Rhapsody
Chapter 12: Epiphany
There were thousands of different types of torture that could domino their way through Sydney's mind if given the right trigger. Some she had experienced herself, a few she had inflicted on others, and every last one she had heard horror stories about, most that had seemed mere myths until she had gained the field experience to show her otherwise. All had their differing levels and outcomes: small bruises that would completely disappear in time; wounds that would eventually fade to nothing more than painless scars; termites of insecurity that could gnaw their way through one's sanity if given the time; and any of the millions of subtle and vicious combinations that spilled too much blood, squeezed out the last molecules of air and snuffed the spirit hidden deep inside…
The ramifications from a single shot alone: the never-ending wait before the explosion of gunpowder, the deadly, breath-like chill of metal, the snapping click of the trigger, and the knowledge that one screaming bullet, a flaming hunk of metal and a few milliseconds, were all that stood between you and crimson agony… or instant death.
Simply considering all of this was enough to drive a person mad, a form of torture in and of itself, capable of making even someone as strong as Sydney keel over into the numbing bliss of unconsciousness. If her brain had taken the time to follow the carefully mapped out routes of logic during moments like these, slowed down when it should have and followed all laws and signs, then Sydney's mind would have been reeling with what ifs and could bes, sending both her and Ilya careening to the floor.
But instead time was almost kind enough to slow down, taking her backwards even without the convenience of a flux capacitor housed safely within a DeLorean, allowing her to relive single moments, ones that she would have thought she had forgotten, but could startlingly remember instant by instant, word for word…
Their first fight (if it could even be called that) as a couple, just a few days after she had moved into his apartment. She still had no idea what it was about, perhaps she had tried to keep something from him, even something as small as the fact that she had a headache; maybe it was because she had been tired of perpetually finding dirty socks hiding in obscure corners of every room; or they might have both been tired, overworked, and… She hadn't even remembered the cause of it then, as she had stood looking out the window, her bold streak of stubbornness rooting her to the ground when she wanted so desperately to go find him, to tell him that she was sorry, even if she hadn't known what for.
The minutes had ticked steadily by as she had stood there, trying to reason with her pride, to tell it that she surely wasn't the easiest person to get along with, must have done something to… But then she had felt his fingertips brush against her shoulder and his strong arms enveloping her. Stubbornness had been forced to relent; she hadn't been able to resist leaning back into him, following his whispered I'm sorry with one of her own. They had just stood there then, watching the sun set and the streetlights turn on…
"… no connection to any of the team."
"Is someone jamming our signal?"
"Possibly, or it might be…"
"Don't give me hypotheses! Get it to work…"
Just a few days ago, she had been doing laundry. She remembered him offering to help and her sweet refusal, neither of them bringing up 'The Great Bleach Caper," but each knowing that it was skipping through the other's mind, a memory shared with small smiles and nothing more. He had left her alone then, and she had been folding the towels when one had been suddenly snatched from her hand.
"Vaughn, what are you…?"
Her sentence had given way to laughter as he had wrapped the towel completely around himself, peeking out from underneath its soft blue cloth with a sigh of satisfaction. She had been able to see him as a three-year-old then: sweet, innocent and absolutely adorable; could imagine their son mirroring the gesture in the years to come…
"They're so nice and warm, Syd."
"I know. I just took them out of the…"
He had pulled her to him then, somehow managing to wrap the towel around them both and find her lips in the dark. The first had by far been the greater of the two feats, the second having been perfected long before that moment. She couldn't exactly recall the feeling of his lips on own, but she wouldn't have wanted to; it would have spoiled the magic. All that had been there were simple sensations… two heights of warmth as different as night and day: one pure heat, the other him; an oxymoron of languid urgency that had always been the two of them together; gentle pressure, soft sighs, and…
It had somehow ended too soon and seemed to have gone on forever. He had been forced to yank the towel from around them eventually, and red-faced and gulping for air, they had come out of hiding, unsure why they had felt embarrassed when the boys had been napping and not another soul had been around.
Vaughn had folded the towel, placing it on her steadily growing pile before she had had a chance to catch her breath, and she had laughingly agreed to let him help with the laundry whenever he wanted…
"…hear that?"
"That's static, sir."
"I know what it is!"
"Yeah, it's just that…"
"Sir! I think I've got it!"
