads moisture he didn't even feel away from his eyes. "Oh, God, Va - "
"No," he says suddenly in a voice not his own. "Please, don't."
She leans back against her heels. "Don't what?"
He simply shakes his head, fingers raking through his hair. When she spoke to him before, on the mornings when his skull felt too small and he no longer remembered where he was, she never dared abandon him. Every morning, she chatted with him over breakfast, and every night she watched him methodically destroy himself only to let her rebuild him as he slumbered.
But now he fears there will be no rebuilding.
"Leave," he whispers. "Don't leave."
"What are you talking about? I'd never leave you."
Perhaps it's her tender tone, or maybe the tiles in the bathroom so conducive to twisting words as they bounce around like a childhood game of telephone, but he feels something shake inside him like a present under the tree on Christmas Eve. He dares not open it for fear of coal though he feels it a justified gift.
"You should."
Her jaw sets as tight as the fists at her sides, and she finds it hard to even look at him. Her eyes flicker up to the mirror and its broken surface, a perfectly circle imperfection radiating out to encompass the entire mirror. It stands proud as a testament to the ripple effect, the circles of broken reflection catching the light at odd angles through a haze of rapidly pooling tears. Instead of sadness, she feels anger; a deep, unrelenting anger sitting in the pit of her stomach begging to be freed.
So she unlatches the cage and lets it loose.
"Why, so you can wallow in your own self-pity? Relive every moment of your marriage just searching for that one clue, that one tell you missed that would have prevented all of this. Or maybe you want to forget it all -- but you'll forget everything, Vaughn, not just the times you want to. No matter how hard you try, they'll still be there." She swallows a sob of her own. "Every night, no matter what you do, you'll see them. Big, giant movies on the backs of your eyelids and no amount of tequila is going to make them go away." She frantic now, fists pounding against his chest. "And every morning you wake up, you wish you were asleep because at least the memories are better than reality and you don't want to face it. You don't want to see the day, or the sun, or the fake smiles people put on for you. Just want to -- "
"-- sleep, or pretend to. Hide under the covers and hope when you come out, everything was all a dream. And when you see it wasn't, when you see what's real, just want to do something, anything to dull the pain. Because nothing hurts more, not even when you fall to the ground, or hit your head. Just want it all to stop and go back to where it was."
His breathing is quick, as feverish as hers, the words pouring from his mouth just as hers did, a bedtime story of how he lost himself and forced her to do the same. But at least when he did, it wasn't by her hand, wasn't a direct reaction to something she did. She didn't wield the knife when his heart was cut out, but he twisted the knife in her each and every day of this new existence.
His voice is low, as if he's already becoming acclimated to his new grave. "I did that to you."
"I let you."
He's surprised by her answer, the dull ache in his chest growing as his heart thuds harder and harder against it, threatening to break free. Her hands rest just over it now, fists forgotten long ago when she heard how her own hell had been passed down to her, used first by him. But this was no stretched pair of shoes or shirt two sizes too big. There are no easy fixes or home remedies to mend the inadequacies sitting in the corner.
(rainmaker)
I can take your pain away if you tear down your fortress of memory.
His feet pound into the uneven ground beside the paved trail, but he likes to think at any moment his foot could slip into a depression and he'd fall. It's the unpredictability that drives him through dead leaves and twigs fallen in dead grass, the hanging possibility of failure he's so used to feeling. At least this time, he has something to blame outside his control, something he can see and feel and confront, though the ground may not be the best conversationalist.
Drizzle falls from a light gray sky, though nothing hard enough to deter him from his path. The dirt slips under his sneakers, a thick paste of mud he trudges through. It's nothing compared to the quicksand he's fallen into, and getting out of the mud requires less motion than climbing from the pit he's willingly thrown himself into.
He gains footing and boosts himself up another inch to reach air, hands groping for something at the surface to hold onto, but he always finds a bottle and curses at himself for being so weak as to bring it down with him. It's been a few nights since the last he's slept, and his legs feel like jelly inside his track pants. But his lungs burn in the crisp air of early morning, and for once he's thankful they haven't given up on him.
A tree, a corner, and he's out into the open of the park where Frisbees fly during the day from hand to hand like a game of hot potato being played with his dreams. The wind coming off the ocean takes his breath away, sucking it out with the tide though he doubts the contribution will be that great.
That's when he sees them.
They jog in tandem, even, but he knows she's pacing herself slowly for him. Their faces are nothing like the stoic mask he's slipped on, as cold and impassive as clay. Smiles light up their faces, laughter slip from their lips, and the sound is so foreign to his failing hearing he wonders if they really are or he's simply crying again.
His feet stop, rooted to the ground as if glued there. Stuck in the mud; he can't move forward but he sure as hell can't go back. His eyes simply scan the horizon, irises reflecting the rolling ocean as he transfixes them to a point just over the edge of the seaside path, just past them as they laugh and run and completely ignore his existence.
Can't blame them, though. His failures, and there are many, live on as a permanent black mark upon their lives, a blemish they can never be rid of no matter how hard they try. His feet are stuck, but he pulls at them just as he tugs at his heart strings, and moves on. Across the park. Away from them. Step. Step. Step. Until their laughter dies away and he's left once again with the weight of his mistakes, lungs burning as he suffocates.
