Spoilers/Timeline: Post-"Prelude"
Rating: PG
Ship: S/V
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JJ and his minions. I'm just borrowing them for a few pages.
Summary: "I am what is left of myself after she was done with me." S3 Vaughn POV. (1/1).
*******
When I think of her, I smell smoke.
I wish it weren't the case. I know, of course, when it started, but I can't remember when it stopped. (Has it ever stopped?)
Maybe it has. Last mission, I didn't smell the smoke. I smelled her hair, it smelled real and tangible and just like a woman I used to love, not like the imposter who took her place.
The imposter doesn't smell like smoke. She doesn't smell like ashes.
*******
To say imposter in the same sense I would say "double" or "clone" would be too simple, would gloss over the surface and smooth over the years (two years. long years.) when she was not her and I was not me and when I could still smell the smoke when I thought of her.
But, again, I'm not making sense.
(Is this what she does to me?)
I say I am not myself, I mean I am no more myself than she is herself. I could say that I am what she has made me, but this would not be the truth, either. I am what is left of myself after she was done with me.
Sitting knees-bent in the ashes at her home, watching the yellow-draped skeleton carried out on a stretcher, not even a full-size one, the kind they use for children, watching the charred mess carried away, I realized my grasp on reality had slipped away and in its place was the smell of ashes.
This is what it feels like to come apart.
*******
My grandmother used to quilt. Take the rags, slice them up, pick out the best of the leftovers and patch them back together. Make them into something that is not themselves and does not resemble themselves – stop them from being rags (or shirts or tablecloths or dresses) and start them being another thing, another kind of matter.
The pieces I had left of myself after Sydney was done with me (after the ashes were done with me), I put them back together. I don't know if the man left behind looks anything like another man named Michael Vaughn, but I know he has been reconstructed, and that's what counts.
Perhaps he is a different kind of matter.
******
When I loved Sydney (I say it in the past tense, not because I learned to stop loving her, but because the man who loved her is no longer me),
When I loved Sydney, I remember watching a profile under a strip of light (in dreams, it ought to be moonlight, in reality, it was a streetlamp), and in the light from the streetlamp I watched her breath rise and fall and the way her cheek sometimes twitched in her sleep. I lay on my side and watched the strip of light play across her body and thought of all the things I must say to her, all the ways to tell her what I suspect she already knew.
That I would lose myself for her.
Not that I loved her; that would be trite. She's heard it before.
But that I would breathe her in and breathe out nothing, that I would follow the sound of her voice to my impending end if I knew this was what was required of me. I knew this in the same way an animal knows it is stuck in the cage (you'd prefer a more romantic analogy?) I knew I could not extricate myself. I knew the process of breathing and sleeping and touching and loving and becoming would be so complete that eventually I would not be able to separate out the gray areas, that she would not lift easily out of my life, that if she were gone all the rest of the pieces would scatter. I knew I would lose myself for her.
I didn't know how soon.
********
She was sleeping on the airplane. We were traveling back from Hong Kong and she was sleeping the airplane. She was sedated.
Suddenly I couldn't breathe, the breath whooshed out of my chest in that way that it does after an especially vicious kick to the gut, when you roll on your side and gasp as if you've never tasted air before and you'll never taste it again.
This is what Sydney tasted like.
But it was not me who tasted her. Not the man you see today, not the person you know. Another person, an imposter – that man still remembers Sydney Bristow.
*******
The way I love my wife is different. Not that it's less, or that it's more, but that it is a different kind of thing. It is the love of a different man for a different woman. It is the love of the person I became after I stopped being who I was, after all the pieces were torn away.
I loved her and I was no longer tattered.
*******
This fact does not help me.
The question ought to be whom I love and the truth is nothing like that. The question is who it is that loves – is it the man I used to know, or is it me?
I don't think I want to know the answer.
*******
I kissed my wife after I came home, kissed her passionately and hard and tried to take her in through my fingertips. Her lips felt strange.
There was a game – a game at a party when I was thirteen or so. Kiss, but kiss through a sheet, you never knew who it was; it felt so strange. We were young enough to play this.
This is what my wife's lips felt like – like a foreign substance, like a sheet, like someone else's lips.
No, like someone else was kissing her.
*******
Sydney crawled down a drainpipe before me. She crawled before me and the fire chased after me and I could smell the ashes. The flames flashed closer to the soles of my shoes and the corrugated metal grew hot under my hands and I felt the cold settling into me, deep in my chest.
I could smell the ashes.
******
She sat across from me on the plane, just sat there as if nothing was wrong. She smiled at me and inclined her head when I went over the op tech. She laughed; she made me laugh. I wondered for a moment if this was really me.
******
I brushed her shoulders as I was fastening the necklace, and for a second her skin felt real. It did not feel like what I knew it to be, the flesh of an imposter.
*******
For a moment, I was myself.
She was herself; she was real. She remembered everything I had ever said to her, and in that moment I would have lost myself again. Perhaps I am losing myself now. Perhaps my crimes will come back to haunt me.
Perhaps I will become the man I was before. (He was the man with Sydney tonight, I'm sure of it – I felt it when he touched her. I heard it in his voice. This was a man who remembered, long after the absence. Long after the ashes.)
But this was a man I did not recognize – a man who could remember the ashes and still reach out to her, still touch her, without being afraid she would crumble away. If I knew this man (if I became him) would he return to her?
It might be worth it.
He might (I might) breathe her in and breathe out nothing, he might reach for her again, he might rush to save her and let all the consequences be damned. He might lose himself for her.
What would he do, if this man had the chance again? (I know, I know what I would do if I were him: I would reach my fingers up to touch her face, I would feel the tears running onto my thumbs and they would feel warm and wet and tangible, not dry, not like the ashes. I would think of the ashes, but they would not force me to fear her, not this time. They would force me to fear the ashes themselves, what they meant. They would force me to fear losing her. I would reach out for her as if she might crumble, as if she might slip away. I would pull her to me, pull her face near until I could not tell if I felt her tears or my own. I would touch her lips to mine, gently, briefly, to see if she responded, to see if she wanted this as much as I did, if she feared what would happen if we let this moment slip away. I would smile and almost laugh when she responded, when she brought her lips back to mine, when I pressed myself against her and let my fingers tangle in her hair. I would pull her to me and take her in, breathing in and breathing out and becoming a man I remember, a man who loved her, a man who would have done anything to keep her safe. A man who would shred to remnants without her. And I would feel suddenly safe, because I would realize she was feeling the same thing.)
But this man is not me. Because I will wait, I will pause, I will hold myself back in fear, let myself remember the smell of ashes. Let myself remember a woman I still call my wife.
Would that woman still call herself by that name, if she could see me now? If she knew the man I was, the man I might become?
(I think she might be the first to leave.)
I wonder what might happen, if I let myself forget about the ashes. If I let myself become this man, the one I want to be.
Perhaps I would realize that I have been him all along, or that he has been me.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps some things never change.