Second Best
Author's Note : I wrote this assuming everything that happened in the finale is reality,. I'm not necessarily sure that is true, but I have five months to write about my theories, so I'll start here.
Also, a row of ********* means a time change, from present to past or vice versa.
Thanks to : JESSICA!!!
Disclaimer: I, sadly, do not own Alias or any of its characters. They all belong to J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot, ABC, etc.
Second Best
__________________________
The last two years had been hell. There had not been a day that he hadn't wished he had just bled to death in the bathtub - that Vaughn had come back for Sydney just five minutes later.
At least death would have spared him the misery that had become his life.
But now, now that she's back, now that she is wrapped in his arms trying to understand what has happened, he has completely stopped feeling his pain and can only feel hers. All he can do is try to make this easier for her.
***********
Almost two years earlier
He had known where he was even before he opened his eyes. He could hear the quiet, steady beeping of the monitors; he could smell the scent of various disinfectant sprays that was always present in hospital rooms. He could remember being stabbed, being prepared to die. And he could feel the presence of someone else in the room, waiting patiently for him to wake up.
He was afraid to open his eyes, because the person sitting there would just confirm all the horrors that he already knew to be true. Francie was dead, and she probably had been for months. And for that same amount of time, his girlfriend has been a complete stranger.
But at least when he opened his eyes it would be Sydney there to tell him all that had happened. It had to be Sydney. He remembered calling her and warning her. Sydney must have been the one who saved him from dying. She would be sitting there, probably crying. He imagined her telling him that she had been sitting there for hours - maybe days. Never leaving his side.
But it wasn't Sydney. It was Marcus Dixon.
Will swallowed hard, but he already knew. He could barely speak, yet he forced the word out. "Sydney?" he asked.
Dixon didn't respond immediately, but Will could see that he was formulating an answer. He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and slowly shook his head.
That was the moment Will began wishing he hadn't survived.
*****************
Jack and Will had met Sydney at the airport earlier that day. When she got off the private, government jet and met them in the waiting room, Will could see that she was in shock. She wasn't crying, but her eyes looked empty.
Sydney didn't say a word the entire car ride home. The back of the government car that her father drove was big, and she curled her legs up beside her and rested her head on Will's chest. He wanted to believe she was asleep, but he knew she was staring straight ahead of her, unable to rest. He couldn't imagine what was going on in her brain.
When they made it to the safe house, she seemed weaker than she had been at the airport. He and Jack had to hold her up until they made it inside the little house and put her down in a bed. They both pulled up a chair.
He didn't know what to expect. Was she going to speak, or was she waiting for them to speak? Did she want to be alone? Even if she wanted to be alone, he wouldn't let her. Over the past two years he had become very familiar with being alone. It wasn't a good feeling.
After almost half an hour of silence, Sydney was the first one to speak.
"I'm ready to hear the whole story." She swallowed. "From the beginning."
************
Nobody had wanted to be the first one to give up hope. At one point or another, Sydney had saved the lives of almost every one of them. She never gave up looking and trying to save them when it was hard or when it was painful. They couldn't stop looking for her if there was even the slightest hope that somewhere she was alive.
That was the general feeling for months and months. Every lead was pursued, every scrap of information was followed up on. They traveled all over the world trying to find her -Sweden, Australia, Spain, China, Korea, the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, Russia - the list went on and on. Slowly, the leads stopped coming, until finally there were none at all. It had been half a year and none of them had heard, seen, or found any reason to believe she was not dead - except for the lack of evidence that she was.
Everyone dealt with her disappearance in their own way. Dixon considered leaving the CIA, leaving L.A., moving somewhere quiet with his children and starting a new life. But then he thought about his wife, and how much he wanted to bring down Sloane. And he thought about Sydney, and how she would have encouraged him to keep fighting. Losing one soldier doesn't mean you need to give up on the war.
