Title: "the elements"
Chapter: {ice}
Summary: After an angry separation, Vaughn and Sydney's lives come crashing together again.
Category: Sydney/Vaughn angst
Author: Bella (bella@bellalumina.net)
Rating: PG-13; future chapters will be R/NC-17
Timeline: AU, takes place after "The Solution."
Thanks: to Souris for the beta-read, and to the reviewers for their kind words.
Disclaimer: Alias is not mine.
Note: Chapters will be posted weekly; the next update will be Monday, May 13.
{ice}
The next thing she remembers is waking up in a thinly-padded waiting room chair, clutching at the arm rests for dear life. The room is painted winter-white, the antiseptic color that seems to be universal to hospitals. Tile floors, mundane office furniture, muted floral paintings: the impersonal, sterile, faux-soothing hallmarks of hospital décor are not missing in this waiting room. She thinks that the air conditioner must be on full-blast, because she's shivering lightly. Her father is standing in a corner, talking to Devlin in a low voice. Weiss is pacing; he notices that she's awake, and he walks over to sit beside her. "Welcome back," he says gently, patting her arm awkwardly with a cool hand.
"Is he...?"
"Alive? Yes," Weiss says carefully.
"Surgery?"
"For the last five hours, so far."
"What do you know?" she asks, coughing and bringing her knees up to her chest.
He clears his throat and speaks quietly. "The bullet shredded a major artery. They've given him a ton of blood already."
She rests her forehead on her knees. "He didn't have a vest on."
Weiss shakes his head. "I have no clue why he didn't." He pauses, frowning at her. "Syd, we really shouldn't even have let you come here."
Her eyes are red-rimmed and angry as she turns to him. "Why not?"
"You know why. We took down the headquarters, Syd, but that doesn't mean that someone else isn't watching."
"I don't care," she replies icily. "You should know that. I have to be here."
He presses his lips into a thin line. "Your father's going to take you home."
"I'm staying here."
"No, Sydney, you're not. You can't do anything for him now. You need to go home and get some sleep. You're exhausted."
"I'm fine."
"You passed out as soon as we got him inside. A doctor checked you out. You've not been taking care of yourself very well, have you?" he asks, his voice even and certain.
"I'm fine, Weiss," she says firmly, swiping at her face, finally realizing that her fingers are still caked with his blood; she can fix that, she thinks, hungering for a faucet full of stinging cold water and some cheap pink liquid soap. Her shirt has a huge brown-red streak marring one side, and her pants are stained as well, but she figures those stains probably won't wash out at all. "I just need to wash my hands."
She stands on wobbly legs and hunts for a bathroom, finally finding one nearby and slipping inside. She avoids looking in the mirror as she scrubs the blood off of her hands. Her head is pounding, and she leans it forward to rest against the cool of the mirror. Inside the sterile, placid, frigid environment of the hospital, her insides feel completely different from their earlier state; as they were in turmoil, hot and angry and unsettled, they are now resigned, frozen, paralyzed, and cold. They know she won't leave him. She wonders why they even bother trying to convince her to go.
Three hours later, he's still in surgery; an hour after that, a balding surgeon garbed in bloodstained green scrubs walks wearily into the waiting room and gives them a weak smile. "He made it through," he intones quietly, and she sighs, leaning against her father's arm, which is as unyielding as ever.
The doctor sits down in a chair nearby, focusing on Sydney. "You're the spouse?" he asks.
She feels her cheeks redden, her hands cold as she clutches the armrest of the chair. "What? No ... no. No, I'm just a friend." She inhales shakily, trying to ignore Weiss's inquisitive stare. "Just a friend."
"Any relatives here at all?"
Devlin shakes his head. "His mother is out of the country. He doesn't have any other relatives in the States."
The doctor sighs. "Okay. Okay. Are you all friends of Mr. Vaughn's, then?"
"I've known the family for years," Devlin explains quietly, and Sydney feels her eyebrows raise in surprise. She knows that Devlin has given Vaughn second and third chances more than once, but she had no idea it was because he was a friend. Had he known Vaughn's father? She decides that it's possible. "I can take care of anything."
"Is there any way to contact his mother?"
Devlin frowns. "Not at this time of year. Her husband died in July, and now she goes to France for the summer every year. She makes sure that she can't be contacted."
The surgeon sighs, and she shivers involuntarily. "It's still touch and go, and it would be helpful to have a family member around...."
