Part 15 : Tailspin
-
She dodged through the onslaught of terrified socialites, her bare feet slapping against the soft carpet as she sped through the Italian-furnished labyrinth. Always, weaving back and forth, a flash of gold silk goading her on. She didn't waste her bullets; the Browning, with a half-used 12-shot clip, was held ready until she could find a clear mark.
One of Quick's errant guards, big as a house and twice as costly, grabbed Sydney from behind and slammed her against the wall. Without pause she lowered her stance, jerked his arm up, and flipped him over her shoulder. As he scrambled to his feet she swung with her knee. His neck snapped and she sprinted past as he fell.
Screaming, all around her, men calling for someone to stop her, none brave enough to approach. Sydney drew up, turning her eyes in a circle. Allison had disappeared.
"Vaughn, Eric - did you get Sark?" she demanded breathlessly into her bracelet, barreling through the crowd, out onto the veranda. She nearly tripped over her previously discarded shoes.
Silence, in the icy breeze and over the comm link. "Eric, do you copy?" she said desperately.
Blackness - dull, empty shapes in the night, trees and bushes and filtered yellow light glowing sparsely from the tasteful, insufficient lamps lining the main pathway into the park.
Silence. Static. It was all she ever heard anymore.
She stepped off the portico, into the salient grass. It tangled between her toes, cool and damp and sharp. Somewhere was Allison, concealed behind the trees, the criss-crossing shadows, somewhere. The Browning up, out, Sydney trod noiselessly down the lawn, darting in and out of deep shadows.
"Did you get Sark?" Simultaneously, in her ear and to her right. Vaughn, in the echoing blackness illuminated by the white moon, approached carelessly, his firearm held at ease, oblivious to the threat.
Before Sydney could call out Allison was on him, slipping from the darkness. A single axe kick to his stomach and he went down. Sydney could almost hear the stitches below his ribcage snapping.
Allison grabbed his arms, twisted; she snatched his gun as it fell from his hand. She pinned him against her and pressed the barrel to his throat. "Stay there," she commanded as Sydney stepped forward.
Hand-to-hand, Sydney could beat her blind-folded.
"Me and Mikey, here, are going for a little trip. Walk away, Syd. Just walk away," she instructed, taking a cautious step back. With no choice, Vaughn moved with her.
Sydney lifted Sark's stolen Browning.
Eyes betraying her fear, Allison halted. "Yeah, right." Poker face. Act indifferent. "Yeah, right. You're going to let Vaughn die just so you can waver between killing me? Do you really think you can shoot me? I know you, Syd. I was your best friend for months."
Allison could be killed. It was a simple fact she'd denied for two years. Rambaldi's accelerated healing couldn't cure a stilled heartbeat.
"You're too noble for vengeance. You can't see past Francie's face and you know it,"
Another step back. Sydney followed steadily.
Allison smiled, smug. Vaughn's breathing came in painful, sporadic bursts. "You can't kill me, Syd. You know it and I know it. So me and Vaughn are going -"
A perfect shot, a bulls-eye through her hand, and Allison dropped the gun with a squeal. Vaughn tumbled to the ground, clutching at his stomach.
Sydney squeezed the trigger twice more, both kneecaps, Allison collapsed onto the brick avenue.
"Francie didn't know me," she explained calmly, another shot into her one good arm. Crippled.
"You can't -" Allison began.
A fifth and final shot, a single bullet punching through the larynx, an agonizing death.
Sydney crouched to check Allison Doren's dissipated pulse. Gone. Remorseless.
Mechanically she knelt beside Vaughn. His eyes were wide, staring at her with sympathy, disbelief. He opened his mouth to speak.
He choked, and coughed blood onto her dress.
Red. A good investment in her line of work.
-
With irritation she swatted away the med student taping up the torn bruise along her jaw line. Her patience was through.
Luckily, her gun had been confiscated at the door.
"Is that all?" she said crisply to Dixon, who watched her thoughtfully from across the tiny room.
Without a word he nodded, and Sydney bolted, charging down the empty hallway toward the bank of elevators. Six floors of soft jazz blaring at her through clipped speakers did nothing to improve her mood.
She'd expected it, of course, but the scene still hammered a blow to her heart. Lauren, curled in an armchair. Tears running down her face, mascara smudged and her hair disheveled from nervous, raking fingers. Eric seated silently beside her, offering whatever stunted comfort he could, an icepack held to the throbbing black bruise on his forehead. They looked up when she entered. This was a private waiting room.
"Hey," Sydney muttered.
"He's asleep right now," Lauren said lifelessly. She held a hand over her eyes. "The doctors found a tear in the weakened tissue. They stopped the bleeding but he's very weak. He's been asking for you."
