"Here I am in a 'padded cell' again," Will thought to himself as he stretched out on the cot. He didn't know how Sydney had managed it, but it felt completely different in the cell than the last time he was here. In fact, the guards had smiled at him. For being a traitor of the state, he was actually being treated rather nice.
He looked around the cell, trying to take it all in. The whole situation seemed all too familiar and deja vu like for him to fully comprehend what was happening. All he knew at this moment was for the first time, he was beginning to question why he had chosen to become an agent in the first place.
Really, it had all started when Sydney disappeared. Everyone had his or her reactions to the loss, Vaughn's being the worse. If he had had as bad as reaction as Vaughn, no one was around to see it. He understood that they were all busy trying to deal with Sydney's departure in both the professional and personal sense.
That didn't make it any less hard that he was stuck in a cold hospital room with little to no updates about what was going on. The only information he got was the kind he really didn't want to hear. The CIA had requested that after the hospital released him, he go into the Witness Protection Program. It was for his own safety, they claimed. Really, he figured it was for the government's safety. They had let the whole second double issue and Allison Doren slip through the cracks. Will was the constant reminder of this little screw-up.
When he woke up after his body had healed and found out that his only option was to hide, he was not happy and refused to go willingly to some small town in Wisconsin to live out his life as a construction worker. Sydney was gone, and he wanted to find out the real reason why.
He pleaded with Director Kendall and got sanctioned to be a double agent in the Covenant. At the time, he wasn't aware that was what he was getting into. The whole idea of becoming an agent seemed the perfectly correct thing to do in the beginning, but now it sounded rather ludicrous. Will had still no idea how he convinced Kendall to let a non-field rated government employee infiltrate one of the fastest growing enemy organizations.
But Kendall did. Will started out rather small, trying to gain the Covenant's trust. The truth was he was too focused on figuring out if Sydney was really dead to invest that much in his operation right away. He knew that the only lead he had was a few passing remarks by some of his contacts on an up and coming power. His contacts gave him other contacts, and, as he adjusted to Sydney's death, it just snowballed from there.
Stupidly, he agreed to let the Covenant test him to make sure he was committed to the cause. In his mind, the whole thing sounded harmless. The thought of them altering anything inside of him was not one he had at the time.
"And look where that took me," he said, banging softly on the cell wall. He saw the guards look up at him and gave them a smile and a wave.
Once the Covenant had been sure of his loyalty to them, they allowed him a minimal clearance. With that clearance, he was able to send Kendall specific files he thought pertained to what had happened to his best friend. He never realized that Sydney was working just down the hall from him.
Kendall had eased off him slowly throughout the two years that Sydney was missing. In retrospect, Will realized that was because Kendall knew Sydney was indeed alive and working for the Covenant. It made him question why Kendall kept him in the organization at all, but that was a question that would probably never be answered.
When Sydney resurfaced and contacted the CIA, Kendall ordered his immediate withdrawal from the Covenant. At first, Will refused stating that he was too far in to just pull himself out. He also brought up the point that there were many different sources of intel he had yet to discover. The CIA would still need a person on the inside now that Sydney wasn't there any longer. Somewhere along the line, his work at the Covenant had stopped being about vindication and started to be his attempt to help rid the world of an organization it didn't need.
After understanding that if Sydney knew he was also working for the Covenant it would probably send her into a downward spiral, Will agreed to do exactly what everyone else thought he was doing. He became Jonah, the Wisconsin construction worker, just like the CIA had always wanted.
He found that the construction life was not as bad as he thought, and he even started having a crush for an artist on the floor below him. Foolishly, he let himself get out of the dangerous life he had been living day to day for the past two years. The second he did that, like clockwork, Sydney suddenly appeared at his side, claiming she needed his help.
Will tried his best to cover up all the evidence that he hadn't been in Wisconsin during the time she was missing. If she hadn't been so distracted, she probably would have noticed immediately that he was lying. But she was caught up in her ransacked life like always. Sydney never seemed to get a break.
So Will let her pull him out of Witness Protection. When she was done using him for what she needed, he secretly returned to some of the work he had been doing with the Covenant. His normal life was shattered, and in all actuality, he knew that he would never be able to truly create an average life for himself. Sydney had made that clear to him time and again, but he wasn't really angry with her. If it were her choice, she would never have caused him all the pain that she had in the past.
Kendall kept Dixon in the loop about what was going on with both Will and Sydney since the day that Sydney called him from Rome and Dixon happened to be in the office. When Will told Dixon that he was going to try to get more information on the Covenant and what they had done to Sydney, Dixon didn't stop him. He knew a little bit about revenge eating its way through you if you didn't try to do something about it.
Will didn't have any success in finding new information. It was like all the communication channels he had previously used were closed. Something had gone on during his brief time in Witness Protection, but he couldn't pinpoint what that was.
He now knew that it was Weiss's defection to the Covenant's payroll that had changed things. The Covenant didn't see him as such a great asset when they had someone with a little power in the CIA now working for them. It wasn't worth the risk to leak information to Will any longer.