Just as the dizziness swells and his legs confuse north and south, right and wrong to form a contradiction in terms, a hand touches his shoulder and he flinches from the thought.
"Vaughn."
He pauses, feet stuck again, one heartstring still connected to her despite his efforts to eradicate himself from her life before the damage he does is irreparable.
He fears it is already too late, and makes a move to finish his circuit and go home.
She tries again, forceful this time. "Vaughn."
"What?" He's surprised by how cold his voice sounds, how the anger and rage and hate for himself singes the edges as the sign of an oncoming apocalypse.
"You left."
Of course he left. He told her he should leave, though she refuted his statement; it didn't make it any less true.
Her strength is too much for his weary body, and before he can protest, before he can run himself into a never-ending rut devoid of fear and emotion, she pulls him around to face her, hand latched onto his arm in a vice grip. Her handling is anything but gentile, and he realizes, to his eternal happiness, that she is finally treating him as he should be treated; an enemy, a foreign national, anything but a friend or confidant.
She traces the slowly healing cuts dotting his face, a finger on his arm smoothing over a deeper, raised red mark not from cheap glass found in a hotel's mirror somewhere a world away, but his own; thicker, stronger glass that showed a clearer image and a deeper internal hatred.
"Where'd you go?" she asks. He sighs, jaw tight, eyes wandering across the sea.
"Home."
"Why?"
He stifles hollow laughter. "Because home is where the heart is."
There's something ironic about that statement, and she's pretty sure it has to do with the former occupants of the house. Not of people or possessions, but a lie propagated through love and weakness, and finally her father's words, that emotion is a weakness to be exploited in this business, makes sense. Her rebirth had been from a clean slate, no home of memories to disturb her turbulent thoughts. Nothing fake pretending to be real. No constant reminders of all she'd lost, all the mistakes made in this new world with chunks of lost time. His heart lives in her house, with her things, and even though his eyes have cleared and the truth lives, he can't be free.
"You shouldn't be staying there," she says simply, "not with her things -- "
"Why not?"
His response shocks her, and she blinks. "What?"
"Why shouldn't I?" he responds. "All actions have an equal and opposite reaction, right? I deserve to live there, to see her things around me, I deserve it -- "
"No," she shakes her head, "don't be a martyr. It's pathetic, Vaughn, and won't get you anywhere."
"Where is there to go?"
"You honestly believe that," she states, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, hand freezing on his arm where red marks form under her slender fingers. "That after everything you've been through - we've been through - you can just quit."
"There's a difference between quitting and failing, Sydney," he hisses.
"Yes, there is," she retorts with equal anger. "And you've failed spectacularly."
His lips form a thin, pale pink line as his eyes wander off again, and she notices he's never looked her in the eyes the entire conversation.
"Vaughn, look at me," she commands, free hand twisting his face to look down at her, and she almost staggers back from the raw force of emotion contained within his eyes. Hate, anger, sadness, regret -- all swirl around in once clear green eyes, and she wonders how he can see at all with all that clouding his normally level-headed perception of the world.
"I don't want Lauren's affections," he says softly, eyes boring into her. "And I don't want to see her -- I don't want to think about her. So why do you want to see me?"
She sighs, exasperated, and wants to scream at the world for its injustice. "You're not Lauren!"
"Aren't I?" he roars, arm finally pulling free of her grasp. She's seen him angry before, but never directed at her, not with this intensity, and she finds herself frightened of him once again. "I betrayed you just as she betrayed me. How can you not want to kill me with every fiber of your being? How do keep yourself from being consumed by it all?"
A wave crashes on the beach, a chime reminding it's time for him to go before it's too late.
"Maybe I should," she says. He stops mid-turn and looks down to the ground. "Maybe next time I see you, I should pull out my gun and shoot you. Kill you. Harm you. Would that make you happy?"
He's silent, but she's on a roll.
"Let's think about this, Vaughn. Really think about this. You messed up, you, my guardian angel, the one person in this world I could trust -- the one person I never thought would betray me. And you did. And it hurt, Vaughn, it hurt so much I thought I'd suffocate. So maybe I should let it free. Maybe I should get so angry with you; I want nothing more than to kill you."
He's turned around by now, eyes on her, taking it all in like that morning so many months ago when faith was lost and hope fizzled to the smallest ember. She wants him to say something -- she wants him to defend himself, wanted him to defend himself even then, in the youth of this dysfunction -- but he remains silent. Takes it all without a word and just accepts it.
And more than the betrayal, the nights spent in a sea of her own tears, in the drowning misery of tequila or whatever else she could find, this angers her the most. His regret is so deep he has no defense, has more remorse than she could even fathom, and that Lauren could exploit this, could do this to him makes her sick. She wants him back, the man she met years ago with a smirk on his lips and a sarcastic retort. With the strength to argue his point until both of them were red in the face.
