Author: Clover Point
Spoilers: A Missing Link.
Rating: PG-13, I suppose.
Disclaimer: Doesn't do any good.
Feedback: Please.
Yuck.
Sydney could only allow herself the briefest moment of disgust at Simon's tongue slithering its way around her mouth. Any more would be a distraction, like the sickening-sinking sense of familiarity that kissing him gave her. She couldn't afford these thoughts now.
Simon pulled back, and she smiled at him. She felt Vaughn listening.
__________________________________________________________________
In bed with Simon, she ran her hands over his body, and kissed escape trails over his skin.
It did not seem long at all to her since she had been kissing Vaughn, safe and as close as she had come to happy in a long while. Closer than she could imagine herself being again any time soon. In the last two years, Sydney knew, an intimate stranger named Julia had used her body, for at least one murder and God knew what else. Now, Sydney was prostituting herself because of Julia, or for Julia, or with Julia. Maybe they were doing it together, she and Julia. Sidney shivered at the thought. For Julia it was a shiver of excitement.
She felt Vaughn listening as she straddled Simon.
And Weiss listening, too. It occurred to her that later on she will be embarrassed.
In a way, it was a relief when Simon attacked her, held a knife to her throat. It was better, something she could deal with. She laughed inside at the perversity of it all, even as Simon's knife teased against her skin and adrenaline pumped through her blood.
__________________________________________________________________
Later, on the side of the road, in the dark and the dust, she pushed the same knife into Vaughn's belly. She felt his pain and hers in equal measure, and so intensely that they slipped into each other. It was a intimate act, and she was grateful and horrified that she was the one to do it. A woman called Julia had told him about betrayal, but it had been Sydney who pushed the knife into him. She hoped that he had been listening.
She rode away with her fellow thieves and left him bleeding. Smiling and swaggering in the back of the van, she was aware of Simon's knife wet with Vaughn's blood, tucked into her pocket.
Someone handed her a bottle of champagne. She tipped her head back with the mouth of the bottle to her lips, and drank. Handing the bottle to Simon, she smiled and winked, delicately wiping her mouth with her finger and thumb. The alcohol churned in her stomach, and she imagined it pouring out of her.
__________________________________________________________________
In a cramped, well lit bathroom stall of the plane heading back home, she changed her clothes. She stripped off her dusty, sweaty black costume and stuffed it in a garbage bag. She used cotton wipes and make-up remover to bare her face, scrubbing with unnecessary violence at it while staring in the mirror. Then, naked, she sat on the lid of the toilet, closing her eyes and pushing her hair up with both hands. She sighed, and allowed herself a shudder.
She felt that if she stopped to appreciate the degree to which her life was spinning out of control, she would simply never be able to start again. The only way to understand her world was to move in sympathy with it, and cling to whatever idea of the familiar she could.
There was danger, though, in too much stability, too much happiness. Whatever she has clung to in the past she has crushed; her life has been full of strange Judas loves who promised constancy and support, and crumbled away once she accepted what they offer. They all seemed to stay around, though, to remind her of what she'd been stupid enough to believe she could have. She should have known better by now.
She stood and slowly, gently put on new clothes, her clothes. Jeans; and a light green long sleeved cotton shirt, that fastens with six tan buttons at the throat; tan tennis shoes, carefully laced; and white socks, that she folded over once around her ankles. She wetted her hair and brushed it straight, then pulled it back in a tight ponytail. She wasn't supposed to be in disguise anymore, and yet she wondered.
__________________________________________________________________
Alone in her new house, she made herself dinner, ate half, and put the rest in her new fridge in virgin tupperware.
After dinner she went running for hours, at a steady pace, with the aim of wearing herself out. She ran until she was shaking, aching, drenched in sweat, and then she ran more. She ran until she could barely think, and only then took herself home for a few hours of deep sleep on a still unfamiliar bed, on soft, light blue sheets that didn't smell like Vaughn.
__________________________________________________________________
She dreamt anyway.
In her dream, Vaughn was kissing a blond woman. Sydney could only see the woman's back. She had a bull's eye painted in yellow and green on the back of her silver sequined evening gown.
Sydney thought she was standing in a warehouse. Dozens and dozens of crows were everywhere, and were cawing louder and louder and louder. Sydney covered her ears, and started to scream, a loud, hoarse throated scream, but she couldn't drown out the sound. As the crows got louder, their noise seemed to change, to metamorphose into something else, like gushing. The ground was flooding, and Sydney recognized the liquid soaking up her jeans as champagne. She stopped screaming.
Suddenly, she was holding Simon's knife in her hands. She flipped out the switchblade, and as she held on to the knife, the blade grew longer and longer, until it was as long as a sword. Sydney watched herself as she ran the sword through the middle of the target on the woman's back, and into Vaughn. The sword cozied into them like a diver through water. with a brief shock of cold resistance at first, followed by a blissful emergence. They kept standing, Vaughn and the woman, and blood ran out of both of them, spreading out and staining the champagne in delicate spider patterns.
Sydney bent to drink, she cupped her hands and brought them to her face. She drank deep, and the crows were quiet.
__________________________________________________________________
Sydney woke with a thump in a cold bed. The room was mostly dark, and filled with ghostly gray shapes surreptitiously watching her. Through the window, a watercolour sunset was easing its way up the sky. Birds were twittering and trilling in tiny, warbling ecstasies.
She held two fingers to her neck, and felt her pulse jumping in time with the birds' exclamations. She breathed, slowly, with control.
She swung her legs out of bed, and padded over smooth hardwood floors to the bathroom, to get ready for another day at work.
Stepping out of the shower, she brushed her wet hair straight.