Chronic Vertigo
Chapter Four: Catalyst [Part B]

Author: Kira [kira at sd-1 dot com]
Genre: Romance/Action/Adventure
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: We all know the drill. I don't own Alias, so please don't sue me. I'm already in debt. And even if you did sue me, it would come off my credit card and I'd still be in debt. So, right. You're better off leaving me be.
Author's Note: Feedback = updates. I swear, that's a real math equation.




You can't refuse something like this.

Vaughn wished for nothing more than his suit coat to insulate him against the cold of the white room he now sat in. He shivered slightly, his skin still recovering from the warm caresses of the sun it found down in Colombia. At least, he reflected cynically, I managed to catch some sleep before being called in again.

He had refused, at first, when Kendall had strode up to him, face red with anger after speaking with their newest aquision for the glass cell, telling him it was time he went under the watchful eye of the regression therapist back at their home offices. He'd refused with every reason and excuse in the book, detailing how it might not be in his best interest to have someone else running around up there when they didn't know all that had been done.

Kendall had almost laughed in his face.

Vaughn had the distinct impression that Kendall was not a believer, and was simply doing this to rule Vaughn out and get on with this so called investigation.

He felt like a prisoner here, not even able to rub his arms for extra warmth, to itch his nose, nothing. Bound and forced to listen to this doctor as she started explaining things in an even, calming voice. God, he didn't want to be doing this!

"Agent Vaughn, I'm going to count back from 10 slowly, at the end of which you'll find yourself back where this all started. 10, 9, 8…"

Her voice floated away after he closed his eyes. Was it possible to remove himself from the situation completely, to avoid her prompting and image placement and wander off into some unexplored region of his mind instead? Wait – that's where they wanted him to go.

"Where are you?" The voice wasn't outside, as he'd expected it to be, but inside his mind. Were they really words, or was he just expecting them to be?

He opened his eyes.

Instead of seeing the white room and the therapist staring back at him, bewildered by his awesome ability to overcome her hypnosis and make a mockery of her profession, he found himself standing on the front lawn of his childhood home, the sun warm above him. He smiled, relieved to no longer being frozen and looked up to the sun, his eyes slipping closed for a moment. He half-expected this all to disappear as soon as he reopened them, like a child playing a game would. But this was no game, and he soon caught sight of his father playing with his 8-year-old self.

He suddenly realized how alike his father he was now in life. How he wore the same crisp suits and shined shoes, the same pressed shirts and loosened ties. And while the vision of his father smiled and bent down to catch his running son, Vaughn could now see the creases near his eyes and upon his forehead from worry, his eyes always moving to make sure he was indeed safe. His younger self ran and jumped up into his father's arms, a laugh falling from his lips not heard soon after this moment, a sound retired by sadness.

His father held him close, his head resting on his son's shoulder as the worries of the days away melted away. It was so clear to Vaughn at that moment that his father lived for his family, did was he did for his family, even died for them. To keep them safe.

He quickly turned his head as the front door opened and his mother stepped out onto the porch with the typical cooking utensil in her hand, a gentile expression covering her sharp French features as she caught sight of her husband out on the lawn. Her sleek shoes, bought last week in Paris, clicked against the walk as she almost ran up to meet him. Vaughn's younger self was released as his father stood and kissed his mother, then rushed in to hug them both around the legs.

And standing off to the side, unseen by any, was the older Vaughn, the tormented, broken Vaughn who had only seemed to get through life with these memories and stories of his father's nobility and love. College was simply a stepping-stone to where he was now, a journey rushed so that he could find the end.

He wondered briefly what his profession would be if his father had lived. Would he still be a spy, like the father he idolized so much, or would he found a different calling in life?

"Where are you?" the words asked again, and this time, overcome by a sad sense of nostalgia, he could do nothing but answer.

"In the front yard," he replied, stepping across the grass as he spoke. His steps were hurried – if he moved fast enough, could he hug them too?

His breath quickened as he moved, almost catching in his chest when the family moved apart, lead hand by hand into the warm house, the aroma of a delicious dinner drifting out the front door. He moved faster, shoes making no noise as they moved up the steps.

