Deteriorate
Author: Pharo
Disclaimer: 'Alias' belongs to J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot, and ABC.
Summary: The jaded path of destruction.
Spoilers: "Q & A".
Feedback: pharo@newyork.com
'So kiss me hard 'cause this will be the last time that I let you.'
—Dashboard Confessional, 'Best Deceptions'There are nights when she stares up at glow-in-the-dark stickers that she's had on her ceiling for as long as she's had a bedroom to call her own. The first set she put up was when she was four and scared out of her mind of monsters that came out in the dark. Bobby Smith told her a story of some unnamed monster that lived under her bed amidst discarded toys and coloring books that had long been finished. He claimed that his brother had seen one in his early childhood and would've gotten eaten if he hadn't reached the bedroom light in time. She just laughed it off and told him that he was making it up.
That night she slept with a flashlight tucked under her arm.
Her mother bought a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars the next day. Her father helped her put them up in patterns of swirls and dashes. They spelled out a big 'S' in the middle of her ceiling. After he went to bed, she took the leftover stars and spelled out a little 'J' next to her letter. They stayed up there like that for years.
Now she has dreams of leaving it like that forever. She dreams of delving into the darkness to find out if a monster lived in it.
She dreams of forgetting a lot of things. She knows too much, remembers every small detail of a night that happened years ago. She remembers every bit of the story that changed her life forever. Every insignificant detail that now has her dreaming of another life.
*****
"Sydney, sit down for a second," he says softly.
He runs his hand through his disheveled hair as she goes up to him. He smells of liquid soap. He faintly smiles as she sits next to him on the couch. She can feel that something is wrong. He never calls her by her full name unless there's bad news. She wonders if she's broken anything recently.
"What's up, Dad?"
"Honey, I have to tell you something. Your mom was driving home really fast—"
He has a look of sheer horror on his face. He takes her hands in his own as he continues to speak, but she can't think of anything else except how cold they are (not clammy, never clammy). She can see it so clearly now. His eyes are redder than usual and match the color of her summer lobster dress.
"Where's Mommy?" she asks, sliding off the couch as she tries not to panic by his appearance.
She hasn't called Mom 'mommy' in years. Ever since she was five and thought that she was too grown-up to still be calling her parents by baby names.
"The rain was too heavy for her to see where she was going. She was driving so fast that—"
She doesn't know why he's talking in the past, but it frightens her.
"Where is she? Where's Mommy? What did you do to—"
"Sydney, Mommy's gone."
She purges him from her world by peeling the 'J' off her ceiling that night. He knocks on her door over and over again, but receives no response. No one in her world has ever died until that moment and she doesn't like the feeling of being cheated by the world. She wants to think it's a dream. At one point, she even tries to force herself to fall asleep in the hopes that morning will come soon and bring her mother with it. Her seven-year-old mind knows better than to invest in such hopeless dreams, but she's reckless and tries to believe them anyway.
The moment she wakes up the next morning, she doesn't smell the familiar scent of Saturday morning blueberry pancakes with maple syrup. She doesn't hear the clang of dishes as her mother takes out pan after pan. She tiptoes down the stairs to find her father sitting at the table with two glasses of apple juice before him.
Apple juice is for Sundays. Orange juice is for Saturday. Her mother would know that.
"Hi Daddy," she says softly in a last ditch attempt to bring her mother back.
She thinks that if she calls him by the baby name, she'll be back and things will be like they were back then. She looks around for the dark-haired woman that smelled of garden-variety roses.
"Who are you looking for?" he asks her.
Her mother is nowhere to be found.
"Mommy," she replies hesitantly, afraid to jinx the last few seconds of her search for someone who disappeared into the night.
"She's dead, Sydney," he says softly as if he's afraid of chipping her shell.
She knows that now.
They drive to the funeral in the rain. She thinks it's fitting. Her mother is gone. There's no need for the sun today.
"Where's your umbrella?" her father asks her before they get out of the car.
"I lost it," she replies, "yesterday. It's gone. Someone stole it."
Just like the world to do something like that.
She walks out of the car with her father. She clings onto his hand as they step out together under the same umbrella (her right arm sleeve still gets wet). He nods when they reach the place in the cemetery that has white chairs pushed off to the side.
She doesn't pay attention to the whole of the funeral. Face after face walk up and talk about her mother and she wonders if they knew her in another time because she's never seen them before. She stares at the mahogany box behind them. The rainwater slides straight off the polished surface, never leaving drop or mark of any kind that indicates that it ever rained.
