As You Were IV: Tell-Tale

Sark made quick work of dragging the corpse of Gerard Cuvee out of the rotunda, leaving a trail of blood. The expression Cuvee had worn at his death registered shocked betrayal when he realized that he had been fatally duped at the hands of Arvin Sloane. No person in the operations center had regretted him being a casualty of his own faulty alliance with Sloane. The sight of an execution had impressed upon the captives their own tenuous position.

Sark             abandoned the body in an empty corridor and returned, dusting his clothing as though he just wrapped up an important business deal.

Together, they looked like a sick parody of the portrait-perfect family. Sloane in the middle, Sark to his left, and Sydney at his right hand. Together, they formed a horrifying triumvirate, sinister and smooth.

"I suppose you're wondering why I planned this," Sloane said.

Jack grimaced. "What I'm wondering involves the numerous agonizing ways I could kill you." Sydney giggled. Her fingers were still stained red with Vaughn's blood.

Sloane looked at her. "I was very upset to learn that you and Sydney had been double agents. Disappointed is probably a more apt term." He seemed to be genuinely sorry that they had to traverse down this particular path.

"You should know Jack, that there was no one in this world that I had higher regard for than you and Sydney."

"I'm so sorry for your loss." Jack Bristow's sneer failed to move Sloane.

Sloane sighed. "I suppose what bothers me more is the fact that you managed to turn Sydney against me." He ignored the scorn in his former confidant's eyes. "For seven years, I was more of a father to her than you ever were. You knew that. And for those years, it seemed as though you were more than satisfied to delegate that title to me."

"Go to hell, Arvin. You stole her from me first. And now..." Sydney stood on her tiptoes, titillated. Her face had a rare expression of solemnity.

"When I discovered that Sydney had been a mole, I won't lie I was devastated. I prayed that it wasn't true when I read the intel that Sark had given me. But in Project Christmas particularly the Mnemosyne treatments, God had answered my prayers."

Irina gave Sloane a withering stare. "You set all of this up. You really just wanted her reconditioned for your own pleasure and you knew Cuvee was capable of doing that. When you got what you wanted, you discarded him like a puppet."

It was only now that Sloane seemed to acknowledge Irina's presence. His face brightened. "Laura. It's been a long time. How have you been?" Her only response was the frosted fury on her face.

He went on. "I knew that she was privy to intel through her work in the CIA, especially about covert operations she participated in and what information her dear parents had provided her. Intel that may one day be useful to me."

Sark let out a scornful laugh. "Sloane persuaded Cuvee to accept Sydney to experiment on and in exchange, he would be willing to share any and all intelligence she surrendered when it was over. And Cuvee fell for it."

Jack and Irina stared at Sydney, betrayal carved into their faces. Her elegant features were chiseled in glass as she gazed at them without remorse.

"When we were finished, Sydney had been redeemed and I rejoiced. She was very willing to work along side Sark and I. She has become in every sense, my very own flesh and blood." He opened his arms toward Sydney who went to him like the dutiful daughter. Jack grounded his teeth and resisted the urge to look away.

Sydney pulled away from the embrace and looked at Sloane, imploring. "I'm not finished playing," she purred. "When can I go back to him?"

He affectionately brushed her hair off her face. "Soon, sweetheart. When we're finished, you may have as many toys as you want," he said, only too happy to indulge her sadism.

Weiss shot an anxious look at Jack. Was Vaughn still alive? There was no way to know. The tranquility on Sydney's face betrayed nothing of the ordeal she put him through.

Sark suddenly spoke up. "Sir? I hate to interrupt this moving reunion but we are on a schedule." Sloane nodded in assent.

"Well then by all means, let's proceed." His eyes went to Irina who had stiffened at his stare. In a few quick steps, Sark was at her side and roughly hoisting her to her feet. Irina grunted at the brutish manner that he handled her but her eyes still blazed with a defiant fire.

"Just what do you plan on doing with us when all this is over?" Jack demanded. Sloane looked hard at him, staying silent. Jack gave a bitter smile which did nothing to disguise his fury. "Kill us then? Well, there go the days when I could say at least he never committed mass murder." He sneered. "I wonder what Emily would say if she knew what you were doing. Tell me, Arvin, if she is alive how would she react when she found out? You don't actually think you can keep this from her can you."