By instinct Sydney went to Eric's side, checking his bruise and smoothing back his hair. She couldn't face Lauren right now. She had nothing to say to Vaughn.
"Syd." Eric caught her hand and gave it a squeeze. "He's been asking for you,"he told her quietly.
Her fault. Indirectly. She owed him that much.
Her unsteady hand was reaching for the doorknob when Lauren stopped her.
"Is it true?"
Turn, turn, face your enemy.
"Did you really kill Allison Doren?"
"Yes."
Cautious silence. Sydney unapologetic.
"I'm glad," said Lauren.
Eric was watching. It was his chosen job. He smiled at Sydney before she walked out of the room.
-
She blew cool air, feather-light, against his face. She took his hand and held it. Asleep, his tense muscles relaxed.
And she watched him, silently, until he awoke to the sound of them breathing in sync, his heavy and labored, hers light and ineffectual. He opened his eyes and managed a smile when he saw her.
Wires and tubes and monitors cluttered the space around him. She leaned forward, inches apart, and allowed a grin as she drew his hair off his forehead. The same comforting gesture she now reserved for Eric.
"For two years," Vaughn told her. His voice was tired, gravel. "For two years I've gone to sleep and dreamed of you being there when I woke up."
He still loved her. Her father loved her, Dixon loved her, Marshall and everyone else from her old life. It was mutual, but it had grown indistinct. It felt like a high school reunion every time she went to work in the morning.
"I'm here," she assured him, and brushed her fingers through his hair until he drifted back to sleep.
"I'm so sorry about Francie," he whispered before his eyes closed.
-
He grasped her hand wherever they went nowadays. It was a vague encouragement, a reminder that he was backing her up when lying became too severe a discomfort. Office gossip was a bitch, sure, but he could deal. There were worse things than being tagged as Sydney Bristow's latest beau.
It came as a surprise, though, when Jack approached and she clamped down on his hand, refusing to let go. Her expression left no room for discussion.
"Sydney," Jack began, staring coolly at Eric, "may I have a moment?"
"Sure, Dad. What's up?"
He attempted escape, but her lock grip assured Eric that, if not him, his arm, at least, was staying.
Eric half-expected Jack to ask if he'd just been Punk'd.
"It's a matter of some importance," he told his daughter.
"I tell Eric everything, anyway, Dad. He might as well hear it first-hand," Sydney answered with false sweetness.
Tense. Sydney's nails dug into his palm. Only then did Eric realize she was on the brink and falling fast.
"Dixon sent a team after Sark. They lost him in Grant Park. He could be anywhere by now." Stalling. Jack wanted Eric gone. Off the side of a bridge, perhaps.
"Spit it out, Dad. Eric knows everything I do," she explained wearily.
A beat, Jack processing, looking blankly at the two friends.
Defeat. He was no match for Sydney's stubbornness.
"Your mother and I have been working together to recover your missing memories."
Blood draining from her face at an alarming rate. The intense throbbing in Eric's skull intensified. He knew that expression.
Oh, you poor fool, Sydney thought.
"She wants to see you. We had a meeting scheduled soon. She misses you, sweetheart." His voice softened into parent-mode, touched her shoulder, offered support.
Screw it.
"I can't." Abrupt, determined. "Sorry, Dad. I can't see her. I can't – no." Tugging discreetly at Eric's hand, her link to sanity.
"I know, with everything that's happened, you justifiably feeling scared. But she loves you, Sydney," Jack pleaded. "You killed the woman who looked like Francie tonight, I understand. Your mother made the mistake of betraying you once. But she realizes now that you're more important than anything else in this world. She only wants you to be happy."
"She has an endgame, Dad. She always does." She sounded so sure. "And Allison Doren was nothing like Francie."
Eric pulled her away down the hall. Jack watched them go.
-
He could make her laugh. It was his special talent, his charm, his greatest asset.
He told her a story from college, when he got a black eye playing hockey with Vaughn and later got cussed out by his sister for ruining her wedding pictures with his unsightly wound. It wasn't terribly funny, told with indignant enthusiasm, something to remind her how to laugh.
"You honestly don't regret killing Allison Doren, do you?"
She shook her head, letting out the last of her giggles. "She wasn't Francie. She never was. I'd do it again if I could."
Eric nodded in slow understanding, the mood held meticulously happy for fear of everything crashing down. He said finally, "You really did change, didn't you? You really aren't the same Syd as before."
"Nope." A slight shrug. The moment of truth. The tension nearly choking her, but she'd play it out to the end.
