Title: Fade (Chapter 2)
Author: agent otter
Summary: "It's safer that way, to remain constantly on the move. But this isn't the first time that they've sacrificed safety for something else." Sydney/Vaughn
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own Alias or anything having to do with it, but if I did I'd be seeing a lot more of Bradley Cooper. And I mean that in several literal ways.
Author's note: I'm just making this up as I go along, and it's not beta'd or even spellchecked. (Yay for crappy Notepad.) But I hope you enjoy it anyway.
He stops in Victorville to clean out the van: vacuuming the carpets, wiping down the panels and surfaces and everything she might've touched. He takes the mattress out of the back, throws it in a dumpster behind a grocery store and then sets it on fire for good measure. When he's satisfied that the vehicle's clean, he abandons it on the side of the road and walks to the Motel 6.
The first thing he does is secure the room, checking it over thoroughly for hidden bugs or surveillance. He expects nothing, and finds nothing. The second thing he does is take a long, hot shower, scrubbing the scent of her from his skin, washing away her fingerprints, the taste of her kisses, every last trace of her. When he gets out and wraps himself in a towel, he shivers despite the humid air trapped in the bathroom, and he thinks, She's safe now, she's safe, she's safe, no one can touch her.
Not even me.
His skin feels immaculate and raw as he slips between the covers. The bed is cold, and he doesn't sleep well.
He makes the rest of the drive to Los Angeles in a rental car, and he's on his way before the sun rises, wrapped up in the pre-dawn darkness to avoid traffic, but he'd much rather avoid the thoughts that clamor around in his head in the early-morning quiet. It's still early when he arrives in LA, and he stops by his apartment to change out of his jeans and into a suit, then drives to the Joint Task Force building in his rental car.
His arrival does not go unnoticed. Even junior officers who he's quite certain he's never met give him speculative and wary glances as he walks by. He passes Weiss in the corridor, and his friend gives him a faint smile and a clap on the shoulder, and says: "Debrief in ten."
Vaughn makes his way to his own desk, but he doesn't expect to find refuge and quiet there; his desk is pressed face-to-face with Jack Bristow's, forming one large work space between them. The paperwork he'd left spread over the surface when he'd driven out of Los Angeles is gone now, neatly cleared away.
Jack meets his eyes as he collapses into his chair, and there's a long moment of silent communication between them. Vaughn wonders, sometimes, when and how that connection was forged, but he finds it difficult to concentrate on the past without a little more privacy, a little more time, and a lot more liquor. He lets the thought pass out of mind.
"She's alright?" Jack says, after a moment's hesitation.
"She's fine," Vaughn answers. "She left me in Phoenix."
He curses himself as soon as the words leave his mouth. He'd meant to say I dropped her off in Phoenix. But it's too late to take it back. Jack just blinks at him, nods as if the information hadn't been quite so telling as all that, and turns his attention back to the paperwork on his desk. He reads the same page three times.
"I didn't mean to say that," Vaughn says, dropping his own pen and giving up the pretense of work. "But she left me in Phoenix. She left." He massages the back of his neck with one hand, but mostly because it's an excuse to intricately study the unremarkable plastic surface of his desk. "I'm never going to get her back, am I, Jack?"
He doesn't get a chance to answer. Weiss stops by their desks to remind them again of the debriefing, and Vaughn can feel Kendall's eyes on the back of his neck from across the room. Bristow gives him a sad smile, and clasps a hand tightly on the younger man's shoulder as he stands, bracing his weight on the cane with his other hand. They walk slowly toward the conference room, with Vaughn matching Jack's hobbling pace, and when they're finally inside, Kendall closes the conference room door with an air of finality.
"Agent Vaughn, I trust you had an enjoyable vacation," Kendall says, as the agents take their seats. There's something in his voice that warns, I know more than you want me to.
"Yes, sir," Vaughn replies, and he leaves it there.
Kendall's eyes narrow. "And how is Agent Bristow?"
Don't panic, don't panic, Vaughn repeats to himself. To Kendall, he says, "He seems to be doing well, sir, but maybe you should ask him yourself." He looks at Jack, as if in expectation of a full report on the senior agent's physical condition, but his eyes beg for help.
