A/N: This is my first fic, so please tell me what you think!
Wake me up inside
Call my name and
Save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become.
- "Bring Me to Life," Evanescence
Despite the biting wind against her cheek, Freelancer didn't blink an eye. Dressed in black and focused entirely on the scene below, she blended in with the dark shadows and numbed silence pervading the compound's rooftop. With elbows propped against roof's icy ledge, she kept the crosshairs trained on the silhouette below. 6'1" male. 185 pounds. Probably African-American, though difficult to tell through the darkness. Her orders had not included a description, merely a time and place.
Waiting until the target left the cover of the vehicle, Freelancer moved for the first time in over an hour. A single squeeze of her finger betrayed her stillness, and sent a jolt recoiling through her shoulder from the rifle…
…and Sydney violently jerked awake, almost overturning the cot under her. As she tried to catch her racing breath, she shivered in the coldness around her. Growing calmer by the second, becoming more aware of her surroundings, she couldn't shake off a sense of bone-deep numbness left by the nightmare. She could still feel the ice beneath her arms, the cold steel through her gloved hands.
But then again, her new accommodations at the CIA didn't exactly evoke warm feelings. Sydney knew from visiting her mother in CIA confinement that the gray, spartan room lacked any accommodating warmth. But, as she swung her bare feet off the cot and onto the carpetless floor, she hadn't realized how raw the air felt until she was on the other side of the glass.
When they had first dragged her pass the security gate, Sydney had immediately guessed the destination of her rough-handling guides, and began to struggle for all her worth. When it only took three guards to shove her into the cell, she knew her emaciated state from the coma in Hong Kong had left her more weakened than she had guessed. Collapsing on her cot after four hours of pacing through the room had confirmed her suspicions. After going hoarse with demands to speak to her father, Sydney had finally tried to sleep and shut off all the thoughts tumbling through her head.
Vaughn stumbling through an explanation. Me stumbling from the room. Ushered on a plane ride home, the dark abyss of the ocean below echoing the emptiness spreading through me. Avoiding his touch, his stare, by drawing further inside of myself. Drawn with the current, against my will, to a life I can no longer live.
Her tormented thoughts had melted into the clarity of her nightmare—the cold clarity of being inside the head of a numbed killer. It didn't help that she awoke from that nightmare to find herself in her mother's cell, accused of her mother's crime. Indeed, though the accusation of treason had not been verbally leveled at Sydney, she had read it in Vaughn's disbelieving eyes, in the rough hands that forced her behind glass.
Her throat still scratched from hoarse demands for her father interspersed with claims of innocence. Now, she merely paced silently, walking off the after-affects of the nightmare, looking down at the floor. Waiting. Waiting to remember, waiting to die, waiting for the quiet footfalls coming down the hall, up the glass wall, stopping in front of her.
As she looked up into his cold blue eyes, she was caught for a moment by the emptiness behind them. For a breath's instant, she got lost in eyes that reflected the turmoil numbing her entire body. Before that turmoil threatened to bubble over, Sydney cut the silence with his name, shattering the stillness.
'Sark."
