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Part 5 : Tinder
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  Allison spoke in his ear.

  "Where have you been?"

  Irritating woman. What would have been desire a month, hell a week ago, Sark now only felt disgust. Disgust, distrust, distaste. Together, disinterest.

  "I'm on the trail of the lovely Miss Bristow," his voice flat, clipped.

  "'Lovely'?" She sounded petulant now, feeling her control waning.

  "She's quite an enigma," Sark observed.

  Silence.

  "She's not an easy woman to find."

  "I never had much problem finding her."  Cutting, sarcastic. A caged animal.

  "Beating her is the trick," he answered.

  "Report to Callaghan the second you have any news."

  Silence.

  She hung up.

  He put away the phone, head spinning. Those damned voices, and his vision was beginning to blur. He hadn't slept, untested-drug-free, for four months. Not since Sydney had shown up in his hotel room, telling them they were even.

  Even. What a dull thing to be.
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  She spent just over seven months in the custody of the Covenant.

  Agent Bristow wasn't the first person to receive the procedure, certainly not the last, but it had never been used on someone so trained to resist torture. They'd cut her, bruised her, burned her and frozen her, and still that unquenchable fire in her eyes had flickered. Mental pain next, horrifying images day and night, dream stimulations when she slipped out of consciousness. It had taken four months to break her and another two to remake her. One throwaway month used on testing her.

  Into the field and back again; all it took was one mission in France to do away all their work.

  Her mark had been an easy one - a French diplomat nosing too close to one of the Covenant's operations. A dose of antipyrine, into the cloudy glass of Petruese he drank every evening, to pawn it off as a heart attack. One witness, leading her on a wild chase through the winding roads of Des Trente. Her report had been vague, and Ockley had noticed an odd sort of flicker in her eyes when she looked at him. At the time he'd written it off as stress, and increased the dosage of her too-heavy medication.

  Two weeks later, she'd given Ockley the scar he bore, a jagged line scraping down his collarbone. It was a miracle that he was alive, and Sydney Bristow didn't believed in miracles.

  She'd ripped the straps holding her down straight off the metal gurney, lodged a palmed scalpel in Ockley's throat and ran. There were guards, of course. She held her head low and shot through them like a dervish. Three survived to enjoy slashed pensions.

  She disappeared for the remainder of the year, resurfacing every now and then, flauntingly using her Covenant alias Julia Thorne. With her, always, was Simon Walker. He'd met her on her second outing for the Covenant, busting into a vault together in Algeria. Callaghan had suggested killing him, but he'd suggested it in vain. There was an otherwise unanimous vote: Simon Walker, though he himself easy enough to eliminate, held far too many secrets to dispatch. He was valuable to anyone with enough money, a favorite pet of many crime bosses paying to keep their hands clean. He had too many allies to simply kill.

  Agent Bristow worked tirelessly those seventeen months when she was dead to her family and friends back in L.A. For reasons that were his own, Simon Walker never left her side.

  Together they uncovered the founders of the Covenant, the treatments used in programming her, and the lasting effects of the procedure. That hollow little voice in her head would be her companion for life.  No amount of doctoring or therapy would ever completely purge the blackness implanted by the Covenant. Most importantly, she found out why.

  Everything in life comes full circle. A story is never done until there is one hero or one villain left standing, and no more. Milo Rambaldi had a flair for the dramatic.

  In his notebook he outlined a story, about a brave, violent woman. A piece of his story went into each of his creations; All assembled, it acted as a mirror. It could show you what was truth, or it could show you what you needed to be true. All assembled, it was nothing. An odd, irregular creation with no use at all. It's surface was dull, and shiny, and reflective.

Agent Bristow knew. She would die in the end, or maybe live. All she could do was act it out to its finish.

  Memorizing the decrypted report, Sark wordlessly gave praise to the neurotic Marshall Flinkman.

-

  He'd known Simon Walker, known him well. They'd met at school, spent hours on the rooftop overlooking the gym, spying on the athletic girls and fantasizing about the life ahead of them. Simon had always aimed high - money, girls, brains, charisma. Finn had been more realistic. He'd looked at the dark-haired boy and said that he'd claw his way up until his nails were torn and bloody, if he had to. Simon would look sickened, repulsed, so Finn would shrug, and say, metaphorically, of course.

