Reverie

Disclaimer: I don't own Alias. I do own Julia Irina Bristow, for the purposes of telling her story.

He hasn't heard from her since Christmas, when she made what he presumed was a Jack-prompted phone call. Before that, they spoke rarely at best, and most of the time, never. He knew there was a daughter – her daughter – who must have been sixteen now, he thought. Julia Irina Bristow.

And then, the phone in his office rings and he knows it is her. He hears it ring once, listens to the permanency and the despair in it, and sits silently, unable or unwilling to move. And then, he picks it up, just as it begins to shatter his world again with its second ring.

"Hello?" he says, not bothering to add on the required greeting – or anything else, for that matter.

"Vaughn," she says, just that one word, but he can tell she is overcome by need and want and pain.

"Syd?"

"It's – it's Julia. There's been an accident."

So this is how it will be, he thinks, disgusted. The daughter he hardly knows, the one she kept away from him, now suddenly requires his help. How utterly like Syd. "What?"

"A fire."

Now he is caught, hooked like a fish. "A fire? Are you all right?"

"She's in the hospital," she continues, as though she had not heard him. "Mercy General."

And he will be there, as she knew he would be.

She is there, waiting, her face lit by the harsh fluorescent lights. She looks just as he remembers, but somehow different. Her face is thinner, and she looks very tired. When she sees him, she crumbles; it is like watching the banks of a river fall into a sweeping flood.

"You came."

"You knew I would." He pauses, those words sound even harsher out loud than he had thought. He immediately softens. "I didn't mean it. What happened?"

She takes a deep breath. "I was out, at a meeting at the school. For the band parents and then one for the French society."

"She's in the band? She speaks French?" he asks, feeling stupid.

She smiles, a bit sadly. "She's a drummer, if you can believe it. And as for French, she's fluent in that, Japanese, German, and Russian."

"And you came back, and…"

"And the house was on fire." Her eyes close, and he suddenly wishes she wasn't seeing such pain behind such eyes. "Julia was… in the yard… on the ground."

A doctor approaches them, speaks quietly to Syd. He takes the moment to look through the window. The girl is his… covered in bandages and tubes. But the facial structure is his, and the brown hair is Sydney's. He is lost for a moment in his reverie, a reverie only to ask how something so perfect could end up damaged.

Then she is back, touching his arm. "Hey."

He is too overcome to say much.

"The doctors have to take her up to surgery. Don't… let's…" She can't quite figure out what to say.

"I miss you," he says. "And I supposed I'd miss her, if I ever had the chance to know her."

She sees the anger in his eyes. "Well…"

"For all these years you've hidden her away, never letting me see her or talk to her, and now she might die, never even knowing me!"

She is taken aback.

He sinks, deflated, into his chair. "But, now," he says, "I guess we have somewhere to start."