* * *
In one world, his best friend brings him sorrow and grief and overwhelming guilt.
In another, he brings him regret and loss, but maybe, just maybe, hope for her future happiness as well - and freedom from guilt.
* * *
a)i)1 - Guilt
His voice is filled with grief, and his words clipped as he explains what the woman Vaughn loved [once and maybe forever] had been up to for the last four years.
"Mike….after you went back to Lauren, Syd took it bad. Real bad."
Vaughn's silent, standing as still as any statue carved, not knowing where Weiss is going with this line of conversation, but not liking the sound of it anyway.
"She started taking on the most risky assignments, the most dangerous jobs…I suppose it's a miracle she lasted this long, I guess. It was like she wanted to die, you know?"
He represses a bitter chuckle. Oh, yes, he knows well. He had tried to get Jack and Kendall to give him the most dangerous missions in the months following her death…..only when they refused to give him any more did he turn to the bottle.
Oh, yes, Michael Vaughn knows what it is like to want to die because your heart has been ripped out of your chest….and because life doesn't seem like it's worth living.
"She's dead, isn't she."
It sounds like a question, but it's not, because Michael Vaughn still knows Sydney Bristow, even six years after she became dead to him in every way that mattered. And he has a sinking feeling, a gnawing pain in his stomach which makes him think that he knows what she's done.
"Yes….we retrieved her body today. It's her, Vaughn. No doubt about it. The bastards shot her in the chest more times than we could count…..but her head…her head was identifiable. It's her. It's definitely her."
"Who was it?" All he wants is a name, because there is still a part of him that wants to hunt down the men who killed her to the end of the earth…..but that part of him has been muted by age and responsibilities and oaths and vows to love, till death do us part…
"We're not sure yet. She's been on a deep-cover assignment for nearly four and a half years now, doubling for us and Sark. She was working her way inside Sark's organization through becoming his lover."
Vaughn remembers Sark, remembers the way she told him about his arrogance, his ruthlessness……remembers the way in which she hated him almost as much as she hated Sloane.
He can't comprehend a Sydney Bristow who would sell her soul, sell her body – not even for her country. Not to Sark.
[This is what you made her.]
"We think Sark intercepted a communiqué which made mention of information only he and Sydney could have known. We'll know more soon though."
"Look, Mike, for what it's worth, I'm sorry."
Eric continues to speak, but Vaughn doesn't hear the words, can't hear anything except the sound of his own heart beating again his chest, can't feel anything except the weight of his crushing guilt pressing down on him.
He has driven her to this, he knows. He chose Lauren, and she chose the lies and constant deceit that he pulled her out of once upon a time….she chose death, in the end.
She would never have accepted such an assignment if he hadn't made the choices that he had.
But now she is dead, now, finally, no more last-minute reprieves….and he is numb.
He drops the phone to the floor, and watches it clatter to the ground absently.
He's killed men before, in cold blood and in the fury of hand to hand combat. Sometimes he still sees the faces of the men he's killed in his dreams.
But he knows that hers will be the face that he sees first as he wakes, and last before he sleeps, every night for the rest of his life.
Because he will have her blood, her death, her overwhelming despair that drove her to Sark…….he will have all this, plus the guilt he can feel even now crashing upon him, for the rest of his life.
[because he knows that she would be alive now in his arms if he had made called eight different numbers six years ago]