  The day he met Julia Thorne, Simon Walker died.

  She was a pretty little thing, all buck and fire, black-eyed and frosted blonde hair. Finn had followed her progress through Callaghan, listening to impatient updates while he took care of the blacker side of business. Callaghan had been boastful, of course; His newest gadget could break the barriers set by Irina Derevko and the masters before her. The moment she stepped off the plane, Finn Ryden had felt for the first time what it was to be powerless.

  The second she laid eyes on him, he felt what it was to be pierced, deep and fatally, to the core and back again. She'd noted every weakness, every strength, every thought that ever went through his head. He was left-handed; He walked with a limp in his right leg that he worked tirelessly to conceal. He could shoot a rabbit across a field, blindfolded. He preferred crippling shots to fatal ones. Then she'd moved her gaze to the dark-haired man at his shoulder, and never bothered to take another glance at Finn.

  Everything about her had infuriated him; Simon, his best friend since grade school. Their fucking mothers had played bridge together on Sundays, for Christ's sake. He was gone, first symbolically then physically, all because of Sydney Bristow, daughter of The Man and prodigy in the game of espionage.

  He'd kill the little princess.

-

  Smirking, Sark ran a gloved hand over the smooth black metal of his long-lost Mercedes. Amazing. She swung around to face him and barely even bated an eye. Fitting, perhaps. She was still dead, or thought herself to be.

  Grunting in exaggerated annoyance, she reached into her pocket and flicked him the keys. "Not even a scratch, I swear," she murmured.

  Exhaling silently, he followed her without invitation. She shot him a questioning, bemused look as she unlocked the front door.

  "You have a thing for France," he noted.

  "I find their driving laws to be useful in our line of work," she deadpanned. "How'd you find me?"

  "You disappeared just 10 minutes after I saw you in Rennes. You're good, Sydney, but you can't simply vanish."

Again, she held that frightening, bemused look. "I did 2 years ago, didn't I?"

  He was astonished by the interior. Outwardly it was in shambles, vines creeping along the woodwork, the porch fallen to termites. Inside was leather, and metal, and smooth, seamless surfaces. The walls were black, the carpet grey. Still computers lined the living room wall, and an imposing black-metal case sat locked in the corner.

  She caught his eye, and half-laughed. "I'd say help yourself, but I'm assuming you're already armed if you came here to kill me."

  "Yes," he replied. "But I came here to talk. The Browning is merely for my protection."

  "From?"

  He smiled at her.

  Grinning ruefully, Sydney caught her heel on the edge of the coffee table, unzipping the cuff of her black cargo pants to remove the dagger sheathed in her boot. Before his eyes she disassembled her armory, removing the second throwing knife from her other boot, and the twin 9mm. Ultrastar pistols holstered on her right hip and thigh. She winced guardedly when she unbuckled the belt, and he saw it. The dull black material of her jacket was torn and stained purple, and at her hip there was blood.

  "You're hurt," he stated.

  "Perceptive little son of a bitch, aren't you?" she lashed, carelessly disassembling the magnificently expensive sniper rifle she'd carried slung across her narrow shoulders.

  "Was Lazarey a bitch, then? I never knew," Sark responded easily, sitting unbidden on the cushioned leather loveseat in the center of the room.

Sydney efficiently unlatched the sighter and locked the chamber shut. The safety feature, he saw, had been taken out altogether. "What do you want, Sark?" She was done (with his games.

  "My 300 million dollar inheritance, a little house in New Jersey with a white fence to call home, and a decent glass of Merlot. It's what the Covenant wants that's got me curious,"

  She gave him a withering look as she locked away the rest of her weaponry. Progress, progress.

  "They've sent me to kill you, as you assumed. Now, judging by your willingness to effectively save my life and forfeit your own, or should I say a certain facet of your life, at least, in the process, I'm guessing you want something from me."

  "My, aren't we the optimist?" she muttered.

  "Name your price, Miss Bristow," he said tersely.

  "The Rambaldi notebook."