Marshall began working even more quickly than ever before, if that was possible. He and Carrie spent hours upon hours formulating theories about the Rambaldi device and what role it might have played in her disappearance. During one of their late-night work sessions, Marshall went off on one of his many tangents - talking only about Sydney for two hours. Carrie didn't stop paying attention once. The next year they were married. Weiss had reacted in a similar way. He buried himself in the work and went on many of the mission to try and find her, but after a while things started to return to normal. They both felt guilty for going ahead with their lives when so many of the others were still grieving, but they thought about Sydney and knew she wouldn't have wanted them to stop living.
Vaughn was probably the hardest hit. He had been the one to walk in to her house, to find Francie dead, to find Will dying in the bathtub. He had dealt with the guilt of leaving her at her house that night and with the pain of losing the person he had loved for so long and finally had. He was the one who stayed at the office all day and all night. He was the one who was shot in the leg while he was on a mission to find her. And he was the one who sat alone in his apartment for two hours with a bottle of pain pills in his hand and considered his options. And then he thought of Sydney, and how she saved his life time after time. And he thought about how much she wouldn't want him to die this way - scared, alone, and depressed. He put the pills down and picked up the phone. He called Michelle.
And as for Will, in one night Will had lost his two best friends and his girlfriend as well as found himself on the brink of death. After he recovered, he immediately went back to work. Like the others, he immersed himself in the clues, in the leads, in trying to find Sydney. And every time he felt like giving up, he too thought of all Sydney had done to save him and he pushed forward.
At first, Jack suffered the least out of everyone. He never accepted that she was dead. The other men who cared for Sydney slowly returned to normal as time went by. Jack, on the other hand, became only more depressed. He knew that each day meant that the likelihood of her survival decreased, but for a long time he didn't lose hope that one day he would go into work and get a letter or a phone call or discover a piece of evidence that would lead him to the only thing that had allowed him to feel any emotion except for anger for decades - Sydney. And every time the rational part of his brain started to take over, he thought of Sydney, and thought of all she had done to save his life. She had been saving his life since Laura died. He couldn't give up on her.
And instead of becoming colder and more closed off in her absence, Jack found himself caring about the well-being of Sydney's friends - as if he needed to fill in for her while she was gone. In a strange way, these six men who were all tied to Sydney in their own way found themselves being tied to each other.
Which is the reason that when Vaughn made the decision to marry Michelle, one of the nurses who had cared for him after he was shot, all of them attended the wedding. Jack wasn't going to attend, but when Vaughn specifically asked him for his blessing, Jack couldn't help but give it. If Vaughn had in him the strength to move on, Jack couldn't tell him that he was wrong. After all, his life had been ruined by the death of the person he loved. Why make Vaughn suffer through the same miserable life when Sydney wouldn't have wanted that? And it was when that thought passed through his mind - nearly two years after her disappearance - that he finally accepted that she was dead. She was dead.
*************
Will and Jack talked to her for more than an hour. And she cried the whole time. She never broke down, though. A steady stream of tears just trickled down her pain-stricken face. They did start at the beginning, and told her Vaughn finding Will and Francie in the house and they told her the story right up until her phone call to Kendall. The left out the parts that they knew would hurt too much (Vaughn's marriage) and focused on the happy ones (Marshall's marriage). And at the end of the speech, she had just one question.
"How did this happen?"
And all they could do was hold her hand and tell her that they didn't know.
After the story, silence once again filled the room.
Jack's cell phone rang. It was Kendall.
"Sydney, I'll just be in the kitchen," he said. She nodded.
When he left, Will moved next to her on the bed and put his arm around her. "Whenever you're ready to talk," he whispered, "I'll be right here."
She leaned up against him, and her tears soaked through his shirt and dampened his skin.