She thinks that at least her mother will be safe.
Some time between the numerous faces and when they walked back to the car, her father bends down to ask her if she wants to put in a flower. She just shakes her head and moves farther back.
"I don't want to go near it."
She sits in the car while her father shakes hands with men and women in dark clothing and black hats. She looks down at her pink socks and knows that she doesn't want to be in the same vicinity as those people.
*****
Half of her life has passed and she still can't wear pink socks. It's not the major days like Mother's Day that gets to her, but rather stupid holidays that no one really pays mind to like Arbor Day and Earth Day. At fourteen, she still can't walk by a garden without getting tears in her eyes. She thinks that is what it boils down to—the inability to move on with life after it's done and over. Her wounds have healed, her pain lessened, but the photographs in her mind refuse to go away.
"Forever, that's what it's all about," she read once in some back whose title seems insignificant now. It's no matter to her who wrote it or what the rest of the book was about.
Lola tells her that she's becoming as closed off as her father as they make bead bracelets.
"Go find something you love that makes you happy."
"Why love anything if it'll be gone someday?" she asks, never expecting an answer.
"Sydney, you're so jaded," she shakes her head, adding, "at such a young age."
"Lola, you're my nanny, not my shrink," she adds with a laugh as if to show her she's not completely disagreeable.
As if on cue, Lola starts off her story of missed opportunities, of how the medical field called to her, but she didn't hear it in time. Now, twenty years later, the possibilities are gone and anyone that tells her different is lying and just wants her money.
She nods and tells Lola that she's wiser than all that practice the profession are: "You can take them all on."
"Your dad called while you were at school."
"Oh?" she asks, trying to feign interest. "Where is he now?"
"Paris."
"Uh huh," she says, once again sticking the beads through the string in her hand.
"Oh Sydney, you must know that he—"
"I don't care, Lola. You know I stopped caring years ago."
He missed her first violin solo because he was in Taipei. The spelling bee appearance went to hell when he was caught up in Moscow selling airplane parts. The storytelling contest, the school play, her first camping trip—all missed because he was away on "important business". At some point, she stopped caring. She stopped crying in the middle of the night because her parents weren't there to cheer her on. She laughed and smiled and told people that her father was a businessman and couldn't be expected to come to everything. She hung out with other people's parents during family meets, took Lola to parent-teacher conferences, and if anything of severe importance ever came up, she faxed her father a line or two about it.
"He cares. You know he cares."
"People have priorities. It's a fact of life. Now where's that red bead?" she asks nonchalantly, dismissing him like she dismisses everything else these days.
*****
She hurts people in attempts to ease her hurt. At her age, they like to chalk it up as rebellion and teen angst, but she thinks they've just not paid enough attention.
She's been subtly hurting people since she was twelve and told her father that the only relation they could ever have is through blood and nothing else. At fifteen, she told Ricky Benson that she went out with him out of sheer pity and that it was all a joke. She told him that she needed an A in math and he was good for nothing but that. Then she kissed him hard and left him standing in the middle of the hall, ten minutes before classes would end.
"Sydney, wait, I could try to be…"
But she waved him off and continued walking. Two days later, she went out with Steve Parks. Three days after that she left him in the janitor's closet crying because she didn't like him anymore. And so the cycle went on.
Now at sixteen, walking down the halls and into class, she doesn't care about what the girls say behind their locker doors. Mother's Day and she's got no mother. She doesn't pay attention to the whispers now.
None of them matter to her.
Her life in this town is not even worth the $2.31 she has in her pocket at that moment. All that matters to her is getting out of this town and going to a place where no one knows of the past and all people care about are their green lawns with ugly lawn gnomes and tacky flamingoes.
She doesn't want white picket fences or three and a half kids plus one dog. She wants to be left alone—to make her way in the world so that she doesn't have to depend on people who will eventually let her down. There was a time when she wanted people to be proud of her. But now, she's just fine being proud of herself. She doesn't need anyone. Does she want to be happy? Yes. Do she want to fall in love? No. Theoretically, love is supposed to make people soar. Realistically, she knows that love is a cycle of disappointment that leads to nothing. To fall in love is to set herself up for defeat. She's smart enough to know that's not what she wants. She doesn't believe in love.
She doesn't believe that people are innately good or that they don't lie either. She's no fool. The only thing she can ever find it in herself to believe—to believe in—is the truth. She wants to believe that somewhere there is a place where truth does tower over the lies and not vice versa.