To make difficult decisions, she finishes mentally, burying her head in her knees.
Devlin sighs. "I can take care of anything," he repeats.
The doctor nods, standing, his shoes squeaking a little against the pristine white floor. She wants to say something; it's on the tip of her tongue, but she can't quite articulate it. It spills from her lips as he turns to leave. "When can we see him?"
He looks up, surprised at her blurted words, and frowns. "A family member could see him in a few hours, but you're not a relative, so hours are completely off-limits at this point."
She swears her blood freezes in her veins. "Then none of us will be able to see him," she argues tightly.
The doctor shrugs. "It's policy. I'm sorry."
"You can't do that!" she exclaims, rising from her chair; her father and Weiss both grab her arms and pull her back to her chair.
"We'll work on it," Weiss hisses, and she relaxes slightly.
A few hours later she's still curled up in the chair; Weiss hands her a can of soda, still chilled from the machine, and her fingers rebel against the icy temperature. She sets it down on a table beside her. "Anything...?"
"Your father's taking care of it. You'll be able to go in." He pops the top on his own soda and sits beside her. "He doesn't like Vaughn. He's been gritting his teeth the whole time."
"He's my father," she shrugs. "I can't believe this is happening."
"I talked to some of the other agents involved in the take-down," Weiss says, taking a long sip of his cola. "Sloane's in custody. SD-6 is gone, Sydney."
She shivers slightly at the words, sinking deeper into her chair. "Why did he come to the building, Weiss? No, don't look at me like that ... listen, he didn't have to come. He shouldn't have come."
"Don't you think you know why he wanted to be there?" he asked lightly, taking a drink and not looking at her.
She stops fidgeting. "What do you know?"
He gives her a look that warns her to shut up. "I know things that could get both of you in trouble," he says quickly, standing and tossing the smooth aluminum can into a trash receptacle before walking away.
Laying her head back against the wall, she exhales, deciding that of all the thousand scenarios she imagined for the end of SD-6, this wasn't ever one of them. She imagined a breezy, pleasant spring day when she would walk proudly out of Credit Dauphine, head held high, ready to move on with her life, ready to face her feelings for the man in her life. Never once did she think that she would end up crying miserably in a freezing cold hospital waiting room, smeared with blood, uncertain that said man would allow her into his hospital room even if the hospital staff assented.
"Come on," her father says tonelessly, shaking her shoulder roughly. She's not sure how long she's been sitting there. She knows he's probably disgusted with her and her behavior. Her father is a graduate of the Stiff Upper Lip Society of the '50s and '60s, and he frowns upon unnecessary emotions. His posture alone when he sees someone crying is an indicator that he's completely uncomfortable with any emotional display. She remembers skinning her knee on a bitingly cold day in January when she was seven -- a year after her mother's purported death -- and watching her father look on while Rosa soothed and swabbed and bandaged. The look on her face then made her certain that her father didn't love her; he was closed-off, uncertain, not quite helpless, but uncomfortable; he didn't want to be there, and that was devastating to her seven-year-old-self. "Come on," he orders again. "You can go see him if you want."
She looks up, willing herself to "pull it together" and "be strong," two of her father's favorite commands in any emotional situation. She nods, unfolding her arms and legs and mutely following him down the icebox-like hallway. They traipse through two corridors before coming up to a set of doors with "Intensive Care," printed on them in bold white letters. Her father hangs back. "I'm not going in. The nurses will tell you where he is." She nods; she figured as much.
The ICU is dead silent. She looks around, surveying the situation from all angles before proceeding. It's at that moment that she realizes that no matter how far removed she is from SD-6 and the CIA, she will always react and carry herself like a spy. Spy skills have been ingrained in her for so long that they're reflexes instead of conscious decisions. She approaches the circular nurses' station and asks a man with deep chocolate skin and a tag that reads "Alex" where she can find Michael Vaughn.
He leads her to a door that is partly propped open and pushes it carefully. "You're the fiancee?" he asks, seeming genuinely interested.
She's taken aback for a moment before she realizes that must be the cover story. "Yes," she says, trying to give him a wan smile. "I really appreciate this."
"It's no problem," he says, smiling gently. "Hospital rules are made to be a little flexible. He's just still under the anesthetic, by the way; he's not in a coma. They'll probably bring him out of it in a few hours."
