Um, here's the next chapter everyone, but I'd like to add an extra warning before you read this...it's not pleasant, okay? Some of the stuff Sloane and Irina do to Syd in here is....disturbing. And slightly sadistic. And not exactly S/V friendly either, but let's just remember that I am a DEVOTED S/V SHIPPER!

WE SHALL BELIEVE, okay?

And we shall try and get the chapters out more frequently too.

And the reason why there's no dedication on this one is becuase of the previous note...

CHAPTER SIX
THEN [AND NOW]

Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouhelpmehelpmyself

She pushes at the barriers, shoving aside the heavy, solid brick walls [let me out let me in]

She's in a dark alleyway, somewhere she's been before…it's raining-

She's drenched to the bone, crying

[you took away my choices in life]

she's in his arms

it's safe

want to stay here forever

please don't send me back

don't go don't go don't go don't go

but he's slipping away

green eyes green eyes green eyes man who haunts my dreams stay awhile please who are you?

Green goes black/black goes white/white goes blue

Blue eyes blue eyes blue eyes why is this wrong?

"Darling, what's wrong?"

She's sweating heavily, flat on her back in bed.

It's the fourth nightmare in as many days.

"Nothing. Nothing's wrong, Danny. Go back to sleep. I'm fine."

Her words are hollow, empty, but the lies roll easily off her tongue.

That's something she's noticed lately. Lies come easily to her [too easily].

And sometimes when she's driving she checks to make sure that no one's following her.

She has flashes sometimes, flashes of people she doesn't know [a caring woman, dark skinned, concerned, crying alongside her/a blond haired, blue eyed guy with preppy clothes] places she's never been [a icy place, bitterly cold/a graveyard, grass around the graves except for one muddy patch/a funeral – two, actually].

She sees things she shouldn't [pier/tears/trainstation/iminifyouneedme/restaurantweshouldgiveitproperconsideration]. She does things that are wrong [she's a banker, but she's terrible at maths].

But she's happy [or so she says to herself].

She has an adoring husband, a wonderful daughter, a beautiful home.

She smiles during the day [but wakes to nightmares about green eyes at night.]

Everything's right but everything's wrong.

* * *
She's walking in a park one day when she sees a man playing with a dog and freezes.

[see you when I get back then/actually no, you won't/I've been reassigned/My guardian angel]

She shakes her head violently, muttering under her breath about ghosts and green eyed men.

She writes it off as déjà vu.


* * *
The next time it's the sight of her husband's mother [tall, dark haired woman, with a vaguely European, not British accent]

She's familiar [curiously so, as a matter of fact Sydney muses].

"Hello, Sydney dear!"

She's taken aback a little by this enthusiastic welcome [she has a flash of another welcome/I've waited thirty years for this…] and doesn't exactly know how to respond.

"It's good to see you again, [LauraIrinaMom?] Irina."

Irina [yes, yes, that was a safe name] kisses her daughter-in-law [daughter in fact] on the cheek and walks over to her granddaughter's cot.

"Hello, sweetheart," she coos [not the One, but adorable nonetheless, Laura muses over the girl who bears her name], petting the now year old baby girl on the head, stroking the dark curls gently.

* * *

The nightmares that night were more vivid than usual, Sydney remembers with a shudder.

Truth takes time/a sharp sudden pain in her shoulder/there's no drug like adrenaline/

Dad tells me you're going to Panama/I want you to know, Sydney, I love you/I haven't earned very much/

Truth takes time

Earrings beeping/

Truth takes time

morse code/

Truth takes time

* * *

She wakes screaming again [bites tongue so hard she draws blood to try to stop the screams from waking Danny and Laura]

Sark lies beside her, a reasonably happy man ["loving" wife, pretty baby daughter, nice home…what more could a man want?]

Sydney, he thinks, suspects nothing of her previous life [that's the way they want it, after all].

It's a pleasing thought, really, to know that your once worse enemy now sleeps peacefully [or so he thinks] beside you at night, oblivious of her previous life [spy, meet banker. Spy, become banker. Banker, become wife. Wife, become mother.]

But when Sydney wakes beside him screaming "Vaughn!" and sobbing "Please, just hold me," over and over [will she ever shut up, he asks silently], even Alistair Sark ["Danny Hecht" now, he reminds himself. Danny. Always Danny] must admit that there is a problem.

* * *
Arvin Sloane looks up from his work the next day to find a not exactly welcome guest.

"Mr. Sark." His words are harsh, clipped [he shouldn't be here.]

"Hello, Arvin."

Sloane frowns at this rather unwelcome use of his first name, but doesn't kick him out of his office [not that he's not tempted, of course], but instead interjects firmly before Sark continues speaking.