A couple weeks after Gabriel had been born, Sydney had awakened from a nap she hadn't meant to take; rubbing the sleep from her eyes and rising from the couch, she had tiptoed down the hall. She had been drawn by the reassuring hum of his voice, the words slowly twisting and unfolding from the droning garble she had at first heard, into the words that even now echoed so clearly within her ears.
"… and this little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef, and this little piggy had n…"
He had stopped when he'd felt her presence in the doorway, offering her one of his patented shy smiles and scooping their wiggling son off the floor and into his arms.
"Hey, gorgeous. How was your nap?"
She hadn't meant to answer, but her escaped yawn had been enough to inform him that she could have slept the rest of the day and all through the night and it wouldn't have been nearly long enough. Vaughn had been ready to rise and meet her, but a few steps had already brought her toward the center of the room, and she had sunk down next to him, resting her head on his shoulder.
"Keep going."
She had felt his smile rain down upon her, washing warmth over every inch of her skin, a sensation that had tingled as it seeped beneath and into every last fiber of her being. There had been no palm trees, no soothing ocean waves or sunset meant to rival any other that had ever found its way onto a postcard. Just sitting on the rug in the middle of her son's room had become paradise, even without the lingering thoughts of Wish you were here! painted in some fluorescent script in the corner.
Vaughn had dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and she had watched as he began to tickle their son's tiny toes once again. "And this little piggy…"
The echo of his voice was shattered by the hissing crackle of static, breaking at points to become a somewhat understandable version of an agent's voice. Despite her best intentions to cling to these scraps of memory, this lucid half-consciousness that was all that kept her sane, sights and sounds began to creep through her reverie, dispersing the swirling fog of dreams that had protectively wound its way around her.
No one had told her that they had repaired their connection to the main team, that they still hadn't heard anything from Vaughn. She could easily figure that out in the way that almost everyone seemed to be avoiding her, hoping that she had been paying enough attention to not need a separate briefing, so that none of them would have to be the one to give it to her, could all carry on as if she weren't there.
"… has also disappeared… in the direction of… Scout. No sign of…"
Sydney allowed the Operations Center to come completely back into focus before trying to move, was surprised to find herself seated in a chair a few feet from where she could last remember standing, nearly panicked when she discovered her arms empty, because she knew that someone, something should have been there. She stood quickly, spinning around so fast that she slammed into a passing agent, only allowed herself a hiss of pain as she reached for her still-wounded arm, searching frantically for Ilya.
"… gunfire… Following the sound to…"
"…ent Bristow?... Sydney?"
A hand was on her shoulder, quickly joined by another, much smaller and less gentle than the first, but easily recognizable and meriting a sigh of relief. She turned to find Agent Lee's concerned eyes searching her own, not yet trained well enough to read the myriad of emotions that played within their seemingly devoid depths, never would be, no matter how far up the spy ladder the younger agent climbed.
At any other time and even under circumstances far less ordinary than these, Sydney would have been able to snatch a smile out of the air and paste it onto her face, capable of convincing the world that everything was okay with a simple upturning of the corners of her mouth. But her fingers were slippery today; she couldn't keep her grip long enough for anything resembling a smile to stay within her fingertips and spring to her lips. If she had, everyone would have been amazed by her strength and resolve… except for one person. But he was not here to give her away, to worm his way through the minutest of cracks in her façade, chip the fake smile from her lips and somehow unveil a real one beneath it…
There must have been some part of Sydney's brain that was still functioning normally, because she was still breathing, still standing; was able to hold out her arm and catch Ilya as he dove into her embrace. Her eyes swept the room, finding her father and a dozen other agents before returning to the young woman who still stood before her.
"He's all right."
The three words had been spinning so rapidly through Sydney's head that they must have hit on the right combination of nerves and muscles to whistle them into speech. She stated them simply, suddenly; only realizing that she had when she tasted their echo floating through the air.
"… opy that… proaching the warehouse…"
"I'm sure he is," Lee nodded, trying to offer a small smile to the agent she still revered above all others, even more so with this recent discovery of actual feeling and emotion beneath what she had previously thought to be a superhuman front.
