Please see Prologue for general info and disclaimers.

*~*

Three weeks earlier…

"Hey, Marshall?" Sydney poked her head into Marshall's office to see him hard at work with a pair of safety goggles strapped around his head and a soldering gun in his right hand.

"Ms. Bristow!" he welcomed ecstatically as he turned his head in her direction and attempted to push the goggles up onto his forehead with his left wrist. He grinned and gestured for her to enter the room. "C'mon in," he invited just as the tip of the soldering gun, which he hadn't been paying attention to, brushed against an object on the table and sent up a series of sparks and a plume of smoke.

"Oh, God, did I make you do that?" Sydney asked, rushing to look at what remained of Marshall's latest project.

"No, no. I should've— It's a…it's a little unstable. Still," he admitted forlornly. "That's the sixth time that's happened today."

"Then the seventh time could be the charm, right?"

"Right." His smile returned as he picked up a charred cylindrical shell and held it before his eyes. "Sorry, little guy. Time to go into the trash with the rest of your friends."

"I'm sorry I interrupted you," Sydney said with a wince. "I should've knocked first."

"No, I— When I can get this thing to stop blowing up on me, it'll be so great so that it's not going to matter how many times I had to rebuild it."

"What's it going to do?"

"Well, it'll be fantastic." Marshall clapped his hands excitedly and ran to his desk to show her some blueprints he'd designed. "See, it'll look like any other pen, like 'Ooh, a ballpoint,'" he mimicked, clicking a regular pen on and off a few times. "But it'll also work as a surveillance system scrambler, an electronic code breaker that'll gain you access to any doors locked electronically, and a high power laser that'll cut through anything. Oh, and the best part?" He reached into the right side pocket of his pants, pulled out his 'space' pen, and demonstrated its ability to write upside-down by scribbling spirals on the underside of a piece of wood. "You should be able to write upside-down with it!"

Sydney burst out laughing at Marshall's antics as she declared, "Wow, multifunctional and practical. I love it already."

"Yeah, I'm just…I'm having some problems cramming all that stuff into such a small…thing. But it'll happen," he promised, rolling the blueprints back up. "Eventually. Anyway, was there something you needed from me, Ms. Bristow?"

"Oh, right. I was, um, I was kind of hoping you could help me with something that's been bothering me lately."

Marshall pulled his goggles off his head and gazed at her in concern. "Is everything all right?"

Automatically kicking into excuse mode, which had become her default reaction as of late whenever anyone asked if she was okay, she spluttered, "What? Oh, yeah, no, everything's fine. I'm just—" Sydney chuckled at her incoherence and took a deep breath as she retucked her hair behind her ears. "Okay, let's try that again. I've been thinking a lot lately about the Cape Town mission."

"The one where you hacked into a server to find out information on Bentley Calder?"

"Yeah, that one. A day after I got back from Cape Town, you informed me that no data had been recovered from the laptop. I think you mentioned something about someone realizing I was there and pulsing the computer as I left. But then, later that day, you were able to get, from that same hard drive, Calder's address in Australia."

"Yeah…"

"Well," Sydney paused to wrap a strand of hair around her right index finger as she attempted to appear as laid-back as possible, "what I've been wondering is how you managed to do that. I mean, I know you're really good with computers and stuff, but if everything had been erased, how'd you come up with an address? Dixon thinks that maybe not everything had gotten erased, but I'm thinking that maybe I picked up some additional file when I downloaded stuff from the server. Something you didn't originally spot because you weren't looking for it. I hear that happens all the time on our missions."

Marshall tugged uncomfortably at the collar of his shirt. He hated thinking back to the Cape Town operation, and he especially hated thinking about it in relation to Sydney. "No-no, neither you nor Dixon are right, but…I guess he's closer than you are. See, when you—" He stopped himself, his eyes focused on the scratched tiles of his office floor, and beseeched, "Do we have to talk about this, Ms. Bristow?"

"Oh, uh…" Sydney had assumed Marshall would be eager, if not overly so, to discuss his amazing skills and was now at a loss as to what tack she should try next. "I was just…curious, but if you're not allowed to talk about it or don't want to—"

"Erased files leave behind ghosts," he blurted out, his face a mask of torture and pain. His eyes were squeezed shut and she could tell from the way in which the centers of his cheeks were caving in that he was biting down – hard – on the inner walls of his mouth.

"Marshall, if you don't want to talk about it…"

"No, it's…" He shook his head and when he looked back in her direction, he'd forced his characteristically charming smile back onto his face. "Everything that you'd managed to download in Cape Town had been deleted. Probably by Agent Hicks right after he accessed whatever information he needed. But the erased files left behind a…trail of breadcrumbs, so to speak. It took me awhile, but I was able to piece together enough of the trail to recover that address. That's how I got it."

"Oh. So no piggyback file then? Oh, well. It was just a guess on my part. That sort of thing probably doesn't happen that often anyway, huh?" she dismissed.

"Not often, but it's not unheard of. Usually it's just inconsequential stuff: old lunch orders or a sentence or two from a random e-mail message." Marshall's eyes jumped to life as he chuckled and recollected, "Although there was this one time Malcolm inadvertently snagged half a memo detailing the possibility of an internal coup at FTL. Sloane really liked that one after I decrypted it for him."

"I'm sure he did. Thanks, Marshall." Sydney flashed him a smile and gave his shoulder a squeeze as she turned to leave. Her mission had been a success.

"Oh, uh…Ms. Bristow?" He wrung his hands and felt goose bumps pop up underneath his shirtsleeves. "I— I wanted to say this earlier, but didn't— I mean, I don't know if— I'm sorry about what happened to Agent Hicks. I know he betrayed SD-6 – and you – but I also know you two were…close. So I'm sorry you had to go through that. You shouldn't have had to."

Sydney froze where she stood, a jaunty half-grin still plastered on her face. Marshall was unveiling himself to be a man full of surprises. I also know you two were…close. Oh, if you only knew how close, she thought, her heart quickening in pace. She could still hear Noah, taste him, feel him…his callused hands tangled in her hair, caressing her cheek, warming her arms, sliding underneath her clothes… She knew Marshall had been sincere with his sentiments, but she also knew he was now watching her, studying her expressions, which, if she weren't careful, would only later compel him to ask "Why?"

"Yes, thank you," she replied, her voice sounding disastrously stiff and strained in her ears even though its timbre hadn't actually changed. "Noah— I mean Agent Hicks…he used to be a good friend, but… What's done is done. Thanks for the help with the Cape Town question. Good luck with the pen." She laughed (because she thought she should) before taking long strides out into the hallway.

…you two were…close. Close. Everything felt close to her these days. Everything.