She decides that she needs to have Alex explain his rule philosophy to Vaughn's surgeon. Smiling again, she thanks him softly and moves into the room, finally getting her first look at him.
Her first thought is that she's never seen so much plastic in her life: plastic machines, plastic tubing, a plastic ventilator tube taped to his pale lips. Her second thought is that he's not in the bed in front of her; that's not him, it's a waxy, pale mannequin. The healthy, tanned, alive Vaughn that she knows -- that she loves, whether he loves her back anymore or not -- is not there, and yet....
She exhales softly, moving to a chair that sits just beside the bed, and just watches him for a long while. He breathes slowly; or, rather, one of the machines at his bedside breathes slowly for him. His eyes are closed, and she realizes with a small smile that, even in his current state, he's thinking about something: the ever-present lines still furrow across his otherwise smooth forehead. Finally she summons the nerve to touch him, and reaches out a single fingertip, smoothing it down his forearm and hand. His skin is soft and warm, not the cold, corpse-like skin she expected. Scooting the chair closer, she lays her head down beside his hand and gently weaves her fingers through his, feeling salty tears trickle down her cheeks and drip onto the bleach-roughened white sheets.
And then, to her embarrassment, she falls asleep. She doesn't stir until Devlin's hand on her arm gently pulls her back to reality. "Sydney, you need to go back to the waiting room," he says, not harshly but.... She's not sure.
Raising her head, she sees that the nurse -- Alex -- is in the room also, discreetly changing IV bags that dangle from a metal tree. He gives her a comforting look, and she stands, wiping furiously at her cheeks. "Something wrong?"
"We've got someone here to take you back to the office. You need to finish a report for us."
She watches Alex working busily in her peripheral vision. "Now?" Devlin nods, and she exhales. "Okay. But I'm coming right back...."
He holds up his hands. "Can't stop you."
"Okay," she says, taking a quick look back at Vaughn, who is still unmoving in the hospital bed. All the fluidity seems gone from him, frozen into a block of skin and bone and blood. She bites her lip and walks back to the waiting room.
Weiss drives her to the CIA headquarters, and neither of them says a word on the drive. He pulls into the parking garage, then drives to his space; she tries not to look, but she sees Vaughn's car still occupying its spot nearby. Weiss takes her arm and steers her into the offices.
"I don't understand why they wanted to do this now," she says edgily, though she knows exactly why they want to talk to her quickly, when everything's fresh in her mind.
Weiss gives her a look, but doesn't say anything until they're on the elevator. "About what I said before...he told me, Sydney, what happened with the two of you. He was acting strange the night he had himself reassigned, and I figured it was you, so Driscoll and I took him out and got him drunk, and he told me when I drove him home."
She can't hold her tongue. "What, so he told you that we slept together and then I screwed him over?" she replies in a low voice.
His mouth drops open at her bluntness. "That's not...he didn't say exactly that."
"I'll bet that was the gist of it," she murmurs, looking down at her shoes.
"Isn't that what happened?" Weiss replies, not needling, but so shocked that it sounds as if he can't help asking.
She lifts a shoulder delicately. "Depends on your perspective, I guess. I can see why he would think that."
Weiss laughs, a short, harsh chuckle that was full of cynicism, not mirth. "How the hell do you change that around with perspective?"
The elevator door opens and they stop talking.
The hours she spends in the office plod by; she meets with Barnett, takes a lie detector test, talks with Davenport and other officers she's never seen before, and takes another tests. They videotape an interview -- she wonders briefly if it could be found someday like her mother's taped interview -- and tell her that she can go home. It's all cold, impersonal, and proper.
She sneaks out of the office before Weiss can find her, hails a cab, and trudges back into the hospital.
He's awake. She knows it before she even steps into the room. He is awake, and he's off the ventilator, breathing evenly on his own. His eyes light on her, wearily glance at her tired face and her blood-smeared clothes, and then close. He turns his head to the side, away from her, effectively shutting her out. She isn't deterred by the icy body language; he's often good at hiding emotion, but she's learned to decipher his feelings. It's when she hears his words -- a raspy, labored, whispered "go away" -- that she truly feels as if a bucket of cold water has been thrown on her. After everything ... after she bawled pathetically over him ... he's going to turn her away.
She should have expected this. She picks up the jacket she'd brought back from the CIA offices and leaves.