And then something he didn't expect occurred.

The image of his father turned to him, hand on the doorknob, and smiled up at him as if he could see him. But this was a memory, not a movie. Had he crafted it into his own design so that this one meeting with his father could occur?

Suddeny, he was jerked violently from this memory, head still spinning as he re-entered the white room, the shocked face of the doctor affirming his fears that something adverse had happened. He blinked, a hand free to come up to rub his eyes; he was only half surprised to find moisture under his lashes. Vaughn quickly rubbed it away, a tired sigh escaping his lips.

"Are you alright, Agent?" the doctor asked, her question rushed, her tone surprised and worried. He looked up at her. Of course he was fine – what had happened?

"Fine, fine. What – what happened?" he asked, stretching. The doctor shook her head.

"I don't know. Do you? One moment you were there – you're supposed to progress out of that state, not jump from one to another. Are you sure nothing happened? What was the last thing you saw?" she pelted him with the questions, firing one right after another, not giving him time to answer in between.

"My father. He, he turned to look right at me. I swear he could see me," he muttered, sitting up in the chair. She didn't make a move to stop him, so he stood, and crossed the room for his suit coat. He put it on, but the cold feeling did not go dissapear, as he'd hoped it would.

"Saw you? Maybe you were yourself and he was looking at you in the memory," she suggested, swiveling in her chair to face him as he leaned against the wall across from her.

"No, it wasn't like that," he retorted, arms up almost hugging himself. She shook her head, eyes cast at the floor.

"That's all for today, Agent," she said to him finally, standing. "I'll report this to Director Kendall. You're free to go."

"What happened?"

"Excuse me?"

"What *happened*? Why was I pulled like that? I swear it gave me whiplash."

She sighed and paused filling out some papers on her clipboard. "I have no idea what's going on up there," she supplied, motioning to his head with her pen, "but whatever it is, I'm not ready to mess with it. Let's see what we can find out before we muck around."

Well, that was reassuring. He rubbed his arms as he ducked out of the room, finding the hallway warmer than the room he just exited. Maybe they had to keep it cold for the equipment, or something like that; he didn't care anymore. His head pounded with a tremendous headache, every movement intensifying the pain.

Just as he was about to round the corner into his dust-collecting office and find solace from his headache, he heard his name being called.

"Vaughn! Oh my God, Vaughn, are you okay?" Sydney came running down the hallway, brown hair tied up into a pony tail bouncing as she did. She came to a halt just before him, a hand coming up to brush his face. He moved it away just in time, before it was seen by anyone passing by, and pulled her into his office, shutting the door behind them.

"I'm fine," he sighed, rummaging through his drawers for some aspirin. "Just – a headache."

"Did you go to regression?"

"Yeah. Just finished," Vaughn replied. He fell into his desk chair and swallowed the pills dry, a trick he'd learned during those years in India when he couldn't find water and got a headache from the intense heat. Leaning back in his high back chair, he let his eyes slip closed and a moan escape his lips.

"Vaughn, what happened?" Sydney asked softly, rounding the desk and sitting on the edge across from him. He pulled his head up from the chair back and leaned his chin on her knees appearing child-like staring up at her, a frown crossing his features.

"No one likes to relive that stuff, Syd," he confessed. She nodded, a hand petting the top of his head as he closed his eyes and relaxed against her. She knew from experience what he was speaking about, how reliving the past was something man wasn't supposed to do. "I saw my father again, before he died, how happy everything was," he murmured. "I got pulled out right when he was looking at me. Not a memory, but me."

Wait. "Pulled out?"

"Yeah." He reopened his eyes. "Why?"

She looked away, her eyes focused on a frame on the wall behind the desk. A solitary degree hung there, out of view of any visitors if he were sitting at his desk. She narrowed her eyes, confused. Most men, and professional women for that matter, hung their degrees and accolades in a prominent place as a way of bragging to all those who entered, showing where they had gone as some kind of badge of worth. And yet, there was his, almost hidden behind an ever growing pile of files and thick manuals, the bottom of the frame completely gone.