****************
Will and Sydney had been on vacation with a group of friends. They were in Mexico, or the Bahamas, or Miami...it wasn't important. Sydney had read an article about a P.O.W. in the Vietnam War who was held captive for several years. Everyone assumed he was dead. They held a memorial service. The whole time, he was alive, and the only thing keeping his that way was the knowledge that he had his wife at home, waiting for him.
When he came home, his wife had remarried.
Sydney thought that must be one of the worst things that could ever happen to someone. To survive for years with an image of your life in your head and then come home to find it totally crushed.
One of the worst things that could happen. Her words. And now it was happening to her. Except that she never even had the time to worry about it, to have nightmares that while she was gone for two years he would have married someone else, to at least prepare herself for the possibility. She just woke up in a strange place and found out she had lost him.
**********************
As he remembered this moment, Will felt ready to cry. Not for himself, but for Sydney. He should have been happy, he should have been ecstatic that she was safe, that she was home, but he wasn't. He didn't want her to go through the hell that he had been going through for the past two years. Except hers would be worse. It would definitely be worse.
From the kitchen, Will could hear Jack yelling at Kendall on the cell phone. (Some things never change.)
All of a sudden she spoke. "I was so scared," she whispered.
"When?" he asked.
"I was in my house, and I woke up in Hong Kong. That's what it felt like. And I'm killing myself trying to remember, but I can't."
"Nobody expects you to remember, Sydney. It'll come with time."
"I didn't even realize what happened. How could two years go by and I didn't even notice? I was so afraid, and then I saw Vaughn, and..." she put her hand over her mouth to try and stop the sobs. "I thought everything would be ok."
Will wanted more than anything to tell her that it was ok, but that would have been a lie. So he just remained quiet for a few minutes and tried to calm her.
"Will...what's she like?"
"Syd, don't do this to yourself," he responded. "It's not important right now."
"I have to know."
**************
Vaughn had called him up and invited him out for lunch. That wasn't too unusual, but it was the first time since he had left the CIA. They sat across from each other and made small talk for a few minutes before Vaughn got to the point.
"I think I want to marry Michelle," he said.
"Are you asking my permission?" Will asked, confused.
"No, no. I guess I'm just looking for advice."
"Well, do you love her?" Will asked, as he took a bite of his pizza.
"Yes, but that's not the point. I mean, of course I love her. How could I not? She's smart, she's funny, but..."
"She's not Sydney," Will interrupted.
"She's not Sydney." Suddenly it became quiet, and remained that way for 20 or 30 seconds.
"Sydney's not coming back, Vaughn, you know that," Will said.
"I had a nightmare the other night that Sydney came home and I was married. I wasn't even happy she was home. I remember thinking that all I wanted to do was pick her up and kiss her, but I just felt so awful and so guilty because I ruined her life and I ruined Michelle's life and I ruined my life. I don't ever want to be in the position where I would be anything less than ecstatic if she were to come back."
"Sydney's not coming back," Will repeated.
He was wrong.
They were all wrong.
*****************
Will didn't know what to say. How could he respond to that question? Could he tell her how Michelle had saved Vaughn from the lowest point of his life? How she taught him to laugh again? How patient she was with him when he would break down crying for what seemed like no reason at all. He could make something up and it would be easier. But he told her the truth.
"She's great. She's funny and smart and kind...........but she can't be you. She's not you, Sydney. To be honest, I like her a lot, and it's sad to have to say this about her. But I am going to say it anyway." He took a deep breath. "I don't have any idea what's going to happen, but I am 100% sure that this is true: no matter what, she will always be second best. Always."
Sydney closed her eyes tightly to try and stop the next influx of tears. "I'm sleepy now," She whispered. He moved from the bed and pulled the blankets over her body. He planted a kiss on her forehead. "I love you, Sydney, and I'll be right here." He turned off the light and sat down in the chair. A moment later, Jack walked in and together they watched her fall asleep.
______________________________________
The end...for now. I might write more later...we'll see.
If you were to review this, I would be very, very grateful. Please, please......pretty please!