Sloane hissed "Jack, I suggest you keep your mouth shut about my personal affairs. You know nothing about them."

"I comprehend more than you think. I was there Arvin. I know how you felt about yourself at the end of the day. Empty, sickened at what you had let yourself become."

"Shut up."

Jack's voice rose. "I knew that in a way you always envied me. That's why you took such a shining to Sydney and why you felt the need to brainwash her just to get her to call you Dad. She was a symbol of something that you would never be able to accomplish with this thing that you call your existence."

Sloane gave Jack a spiteful smile. "That's where you're wrong Jack. Sydney is my greatest accomplishment. As you will come to see."

Jack slowly shook his head. "Even when you claim to love her as your own daughter, you still feel the need to manipulate her to the last. I would pity you if I didn't despise you so much."

Something flashed across Sloane's eyes. His jaw clenched and his fists tightened. The words had a sting of truth to it, no one would deny that. But no one had dared to voice it before this moment. In general it is so much easier just to hate than to understand why. Jack Bristow had the luxury of being able to do both.

Sloane turned away. "Let's go." The three of them began to leave with Irina in tow when Jack called out.

"When all is said and done, you've always been a disappointment, Arvin. And it's only a matter of time…until Emily realizes that."

The next sound was Sloane viciously backhanding Jack across the face. Jack faltered but did not fall over. Instead, he sat up again and looked at Sloane, contempt written all over his face. "I guess you proved me wrong. You're a real man, beating an unarmed hostage." Sloane whipped out his gun-the very same gun he used to execute Cuvee- and aimed at Jack's throat.

"Don't make me kill you in front of your own daughter Jack. I'm warning you."

A wail abruptly tore apart the stand-off in the room. Everyone stared in the direction of Sydney, who was standing away from them. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and she was trembling.

She obviously did not like what she was seeing. As soon as Sloane had started to hit her true father something had come over her once glassy features. The coyness vanished and she had winced as though she felt a pinch of

Guilt? Empathy? Nobody could be sure but it was certain that she did feel something. An unpleasant little shock to her otherwise carefree system. She had begun to back away from the sudden jolt of violence as though the sight of it sickened her to her tender stomach. A sob escaped from her lips as an awful yet very familiar feeling pierced her skin and was now crawling beneath it, making her tingle and shudder.

She twisted her body away, an unforeseen sense of self-disgust drowning her until she was unable to hear anything.

Sydney lifted her head and gasped in astonishment.

There it was clear as day.  Except it wasn't. It had been night but she remembered it all so clear.

Oh God, how she remembered.

"Vaughn?" Sydney called out. She shivered against the chilly night air, made sharper by the ocean waves which crashed beneath her.

It was a beautiful night. Despite the cold, the moon was plump and bright; the twilight peppered with miniscule points of light that were the stars. Despite the misery she experienced that afternoon with Vaughn, when she stared at those celestial forms she couldn't help but swell with hope and wonder. She had heard the old cliché of how looking at the heavens was a reminder of just how small we are in the whole scheme of things. But when she gazed at them, she dreamed.

She didn't have many friends as a child. In fact, she didn't have much of anybody. Mom was dead, Daddy didn't want her so what was she to do with herself? She was just a little girl. So some nights when the moon was full, nights like this one, she would climb to the roof of the house. There she would lie on her back and stare at the starry sky, with its galaxies and black holes and its endless mysteries.

There on that roof, she was never alone; she was just an extension of the stars which she adored. And she was complete.

Now, she had found a new thing to adore. Sydney cast another look around the bluffs for any trace of Vaughn. The note had simply asked her to meet her at this place, never bothering to specify a time. Typical of a man.

Another smile lighted her face when she remembered what Vaughn had done for her one night. It was the anniversary of the first day they had ever met and he remembered. It should have been against the protocol which he held so closely but that night, protocol had been the last thing on either of their minds.