Another pause.
"I still love you, though," he pointed out.
"I know."
"I know you know."
He took up the remote control and switched on the TV.
She wasn't all sunshine and roses. He could accept that.
-
It was dim morning when she broke into consciousness, the still living room shadowed and warm, lit by the glow of the muted television, filled with the sound of Eric's muted snores. She was tired, comfortable, and completely alert to the feeling of being watched.
Sydney slid slowly out from beneath Eric's arm, which he'd slung casually around her shoulders before they fell asleep. He stirred, and coughed, and remained dead to the world as she smoothed a quilt over his legs. Against training she ignored the Beretta placed beneath a stack of photo albums in the third drawer in the coat closet. She cracked open the front door and crept outside.
He was there, crouching in the shrubbery, his old haunt where he'd whiled away the hours by familiarizing himself with every aspect of Sydney's home life.
"Is it something about me, or do you just like skulking?" she called out.
He stood, and walked toward her. Outdoors, dressed casually in loose clothes and an unzipped jacket, he looked younger, less feral, ill at ease but faking it well. He smiled at her, a fraction away from a smirk, and she wondered if this was Julian setting aside his alias, terrified and confident.
"It's most definitely you," Sark answered lightly, stopping closer to her than strictly necessary.
"I thought this was a gated community," she said wryly.
"Oh, Sydney. Walls can't keep me out."
He'd come here for a reason, and she was almost expected to throw a wrench in his plans. It was their routine - Sark the aggressor, Sydney the champion.
She took a step back.
He was surprised, for an eternal instant, but he hid it quickly and Sydney agreed to not notice. He shrugged his shoulders and clasped his hands behind his back. The usual stance, the usual dialogue, both playing their roles but it wasn't quite working.
"So. Tell me, darling, how are you going to make me pay for my little trick tonight?" He was smiling, because he had to.
"Nothing," she snapped, folding her arms across her chest.
"What do you have to do to me to make us even again?" he asked. None of the subtlety, the infuriating games Sark always played.
She let out a despicable laugh. "What does it matter if we're even or not? It doesn't make it any better."
She was changing the rules. Finally, one of them had the courage to.
"Being even doesn't help anyone, Julian. All it does is cause more pain. Don't you get it? Killing your father, using Allison to distract me, none of it is right just because it's justified!"
He searched for a quip, a barb to stop her in her tracks, to make her despise him again instead of the searing look of pleading she held in her eyes.
"I know that, Sydney," he said softly. "But it's the wicked lives we lead."
The fight went out of her. Drained out of her and all that was left was tortured.
A burst of wind, kicking leaves around their ankles. It was winter fading to spring, cold and dry. She looked away.
"23 feet, 9 inches. Gilded mahogany, rotting slightly around the left door handle," he recited quietly. "12 feet, 2 inches wide. An abandoned spider web in the upper left corner."
A tired, flickering grin. "Chalk marble, early afternoon. Winter. Taken in '98 or '99. A shadow, probably the photographer, in the right hand corner," she finished.
The church de la Seul. The photograph pinned to the colorless wall of Ockley's lab.
"Thank you," Sark said.
She met his eyes.
"Is there anywhere else I should go for my well-being?" he asked casually.
Unexpected, indecisive. She hesitated before answering.
"After Mom left, when I was younger, Dad always took one week off just before school started in the fall. He'd take me all over the country, just when all the other tourists were going home," she explained. "There's this little stretch of beach in Sarasota, Florida. Siesta Key. Right between the condos and the hotels."
He listened patiently; Almost smiled when he fixed his gaze on her lips and her words faltered slightly.
"In the morning, when it's raining. There isn't another human around for miles." She spoke in a listless monotone, picking through the details remembered by a 12-year-old Sydney. "Everything looks grey. The sky, the sand, the water." She shrugged, feeling faintly silly. "You'll understand when you see it."
Sark was close and leaning closer. She was caught between fleeing into the house or meeting him halfway.
He kissed her nose.
"It's your life, Sydney," he said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "Not theirs."
She was still stiff with shock, chocolate brown eyes wide and staring, when he stepped back and jammed his hands in his pockets. So casual, so - normal. Sark had seen her torn apart so often and so completely that he thought it only fair to show her a glimpse of whom he might've been. Could still maybe be.
"I'll be back later for my car," he added. Assured her it wasn't goodbye.
Shaken, but not stirred, Sydney nodded. She watched in subdued amazement as he strolled indifferently down the driveway, onto the sidewalk. He gave a vague wave without glancing back and he disappeared down the street.
Arrogant bastard.
She was involuntarily smiling when she closed the door and locked it.