Author's Note : I wrote this assuming everything that happened in the finale is reality,. I'm not necessarily sure that is true, but I have five months to write about my theories, so I'll start here.
Also, a row of ********* means a time change, from present to past or vice versa.
Thanks to : JESSICA!!!
Disclaimer: I, sadly, do not own Alias or any of its characters. They all belong to J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot, ABC, etc.
Second Best
__________________________
The last two years had been hell. There had not been a day that he hadn't wished he had just bled to death in the bathtub - that Vaughn had come back for Sydney just five minutes later.
At least death would have spared him the misery that had become his life.
But now, now that she's back, now that she is wrapped in his arms trying to understand what has happened, he has completely stopped feeling his pain and can only feel hers. All he can do is try to make this easier for her.
***********
Almost two years earlier
He had known where he was even before he opened his eyes. He could hear the quiet, steady beeping of the monitors; he could smell the scent of various disinfectant sprays that was always present in hospital rooms. He could remember being stabbed, being prepared to die. And he could feel the presence of someone else in the room, waiting patiently for him to wake up.
He was afraid to open his eyes, because the person sitting there would just confirm all the horrors that he already knew to be true. Francie was dead, and she probably had been for months. And for that same amount of time, his girlfriend has been a complete stranger.
But at least when he opened his eyes it would be Sydney there to tell him all that had happened. It had to be Sydney. He remembered calling her and warning her. Sydney must have been the one who saved him from dying. She would be sitting there, probably crying. He imagined her telling him that she had been sitting there for hours - maybe days. Never leaving his side.
But it wasn't Sydney. It was Marcus Dixon.
Will swallowed hard, but he already knew. He could barely speak, yet he forced the word out. "Sydney?" he asked.
Dixon didn't respond immediately, but Will could see that he was formulating an answer. He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and slowly shook his head.
That was the moment Will began wishing he hadn't survived.
*****************
Jack and Will had met Sydney at the airport earlier that day. When she got off the private, government jet and met them in the waiting room, Will could see that she was in shock. She wasn't crying, but her eyes looked empty.
Sydney didn't say a word the entire car ride home. The back of the government car that her father drove was big, and she curled her legs up beside her and rested her head on Will's chest. He wanted to believe she was asleep, but he knew she was staring straight ahead of her, unable to rest. He couldn't imagine what was going on in her brain.
When they made it to the safe house, she seemed weaker than she had been at the airport. He and Jack had to hold her up until they made it inside the little house and put her down in a bed. They both pulled up a chair.
He didn't know what to expect. Was she going to speak, or was she waiting for them to speak? Did she want to be alone? Even if she wanted to be alone, he wouldn't let her. Over the past two years he had become very familiar with being alone. It wasn't a good feeling.
After almost half an hour of silence, Sydney was the first one to speak.
"I'm ready to hear the whole story." She swallowed. "From the beginning."
************
Nobody had wanted to be the first one to give up hope. At one point or another, Sydney had saved the lives of almost every one of them. She never gave up looking and trying to save them when it was hard or when it was painful. They couldn't stop looking for her if there was even the slightest hope that somewhere she was alive.
That was the general feeling for months and months. Every lead was pursued, every scrap of information was followed up on. They traveled all over the world trying to find her -Sweden, Australia, Spain, China, Korea, the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, Russia - the list went on and on. Slowly, the leads stopped coming, until finally there were none at all. It had been half a year and none of them had heard, seen, or found any reason to believe she was not dead - except for the lack of evidence that she was.
Everyone dealt with her disappearance in their own way. Dixon considered leaving the CIA, leaving L.A., moving somewhere quiet with his children and starting a new life. But then he thought about his wife, and how much he wanted to bring down Sloane. And he thought about Sydney, and how she would have encouraged him to keep fighting. Losing one soldier doesn't mean you need to give up on the war.
