Story: A world of chances, left behind
Chapter: Back from the dead.
Rating: PG 13 at the moment for minimal course language but the rating will probably change later when I get into it a bit more.
Disclaimer: I don't own it and if I did I can guarantee that the second season wouldn't have ended like it did. JJ Abrams owns it and he'll have it how ever he damn well wants
A/N: Okay it finally got to me. I said that I wouldn't do this but here I am, again. I was going to wait until I'd seen the ep but I guess that I'll have to improvise. Now you have to be nice to me because I haven't actually seen any of the second season of Alias as I live in Australia and 24 is currently ruling the Alias spot so bare with me. Please Read and Review. All advice and criticisms welcome. Thanks.
Chapter Summary: This picks up directly where 'The Telling' left off. Vaughn picks Sydney up in Hong Kong and he's got some explaining to do.
~*
Sydney stared at him. There was little else that she could do. The most amazing person that had ever entered her life was sitting in front of her, telling her that she had been missing for two years and nobody had any recollection of where she had been.
She gaped like a fish out of water and tried her hardest to remember how to breathe. The first words after an endless moment of silence were a stutter of confusion. "What? What? What the hell are you talking about?" She climbed on to her shaking feet and began to pace the small room. "I want answers! This has to be some kind of sick joke! Who the hell are you?"
Vaughn knew that time would need to be allowed before she came round to accept that she was no longer living in the world that she had left almost two whole years ago. "Syd, would you please sit down." He said putting his restless hands between his knees and holding them there.
"No! No, I will not sit down. What the hell is this? What have you come back from? Where's my father? Where's Will? What date is it? God help me." She folded her body in two at the waist and started to breathe in steady breaths.
Vaughn's heart broke. She was not the only one confused beyond belief but she was the main character in the whole messed up, thing, was the only word for it. "Look," He began climbing to his feet and walking to her, he touched her arm gently only to have her pull away and stalk across the room, "Syd. This is all messed up. You think I know anymore than you do, then you're wrong. I came back from my world, I don't work for the CIA anymore, I couldn't, not after you died."
"I'm not dead!" She yelled waving her arms around, knowing that this had to be some horrible nightmare that she had to wake up from. "I have to be dreaming! Tell me that I'm in a coma or something, and that you're just a figment of my imagination. Please tell me that."
"I wish that I could tell you that but then I'd be lying and I don't lie." He tried to reach for her again when she dared to move close enough to beg for a way out.
"Don't you fucking touch me!" She pulled herself into a tight ball and slid down the wall and onto the floor. She rocked back and forward in the fetal position. She wanted to cry but was too confused to let the tears come. She fought them, the same way she'd fight the nightmare that she was living in.
"Sydney please, let me help you." He crouched in front of her but didn't dare to touch her. "Let me take you back to LA. You can see Kendall and he'll help you. You need to get your life back in order. I promise that I'll explain everything to you on the plane. Please, let me help you." He held out a hand.
She stared at his out stretched hand. She didn't know if she should trust him or not. If this was her Vaughn then she had nothing to worry about, but there were so many unanswered questions. Questions that may never have answers. She would take her chances she decided and took the outstretched hand.
~*
She slept for a good part of the flight, leaving Vaughn to contact Kendall, arrange paperwork and start answering the questions that had started to circle in his own mind.
He avoided going near her as much as possible. What ever was going one in her mind at the moment was painful and the biggest pain was probably his betrayal. He eased his own mind by telling himself that he thought that she was dead. It had taken a long time but he's gotten past it, out of the CIA and over Sydney Bristow. He'd married, so what, it wasn't a crime. Maybe it had been in a moment of weakness but to spite himself, he had learned to love his wife, even if he didn't love her at first, he loved her now, more than ever. He wanted to go home to her, to his son and his dog and pretend that it was Sydney's nightmare and that he was never apart of it. Maybe it was selfish to want her out of his life, but he loved his wife, maybe he was afraid that he loved her more.
"Why are you watching me like that?" Sydney said opening one eye and lifting an eyebrow. "It's creepy." She sat up and rubbed at her tired eyes. She knew that it was real now and had calmed down enough to begin to process this new beginning. She was dirty and bloody, she discovered when she took a closer inspection of herself. She needed to shower and fast. She felt so dirty and so incredibly alone.
"I wasn't - ah" He rubbed the back of his head and placed one hand on his hip. "I didn't realize that I was even -"
"Don't worry about it." Sydney cut him off sensing the awkwardness and starting to feel the same way. "So are you going to tell me what I missed or were you going to let me sleep the whole way and make me guess?"
He sat, he didn't want to but he did. "There's some stuff that I haven't been cleared to tell you. Do you understand that?"