"Sark! What are you doing here? I thought we'd discussed this already. Sydney cannot be allowed to suspect any links between us except for the normal family connections."

"Oh, relax, Arvin. Sydney will just think I'm here playing the doting husband and making a surprise visit to my lovely wife," Sark drawled nauseatingly, "She really has no idea, does she?"

"She certainly shouldn't have any idea. That was what the treatments were for, after all."

"Well then, I'm afraid to admit that they've failed."

"What do you mean they've failed?"

He's up out of his chair by now, obviously enraged, wondering where on earth this British upstart got off by telling him that his doctors [the finest around] had failed.

"I mean that last night she woke screaming the name of her CIA handler."

"Mr. Vaughn."

"Yes."

He sits back down a bit deflated [like a pompous hot air balloon that's had all it's air taken away from it, Sark reflects with great satisfaction], certainly not having expected this.

"This...is most unusual. And it certainly shouldn't have happened. It really is a pity we had to dispose of the scientists responsible for this treatment…but they just posed too great a security risk to take a chance with…" he muses, turning over possible solutions to this most unexpected problem.

"All right, Sark. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I'll let you know how we decide to proceed."

And with the pressing of a button on Sloane's desk, the doors to his office fly open, obviously "inviting" Sark to leave.

Sark exits, muttering under his breath, a characteristically "Sarkian" sneer on his face.

* * *

When Sark gets home, there's an email waiting for him in his inbox, directing him to take Laura to a nearby park once Sydney gets home.

He exits from his mail program and quickly wipes a guilty expression from his face as he hears a key in the lock of the front door.

"Oh, hello sweetheart!" he says, walking over to kiss Sydney on the cheek and take some shopping bags from her hands, "And how's Daddy's little angel today?"

"Alice said she slept well this afternoon, but I'm afraid she won't sleep well tonight. And I'm getting a headache."

"Syd, why don't you go and have a nap while I take Laura out to the park to tire her out?"

"Would you?"

"It's fine- I could really do with the exercise, actually."

"Great," she says, handing Laura to Danny [he's never liked children-it's probably the hardest part of this cover].

He walks out of the house [it was a rather lavish house, he thought, almost too lavish-well, too ornate, anyway, he thought-he preferred a more modern, sleek design], his "daughter" in his arms, and his wife off to bed.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Sloane knocked on the door to Sydney's bedroom [he had had a key to the Hecht's house made without their knowledge sometime ago, just in case something like this happened].

Hearing no sound coming from within, he opened the door quietly and looked in. Seeing only Sydney's sleeping form, he gestured the team [eight ex-Army commandos, two medics, because it never hurts to be safer rather than sorry, especially when Sydney Bristow is involved] into the room.

"Treat her carefully," he cautioned the team. "We don't want any visible injuries, remember. She can't remember any of this."

One of the medics slowly injected something into Sydney's arm, "It's just a sedative, in case she wakes up, Mr. Sloane."

"Good. Now let's get out of here."

They loaded her onto a stretcher and carried her out carefully, down the back stairs and into a delivery van parked at the back of the house.

* * *

Irina watched in pain as the medics went to work on her daughter, hating herself [hating her daughter, hating Rambaldi and his prophecy, hating Arvin Sloane…hating the people who took both her and her daughter and put them on this twisted path, puppets of a 15th century prophet] as she saw her daughter cry out in pain as they sent an electric jolt throughout her body.

Sydney wore a set of headphones on her ears. Irina knew exactly what was being played through them [how can I call myself a mother after this?]-as a matter of fact, she had gathered the tapes being played through some of her CIA sources.

There was a warehouse, Irina knew, where Sydney and her handler Vaughn had met regularly to discuss her missions.

The CIA [or, more correctly, Steven Haladki] had bugged this warehouse early in Sydney's first year of work within the real CIA, as part of an investigation into the emotional tie between Sydney and Agent Vaughn.

Even after Haladki's death at the hands of Irina's husband, the bugs had continued to transmit, resulting in hours of conversation between the two, even after SD-6's "destruction".

Irina slowly picks up the set of headphones attached to the computer console in front of her in the glassed-in viewing room above the chamber where Sydney was being tortured.

She determinedly puts them on her own ears, resolute that if she was to torture her own daughter [her own flesh and blood] like this, then the least she could do to make things more equal [least she could do to punish herself for doing this to her child] was to listen to the same words her daughter was.

"You look really pretty tonight."

"You know you can talk to me about your mother/I know that doing that is harder for you than you make it seem/ Well, it's my job/Vaughn, she killed your father/ Yes, thank you/You don't have to pretend with me/And you don't have to withhold/ All I'm saying is that it's unfair/Well, maybe so, but I certainly didn't join the CIA looking for fairness! After everything she's done to you, are those things you could ever forgive?"