Marshall began working even more quickly than ever before, if that was possible. He and Carrie spent hours upon hours formulating theories about the Rambaldi device and what role it might have played in her disappearance. During one of their late-night work sessions, Marshall went off on one of his many tangents - talking only about Sydney for two hours. Carrie didn't stop paying attention once. The next year they were married. Weiss had reacted in a similar way. He buried himself in the work and went on many of the mission to try and find her, but after a while things started to return to normal. They both felt guilty for going ahead with their lives when so many of the others were still grieving, but they thought about Sydney and knew she wouldn't have wanted them to stop living.
Vaughn was probably the hardest hit. He had been the one to walk in to her house, to find Francie dead, to find Will dying in the bathtub. He had dealt with the guilt of leaving her at her house that night and with the pain of losing the person he had loved for so long and finally had. He was the one who stayed at the office all day and all night. He was the one who was shot in the leg while he was on a mission to find her. And he was the one who sat alone in his apartment for two hours with a bottle of pain pills in his hand and considered his options. And then he thought of Sydney, and how she saved his life time after time. And he thought about how much she wouldn't want him to die this way - scared, alone, and depressed. He put the pills down and picked up the phone. He called Michelle.
And as for Will, in one night Will had lost his two best friends and his girlfriend as well as found himself on the brink of death. After he recovered, he immediately went back to work. Like the others, he immersed himself in the clues, in the leads, in trying to find Sydney. And every time he felt like giving up, he too thought of all Sydney had done to save him and he pushed forward.
At first, Jack suffered the least out of everyone. He never accepted that she was dead. The other men who cared for Sydney slowly returned to normal as time went by. Jack, on the other hand, became only more depressed. He knew that each day meant that the likelihood of her survival decreased, but for a long time he didn't lose hope that one day he would go into work and get a letter or a phone call or discover a piece of evidence that would lead him to the only thing that had allowed him to feel any emotion except for anger for decades - Sydney. And every time the rational part of his brain started to take over, he thought of Sydney, and thought of all she had done to save his life. She had been saving his life since Laura died. He couldn't give up on her.
And instead of becoming colder and more closed off in her absence, Jack found himself caring about the well-being of Sydney's friends - as if he needed to fill in for her while she was gone. In a strange way, these six men who were all tied to Sydney in their own way found themselves being tied to each other.
Which is the reason that when Vaughn made the decision to marry Michelle, one of the nurses who had cared for him after he was shot, all of them attended the wedding. Jack wasn't going to attend, but when Vaughn specifically asked him for his blessing, Jack couldn't help but give it. If Vaughn had in him the strength to move on, Jack couldn't tell him that he was wrong. After all, his life had been ruined by the death of the person he loved. Why make Vaughn suffer through the same miserable life when Sydney wouldn't have wanted that? And it was when that thought passed through his mind - nearly two years after her disappearance - that he finally accepted that she was dead. She was dead.
*************
Will and Jack talked to her for more than an hour. And she cried the whole time. She never broke down, though. A steady stream of tears just trickled down her pain-stricken face. They did start at the beginning, and told her Vaughn finding Will and Francie in the house and they told her the story right up until her phone call to Kendall. The left out the parts that they knew would hurt too much (Vaughn's marriage) and focused on the happy ones (Marshall's marriage). And at the end of the speech, she had just one question.
"How did this happen?"
And all they could do was hold her hand and tell her that they didn't know.
After the story, silence once again filled the room.
Jack's cell phone rang. It was Kendall.
"Sydney, I'll just be in the kitchen," he said. She nodded.
When he left, Will moved next to her on the bed and put his arm around her. "Whenever you're ready to talk," he whispered, "I'll be right here."
She leaned up against him, and her tears soaked through his shirt and dampened his skin.