"Hey, is it true that your mother left because she didn't love you?" a cheerleader wearing way too much pink asks her as she passes by a locker lined with pictures of celebrities.
She turns around to face her, wondering if it was another stupid joke. Yet another attempt to make her cry.
"She didn't leave."
"Right. She died," the girl clarifies. "From what I've heard, she purposely drove off the road that night."
"If she did, it was because she didn't want to be in this God-forsaken town brimming with morons that think twirling a baton and chewing gum at the same time is considered talent," she replies coolly before walking away triumphantly.
She does not cry. They should know that by now. She hasn't cried since that day she sat in the car, waiting for her father to find the right moment to let go and drive on without her mother.
*****
The guests—mourners—have started to leave. They smile and tell her that they are sorry for her loss. The older ones pat her hand before walking on as if is a deeper symbolic gesture that is supposed to make her feel better. His fellow doctors, unbeknownst to her, shake her hand briskly before walking back to their cars where they can once again turn on their pagers.
After the last of them leave, she takes the stairs two at a time and lunges into the bathroom. She clicks the door shut and slides down the door until she's sitting on the white tiled bathroom floor.
She hears footsteps and then three knocks on the door.
"Sydney, open up. Come on. You need to eat something."
If she eats anything, she'll just be back here, throwing it up. The sight is still too fresh in her mind for her to even think about eating.
"Come downstairs so we can talk," Will says.
She doesn't want to talk. There's nothing to say. There's never anything to say, at least not for her.
"Syd…"
Receiving no response, he tells her that he'll come back when she's ready. She leans her ear against the closed bathroom door and listens to the sound of Will's footsteps grow fainter and fainter as they travel down the stairs until they are finally gone.
"Tell me what to believe, Will, because I don't even know anymore," she said this morning.
"You're a good person. You didn't deserve this," Will replied. "Believe that."
She laughs now at the thought of it. She betrayed him. It doesn't matter that he called the answer machine or that he talked on an insecure line. All that matters is that she did this to him and it can never be told any differently if it is still to remain the truth. She betrayed him when she told him the truth. She told him that she'd never hurt him and then violated her promise to him. She told him the truth and that in and of itself is what lead to this, here, now.
She betrayed Sloane by telling him—that isn't a top priority now but it exists nonetheless.
She betrayed herself when she went against the cardinal rule and got involved. She allowed herself to let down a couple of shields here and there. It hasn't even settled in yet and Danny is gone. The pain has rushed in through the cracks in the wall and the openings of the fortress.
She has become her father, stopping the world from moving until it sinks in that life is different. He was afraid to come into the car and leave the cemetery. She is afraid to leave the bathroom and walk away from what could have been.
Pink socks and black umbrellas—she's back where it all started.
*****
Seven years gone and the end came suddenly. SD-6, wrapped up in a brown package, waited to be sent home to relatives with a postcard that said "Happy Anniversary" or something equally festive. She watched the stretcher with an unconscious Arvin Sloane's broken body being pushed by a second year student into an ambulance brimming with CIA agents. He went out with a fight. And what a fight it was. Twenty years of coercion, lies, and murder wrapped up into a three-second-phone call at 9:30 AM that said, "we're ready".
"Vaughn, I'll see you around," she says as she turns to go to her car.
"Maybe we can have lunch someday."
"Yeah," she replies, knowing fully well that it will never happen.
She wishes it had been different between them.
"Sydney, I love you," he said softly.
"You don't even know me, Vaughn. Pier visits and warehouses are not love. Calling a person by their last name isn't love either."
"I know, but I could love you."
"I'm sorry. I can't do this…"
"Is it SD-6?" he asked desperately.
She shook her head 'no'.
She wishes that she could've loved him, but she isn't the type of person that breaks the same vows twice. If he had said it to her seven years ago, she wouldn't have questioned anything. Six years ago, there was still possibility for 'them'. She was hurting and she would've loved anyone at that time. Now, she looks at him and sees all that she promised not to betray and she can't deal with that. She walked away long ago from that picture and to look back would be fatal now.
She wishes the circumstances were different, her life were another, the pain non-existent, the promises altered, her life didn't work that way. She was still the little girl in the pink socks that didn't want to get hurt and so promised not love anyone ever again.
"Vaughn, I don't believe in love. I stopped believing in it a long time ago."