"When you ever feel you're alone in all of this…I'm your ally. Never question that."

"I don't think I can ever forgive my father for the things he's done, but maybe he's right about what he's been saying all along…. Maybe her cooperation is part of some elaborate strategy he's more equipped to see than I am/Look, your father's asking you to let her die for something she might do. I don't think you can live with that."

"This watch belonged to my father. It's broken now, but it used to keep perfect time. And when he gave it to me, he said, "You could set your heart by this watch." It stopped October 1st -- the day we met."

"I didn't want you to have more on your mind/Why are you worrying about what's on my mind?/It was a judgment call/It's a judgment call you've been making for the past three months!/Involving you had no upside/There's no upside to keeping me informed? You didn't tell me about Monolo or that you had discussions with my mother! You didn't even tell me that you were seeing Alice again!/ Wait. What is this about?/This is about me being too old to be coddled!/Your life is complicated, Sydney! Forgive me for trying to make it any easier!/I don't need you for that!"

And then, as the hours of recordings from their warehouse rendezvous finished [she used the place as a refuge…we have destroyed that now, haven't we? No, Irina, Laura whispered from her cage within her hollow heart, you destroyed that for her. Not us. You.], the tapes of recordings that Sloane's LA asset, a woman once known as Allison Doren, now Sydney's roommate, Francie [courtesy of Markovic's cloning device, apparently] had collected from bugs planted in Sydney's apartment itself.

"You're so beautiful/Dinner's ready/We have an oven, you know. We can reheat."

"I'm the point guy./You're the point guy./I'm the point guy."

She couldn't bear to listen much longer after this, couldn't bear to watch as they electro-shocked her daughter.

She knew the theory behind this "treatment": the subject would be exposed to something benign, like a certain type of flowers [it was always orchids that they used, she mused absently]……or the voice of a loved one. They would be given an electric shock while exposed to this benign object, and eventually, given a certain length of time [the greater the shock, the less amount of time required], the subject would begin to associate the pain with the object.

And so, she knew, every time Sydney spoke of, or heard spoken, Vaughn's name, or even so much as thought of him, she would remember [and experience] this pain.

It was the ultimate weapon for turning someone against another. It was sick enough that only the mind of Arvin Sloane, however, could possibly comprehend using it in this way.

Because, she knew, now, after some hypnosis to erase all of Sydney's conscious memories of this event, the mere thought of Vaughn would be enough to make Sydney remember [and experience] the pain she was suffering now.

The sight of the man [the man who loved her so deeply that he would face the woman who killed his father…face you, Laura whispered again[i]] who had meant so much to her would probably cause her to pass out from the pain, she thought. [[i]What a cruel, twisted game we play…first we destroy her life, now we take away whatever chance she has of rejoining the one she loves…]

So, she reflected bitterly, she would destroy her daughter's chances of happiness with one man as Arvin Sloane had.

Irina, Laura mocked, how can you call yourself a mother?

"I can't," she whispered to herself, biting her lip as she watched the scene below her, memerized [no, not memerized…caught/trapped/ensnared] by her daughter's pain.

Her daughter and her husband [lovebetrayalhatepain] were the only people able to break Irina Derevko out of her shell, the only people who allowed Laura Bristow to resurface even for a short time [I love you, Sydney/My love for you and your father was not a contrivance]…they made her weak [Laura is weak. Laura is human. Laura is emotional], and maybe, she thinks, maybe that is why she hates them [loves them] so much.

They make her human, and that is not something that Irina Derevko enjoys being [weak/flawed/emotional/real/strong/resilient/fragile/human].

* * *

And so she watches her daughter's torture, and she tries to resist Laura's screams [for Laura always did love her daughter, didn't she?] from the deepest corner of her heart [the darkest place, where the sun doesn't shine and plants don't grow]…she tries to resist being human.
But she can't, because she is human, and because Irina Derevko, even underneath all of the scars and pain and lies [underneath all of Rambaldi's prophecy, underneath all of the betrayal, underneath all of the blood] still has a heart.
And because she still loves her daughter, no matter how much she tries to fight it.

* * *

And so Sydney Bristow screams for her lover while her mother watches on, trying to fight against everything that makes her love her daughter.


Um...yeah. Ouch, huh?

And everyone was wondering why this chapter was taking me so long!

Ooh, and really off topically - HARRY POTTER FIVE IS OUT IN *counts on fingers* TWO DAYS! EEE!!!

*calms down*

Anyway, please read and review....and thanks as always for the reviews!

Em [thanks for sticking with me through this, everyone. I couldn't have done it without you.]