Sydney just stared at the man she loved with all her heart standing in the doorway of the hospital room. She didn't even know where to begin. How do you start up a conversation about what to do now that his wife is in CIA custody and the sham that was his marriage will be ending? Finally, she managed to blurt out, "I wasn't expecting you to be here."

He smiled at her. "When have I not been there when you've needed my help? Excluding the whole kidnapping, missing two years thing. It's part of the guardian angel job description."

She smiled shyly at him and broke eye contact. "God, I haven't felt like this since my days as a double agent," she whispered.

"What?" he asked, sitting down on the hospital bed next to her.

"Shy when I'm around you. I don't know what to say to you. I don't even know what I'm allowed to say to you."

"Sometimes words aren't needed, Syd." Vaughn slipped his arms around her and pulled her into a hug. "I want you to know that I never stopped loving you. Not once."

Sydney stayed still for a minute savoring the feel of his body against hers. But then she pulled away. "I want to know what happened. I want to hear it in your words."

Vaughn nodded. "I wasn't lying to you when I said that your death destroyed me. My whole world imploded on me. Dixon, he really is a good man. He pretty much saved me. Forced me to go to CIA counseling and then he gave me my job back. And then some. He showed faith in me that no one else was willing to give. He gave me the assignment to get closer to Lauren Reed. I had met her a few times through my counseling. She was doing a deposition about some NSC investigation on the same floor my psychiatrist was."

"So, Dixon asked you to get close to her."

"She showed interest in me romantically. I had nothing to lose. I knew that I wouldn't fall in love with her. I knew that I couldn't. Now when I still loved you so much that it hurt. So I went with it. I formed a completely false relationship with her. Half the time, I was in complete disbelief that she was buying the lies I was feeding her. Nothing in our relationship happened normally. I didn't even propose to her. She proposed to me."

"No!" Sydney couldn't help but laugh.

"Yeah. I said yes because I was still trying to gain solid information on her being an agent for the Covenant. And once again, you weren't alive so I had no reason to say no."

"I understand."

"When you reappeared in Hong Kong, my heart tore in two. Because I thought you were gone forever, I had entered into a marriage that all of the sudden I would have given my life to get out of. Before I was sent to retrieve you from Hong Kong, I had a meeting with Dixon. He told me that there was no way I could tell you the truth about the situation with the Covenant and my marriage. It killed me to have to hide the truth from you."

"It killed me not knowing the truth." Sydney paused. "But Dixon was right. I wouldn't have been able to handle it at the time. He was right to want to wait until you had taken them into custody."

"It was hard, but I think I knew in my heart that he was right. Still, I really didn't want to go along with it. There were about a thousand times where I almost told you everything."

"It was hard on both of us."

"I think it may have been a little harder on me." As Sydney shot him a look of disbelief at what he had just said, he realized he needed to elaborate. "You see you didn't know what could have been with us. I did." He placed his hand on top of where hers was sitting on the bed without turning his head to make eye contact. "I was going to ask you to marry me."

"What?" Sydney looked over at him in confusion.

"Do you remember that one day I said that my mother was in the hospital and I had to go to Paris? It was over two years ago, so I don't know why you would."

"I remember," she said hesitantly.

"Well, the going to see my mother part was true. Her being the hospital wasn't. I was going to get this." Vaughn pulled a small box out of his pocket.

Sydney took the box from him and opened it slowly. Her mouth dropped open. "Is this what I think it is?"

"It was my grandmere's wedding ring. She told me that I was supposed to give it to the one woman I couldn't live without." Vaughn looked into Sydney's eyes. "That would be you, Syd."

She just continued to stare at him in disbelief.

"I was going to propose to you when you got back from your mission in Taipei. Ironic, isn't it?"

"Ironic is the theme of my life," she said softly.

"There's something else I want you to know. When I married Lauren, I bought a ring from the jeweler down the street from my house. I didn't give her this ring. Because I knew that it was yours, and no matter what happened, it would always be yours. I could never give it to another woman."

Sydney went to hand the ring back to Vaughn. "That is very sweet. Thank you for telling me that."

Vaughn looked down at her hand and then back up at her face. "Why don't you keep it?"

She tilted her head in a look of confusion. "You want me to keep it?"

"I was hoping you would want to wear it," he said shyly. "I love you, Syd. It seems like I always have, and I know I always will. I'm so sure of this. I can't live without you. I think I've earned you."

"I'm a reward?" Sydney said with an eyebrow raised.

"You're the best reward I could ever think of." He smiled. "I want you with all my heart and soul, Sydney." He stood up off of the hospital bed and kneeled down on the ground. Taking the ring out of her hand, he held it out to here and said, "Will you marry me?"

"Of course I will," she said before the tears started spilling down her cheeks.

Vaughn sat down next to her again and wiped the tears away gently. "I'll always be here to wipe your tears away from now on," he whispered. He slid the ring on to her finger.

Overcome with emotion, she pulled his face to hers and gave him the kiss she had been storing up inside of her for months. After a few minutes, they heard a subtle coughing noise from the doorway. Turning towards the sound, Sydney saw Weiss standing in the doorway.

"I was trying to give you two some time to talk things out," Weiss started to explain. "But then Sark showed up, and he's kind of impatient. So are you done?"

Sydney went running into his arms.

"This is unexpected," he said.

"I think she's just a little overwhelmed right now," Michael said giving his best friend a wink.

"You gave her the ring, didn't you?" he said looking at Sydney's smiling face. "You are a smooth one, Michael Vaughn."

Vaughn just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Weiss laughed and called out into the hallway. "Let's get this meeting started, guys."

Sydney watched the rest of the group filter into the room. Both of her parents were in a deep conversation with Sark, presumably about Kaylee and what exactly had occurred in the past few hours. Marshall bumbled in after them with a massive bag of what Sydney could only guess to be tech stuff he had stolen for her. When he looked up at her, she mouthed a silent thank you and he just blushed. Last was a battered and bruised, wheelchair bound Will.


"I wouldn't miss this for the world," Will said to Sydney as the nurse wheeled him next to her.

Sydney walked over to her mother. "We need to talk," she said bluntly.

"I know," Irina replied. "Do you want me to explain?"

"I think I've pieced it together mostly. Dad seems to trust you. It's not going to happen that easily with me. I want to believe that everything you've done was for the benefit of me and Kaylee. But I can't just erase the ways you've hurt me."

"I understand."

"I just wanted to let you know that I'm willing to give you at least a little benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give you the chance to prove to me where your priorities really are."

"That's all I can ask." Irina smiled at her daughter. "Thank you."

Sydney looked at her mother for a moment. "You do know that this will definitely not be as easy as it was with Dad, but it's going to be twice as hard with Kaylee. She hates you more than you can imagine."

"I know that. She tried to lie to me and tell me that she missed me. A mother always knows when her children are lying to her. I know it's going to be hard. But I don't care. It's something I have to do."

Sydney nodded to her mother and took her place next to Vaughn again.

"Well, we have two extremely capable handlers, if I do say so myself," Weiss began, "the best tech guy at the CIA, a family of spies, a CIA analyst, and one very pissed off ex-boyfriend. I say we're in good shape."