Title: 3 Nights in Santa Barbara
Author: wolfish
Rating: PG
Time: Takes place after the fight scene between Sydney and 'Francie' in The Telling
Disclaimer: Alias belongs to J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot, and ABC. All quotes taken from Secret Agent Fan's transcripts @
Summary: Two years isn't long enough for Vaughn to get over Sydney, but three nights is an eternity.
A/N: This is what comes of listening to the City of Angels soundtrack. Dark, angsty, tragic, and nothing like my normal style of writing. Usually in even my saddest fics there is some ray of hope for my characters, but this…nothing. Like I said, not my usual style. It came completely out of nowhere. So with that warning, er, enjoy or whatever. And don't forget to leave anything you're thinking when you finish reading! Any and every thing you have to say is greatly, greatly appreciated.
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"Gone? That thought creates a deep shuddery feeling, like swallowing an earthquake."
--excerpt from Sheri S. Tepper's The Visitor
~~~~
The First Night
~~~~
I knew as soon as my hand touched the doorknob that something was wrong. Terribly, horribly, irrevocably wrong. A deep, awful, primitive terror gripped all of me: ice like artic frost traced a line of fire down my spine, spreading through my body to all my nerve endings, freezing everything in its path; shudders bloomed in my toes, progressing up the length of my legs, until they found the pit of my stomach, sticking there; my vision darkened to the point where I was quite literally swimming in darkness, my mind chasing itself in dizzying circles; and the warning bells went off in my head--not the cautionary tingling I usually get that alerts me to someone behind me--but the bells actually screamed--screamed until I nearly clamped my hands over my ears…except the noise was coming from inside my mind. Yet, humans are the only animals that have the capacity to ignore something so urgent as instinct, and in spite of myself, I opened the door.
It smelled like blood and fear--two things I have become acquainted with in my years--and death--something I don't know as well, but it's bred into a person to recognize that distinct odor. It was everywhere, it was on everything--the walls, the floors, especially in the bedroom, on the shattered glass, on poor Will in the bathtub, on that…that thing I had once called Francie--everything but one person, because she wasn't there. I searched the whole house, top to bottom and all the hidden corners in between, calling her name until my throat was raw with it, but she was gone.
Gone. That word is like a plague.
I felt like the sole survivor of some catastrophic disaster. Like I should be sitting in the back of an ambulance somewhere, with the lights whirling and the sirens blaring, huddled in a space blanket, my clammy fingers wrapped around a mug of something warm, telling the reporters and the cameras, "I don't know what happened…I don't know…I never saw it coming…"
As it was, I was sitting on the front of my car, staring at what may have been the most beautiful, clear night of stars I have ever seen in the city, and I was blind to all of it. I was waiting on the cars, the cars that would bring the people, the people who would clean up the mess inside, categorize it all into neat little baggies of evidence, and make up neat little tales for the neighbors to gossip about. They would make it as if it never happened. But the problem was, it had happened--it was happening--and I would never be the same because of it.
The car dipped as Weiss settled his weight next to mine. I didn't remember calling him--I barely remembered calling anyone, but there they were, there he was. He pressed the neck of a black trash bag into my unresponsive hands, holding it there until I finally had enough presence of mind to close my fingers around it.
"What is this?" I asked, even as I peeled back the opening and peered inside, stirring the contents with a probing finger. All the belongings I had packed into my drawer, every item of mine that had been in her house.
"I thought you might like your stuff back before the investigators and everybody came. Before, you know, they wouldn't let you take it away."
"Thanks," I muttered, my thoughts already roving elsewhere.
"The middle drawer. It's yours."
"Yeah?"
"It's just a drawer."
"I'm just saying it's a great idea."
She had offered the drawer as if it was nothing, but to me it was something. It was a foothold in her life, a declaration that I was not some passing phase, not just a releasing of pent up passions. My feelings were all returned in that one simple, careless act. Something. Something turned back to nothing when it was shoved into the large plastic bag clenched in my fists.