They broke into the observatory where he had a picnic all laid out for her. She was never one to question her luck. She spent the night pointing out the constellations to him while he made up his own. She remembered how close he had held her to his body; close enough to feel his heart beat wildly in time with her own. She remembered how whenever she made a joke, he would laugh into her hair.

They fell asleep together, entwined and content that nothing in this world or beyond it would ever tear them apart.     

Sydney sighed wistfully at the memory. She walked toward the edge of the precipice and stood there, letting the ocean breeze caress her face. Her lips began to shape the words of a poem her mother used to read her and had stayed with her ever since.

"…and in my soul, I feel a lark singing: your voice," she murmured. She closed her eyes and let the crashing of the waves drown out any thought or emotion within her except what it felt to be free and safe.

All of a sudden, the reverie was shattered. Sydney felt a cloth being slapped across her mouth and the smell of chloroform filling her nostrils. "Don't struggle," an unfamiliar male voice with the unmistakable trace of thug in it said.

Instinct kicked in and Sydney managed to put enough of a margin of distance between herself and her attacker to elbow him in the stomach. The man howled in pain and released her. She took him out with a single roundhouse kick to the face and then fled her head slightly woozy from the inhalation of the drug.

So she was unable to see the ambush that was awaiting her when she ran from the brink. A pair of arms grabbed her and she screamed as another set of hands was putting an injector gun to her neck. She heard the soft click and the world crawled away into darkness.

Sydney was thrown into a waiting van, ready to drive her away from life as she knew it. In the fading seconds in which she clings to consciousness, her eyes fluttered open. Sark was there too. His hands and feet were bound, a gag had been slapped over his mouth, and he was staring at Sydney with wild confusion as he lay on his stomach on the floor beside her.

"Sark," she murmured. "What…?" And then she passed out.

As she did, she wondered why Vaughn never went out to meet her that night.

"Oh God," she whispered, staring at the unfolding scene which no one else could see. Remnants of that which had been repressed for so long were suddenly brought to the surface and it was too much. Unwanted emotion flowed over her like a poison she drank before reading the warning label.

Love. I knew what love was once. She cried out as the pain of knowing what she had once been and had lost gouged itself into her core. All that mattered was that she couldn't feel the hurt and now here it was with a vengeance.

She was pure once, wasn't she? Before becoming fodder for a lab experiment gone horribly right, she was a human being. And now where was that woman?

Here, with blood on her hands and a void where there should have been a soul. For a second, anguish wounded her while remorse nipped the back of her mind.

Sark sat Irina back on the ground before approaching Sydney who was still staring off into catatonic space. "Sydney? What's the matter-" He reached out a hand to touch her, to bring her back.

She jerked herself away, her face twisted with raw hate. "Don't touch me," she hissed. Sark looked as though she had slapped him in the face.

And she felt the hurt she inflicted on him as though she had said the words to herself. remorse overwhelmed her and she reached out to comfort him. Yet something pulled her away.

Remorse. Fear. Hate. In this incarnation of her life, they were as taboo as love and hope. So why was she standing here, opening herself to all this useless emotion?

Because she used to feel.

Sydney began to back away from Sark and all those vestiges of a life that had been abandoned to joyful despair. "At the end of the story, the heroine dies," she murmured. She let out a whimper as she looked around the rotunda. "What is this place? What have you done with her?"

Sark stared at her speechless. Her face contorted into tears for a woman who died in a lab somewhere and whose soul was condemned to wander in limbo. But finding awareness would not be discovering Heaven because she knew what waited for her if she should open that Pandora's Box. And self-punishment was an awful thing to live with. So it was a choice between mindless despair or to delight in her damnation.

Sydney erupted into tears and fled the operations center. Sloane looked after her irritated. "What the hell is wrong with her?"

Sark who had been looking after Sydney with grief in his eyes turned on Sloane. His voice was bitter with anger as he spit out "Leave her alone. You know she doesn't like it when you yell."

"She's being an immature brat and this is something which we don't have time for."

Sark fumed at the insult. "You know what Sloane?" he said in a tone verging on mutiny. "Sometimes I really have to work to resist telling you to fuck off." Sloane stared hard at Sark.