Posted: Monday, May 6, 2002
Next week: {earth}
Chapter: {ice}
Summary: After an angry separation, Vaughn and Sydney's lives come crashing together again.
Category: Sydney/Vaughn angst
Author: Bella (bella@bellalumina.net)
Rating: PG-13; future chapters will be R/NC-17
Timeline: AU, takes place after "The Solution."
Thanks: to Souris for the beta-read, and to the reviewers for their kind words.
Disclaimer: Alias is not mine.
Note: Chapters will be posted weekly; the next update will be Monday, May 13.
{ice}
The next thing she remembers is waking up in a thinly-padded waiting room chair, clutching at the arm rests for dear life. The room is painted winter-white, the antiseptic color that seems to be universal to hospitals. Tile floors, mundane office furniture, muted floral paintings: the impersonal, sterile, faux-soothing hallmarks of hospital décor are not missing in this waiting room. She thinks that the air conditioner must be on full-blast, because she's shivering lightly. Her father is standing in a corner, talking to Devlin in a low voice. Weiss is pacing; he notices that she's awake, and he walks over to sit beside her. "Welcome back," he says gently, patting her arm awkwardly with a cool hand.
"Is he...?"
"Alive? Yes," Weiss says carefully.
"Surgery?"
"For the last five hours, so far."
"What do you know?" she asks, coughing and bringing her knees up to her chest.
He clears his throat and speaks quietly. "The bullet shredded a major artery. They've given him a ton of blood already."
She rests her forehead on her knees. "He didn't have a vest on."
Weiss shakes his head. "I have no clue why he didn't." He pauses, frowning at her. "Syd, we really shouldn't even have let you come here."
Her eyes are red-rimmed and angry as she turns to him. "Why not?"
"You know why. We took down the headquarters, Syd, but that doesn't mean that someone else isn't watching."
"I don't care," she replies icily. "You should know that. I have to be here."
He presses his lips into a thin line. "Your father's going to take you home."
"I'm staying here."
"No, Sydney, you're not. You can't do anything for him now. You need to go home and get some sleep. You're exhausted."
"I'm fine."
"You passed out as soon as we got him inside. A doctor checked you out. You've not been taking care of yourself very well, have you?" he asks, his voice even and certain.
"I'm fine, Weiss," she says firmly, swiping at her face, finally realizing that her fingers are still caked with his blood; she can fix that, she thinks, hungering for a faucet full of stinging cold water and some cheap pink liquid soap. Her shirt has a huge brown-red streak marring one side, and her pants are stained as well, but she figures those stains probably won't wash out at all. "I just need to wash my hands."
She stands on wobbly legs and hunts for a bathroom, finally finding one nearby and slipping inside. She avoids looking in the mirror as she scrubs the blood off of her hands. Her head is pounding, and she leans it forward to rest against the cool of the mirror. Inside the sterile, placid, frigid environment of the hospital, her insides feel completely different from their earlier state; as they were in turmoil, hot and angry and unsettled, they are now resigned, frozen, paralyzed, and cold. They know she won't leave him. She wonders why they even bother trying to convince her to go.
Three hours later, he's still in surgery; an hour after that, a balding surgeon garbed in bloodstained green scrubs walks wearily into the waiting room and gives them a weak smile. "He made it through," he intones quietly, and she sighs, leaning against her father's arm, which is as unyielding as ever.
The doctor sits down in a chair nearby, focusing on Sydney. "You're the spouse?" he asks.
She feels her cheeks redden, her hands cold as she clutches the armrest of the chair. "What? No ... no. No, I'm just a friend." She inhales shakily, trying to ignore Weiss's inquisitive stare. "Just a friend."
"Any relatives here at all?"
Devlin shakes his head. "His mother is out of the country. He doesn't have any other relatives in the States."
The doctor sighs. "Okay. Okay. Are you all friends of Mr. Vaughn's, then?"
"I've known the family for years," Devlin explains quietly, and Sydney feels her eyebrows raise in surprise. She knows that Devlin has given Vaughn second and third chances more than once, but she had no idea it was because he was a friend. Had he known Vaughn's father? She decides that it's possible. "I can take care of anything."
"Is there any way to contact his mother?"
Devlin frowns. "Not at this time of year. Her husband died in July, and now she goes to France for the summer every year. She makes sure that she can't be contacted."
The surgeon sighs, and she shivers involuntarily. "It's still touch and go, and it would be helpful to have a family member around...."