Frustrated with his lack of new findings, he gave up on trying to help take down the Covenant. He had never really been cut out for the job anyway. The only reason he got into it in the first place was to see if there was proof that Sydney was alive. Now that she was back, his desire to help the CIA take down the Covenant had disappeared and he didn't feel compelled to try to find it again.
The normal work of a CIA analyst kept him busy for over a year, but eventually, it became boring. After being an active agent for three years, he couldn't just let himself do the important but rather monotonous work of an analyst.
Will returned to his first love, journalism. Now that he had the CIA's full support behind him, he had no trouble finding a position at one of the more respectable papers. He was no longer saddled to the travel stories and weather reports. The CIA had somehow wiped his fictitious heroin problem completely off his record and kept anyone from questioning where it had gone.
He was just finally getting used to a normal life again when Sydney reemerged in his life to drop a few bombshells on him. One, like always, she needed his help to save another loved one. Two, she was marrying said love one. Three, that special someone was the one man that Will hated with a vengeance.
After that things just got progressively worse. Amy forced him to go to Tokyo with Sydney, and then he got left behind to help a woman hang her laundry. Though in retrospect, if what Sydney and Sark were telling him was true, he was really the one that positioned himself to go to Tokyo. Amy had no part in that, and Sydney managed to foil his evil plans anyway.
"Evil plans," he mumbled to himself with a laugh as he watched a fly buzz around the cell. "Imagine me having evil plans."
It was strange knowing that he did things that he couldn't remember. And it was also frustrating to know that he had recognized that something was wrong and had done nothing to stop it. He had been blacking out for weeks, but he attributed it to the stress of having to live a normal life again and some leftover compensation for the horrors he was forced to witness when he worked for the Covenant.
And that's when it hit him. The startling realization that he was performing some horrific things himself.
For instance, stabbing Amy.
He had almost killed his own sister, and he didn't even know it.
And now he couldn't even go to her hospital room to explain. He would have to rely on Sydney to go tell her what was going on and explain that he didn't fully understand what he was doing at the time.
"Why is it that when push comes to shove, I always seem to be relying on Sydney?" he asked himself out loud.
"Because she gets things done," answered a voice from outside the cell.
Will turned to see Vaughn peering in at him. "Any news on the is-Will-a-double-agent-or-triple-agent-or-is-he-an-agent-at-all front?"
"No," Vaughn answered. "You should thank Sydney for making your stay so comfortable."
"I would, but I don't think all this comfort has to do with what she's told you.""And what does it have to do with?"
"The fact that the CIA is embarrassed and ashamed that they have partial responsibility in this. I wouldn't have had ties to the Covenant if they hadn't let me try to infiltrate it."
"Your story hasn't checked out yet, so I wouldn't be spouting that off as a reason quite yet."
"Kendall can't be reached?"
"He's working on some project in the Cayman Islands."
"What about Dixon?"
"Dixon's only moderately familiar with your operation. And everything is getting so confusing around here that he's not sure if we can believe you quite yet."
"Things are more confusing than normal?" Will asked.
Vaughn sat down on a chair that was leaning against the wall. "Yeah. I can't keep track of all the ties everyone has to the Covenant. It seems like every one of us has either worked for the Covenant at one time or has been brainwashed by them. I'm starting to wonder about this incestuous relationship that the CIA has with the Covenant."
"Like maybe the Covenant is really a part of the CIA? Because if you're going to go there, I think you might need to start seeing Dr. Barnett again,' Will suggested. "I bet we can get a group rate. Or dual sessions on dealing with the Covenant and dealing with the revolving door of life that keeps resurrecting all of us from the dead."
Vaughn nodded and got a little too silent for Will's liking.
"Something's wrong, isn't it?" Will asked.
"It's a little hard to sit here and talk to you when you're acting so normal. You've been the person that I've been tracking for the past few weeks. I imagined it being Anna or Sydney's mother. Someone who has been known to have flexible loyalties. I never expected it to be one of my friends."
Will looked at Vaughn carefully. "You're not going to tell Sydney about my working for the Covenant under orders of the CIA, are you?"
"That's still classified, Will. For now. The only reason I know is because Sydney chose me to come pick you up from New York, and that information was necessary for me to know if you were going to arrive here safely."
"The CIA thinks that the intel I uncovered is still good, don't they?" Will stood up and walked over to the glass. "They're willing to let my life be torn in two as long as they keep profiting. If I didn't know better, I'd think the CIA is the bad guy in this situation, not the Covenant."
"Don't start saying things like that Will," Vaughn said, standing up. "It will make your stay with us a lot harder than it should be."
Will just stared at him. He was getting tired of his friends' thinking that he would willingly betray them. Maybe it was time he started acting like they thought he should.
Vaughn sighed. "I'll try to hurry things along, but it's still going to take a while to check out your story. And even if it does check out, you're going to have to stay here until we can figure out a way to reverse whatever the Covenant did to your head."
Will turned his back on his friend and walked back to the cot. Yeah, he was getting tired of this whole situation.