  How embarrassing. The detached, impassive, heartless assassin literally choked on his teeth in surprise.

  "The Rambaldi - Sydney, if you needed the bloody notebook, why didn't you just let Boy Wonder and his crack team of lapdogs draw you up a transcript? Certainly you realize that the notebook in in the CIA's possession. You stole the damned thing."

  "Yes," she agreed. "And I want it back. The original."

  "Why?"

  Finally Sydney turned, and looked him in the face. He was older, more beaten. His colorless skin glowed virulently against the dark circles under his eyes, which, she was amused to note, were still made of ice. Prison hadn't broken him, and neither, it seemed, had the Covenant.

  Without a word she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the bracelet; A set of rough-cut harlequin opals on a frayed gold string.

  "Good lord, is that -?" Sark demanded, and couldn't resist a laugh as he leaned forward in wonder.

  It was old, extremely valuable, and a piece of the famed Rambaldi puzzle. The jewels were oddly shaped, irregularly cut to form an as-of-yet indecipherable code.

  Sydney stepped onto the tiled floor outlining the kitchenette boxed into the living room. She dropped the bracelet to the ground, and smashed it under her boot.

  Excuse the distasteful and wholly unoriginal language, he thought, but Holy fucking shit.

  Sark had her against the wall and pinned, his hand around her throat, before he ever considered how badly the caveman approach ever worked with Sydney Bristow.

  Upon reflection, the move was ill advised, to say the least. She winded him with a jackknife punch to the sternum, and swept his legs out from beneath him. He yanked her down with him, and she hissed in pain when he clutched her upper arm.

  Sydney was off the ground in an instant, rolling away from Sark and performing a spotless kip-up, snapping her legs up to her chest then forward, using the momentum to flip to her feet. She'd gained strength since Sark had last fought her - she pounded him in the face with a snap kick as he sprang from the floor.

Hating himself for the sheer blatantness of the maneuver, Sark lunged, wrapped his arms around her waist, and tackled her linebacker-style. She went down hard, her head striking the coffee table with a crack. He pinned her ruthlessly, holding her still, squeezing the bullet wound on her bicep. She didn't flinch, or make a noise. Eyes that would have spit contempt two years ago were now merely lifeless.

  "What's the plan, Sydney?" he gritted. "Kill your enemies, destroy the prophecy, and throw your life away? Is that it?"

  She wouldn't answer. She was barely even listening.

  "Do you think blood with cure your wounds?" he suddenly yelled in her face. "Do you think killing, cheating and lying your way out will save you? Do you think revenge will ever make you whole again?"

  He shook her then, violenty, thrashing her body back and forth until her head snapped against the trodden carpet.

  "Vengeance leaves you nothing, Sydney. You can cease to live, but your mind goes on. Keep going long enough and all you'll have left is torment," he barked. "And believe me, Agent Bristow, I know."

  She didn't move, wouldn't speak. Hardly even looked at him with those despicably dead eyes.

He could explain it, perhaps, if he'd wanted to. Sydney Bristow was his equal in many, in most ways. She was the best at her job, ruthless and resourceful. Yet she'd been better than him, always, because she was alive when he had died years before he'd ever met her. She'd lived this life until it had broken her, and still she had always found something to laugh about, someone who made her smile. It had given Sark an unreasonable hope that redemption was not unattainable, that this life didn't kill everyone and everything it touched.

  Sydney Bristow was dying inside, and some remnant of humanity would not allow Sark to let her.

  So he shook her, screamed at her, beat her bloody and finally, kissed her. He clawed away her clothing and still she did nothing, moved not an inch, didn't even whisper the hatred-filled curses he was accustomed to hearing from her red mouth. He pawed, caressed, tore his way into her because she refused to resist him. She tasted like vanilla and smoke.

  He let out a triumphant, violent laugh when she suddenly raked her nails across his bare back. The beautiful face he'd battered moments before leaned forward to kiss him, and she cried out when his teeth scraped her shoulder and he drove deeper into her, feeling the nearly extinguished fire inside her crackling to life.

  The first time that he felt anything in years, and Sark couldn't name it, could barely even form a thought. It was disgust, distrust, distaste, and something dangerously close to happiness.