To make difficult decisions, she finishes mentally, burying her head in her knees.
Devlin sighs. "I can take care of anything," he repeats.
The doctor nods, standing, his shoes squeaking a little against the pristine white floor. She wants to say something; it's on the tip of her tongue, but she can't quite articulate it. It spills from her lips as he turns to leave. "When can we see him?"
He looks up, surprised at her blurted words, and frowns. "A family member could see him in a few hours, but you're not a relative, so hours are completely off-limits at this point."
She swears her blood freezes in her veins. "Then none of us will be able to see him," she argues tightly.
The doctor shrugs. "It's policy. I'm sorry."
"You can't do that!" she exclaims, rising from her chair; her father and Weiss both grab her arms and pull her back to her chair.
"We'll work on it," Weiss hisses, and she relaxes slightly.
A few hours later she's still curled up in the chair; Weiss hands her a can of soda, still chilled from the machine, and her fingers rebel against the icy temperature. She sets it down on a table beside her. "Anything...?"
"Your father's taking care of it. You'll be able to go in." He pops the top on his own soda and sits beside her. "He doesn't like Vaughn. He's been gritting his teeth the whole time."
"He's my father," she shrugs. "I can't believe this is happening."
"I talked to some of the other agents involved in the take-down," Weiss says, taking a long sip of his cola. "Sloane's in custody. SD-6 is gone, Sydney."
She shivers slightly at the words, sinking deeper into her chair. "Why did he come to the building, Weiss? No, don't look at me like that ... listen, he didn't have to come. He shouldn't have come."
"Don't you think you know why he wanted to be there?" he asked lightly, taking a drink and not looking at her.
She stops fidgeting. "What do you know?"
He gives her a look that warns her to shut up. "I know things that could get both of you in trouble," he says quickly, standing and tossing the smooth aluminum can into a trash receptacle before walking away.
Laying her head back against the wall, she exhales, deciding that of all the thousand scenarios she imagined for the end of SD-6, this wasn't ever one of them. She imagined a breezy, pleasant spring day when she would walk proudly out of Credit Dauphine, head held high, ready to move on with her life, ready to face her feelings for the man in her life. Never once did she think that she would end up crying miserably in a freezing cold hospital waiting room, smeared with blood, uncertain that said man would allow her into his hospital room even if the hospital staff assented.
"Come on," her father says tonelessly, shaking her shoulder roughly. She's not sure how long she's been sitting there. She knows he's probably disgusted with her and her behavior. Her father is a graduate of the Stiff Upper Lip Society of the '50s and '60s, and he frowns upon unnecessary emotions. His posture alone when he sees someone crying is an indicator that he's completely uncomfortable with any emotional display. She remembers skinning her knee on a bitingly cold day in January when she was seven -- a year after her mother's purported death -- and watching her father look on while Rosa soothed and swabbed and bandaged. The look on her face then made her certain that her father didn't love her; he was closed-off, uncertain, not quite helpless, but uncomfortable; he didn't want to be there, and that was devastating to her seven-year-old-self. "Come on," he orders again. "You can go see him if you want."
She looks up, willing herself to "pull it together" and "be strong," two of her father's favorite commands in any emotional situation. She nods, unfolding her arms and legs and mutely following him down the icebox-like hallway. They traipse through two corridors before coming up to a set of doors with "Intensive Care," printed on them in bold white letters. Her father hangs back. "I'm not going in. The nurses will tell you where he is." She nods; she figured as much.
The ICU is dead silent. She looks around, surveying the situation from all angles before proceeding. It's at that moment that she realizes that no matter how far removed she is from SD-6 and the CIA, she will always react and carry herself like a spy. Spy skills have been ingrained in her for so long that they're reflexes instead of conscious decisions. She approaches the circular nurses' station and asks a man with deep chocolate skin and a tag that reads "Alex" where she can find Michael Vaughn.
He leads her to a door that is partly propped open and pushes it carefully. "You're the fiancee?" he asks, seeming genuinely interested.
She's taken aback for a moment before she realizes that must be the cover story. "Yes," she says, trying to give him a wan smile. "I really appreciate this."
"It's no problem," he says, smiling gently. "Hospital rules are made to be a little flexible. He's just still under the anesthetic, by the way; he's not in a coma. They'll probably bring him out of it in a few hours."