Weiss cleared his throat, preparing to broach some point he knew would upset me. "You've been here awhile now…and I was thinking…maybe you should go home. Get cleaned up, get some rest. There's really nothing to be done that we can't do without you. We're all trying the hardest we can--doing everything we can--and just for this once…could you leave this job to the professionals? I'm not saying that you have to give up your part in the search completely, but…get some sleep, man. It'll all be here for you tomorrow."
I wanted to yell all sorts of dreadful things at him for saying that to me. I wanted to tell him that tomorrow, tomorrow Sydney might be farther beyond our reach, might be dead, and tomorrow was too late. But my mouth betrayed me, forming words I hadn't asked it to, "Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'll do that."
The trip to Santa Barbara is indisputably the most confused, most unclear of all my memories of that nightmare. I remember staring, unfocused, into the depths of my trunk, at the small, nondescript brown suitcase nestled alongside the obsidian trash bag I had moments before placed next to it, and thinking what a waste it was. All our innocent planning, and all our putting-off, and when we were finally on the verge of doing what we had been wishing for…it was all gone. All for nothing.
I left the number I could be reached at with Weiss, hoping against hope that it was not a gesture made in vain.
It was only about five minutes away from the hotel that I recognized--allowed myself to recognize--what I was doing. I was running away. All those times I had dashed around gallantly, stubbornly, appealing to anyone that might be able to save her life…and I was just giving up, I was running away from my problems.
What made this time different from any other?
Why was this not the same as the time I had pulled the gun and threatened Hassan for her life…
"Give me the deactivation code!"
"Not until I have an agreement, in writing, signed by your superiors, guaranteeing that my family will be allowed entrance into the witness protection program."
"Give me the code you son of a bitch, or I'll pull the trigger."
"I have no doubt that's true."
Or all those countless occasions when I'd argued with Kendall…
"Let me make a personal appeal."
"Vaughn, everybody is working on this already--state, NSE, DOD."
"Look, you're probably going to say no to this but I want to go to India. I was stationed there for two years, I have relationships--"
"Go."
"Go?"
"I'll have a military aircraft waiting. This is totally back channel."
"You're just gonna--Are you trying to get rid of me?"
Or stood on Dixon's porch and pleaded my case…
"Sydney's in trouble."
"Respect my decision."
"I can't do that. Not when your decision may cost Sydney her life. You wouldn't tell Sydney how you infiltrated Kabir's so she found an alternative way in, which turned out to be faulty intel. She was captured and unless we find another confirmed access point, no one will be sent in to get her out."
"It's not that simple."
"Yes, it is! You will either help save Sydney's life or you won't."
Why? I would have lingered at the innermost gates of my personal hell and beseeched her safe return, but I wasn't given that choice this time. There was no one to ask, no one to intimidate, no one to beg, not the least inkling of where she'd gone. So instead of feeling hopeless, useless, and destroying myself in my futility, I distanced myself from all of it.
I know I must have scared the staff, looking like I did: a lone man staggering in, clutching a suitcase and a garbage bag so tight my knuckles were white, and dried blood on my shirt from where I'd tried to stop Will's bleeding while I'd waited on the medics. The man behind the desk actually shrank back from the shadows in my eyes, and I didn't blame him; nobody wants to look into the face of a drowning man.
I carried my own luggage to my room, and as soon as the door was securely shut behind me, I once again opened the trash bag, fishing out the picture of Sydney I had stolen from her house. It was really a beautiful photo of her, smiling carefree and untroubled at the person holding the camera--probably Danny I decided, then tried not to think about it anymore. I propped the frame up on the table and traced the lines of her face until I at last convinced myself to lie back on the bed--far too big and cold for one man by himself--and eased my eyes closed.
I ended up on the floor, sprawled under the comforter with the pillows piled under my head. I couldn't sleep in that bed, not without her. Not alone.
~~~~
The Second Night
~~~~
I woke up the next day with hope. There was hope in her smile beside the bed.
Sitting in one of the two chairs that floated like islands in the empty space of the room--the same place I had been all day--my feet digging holes in the carpet, I remembered how hard I had worked for those first smiles. Everyone had been well worth the effort, had been like…What had it been like? I stopped moving, my hands clenching around the armrests. Had I taken our time together so much for granted that I had forgotten those precious moments? It had been like…the sun coming out from behind the clouds, or opening a window in a stuffy attic, or the red and orange lights of dawn after the longest night of the year.