"See to your girl, Sark. See if you can't calm her down." To this suggestion, Sark gave a curt nod and was only too glad to leave.

"Sydney?" Sark called out. "Where are you?" He hoped she wasn't trying to play one of her hide and seek games. Last time he agreed to play he had to track her down throughout three counties. And Sloane's fuse was already shortening by the second.

"Syd?" He heard a sob come from around the corner. He followed it into a corridor and sure enough found Sydney curled up in small corner, sobbing violently.

He swallowed back the ache he felt for her. He went to her and knelt beside her, wanting to comfort her yet being impotent to do so. He placed a hand on her knee and she looked up. Her face was red from weeping and dark strands of hair stuck to her damp cheeks. Tenderly, he wiped them away along with the tears.

"What's wrong with me?" she asked, her voice not rising above a whisper. She yearned for some confirmation of what she was exactly and he himself did not know.

 He did know that she was not alone during the mnemosyne treatments. Unlike her, he never put up a fight.

"Nothing's wrong with you, baby. You're just not- you're just a little sick." He leaned forward. "Remember, that's why we're here. So we can get the ingredients for your medicine and soon you'll be as right as rain."

They didn't have a lot of time. He could tell Sydney was weakening each day. Last week, he found her hunched over the toilet coughing up blood.

She looked into his eyes, searching for any type of deception. She found none. She smiled, painfully. Then the smile crumbled as her eyes widened with terror.

"It's the pounding," she whispered. Sark frowned, unable to interpret. "It's incessant," she added. "It never stops. It bleeds and throbs and at night I scream at it stop but it only pounds harder. Don't you hear it, Nathaniel? It's deafening." She leaned back, miserable.

"Sydney, there's no pounding. It must be all in your dreams."

She denied it with a feverish shake of her head. "No, it isn't." She pointed to her temple. "It's here. Where my soul used to live. And-" she took his hand and placed it on her chest. Beneath his palm, he felt the erratic pound of her- oh.

"Do you see?" she whispered, her eyes filled with desperate sorrow. She pressed his hand harder against her. "Can you feel it?" Another sob. "It's the beating. It's the beating of that hideous heart!" She cried out the last words.

Edgar Allen Poe could not have framed it better.

"She left it for me," Sydney went on. "As a reminder- a punishment. It was all that was left after the doctors ripped her soul out. And now it's trapped in me, wants to destroy me the way she was destroyed."

Sark swallowed the lump in his throat. "It won't stop," Sydney sobbed. She clutched him, staring wildly. "God, why won't it stop?"

Sark held her as she buried her face in his chest, soaking his suit. He stroked her hair, the terror she felt transcending her skin until he absorbed it as well. Terror was not an emotion he dealt well with. Nor was love but here they were, holding each other, and the love he felt for her was as terrifying as she was.

From her tears, he heard a muffled "I'm sorry." She pulled away to stare into his face, which was still stained with tears.

"For what?" The redness was starting lighten and the tears stopped flowing momentarily. "For being like this. I know you don't like it because it hurts you."

Suddenly she had all the eagerness of a child again. She cuddled up against him, nestling her head beneath his jaw. "And I never want to hurt you. I love you so much, Nathaniel." She pulled her head up and her face was brilliant in the earnestness it produced. "Because you're real. In this entire world, you are the only thing that is real to me."

He cupped her face in his hands and leaned his forehead against hers. How easy it was to forgive her insanity. "And you're the only thing in this world that I love, Sydney. Never forget that."

They sat there for a few moments. It was these flashes of sweetness that he lived for where she was sane enough to bestow it. They always ended too soon.

She stood up, no trace of mourning on her face, except for a few gossamer streaks. "It's time," she said, resolution in her voice.

Sark still sat on the ground, looking up at her. The warmth was gone and a foggy dread had begun to pass over him. "This isn't going to end well is it?"

Sydney smiled at him, her eyes glittering as hard as diamonds and an ominous fire burned behind them.

"No," she purred, sweetly. She turned away. "It really won't."

tbc

Hey so I know that I said I only had one more part to go but turns out I was lying. And also sorry if it turns out that this chapter doesn't make a lot of sense. I was sort of sleepy when I wrote it.