****************
Will and Sydney had been on vacation with a group of friends. They were in Mexico, or the Bahamas, or Miami...it wasn't important. Sydney had read an article about a P.O.W. in the Vietnam War who was held captive for several years. Everyone assumed he was dead. They held a memorial service. The whole time, he was alive, and the only thing keeping his that way was the knowledge that he had his wife at home, waiting for him.
When he came home, his wife had remarried.
Sydney thought that must be one of the worst things that could ever happen to someone. To survive for years with an image of your life in your head and then come home to find it totally crushed.
One of the worst things that could happen. Her words. And now it was happening to her. Except that she never even had the time to worry about it, to have nightmares that while she was gone for two years he would have married someone else, to at least prepare herself for the possibility. She just woke up in a strange place and found out she had lost him.
**********************
As he remembered this moment, Will felt ready to cry. Not for himself, but for Sydney. He should have been happy, he should have been ecstatic that she was safe, that she was home, but he wasn't. He didn't want her to go through the hell that he had been going through for the past two years. Except hers would be worse. It would definitely be worse.
From the kitchen, Will could hear Jack yelling at Kendall on the cell phone. (Some things never change.)
All of a sudden she spoke. "I was so scared," she whispered.
"When?" he asked.
"I was in my house, and I woke up in Hong Kong. That's what it felt like. And I'm killing myself trying to remember, but I can't."
"Nobody expects you to remember, Sydney. It'll come with time."
"I didn't even realize what happened. How could two years go by and I didn't even notice? I was so afraid, and then I saw Vaughn, and..." she put her hand over her mouth to try and stop the sobs. "I thought everything would be ok."
Will wanted more than anything to tell her that it was ok, but that would have been a lie. So he just remained quiet for a few minutes and tried to calm her.
"Will...what's she like?"
"Syd, don't do this to yourself," he responded. "It's not important right now."
"I have to know."
**************
Vaughn had called him up and invited him out for lunch. That wasn't too unusual, but it was the first time since he had left the CIA. They sat across from each other and made small talk for a few minutes before Vaughn got to the point.
"I think I want to marry Michelle," he said.
"Are you asking my permission?" Will asked, confused.
"No, no. I guess I'm just looking for advice."
"Well, do you love her?" Will asked, as he took a bite of his pizza.
"Yes, but that's not the point. I mean, of course I love her. How could I not? She's smart, she's funny, but..."
"She's not Sydney," Will interrupted.
"She's not Sydney." Suddenly it became quiet, and remained that way for 20 or 30 seconds.
"Sydney's not coming back, Vaughn, you know that," Will said.
"I had a nightmare the other night that Sydney came home and I was married. I wasn't even happy she was home. I remember thinking that all I wanted to do was pick her up and kiss her, but I just felt so awful and so guilty because I ruined her life and I ruined Michelle's life and I ruined my life. I don't ever want to be in the position where I would be anything less than ecstatic if she were to come back."
"Sydney's not coming back," Will repeated.
He was wrong.
They were all wrong.
*****************
Will didn't know what to say. How could he respond to that question? Could he tell her how Michelle had saved Vaughn from the lowest point of his life? How she taught him to laugh again? How patient she was with him when he would break down crying for what seemed like no reason at all. He could make something up and it would be easier. But he told her the truth.
"She's great. She's funny and smart and kind...........but she can't be you. She's not you, Sydney. To be honest, I like her a lot, and it's sad to have to say this about her. But I am going to say it anyway." He took a deep breath. "I don't have any idea what's going to happen, but I am 100% sure that this is true: no matter what, she will always be second best. Always."
Sydney closed her eyes tightly to try and stop the next influx of tears. "I'm sleepy now," She whispered. He moved from the bed and pulled the blankets over her body. He planted a kiss on her forehead. "I love you, Sydney, and I'll be right here." He turned off the light and sat down in the chair. A moment later, Jack walked in and together they watched her fall asleep.
______________________________________
The end...for now. I might write more later...we'll see.
If you were to review this, I would be very, very grateful. Please, please......pretty please!