TITLE: "Pain"
SUMMARY: "I was so in love with you...it nearly killed me." Vaughn, second-person POV, post-Telling.
RATING: PG/PG-13
DISCLAIMER: You know, I really don't own them. Wish I did though... Hey, my birthday's coming up soon. Anyone want to give me them for my b-day? Really? Cool.
AUTHOR's NOTES: I had to write this after seeing the AliasMedia clips from "The Two" and "Succession". Michael Vartan's acting in that scene with Syd in "Succession"........his eyes just looked so sad and haunted, it nearly broke my heart. This pain that Vaughn feels? I feel it too... But, my goodness, what a season this is going to be....

Thanks so much to sv4ever07 and Old Romantic, who really helped me out with betaing this fic. Old Romantic fixed up the ending so it just whoomps you with all it's emotion - it's a much better fic with her suggested ending...so, yeah, if you're crying at the ending of the fic - well, blame her.
She really maximised the emotion in the last couple of lines........

SUGGESTED SOUNDTRACK: "Colorblind" by Counting Crows and "Here Comes the Flood" by Peter Gabriel. But don't blame me if you cry. Really.


Pain.

pain.

That's all you have anymore, except after too many bottles of alcohol, which just masks the pain just enough so you can sleep even a little and then again the next morning there is pain, returning again unbidden.

You drink every even day, and recover every odd one, because really, you're not enough of a masochist to drink yourself stupid every day – not yet, anyway.

So you drink yourself into oblivion on the Saturday and try to sleep off the pain on the Sunday.

On the Monday and Tuesday, you repeat the pattern of drinking and sleeping, and on goes your life, except for Fridays, where you go and buy yourself enough alcohol to survive on for another week.

Eric comes by every third day, so sometimes you're drinking and sometimes you're asleep, but you're always oblivious to his presence.

He brings you food, but you don't eat it.

He took Donovan with him after the first week, when he realized that you were too much of a wreck to take care of him.

People talk to you, tell you how sorry they are, but you don't hear them, don't hear anything anymore except her.

Everything else is just so much white noise.

You can still hear her, clearly, her words running around and around and around inside your head, until you're not sure where she starts and where you end.

And to be perfectly honest, you don't really care.

This is where she belongs, and this is where you belong [together.]

You have conversations with her, these long, rambling chats like the ones that you'd always envisioned yourself having with her once you were happily married and settled down, living the normal life that she'd always wanted, rambling chats about nothing in particular that you'd never had time for, weather and cars and hockey and France and movies that you'd seen years ago.

And one day she begins to talk back to you, and one day you reach a point where you can no longer separate your memories of before, the real memories, even though that's a purely subjective term from your point of view these days, and the fake, which are nearly as real, almost more real than the real and then not even drinking is enough to dull the pain, this gut wrenching, physical ache that just hurts and hurts and it's this empty, dull gnawing feeling in your stomach that won't leave you alone and oh, how it hurts.

It hurts. It just hurts, and you can't do anything about it, because the alcohol doesn't work anymore and all you can ever think about these days is her and all the things you did and all the things you never had the chance to do, all the words you never had the chance to say to her, and somehow that hurts all the more because you had so little time with her and you think that you would have kissed her so much sooner if you had known she'd have been taken from you so soon.

You lie for hours at a time, on your bed, in the apartment she never saw, and sometimes you're horrified at the state you've let your apartment get into, with beer bottles everywhere and dirty clothes and pizza boxes all over the floor, because you know that she would have been horrified – and then you realise that it doesn't matter anymore, because there's no more Sydney to be disgusted by the state of your apartment, is there?

You're sure that you had a job once, and maybe you enjoyed it once. But you're not sure that you've still got a job anymore, and to be perfectly blunt you don't really care, because it's not like you really need the money because money doesn't matter, and neither does any of the things it buys, because you're hurting so much inside that at this point you'd welcome death.

There's nothing left of you anymore but the pain, and her, and the imaginary world you've created inside a corner of your brain, where you went to Santa Barbara and ate at La Superica, where you live happily, married with 2.5 kids, dogs and a minivan, where she's still alive and you're still sane.

This is all that you are now:

A hollow shell, a body that used to hold a man.

Emptyuselessshadowsofreality

Empty inside, out of place in the world since she died and left you behind, alone, upsidedownandinsideout.

There is nothing left in the space that your heart used to occupy, because she took it with her when she left you here.

Consumed by yourself
and
by
her.

You feel empty inside

hollow

Like you cannot breathe anymore

chestconstricting

You are not without feeling

there is too much feeling

All there is is a vacuum

sucking you down

And pain

It hurts so bad that you wish death would come quickly

You have fallen

without a safety net

You have sinned, oh, sinned so much/leaving her there that night/loving her too much/drinking yourself to blackness so that if she was here she'd be appalled but then you remember that she's not here and so it doesn't really matter anymore does it

You have died inside.

You are as empty as the room you're sitting in.

But in the end, though, you're just a guy who stays up too late drinking and talking to his dead girlfriend.