Means to an end?

"I'm not surprised you have a headache," she decided to answer cryptically, letting her gaze fall back to him. She laughed a bit at his face that looked like one of a child asking his mother for something. Green eyes tilted to the ceiling, chin balanced on her bare knees; she couldn't help but smile at him as his face moved into a frown as he assessed his headache.

"Still there, just…stop talking so loud," he reported.

"If I do, I won't even be able to hear myself talk. C'mon, you shouldn't be here with that headache – and I wasn't even pulled out!" He looked at her quizzically as she pulled him to his feet, wondering where her tangent came from. "Never mind," she said, catching his look. "Just – get some sleep and it should go away."

Sydney ushered him to the door, almost pushing him out of it –

- and right into Weiss.

"You look like hell, man," he commented. "Anyway, Kendall wants you at JTF ASAP. They're having some problems with Mitchell."

"That can wait. He just had his regression," Sydney told him. Weiss held up his hands in surrender.

"Hey now, don't shoot the messenger."

"What's the problem?" Vaughn asked sleepily, a hand rubbing his forehead.

"He won't talk to anyone but you."

::

"I believe you have some information for me."

"You know I hate meeting out in the open like this." His companion, a shaking, jittery man of Russian descent, glanced nervously around him, glad for the complete lack of people.

"It's secure as long as you provide yourself useful," Jack Bristow commented, noticing the man's movements. His eyes bore into his contact as he spoke, causing the man no longer feel safe in this supposedly secure solitude.

"Alksandr Zuravlev canceled a US Labor dinner invitation for tomorrow night claiming relative were in town and wished to see him before they left," the contact explained, eyes scanning for anyone that might be around to back Jack up in the event that he wasn't helpful. It annoyed Jack that the man usually had no faith in his own information, an annoyance that reminded him of countless other things he could be doing at the moment instead of this.

"I don't understand how this is of any worth to me," he remarked offhand. The contact's jittering intensified, and just as Jack expected, he shoved his hands into his pockets.

"Zuravlev has no family; the US Labor union is big ally, no men he would just 'blow off' as you say."

"And you suspect that whatever occurs in this meeting will be of use to me?"

"I know so!" He was pleading now, so sure his information was worth this meeting. "Listen, Zuravlev has his hands in everything. He would only not attend this meeting if it were something big." He stopped and looked at Jack's face – he was loosing. Money was worth nothing if you were dead, and the informant pulled out the last bit of information he had, his hopes of selling it to agencies across the ocean crushed. "I heard what the meeting was going to be about."

"And?"

"A computer. Some kind of computer that his 'relatives' are looking for," the informant said. Jack's eyes widened just a bit. "I see I have done good."

"This meeting never happened." The CIA agent quickly got into his car and drove off, leaving his contact alone at the top of the dirty hill. He smiled and rubbed his hands together, thankful to be alive another day.

::

He'd called the meeting as soon as he could, tasking a junior agent to do some quick research, something to back up the informant's claims. The drive back to the JTF was terse and worrisome at the least, his mind mulling over the several possibilities of what this move could mean. Irina knew more than any of them – he was sure of this even before her escape. But no matter how hard he tried, she'd never budge, her only input that of not saying what could be the end of Agent Vaughn. And while he knew in his heart that she was saying that to protect her child's happiness (as was he, in every move he made), he felt it selfish of her to with hold information.

Now she was working off her knowledge without consulting them, or him. He didn't know if he could trust her, if these new movements of hers were to benefit the young agent and her daughter or if she were working from the other side, hoping that, now that she knew where to find him, she could use the information for her own devices.

The cynical side of his mind that had long ago taken over felt the second scenario was the proper one.

At no cost could he allow Irina to take possession of this computer or any information this Russian businessman was ready to provide her. They just had to get there first.

As he slid into an empty parking space just outside the JTF, his cell rang. "What?"

"I've found the guest list for a US Labor Department/ABC Volgograd dinner, sir, and Mr. Zuravlev is not on it."

He hung up.

Damn.