She nodded. She really wanted to scream and pull her hair but decided that acting like a spoiled little brat wouldn't get her anywhere with mature adults.
"Okay. First of all it's the year 2005 and Holly Cutex is the President, the first female president might I add." He gave her a history lesson to delay breaking any type of bad news, not that he thought any news he had was good news.
"Vaughn, I don't really care who the President is and how she got there, who she's been sleeping with behind her husband's back and what state the democracy's in. I want to know about me. What the hell happened while I was gone?" She got up to pace, dusting dirt and dried muck of her sweater as she went.
"Okay, but you asked." He said and stood to join her pacing. "You just disappeared. I went to your apartment to pick you up and the whole thing was just a wreck. Do you remember, we were going to go to Santa Barbara?"
"That's the last memory that I have." She smiled softly remembering that gentle moment in his car when he touched her and kissed her. "Well the good memory anyway. My last memory is passing out on the floor in my room and Francie was dead, I shot her. Michael, it's like it only happened yesterday. How can you stand there and tell me that I have missed two years of my life? It's just not fair. What happened in those years?" A question that was more directed towards herself then to Vaughn. She stared out the window. Clouds, endless sky in different shades of blue, it would haunt her and she knew it.
"I don't know what happened to you." He walked to her and stood behind her. She hadn't cried for her lost years yet, just when she saw him the first time in Hong Kong. She was so confused, but then again, who wasn't? "I ran inside but you weren't there. Francie - Allison was there. She was dead, she had bled to death on your bedroom floor. I searched all over the house, I found Will semiconscious in the bathtub but no sign of you. I called back up and broke down. Weiss took me home where I stayed for so long that I don't even remember. I quit the CIA and started working at a law firm in administration." He watched her back as it all came back in one painful reminder.
She kept her back to him as she looked out of the window. She had so many questions that she couldn't wait to ask anymore. She whirled around to face him, "What happened to Francie? Is she dead? Sloane planted Allison didn't he? Where's Will? Is he okay? How's my father? Did you catch my mother? Is Sloane dead? Tell me!" She gripped his shoulders and shook him. "Tell me!"
"I'll tell you what I know, which is next to nothing." He gripped her back to stop her from shaking him. Whether or not he meant to, he pulled her into his arms and just held her there. "Allison was sent in to take Francie's place and report back to Sloane. We don't know when she was put in place but we think that it was some where near the time that we brought SD6 down and Sloane went MIA. Speaking of, nobody's saw him for a while after you went missing, whether or not he's surfaced since, I couldn't tell you. Are you okay?"
She pulled away from him and strolled back to the chair that she had been asleep on and sat, she put her hands between her knees and focused on a spot on the floor. "I'm listening, please keep going, I need to know."
He also sat. "Syd, I don't know how to tell you this but - when Will was stabbed and strangled - he suffered a lot of brain damage and went into a coma."
She looked at him, desperation showed in her eyes and they finally started to well. "You said that he was okay. You said -"
He crouched in front of her and put his hands on her knees, "I know what I said. Sydney, Will's still alive and he is okay, but he suffered a lot of blood loss and the strangulation was bad, he's in a home. He'll spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and he has to be monitored constantly. I go and see him all the time. He has minimal brain damage but he still has his memory. Which is a good and bad thing when you consider what he's been through over the years. He'd really like to see you. He, unlike many of us, never believed that you were dead. He said that he wouldn't until he saw your lifeless body. I'm so glad that he was right." He smoothed out a piece of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. "He was one of the good ones."
Sydney smiled through her tear-streaked face. Her Will was in a wheelchair, he would never be the fun loving idiot he once was ever again. It made her sad. "I want to see him, I really do." She nodded before leaning back to look at the ceiling and running both hands through her hair. "What about my parents?"
"Disappeared." Vaughn said simply. "Nobody knows or pretends to know. Your father disappeared after you died, he made sure that I knew that it was all my fault that you were dead before he packed up and left. Nobody's seen him since that I know of and your mother escaped that night and nobody knows what happened to her either." He watched the emotions on her face swim from confusion, to love and back to confusion at the mention of her parents. "Kendall may know what happened to them or may have had a call from your father. That I really don't know."
She breathed in heavily and tried to beat back the tears. "And what about you? You're married. What's your wife's name, is she nice?"
"Syd -" Vaughn began but was just cut off.
"No really, I want to know." She sat and looked at him with keen interest.