She decides that she needs to have Alex explain his rule philosophy to Vaughn's surgeon. Smiling again, she thanks him softly and moves into the room, finally getting her first look at him.
Her first thought is that she's never seen so much plastic in her life: plastic machines, plastic tubing, a plastic ventilator tube taped to his pale lips. Her second thought is that he's not in the bed in front of her; that's not him, it's a waxy, pale mannequin. The healthy, tanned, alive Vaughn that she knows -- that she loves, whether he loves her back anymore or not -- is not there, and yet....
She exhales softly, moving to a chair that sits just beside the bed, and just watches him for a long while. He breathes slowly; or, rather, one of the machines at his bedside breathes slowly for him. His eyes are closed, and she realizes with a small smile that, even in his current state, he's thinking about something: the ever-present lines still furrow across his otherwise smooth forehead. Finally she summons the nerve to touch him, and reaches out a single fingertip, smoothing it down his forearm and hand. His skin is soft and warm, not the cold, corpse-like skin she expected. Scooting the chair closer, she lays her head down beside his hand and gently weaves her fingers through his, feeling salty tears trickle down her cheeks and drip onto the bleach-roughened white sheets.
And then, to her embarrassment, she falls asleep. She doesn't stir until Devlin's hand on her arm gently pulls her back to reality. "Sydney, you need to go back to the waiting room," he says, not harshly but.... She's not sure.
Raising her head, she sees that the nurse -- Alex -- is in the room also, discreetly changing IV bags that dangle from a metal tree. He gives her a comforting look, and she stands, wiping furiously at her cheeks. "Something wrong?"
"We've got someone here to take you back to the office. You need to finish a report for us."
She watches Alex working busily in her peripheral vision. "Now?" Devlin nods, and she exhales. "Okay. But I'm coming right back...."
He holds up his hands. "Can't stop you."
"Okay," she says, taking a quick look back at Vaughn, who is still unmoving in the hospital bed. All the fluidity seems gone from him, frozen into a block of skin and bone and blood. She bites her lip and walks back to the waiting room.
Weiss drives her to the CIA headquarters, and neither of them says a word on the drive. He pulls into the parking garage, then drives to his space; she tries not to look, but she sees Vaughn's car still occupying its spot nearby. Weiss takes her arm and steers her into the offices.
"I don't understand why they wanted to do this now," she says edgily, though she knows exactly why they want to talk to her quickly, when everything's fresh in her mind.
Weiss gives her a look, but doesn't say anything until they're on the elevator. "About what I said before...he told me, Sydney, what happened with the two of you. He was acting strange the night he had himself reassigned, and I figured it was you, so Driscoll and I took him out and got him drunk, and he told me when I drove him home."
She can't hold her tongue. "What, so he told you that we slept together and then I screwed him over?" she replies in a low voice.
His mouth drops open at her bluntness. "That's not...he didn't say exactly that."
"I'll bet that was the gist of it," she murmurs, looking down at her shoes.
"Isn't that what happened?" Weiss replies, not needling, but so shocked that it sounds as if he can't help asking.
She lifts a shoulder delicately. "Depends on your perspective, I guess. I can see why he would think that."
Weiss laughs, a short, harsh chuckle that was full of cynicism, not mirth. "How the hell do you change that around with perspective?"
The elevator door opens and they stop talking.
The hours she spends in the office plod by; she meets with Barnett, takes a lie detector test, talks with Davenport and other officers she's never seen before, and takes another tests. They videotape an interview -- she wonders briefly if it could be found someday like her mother's taped interview -- and tell her that she can go home. It's all cold, impersonal, and proper.
She sneaks out of the office before Weiss can find her, hails a cab, and trudges back into the hospital.
He's awake. She knows it before she even steps into the room. He is awake, and he's off the ventilator, breathing evenly on his own. His eyes light on her, wearily glance at her tired face and her blood-smeared clothes, and then close. He turns his head to the side, away from her, effectively shutting her out. She isn't deterred by the icy body language; he's often good at hiding emotion, but she's learned to decipher his feelings. It's when she hears his words -- a raspy, labored, whispered "go away" -- that she truly feels as if a bucket of cold water has been thrown on her. After everything ... after she bawled pathetically over him ... he's going to turn her away.
She should have expected this. She picks up the jacket she'd brought back from the CIA offices and leaves.
Posted: Monday, May 6, 2002
Next week: {earth}