It boils up in her, and her own world falls off kilter in a red fog. Her fist tightens, chest expands, and she swings up at his marred, sorrow-filled face with all the strength she possesses. Fueled by her anger, her hate, her own loneness and anguish, it connects with a crack and flies through the open air as he sways and falls back from the force of the blow.
The fog clears. The roar of the ocean fills her ears with white noise as her chest heaves and hand stings. Waves roll in, lop onto the beach, and flow back out to shore.
A few more moments pass and she regains control over her breathing before looking down, in front of her, to where Vaughn's propped up on his side, eyes wide as a hand grips the side of his face, blood leaking out from between his fingers. It feels eerily familiar, but she won't regret holding her hand out to this half of her unbalanced equation.
He waves her off, blinks, and tries to stop the world from spinning.
She crouches down next to him instead and pulls his hands from his face to take a look. "I'm sor - "
He presses a blood-covered hand to her lips and struggles to shake his head. "No," he manages to mumble, though his speech is like that of a two year old.
"Don't you see," she says, holding back a grimace as his face turns a sickly shade of purple she knows will darken in the next few minutes. "Lauren has no regrets. She would never accept the blame. You do -- you have. Can't you see you're not her? You could never be her."
"How?"
"How what?"
He struggles a bit, opening and closing his mouth reflexively to no avail, and tries to speak.
"Hating her will do nothing but consume you, Vaughn. You'll get a punch in here and there, but it won't do anything. She will still be evil, still be the one who betrayed you, and nothing can change that. Not even death. Forget it, move on."
He'd say he knows this already, but his jaw's becoming increasingly stiff.
"Please," she whispers, wiping blood from his lips, "please."
He decided long ago he'd give her anything he could, even his very soul if he found a way to hand it to her. As she sits at his side and pulls her cell phone from the clip on the side of her track pants, he realizes he already did so long ago, and can do nothing but comply.
His face hurts, but he'd take pain over death -- emotional or physical -- any day.
(unanimous)
You don't need one word to talk to me/All I know is we have sympathy
The curtain swishes aside with the song of metal sliding across metal, and he groggily opens his eyes expecting Sydney to walk up to him.
When Jack appears at his bedside, he groans and tries to frown. It's been days since he last spoke to the elder Bristow, half the conversation obscured by a haze of avoiding responsibility and the stench of alcohol. He expects nothing more than a reprimand and black mark in his file for abandoning the mission from this man, and wishes he could speak to defend himself.
"I see Sydney spoke with you," he comments. Vaughn nods dumbly -- the Bristows, he's learned over the years, have a skewed way of looking at things, and a dislocated jaw coupled with a nap in the ER must equate to a conversation in their books.
"Dixon has decided to take you off active duty," he continues, and Vaughn's stomach drops, sweat forming on his brow. "It's temporary, of course, but he feels you're unfit to be in the field until you resolve your personal issues."
He wants to scream and shout, to tell Jack there is nothing wrong with him and that he was just doing his job like he has for the last ten years and will continue to do so until retirement or until he meets a bullet with his name on it, whichever comes first. He has no delusions about death, no irrational fears past the devastating thought of abandoning his mother to roam the Earth over the graves of the men carrying her borrowed family name. The interest in his personal life seems almost ironic, as thirty years ago they wished to have nothing to do with him, and wonders when this change occurred and if it's for the best or worst.
"I convinced him not to take more drastic measures concerning your failure to report in Paris last week," Jack drops. Vaughn shifts uncomfortably under his gaze, pulling himself together and into a sitting position as he brushes sleep from his eyes. His fatigue overwhelms him, and he puts a steadying hand behind him on the cot to preserve his balance. If only it were that easy.
There is a time to fight and a time not to, and only too late has he finally figured out how to tell them apart.
"Ok," Vaughn manages, and winces after he finishes the monosyllabic word.
"I'm surprised you didn't consider my offer."
"I did."
Jack nods, sage-like, and shifts a bit, uncomfortable. "You will live with this for the rest of your life," he says, "but perhaps, instead of becoming consumed with the hatred that comes with betrayal, you'll recover. But you'll never forget."
Vaughn rubs his jaw as to show he understands, and swings his feet over the side of the narrow, rough gurney to push himself up on unsteady feet. A hand remains on the bed behind him, but he holds the other out, an offering to someone he never thought he'd come to truly respect.
Jack takes his hand and shakes it before checking the clock on the wall over Vaughn's shoulder. "If you'll excuse me, I have a meeting to attend."
He pivots on his heels and takes two steps towards the temporary door when Vaughn finds it in himself to speak.
"You were right," he slurs, "about everything."
Jack pauses a moment, then finishes his exit, passing his daughter on the way out. She smiles at him and lowers her head, bashful, as she passes. Jack walks slower than normal, steps measured to keep him within ear shot, and just as he hears his daughter laugh in the brightness of the overcrowded ER, he lets the hint of a smile appear on his face before quickening his pace and walking out into the sunlight.
He dips his head in greeting to the sun, and walks to his car.
I believed that you'd always be here
And once you promised a life with no fear
Please don't break my ideals
And say what's fake was always real
I was the one, now I'm gone
Take me back again
Fin