All those idealistic images that form lovesick poetry contained in two upturned corners of her mouth, a brief flash of white, and then it would be gone, drawn back into her solemn, forbidding front. But she had been a different person then, consumed with her hatred and her rage and her grief, she had mistrusted me and my intentions. She had believed that through sheer willpower and dedication she could eradicate Sloane and SD-6 in matter of weeks, months.
"Now, you listen to me, Mr. Vaughn. I appreciate what your job is here, even though I think you're a little young to be doing it, to establish a protocol between the CIA and their latest double agent. But I'm not sitting here to pick up the ins and outs of Langley procedure. I am sitting here for one reason only, and that is to destroy SD-6!"
"Hey--"
"After which I am out! I want no more of this spy crap, that's why I went to you in the first place. So, listen to me and I will hand you, in record time, the people who will render SD-6 useless."
"Record time."
"Two months. Tops. And then I am out. I walk."
She had never imagined that we would still be chasing the same man these two years and more, that humor--not purpose, since it waxes and wanes--would get her through those darkest, bleakest periods. I tried my best to make her laugh, when I could.
"You know any jokes? 'Cause I could use one."
"This grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, 'Hey, we have a drink named after you!' And the grasshopper says--"
"'You have a drink named Doug?'"
"Well, I was going to use Phil."
And when she couldn't laugh, I held her while she washed the pain down with her tears.
I was right about her, I had discovered one night not so long into it when her father stood her up for dinner: beneath her toughened exterior, she was just as human as any of us, scared and tired and lost, looking for a little light, searching for a hand to cling to. She chose my hand. When she crumbled, she called me, and I came without question, barely pausing to wonder what protocol I was breaking in doing so. She made it frighteningly easy for me to be her shoulder to cry on, her source of comfort.
"Okay, listen to me. There's something you need to know. When you first walked into my office with that stupid Bozo hair, I thought you were crazy. I thought you might actually be a crazy person. But I watched you, and I read your statement, and I've seen... I've seen how you think, I've seen how you work, I've seen how you are in this job. In this job, you see darkness. You see the worst in people and though the jobs are different and the missions change, and the enemies have a thousand names, the one crucial thing, the one real responsibility you have is to not let your rage, and your resentment, and your disgust, darken you. When you're at your absolute lowest, at your most depressed, just remember that you can always... you know. You've got my number."
I have never been prouder than those times when she chose to come to me over all others, when I was the only one able to coax the spark back into her eyes, the smile back to her lips. I will never forget when she stumbled into the offices after she found out about her involvement in Project Christmas, soaked to the skin, mascara running down her cheeks. She had come naturally into my arms, her fingers around my neck dripping rainwater down my collar, my hands slowly progressing up and down her back, attempting to rub some warmth back into her damp, chilly skin. I have never claimed to be particularly strong or brave or valiant or even ambitious, but with her it was effortless to pretend I was. When she was depending on me, I was solid, immutable, the only steady point in the entire universe, and if she had asked me that night, I could have stopped the world from turning.
The phone rang, clanging harshly in my ears, my thoughts fleeing before the sound like shadows, but there was no hazy hesitation or transition, my hand simply swung out automatically and caught the receiver up in mid-ring.
"Hello?"
There was voice on the other end, telling me gently that no, they hadn't found Sydney, or any trace of her either, but there was hope that maybe, possibly there could be…
I didn't wait to hear the rest of what the speaker had to say, but hung up in the middle of a sentence. I didn't need any false hopes, I already had enough of those.
Instead I turned to the picture, lifting eyes that had suddenly fallen dismally to the carpet, but there was nothing there. How could I have never noticed before that her smile was a little faked, a little strained around the edges, how it didn't reach her eyes? She had smiled because she had felt obligated with the camera turned on her, but her heart wasn't in it.
I paced off the distance between my chair and the lamp stand, scooping up the photo in one hasty motion, but closer inspection failed to change my impression of it.