He sat on the chair opposite hers in the little flying sitting area and sighed. "She's really nice. Her name's Kate and we have a son." Vaughn saw the wound gash deep in Sydney, he looked away and forced himself to keep talking. "His name's William, after my father of course. We're really happy. A typical family really. Pretty little house in the burbs and a dog. It's quite boring actually. No SWAT teams invading you house in the middle of the night, no waiting around, wondering if your wife will make it home from work in the afternoon."
The tears had gone and just left Sydney with a blunt anger that she was going to punch out of the next civilian that crossed her path. She climbed to her feet and stalked angrily across the cabin, entered the bathroom, slammed the door at her back and broke down crying.
~*
LA was, in a word, a dump. Litter lined the streets and the city seemed almost broken. Two years really screwed up the world. But Sydney found as she entered the big glass doors of the LA CIA field office that the building hadn't changed a bit and the buzz of the insides were much the same.
The same receptionist that had tended to her on her first trip in to the building was still sitting behind the powerful desk answering phones. She almost fell over when she saw Sydney. The whole room went amazingly quiet when they spotted Sydney alive and Vaughn back in the building.
"Do none of you have work?" Kendall asked stepping into view. The room imeaditly began to buzz again and Kendall crossed the room to shake hands with his two stray agents. "Come to my office."
They followed him. Neither of them had said more than they had to, to each other since the plane. They exchanged no glances, no words and no friendly gestures that they had once upon a time.
Once they were settled in Kendall's office, he was the first to speak. "Well Agent Bristow, I won't pretend that we were ever expecting to see you again. Or you Mr. Vaughn." He addressed each of them in turn. "Agent Bristow, I have to ask, will you be joining us again or will you be finding alternate means of living."
Sydney's throat was raw and she needed water. She spoke, her hoarse voice catching occasionally. "I don't feel as though I am equipped to answer that question at this time. I have just discovered that I have been missing for two years and I have no idea what happened to me in that time. As it happens, nobody else knows where I've been or what I've been doing because they all thought I was dead. I will however, agree to all necessary testing."
"That's good of you Bristow." Kendall spoke, "But not today. You need to rest -"
"That is not the policy." Sydney interrupted.
"I'm the boss and I make the rules. Fall in line, for your own sake. You're not in good shape Bristow. I'll have someone organize somewhere for you to stay and you can come in tomorrow for all necessary testing." Kendall began to pick up his phone to call his assistant.
"She can stay with me." Vaughn spoke and was glared at by both Kendall and Sydney.
TBC.
Chapter: Back from the dead.
Rating: PG 13 at the moment for minimal course language but the rating will probably change later when I get into it a bit more.
Disclaimer: I don't own it and if I did I can guarantee that the second season wouldn't have ended like it did. JJ Abrams owns it and he'll have it how ever he damn well wants
A/N: Okay it finally got to me. I said that I wouldn't do this but here I am, again. I was going to wait until I'd seen the ep but I guess that I'll have to improvise. Now you have to be nice to me because I haven't actually seen any of the second season of Alias as I live in Australia and 24 is currently ruling the Alias spot so bare with me. Please Read and Review. All advice and criticisms welcome. Thanks.
Chapter Summary: This picks up directly where 'The Telling' left off. Vaughn picks Sydney up in Hong Kong and he's got some explaining to do.
~*
Sydney stared at him. There was little else that she could do. The most amazing person that had ever entered her life was sitting in front of her, telling her that she had been missing for two years and nobody had any recollection of where she had been.
She gaped like a fish out of water and tried her hardest to remember how to breathe. The first words after an endless moment of silence were a stutter of confusion. "What? What? What the hell are you talking about?" She climbed on to her shaking feet and began to pace the small room. "I want answers! This has to be some kind of sick joke! Who the hell are you?"
Vaughn knew that time would need to be allowed before she came round to accept that she was no longer living in the world that she had left almost two whole years ago. "Syd, would you please sit down." He said putting his restless hands between his knees and holding them there.
"No! No, I will not sit down. What the hell is this? What have you come back from? Where's my father? Where's Will? What date is it? God help me." She folded her body in two at the waist and started to breathe in steady breaths.
Vaughn's heart broke. She was not the only one confused beyond belief but she was the main character in the whole messed up, thing, was the only word for it. "Look," He began climbing to his feet and walking to her, he touched her arm gently only to have her pull away and stalk across the room, "Syd. This is all messed up. You think I know anymore than you do, then you're wrong. I came back from my world, I don't work for the CIA anymore, I couldn't, not after you died."
"I'm not dead!" She yelled waving her arms around, knowing that this had to be some horrible nightmare that she had to wake up from. "I have to be dreaming! Tell me that I'm in a coma or something, and that you're just a figment of my imagination. Please tell me that."
