AN: Guys I am really flattered that you are so anxious about my work ::happy grin:: but I can't keep explaining the situation in individual emails. A combination of sleep deprivation and stupidity led me to accidentally delete VUV from the site (2am don't ask). I am therefore halfway through the painfully tedious process of reposting and sort of revising (encouraging emails are tastefully begged for).

I should be onto new chapters by Wednesday :-)

Thanks again guys for all your support, it's so great to know people are reading it.

AlexJ

BTW I would really like to know what you think of the rewrites, I'm really working hard to develop characters and such.

Chapter 4

"Sydney?"

When he was a child Aunt Trish had constantly labeled him 'gifted with sight', like it was something Vaughn would be proud to tell his already antagonistic peers at the water cooler. Unfortunately, in this situation those same senses were doing nothing but screaming the blatantly obvious.

How the hell did Matt know?

Vaughn was rarely thankful for his CIA training outside work, but now was one of the exceptions. Turning purposefully, he was careful to force the panic from his face. Instead, he replaced it with what felt like a tortured mockery of casualness. The exhaustion that had manifested itself in a migraine was being replaced, and not pleasantly, by adrenaline.

"Sydney who?" he asked neutrally, watching his cousin as the counselor moved cautiously passed Donavon to sit opposite him.

"You cry out that name over and over, you sound almost heartbroken" Matt said quietly as he leant forward. Michael's tortured cries had reminded him painfully of the time just after his uncle's death when mother and son were alternately plagued by harrowing nightmares.

There were ways to deal with this. It wasn't uncommon for agents to suffer dream reoccurrence, although he was relatively sure nothing like his present dreams were covered in Bennett's thesis making projects. He shoved aside the stab of guilt as he began to formulate the lies; he only felt a momentary pain as he relaxed his face into a half-mocking smile.

"You left your cushy job in Washington to emulate Bennett?" he asked. References to real people or places helped to rebuff suspicion.

"I'm here because Aunt Margaret wanted me to check on her baby boy," Matt corrected with a grin. Vaughn had begun to suspect that Matt's spontaneous move had been the work of his mother and her conspirator.

"It has absolutely nothing to do with your mystery girl?"

Matt shrugged, laughing softly. "Aren't we leaping ahead a bit here? Francie hasn't even passed the dreaded 'Vaughn interrogation.'" He was referring to Margaret Vaughn's compulsive need to see "her boys" settle down.

Matt loved Margaret as if she was his own mother, which in a way she was. His own mother, the youngest twin in a family of three children, had never really been a feature in his life. Karen Delorme was an artist living, as far as her son knew, in Geneva. Trish was the black sheep; Karen was the relative nobody talked about. While the eldest child had moved to America to marry William Vaughn, the younger Delorme sisters had pursued wild lifestyles, of which Matt was an unwanted by product.

Matt was jolted from his reverie to hear Michael murmuring some unheard agreement.

"I don't think she's even given up that dream of a double wedding" Michael reflected absentmindedly scratching Donovan's ears.

"No, it's always been her ambition, right up there with reforming my mother," Matt said jokingly but with an edge of seriousness.

A pause before, "She really liked Alice."

He frowned at the CIA agent's almost physical recoil.

The subject of his ex-girlfriend seemed to cause his cousin an odd sense of guilt. For the briefest of moments Matt's mind was filled with tabloid-like workplace affairs. Unfortunately, he usually ended up dealing with the distraught repercussions of theses acts.

"Just didn't work out, huh?" Matt asked gently, forcing the unwanted accusations from his mind.

In reality Alice had gotten tired of competing with Vaughn's pager, but Matt's phrasing was a less painful interpretation, so he nodded. "Something like that," he said despondently, reluctantly recalling Alice's tearful face when he rushed out in the middle of his carefully rehearsed breakup speech.his parting words spoken into a phone, "I'll be right there," before mumbling the empty platitude, "I'm sorry."

Any possible deepening of the increasingly uncomfortable conversation was mercifully forestalled by the same, relationship-ending beeping of his pager.

"I have to go," he said, standing up and picking up Donovan's leg from the table. "Enjoy your date tonight." Vaughn fought a stab of jealousy as he thought about Matt casually getting to know a woman he was developing feelings for.an encounter devoid of any complication, an encounter that was achingly normal.

It was funny; if he tried hard enough, Vaughn could still feel pleasure when he imagined himself and Sydney together. Wistful thinking was almost like an addictive poison: the more he got drawn into his feelings, the more he become driven by the twisted reality of their parents' legacy.

**

Jack Bristow felt his heart clench in sympathy as he regarded the young man before him. Eyes filled with barely concealed misery stared back him. Jack knew that feeling all too well, that feeling of despair, clinging to the one thing in a spiraling world that made even the slightest sense. The idealistic man trying to impress his disturbingly susceptible daughter was gone.

For some reason that saddened Jack more the he cared to admit.

Something that the elder Bristow was determined to instill in Michael Vaughn was that there was no time to wallow in self-pity. The CIA had sacrificed too much for this operation to be compromised, too much was at stake. He knew with certainty that the rigorous schedule he had been keeping would eventually incapacitate the talented young agent. Jack also knew why he was pushing himself down the slippery slope of punishment: it was all a desperate act of penance.

Jack had gone through the same process after Laura Bristow's "death."

In a way he had never really stopped.

"I am here to discuss the possible recruitment of Will Tippin"

Jack was privately relieved to see the almost reflective jealousy play across Vaughn's hardened expression.

It was a sign that Michael Vaughn's emotions were not as isolated as he probably wished them to be.

There was still hope.