With a sigh, I turned my head away and placed the frame back, facedown on the stained wood.
~~~~
The Third Night
~~~~
"I booked the hotel."
"No you didn't."
"Yes I did."
"You did?"
"Mm-hmm."
"Santa Barbara."
"Three nights starting tonight. I mean, it was probably the greatest phone call I've ever made."
"Well, you're a genius."
"Thank you."
If I had known that was the last time I would kiss her, I would have done it differently. I would have pulled her closer, held her tighter, longer, memorized the shape of her face, the feel of her hair…If I had known, I would never have let her out of the car, never let her go back into that lion's den. I would have kept her safe, saved her from all that anguish, all that she suffered there alone because I hadn't known, I hadn't guessed…
But, alas, it is both humanity's curse and blessing that we never know what is to come until it has passed us by; we were gifted with the awareness of both past and present, and that is almost more than we can bear. We spend far too much time already that should be used living worrying about tomorrow, without knowing what tomorrow will bring. Knowing the future would surely drive us all into madness.
By that third night, after the second phone call, I knew she was dead. I had no evidence to support that idea--in fact, there was a decided lack of evidence for any theories--but I had a gaping, black hole in me, whispering irresistibly in my ear that she was gone, giving me a gut feeling that transcended anything logical. It manifested itself in a nagging helplessness, a weighty anxiety that pressed down on me like some giant hand, a desperation that kept me pacing the floors in my inability to change the fate that had befallen her. I felt like crying, but I simply could not find the tears.
She was dead or insane--because it was quite possible she had been driven out of her mind by seeing one friend supposedly dead and being forced to kill the other; it would have been more than enough to steal the sanity of any lesser person. The image of her like that tormented me, to think she could live out the rest of her life with only vague memories of me haunting her, never knowing who I was or what we had shared--all the things I would carry with me for the rest of my days.
But either way, she was lost to me now.
I understood, then. I understood what Marcus Dixon had felt watching powerless as his wife's car went up in flames, holding his children, swallowing those pills, crouching inches from open air, wondering what life had to hold him here. I understood what Jack Bristow had experienced all that time in solitary confinement, understood why he had tried to allay it in alcohol, why he had pushed his daughter away. And I knew more than either of them ever would, something only those like Agent Lennox and I could identify; they knew the pain of losing what was, but I knew the pain of losing what could have been. All those things we had whispered under the cover of darkness, like we were afraid that if we spoke too loudly it would be stolen away, all gone before we had even had a taste of what we could have had. It was like watching a ripple you've made on an immeasurably deep pool of water, and watching it disappear.
I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't do it without her. I couldn't face the same thing day after day, pursuing a faceless enemy that escaped and changed and never ceased to exist. Sydney had been my first true introduction to that life, and the only reason stayed after the monstrosities I saw; it had never been the dignified, heroic business I had dreamed of as a lowly junior officer. I'm not strong or brave or any of that, and with her gone there was nothing left to bring that out in me, no motivation to carry me through. I couldn't be there, where her hands had touched, where her feet had traveled, where her words had echoed. I needed something more than her ghosts to survive on because they would surely nourish me on grief and fire my rage until I was the same as that woman that sat across from me in her angry red wig with her bleeding gums, and no one would be there to show me the way back. I needed something that couldn't remind me of her, something she had only talked about in a hushed voice like some deep-rooted secret, something she had never had. A normal life.
My hands were on the phone before I realized what I was doing, already dialing the numbers. I pried my fingers away, noting with distaste how the shook, either with reluctance or with weakness. I walked away, searching out the bottle of wine I had ordered like the rest of my meals from room service, and poured myself a small glass--only a thumbnail's height, but it was enough for my purposes. The rest would follow later.
Only then did I allow myself to settle back on the bed, to pick up the phone and press the numbers, to accept wholeheartedly the direction my life was taking, the magnitude of my decision. I was calling in my resignation. The ultimate compartmentalization
Even as the phone rang, I raised my glass to the ceiling, to the sky, maybe even to heaven itself, in a silent toast.
Here's to the dead, the glorious dead.
END.