"I wish that I could tell you that but then I'd be lying and I don't lie." He tried to reach for her again when she dared to move close enough to beg for a way out.
"Don't you fucking touch me!" She pulled herself into a tight ball and slid down the wall and onto the floor. She rocked back and forward in the fetal position. She wanted to cry but was too confused to let the tears come. She fought them, the same way she'd fight the nightmare that she was living in.
"Sydney please, let me help you." He crouched in front of her but didn't dare to touch her. "Let me take you back to LA. You can see Kendall and he'll help you. You need to get your life back in order. I promise that I'll explain everything to you on the plane. Please, let me help you." He held out a hand.
She stared at his out stretched hand. She didn't know if she should trust him or not. If this was her Vaughn then she had nothing to worry about, but there were so many unanswered questions. Questions that may never have answers. She would take her chances she decided and took the outstretched hand.
~*
She slept for a good part of the flight, leaving Vaughn to contact Kendall, arrange paperwork and start answering the questions that had started to circle in his own mind.
He avoided going near her as much as possible. What ever was going one in her mind at the moment was painful and the biggest pain was probably his betrayal. He eased his own mind by telling himself that he thought that she was dead. It had taken a long time but he's gotten past it, out of the CIA and over Sydney Bristow. He'd married, so what, it wasn't a crime. Maybe it had been in a moment of weakness but to spite himself, he had learned to love his wife, even if he didn't love her at first, he loved her now, more than ever. He wanted to go home to her, to his son and his dog and pretend that it was Sydney's nightmare and that he was never apart of it. Maybe it was selfish to want her out of his life, but he loved his wife, maybe he was afraid that he loved her more.
"Why are you watching me like that?" Sydney said opening one eye and lifting an eyebrow. "It's creepy." She sat up and rubbed at her tired eyes. She knew that it was real now and had calmed down enough to begin to process this new beginning. She was dirty and bloody, she discovered when she took a closer inspection of herself. She needed to shower and fast. She felt so dirty and so incredibly alone.
"I wasn't - ah" He rubbed the back of his head and placed one hand on his hip. "I didn't realize that I was even -"
"Don't worry about it." Sydney cut him off sensing the awkwardness and starting to feel the same way. "So are you going to tell me what I missed or were you going to let me sleep the whole way and make me guess?"
He sat, he didn't want to but he did. "There's some stuff that I haven't been cleared to tell you. Do you understand that?"
She nodded. She really wanted to scream and pull her hair but decided that acting like a spoiled little brat wouldn't get her anywhere with mature adults.
"Okay. First of all it's the year 2005 and Holly Cutex is the President, the first female president might I add." He gave her a history lesson to delay breaking any type of bad news, not that he thought any news he had was good news.
"Vaughn, I don't really care who the President is and how she got there, who she's been sleeping with behind her husband's back and what state the democracy's in. I want to know about me. What the hell happened while I was gone?" She got up to pace, dusting dirt and dried muck of her sweater as she went.
"Okay, but you asked." He said and stood to join her pacing. "You just disappeared. I went to your apartment to pick you up and the whole thing was just a wreck. Do you remember, we were going to go to Santa Barbara?"
"That's the last memory that I have." She smiled softly remembering that gentle moment in his car when he touched her and kissed her. "Well the good memory anyway. My last memory is passing out on the floor in my room and Francie was dead, I shot her. Michael, it's like it only happened yesterday. How can you stand there and tell me that I have missed two years of my life? It's just not fair. What happened in those years?" A question that was more directed towards herself then to Vaughn. She stared out the window. Clouds, endless sky in different shades of blue, it would haunt her and she knew it.
"I don't know what happened to you." He walked to her and stood behind her. She hadn't cried for her lost years yet, just when she saw him the first time in Hong Kong. She was so confused, but then again, who wasn't? "I ran inside but you weren't there. Francie - Allison was there. She was dead, she had bled to death on your bedroom floor. I searched all over the house, I found Will semiconscious in the bathtub but no sign of you. I called back up and broke down. Weiss took me home where I stayed for so long that I don't even remember. I quit the CIA and started working at a law firm in administration." He watched her back as it all came back in one painful reminder.
She kept her back to him as she looked out of the window. She had so many questions that she couldn't wait to ask anymore. She whirled around to face him, "What happened to Francie? Is she dead? Sloane planted Allison didn't he? Where's Will? Is he okay? How's my father? Did you catch my mother? Is Sloane dead? Tell me!" She gripped his shoulders and shook him. "Tell me!"
