Rating: PG
Ship: S/V, S/S
Spoilers/Timeline: post-"A Missing Link", AU
Archive: Cover Me, anyone else drop me a line
Disclaimer: Alias and its characters belong to JJ Abrams, Bad Robot, etc. I am not JJ Abrams, Bad Robot, or etc. Don't sue.
Summary: Sydney must deal with the fallout from her actions in "A Missing Link".
******
One day, I will have lost everything there ever was to dream about, and I will be left here with only this threadbare scarf around my neck to block the wind. I will sit with my legs dangling over the edge of the little pond where the lilypads float and I will stare across the water as if I am staring into the horizon, as if I am thinking great thoughts, and no one will know I have lost the ability to feel.
No one will know, because I hide these things well.
******
I picked up the threadbare scarf at a thrift store outside Detroit, the location of one of our least glamorous missions. This was, of course, after I'd gone rogue and spent what little money I had on disappearing, so I stood in line at the Salvation Army so that I could use a tiny dressing room behind a fuschia curtain in a room that smelled of dust and wood varnish and cornnuts, and I bought a long satin dress and a faded clutch (if I held it just right, you wouldn't even see the missing sequins) and, with the leftover money, a puffy, oversized jacket and a faded wool scarf.
The scarf is pure wool (not synthetic) but that is not why I chose it. It must not have been in the room long, because it does not smell of dust and cornnuts, but of cloves and cedar. It smells like my mother's sweaters, soft on her body in November after she pulled them out of storage; I used to hug her around the waist and bury my face in her stomach, where I could catch this scent.
Perhaps I accepted her offer because of this memory; perhaps I conjured this memory as an excuse to accept her offer. Not that it matters.
******
No one plans to go rogue; at least no one plans to do it in the way I did. Don't get me wrong; people change their plans all the time, they trade secrets and save technology and hoard money, and for the right opportunity or the right price, they change their allegiances.
This has nothing to do with me. My allegiances were changed for me (this is what I like to tell myself) and I have done no more than follow their pull. I am frozen, still, floating along. Like a lilypad suspended on the water.
But these are the deep thoughts; I do not think them any more.
******
Do you know what it is to feel raw? I remember the feeling: knees sliding across the carpet until they were pushed too far, raspberry-red and oozing, and my mother dabbed them with peroxide while my father blew to stop the stinging. Rope-marks around my wrist in SD-6 training; just one wrist, just in the right place, where it could be hidden beneath my watch. I lived this life on the weekends; learned fighting and resistance and basic techniques in torture, and on Monday I buttoned my shirt and zipped my backpack and fastened my watch; it chafed against the rope burns during class, and I felt like the oldest nineteen-year-old in the world.
This was the time of Noah, of course, but I choose not to think about him. (If I did, I might know what it is to be raw, I might remember – but this is for another time. It is of another time. It is in the life I leave behind while I sit beside the pond and watch the lily pads.)
******
I hate the smell of earth, the way it gums between fingernails and cakes in shoe-soles. I choose this pond because it is surrounded by weeds and full of algae, because around the edges it is caked with thick black mud, dark and rich as cake, and it smells sharp, and rancid, like it is oozing into oil.
It does not smell like dirt, the dirt where I left Vaughn, when he crumpled to the ground. It does not smell like the puff of dust curling up around him, the cloud that blew onto my clothes when they kicked him down the hill. That was the scent of earth, simple and dull and omnipresent, the kind found on every playground and in every park. That is the scent I avoid, the reason I carry clear, sharp-smelling gel in my pockets, just in case some should get on my hands, the reason I sink into the black ooze that smells of decay.
Because it, at least, does not smell of death.
******
I walked out of the Detroit airport after the handoff.
It should have been so simple. A quick pickup, a meeting with a valued asset, I didn't even have to wear a wig. Meet, swap packages, and pass the plain manila envelope to a gray-shirted janitor with a nametag that said "Larry". It disappeared into a pocket somewhere beneath the yellow mop-bucket that held gray water and said "caution". I did not see where, because I did not look back (I've learned never to look back) and I kept on walking.
All I had to do was get on the plane. Walk to the proper (private) gate, nod at the attendant, I did not even need a ticket. They were paid to recognize my face.
But I walked past the gate, made a hard left like I was going to the ladies' room, and when I saw that sign I just kept walking. Past the private gates and the larger ones of the commercial airlines, past the moving sidewalks that pulled the lazier travelers along, past the long rows of tastefully decorated lounges for the most frequent customers. I walked past the long lines at security and baggage claim and out the double-doors by the taxi stand, and I just kept walking.
I had eighty-four dollars and one CIA-issued handbag to my name.
******
Lauren was waiting on the plane for me, and she would be wearing black. I wondered if she was really that old-fashioned, observing some formal period of mourning, or if she did it to spite me, of if she did it unconsciously, like crying.
In those days, I never knew it was happening until the water-drops hit my hands. I wondered at first what it was, what was leaking. It took a half-second to realize that it was me. That I was losing myself, one drop at a time.