"Knee feels just fine today," Jack says, and his voice is a warning rumble like distant thunder fast approaching. "Now can we carry on with this debrief? I've got a lot of work to do."
* * *
She takes three full days just to travel away from Phoenix, but she hits some stores first. New clothes, new hair, different makeup, and she's still amazed at how easy it is to create a stranger in the mirror. She buys a used car and starts driving, and at the end of a blur of roadside diners and double yellow lines, she finds herself in Denver. She only stays for two days, then she moves on. Cheyenne. Boise. El Paso. Cedar City. She sticks to the larger cities, where her comings and goings won't be noticed or remarked upon by the locals, but she still feels uneasy. She takes a week in Mexico, in Ciudad Obregon, but she's restless on her feet, and paranoia makes her leave town.
They find her just outside of Wichita.
She's been carelessly lately, and they catch her easily, but she's difficult to hold on to, and none of them survive her daring escape. After that she's more careful, but it does little good; the hounds have caught her scent and she can't seem to shake them.
She makes the call out of desperation, late on a Friday night, from a motel in Abilene, Texas. She nearly loses her nerve, but he picks up on the second ring.
"You don't know anything about me," she says, skipping over the greetings and pretenses.
There's a pause, and she can almost hear him shaking his head. "You're wrong. I know you better than you want anyone to know you. Isn't that why you left?"
"I've killed people."
"Join the club."
"I killed my best friend." A sob threatens to escape her mouth, but she catches it in her throat, smothers it with ruthless expertise.
"I killed my dog."
She'd been prepared to carry on with the self-recriminations, but he's stopped her cold. Her jaw is dangling open and she can do nothing but blink stupidly for a few moments, then she manages to choke out, "You killed Donovan?"
"Well, no. I just made that up. But you didn't kill your best friend, either, so I sort of figured we were heading into fiction territory and I should embellish."
She wants to scream at him, utilizing curse words in a wide range of languages, but she can't seem to do it. She finds herself smiling instead. "How is Donovan really?"
"He misses you." He's smiling, too; she can hear it in his voice. "He thinks that my skills in the belly-rubbing arts pale in comparison to yours. Though I don't think he minds never being locked out of the bedroom anymore."
Sydney's smile fades away, and she catches her lower lip between her teeth. It's a tell, but he isn't there to see it, so she doesn't bother to suppress it. "Not ever?"
He sighs, and that's a tell too. "No, now I just leave the door open during the wild orgies."
She laughs, almost in spite of herself, and and she pictures him on the other end of the line, sitting on his couch, shoes off, feet up, looking relaxed. There would be a tension in his body, detectable to her eyes if she were there, but she can hear it in his voice regardless, and it's mixed up with love and longing and frustration. But they're chatting like it's a regular Friday night and they're about to make plans for dinner and a movie and she'll be staying at his place tonight and locking the dog out of the bedroom because he likes to jump up on the bed to see what all the excitement's about...
"I shouldn't have called you, before," she says suddenly, because it's what she's been wanting to say all along. "When I asked you to come and get me. I put us both in danger -- but I always do, don't I? -- and it was a stupid thing to do. I'm sorry I left like that in Phoenix."
"Sydney--"
"It's not even that it would make it easier for them to track me, really, or that it messed up some perfect life I was having. I don't regret any of it for those reasons."
"But you do regret it?" His voice cracks as a sob almost escapes. It's understandable, she thinks, because he never could be a ruthless killer like her, even when all they're ruthlessly killing are the emotions that choke them.
"I regret that it hurt you," she clarifies. "Because I know that it did. I did. And it was selfish. This whole thing has been selfish."
There's a pause as he thinks over the implications of that statement, and she finds herself giving very intense scrutiny to the pattern of the worn bed-spread she's sitting on. It's something awful and floral, and its uniformity is interrupted every once in awhile by old stains. She doesn't want to know what they are.
"This whole thing," Vaughn finally says. "You mean the past year and change. You mean you're--" He can't seem to finish the sentence. Doesn't want to jinx it.
"This doesn't make things any better, does it? It just makes them worse." She has to suck in a breath before she can speak again. That sob is crawling up her throat again, looking for a way to escape. "I'd like to come home. Can you meet me in Phoenix?"