"I'll tell you what I know, which is next to nothing." He gripped her back to stop her from shaking him. Whether or not he meant to, he pulled her into his arms and just held her there. "Allison was sent in to take Francie's place and report back to Sloane. We don't know when she was put in place but we think that it was some where near the time that we brought SD6 down and Sloane went MIA. Speaking of, nobody's saw him for a while after you went missing, whether or not he's surfaced since, I couldn't tell you. Are you okay?"
She pulled away from him and strolled back to the chair that she had been asleep on and sat, she put her hands between her knees and focused on a spot on the floor. "I'm listening, please keep going, I need to know."
He also sat. "Syd, I don't know how to tell you this but - when Will was stabbed and strangled - he suffered a lot of brain damage and went into a coma."
She looked at him, desperation showed in her eyes and they finally started to well. "You said that he was okay. You said -"
He crouched in front of her and put his hands on her knees, "I know what I said. Sydney, Will's still alive and he is okay, but he suffered a lot of blood loss and the strangulation was bad, he's in a home. He'll spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and he has to be monitored constantly. I go and see him all the time. He has minimal brain damage but he still has his memory. Which is a good and bad thing when you consider what he's been through over the years. He'd really like to see you. He, unlike many of us, never believed that you were dead. He said that he wouldn't until he saw your lifeless body. I'm so glad that he was right." He smoothed out a piece of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. "He was one of the good ones."
Sydney smiled through her tear-streaked face. Her Will was in a wheelchair, he would never be the fun loving idiot he once was ever again. It made her sad. "I want to see him, I really do." She nodded before leaning back to look at the ceiling and running both hands through her hair. "What about my parents?"
"Disappeared." Vaughn said simply. "Nobody knows or pretends to know. Your father disappeared after you died, he made sure that I knew that it was all my fault that you were dead before he packed up and left. Nobody's seen him since that I know of and your mother escaped that night and nobody knows what happened to her either." He watched the emotions on her face swim from confusion, to love and back to confusion at the mention of her parents. "Kendall may know what happened to them or may have had a call from your father. That I really don't know."
She breathed in heavily and tried to beat back the tears. "And what about you? You're married. What's your wife's name, is she nice?"
"Syd -" Vaughn began but was just cut off.
"No really, I want to know." She sat and looked at him with keen interest.
He sat on the chair opposite hers in the little flying sitting area and sighed. "She's really nice. Her name's Kate and we have a son." Vaughn saw the wound gash deep in Sydney, he looked away and forced himself to keep talking. "His name's William, after my father of course. We're really happy. A typical family really. Pretty little house in the burbs and a dog. It's quite boring actually. No SWAT teams invading you house in the middle of the night, no waiting around, wondering if your wife will make it home from work in the afternoon."
The tears had gone and just left Sydney with a blunt anger that she was going to punch out of the next civilian that crossed her path. She climbed to her feet and stalked angrily across the cabin, entered the bathroom, slammed the door at her back and broke down crying.
~*
LA was, in a word, a dump. Litter lined the streets and the city seemed almost broken. Two years really screwed up the world. But Sydney found as she entered the big glass doors of the LA CIA field office that the building hadn't changed a bit and the buzz of the insides were much the same.
The same receptionist that had tended to her on her first trip in to the building was still sitting behind the powerful desk answering phones. She almost fell over when she saw Sydney. The whole room went amazingly quiet when they spotted Sydney alive and Vaughn back in the building.
"Do none of you have work?" Kendall asked stepping into view. The room imeaditly began to buzz again and Kendall crossed the room to shake hands with his two stray agents. "Come to my office."
They followed him. Neither of them had said more than they had to, to each other since the plane. They exchanged no glances, no words and no friendly gestures that they had once upon a time.
Once they were settled in Kendall's office, he was the first to speak. "Well Agent Bristow, I won't pretend that we were ever expecting to see you again. Or you Mr. Vaughn." He addressed each of them in turn. "Agent Bristow, I have to ask, will you be joining us again or will you be finding alternate means of living."
Sydney's throat was raw and she needed water. She spoke, her hoarse voice catching occasionally. "I don't feel as though I am equipped to answer that question at this time. I have just discovered that I have been missing for two years and I have no idea what happened to me in that time. As it happens, nobody else knows where I've been or what I've been doing because they all thought I was dead. I will however, agree to all necessary testing."
"That's good of you Bristow." Kendall spoke, "But not today. You need to rest -"
"That is not the policy." Sydney interrupted.
"I'm the boss and I make the rules. Fall in line, for your own sake. You're not in good shape Bristow. I'll have someone organize somewhere for you to stay and you can come in tomorrow for all necessary testing." Kendall began to pick up his phone to call his assistant.
"She can stay with me." Vaughn spoke and was glared at by both Kendall and Sydney.
TBC.