But that tiny grin of reassurance was swiftly and viciously torn from the younger woman's lips and flung across the room as a sudden surge of thunder growled hungrily, swallowing all other noise and action. Goosebumps sprung up on Sydney's skin, the younger cousins of the chill that began as a tingle deep within her and snapped suddenly up her spine, nearly knocking all air from her lungs. A few shouts of alarm from the more easily startled agents intermingled with gasps and quick intakes of air. All those sounds had to be read in facial expressions and movement, were completely obliterated by the crashing explosion that rocked the room, riddled with gaps of static that created an oddly warped, wave-like sensation, only made the clamor of the blast seem that much more deafening when it once again assaulted their ears.
It seemed like years before the roar finally gave away to the humming of static, which, in the aftermath of the explosion now mingled so well with silence that it became just as much a part of it as their own breaths and heartbeats. In reality, it had only been seconds, a few blinks of the eye and shuddering breaths from those who even remembered how to breathe, a numbing and fiery stillness for those who hadn't; but no one would have argued if someone had claimed it had furiously rumbled for years.
Even in the CIA Operations Center, where sudden surprises were expected and angry explosions usually taken as lightly as sugar with morning coffee, it took a moment for life and functionality to slowly schlep their way back. Jack's almost frighteningly calm voice stood as the trigger, breathing life into every last body in the room and jumpstarting the busy hum of activity.
"Alpha Team, report in. What's your status?"
"One… ossibly two down… ajor struct… al damage t… building... s no way anyone… ould have survived that blast…"
"Copy that, Alpha Team."
"Requesting… ermission to… vestigate."
"Affirmative; permission granted. Proceed with caution."
Ilya clung to Sydney so tightly that she was actually beginning to feel the pain; she wouldn't remember where the bruises came from when she took a shower the next morning, but had given up trying to remember the origin of her wounds long ago. The child's skull was digging into her shoulder, but the tiny whimpers that managed to make themselves heard were not provoked by pain.
"He's all right," she repeated in a whisper, hugging the child almost as desperately, as if she had nothing else. She didn't know whether the words were for the little boy, the young agent who still stood before her, or simply her own reassurance, but suddenly she wished she hadn't left Gabriel with Charlotte, that she had both her little boys in her arms and the older woman beside her. "I know him. He's all right."
Surely she would have felt something if he had been killed: a heaving, gut-wrenching nausea; the violent stabbing of her heart being ripped into shreds and torn from her body; the snapping of her connection to him, as if she had been cut from her tether to life… something, anything… But all that was there was the queasy uneasiness of having no idea where he was or what sort of danger had found him.
He was all right. He had to be… Because he… he wouldn't, couldn't leave her… Could he?
"Vaughn!"
Somewhere a few hundred yards back, he had stopped trying to pay attention to the shrieking hisses and gruff voices that buzzed over his com-link. He had tuned out any and all sound that wasn't somehow her, until even his own heartbeat spelled her name. For a split second, he could swear that he had heard her voice serenading him, knew that it must have been the wind, a trick of his suddenly cruel imagination because…
"What… ell are… ou doing?"
But there was no mistaking the anxiety clanging through her voice, so close to anger that he could feel its heat simmering in his ears. And he wouldn't have dreamed the crackling static that severed her harsh whisper into jagged pieces, would have willed her voice to come through as perfectly as his own breaths; it would have been all that could have reminded him that it was necessary to breathe.
"Syd?" As her name broke from his lips, he thought he could hear her sigh on the other end, the relief this sound brought him making every muscle in his body quiver, nearly so overwhelming that it was rattling his bones and he was sure Bykov would hear it… "I had to go, Sydney. To protect you and the boys…"
"You told m…d be careful."
The way she said the words, her emphasis on 'careful' as if she had had to spit it out, to keep its poison from sullying her veins, nearly pained him. Vaughn forced himself to ignore its stinging ache, continuing onward and leaving it all behind. He would have stopped; that one word, the simple sound of her voice would have ordinarily been enough, but…
"I am. I will be. Syd, I – I have an instinct about this, about where he is. I have to find him, to get him."
It was becoming a sickness, had grown from simple want to the more strong desire, barreling straight past need and into something he had absolutely no control over. If Sydney had broken down at that moment, begged him to stop being a fool, to come back to her and the boys, he would have listened, would have used every cell, nerve and muscle that he had any control over in an effort to bring his ever-marching feet to a halt. He would have tried his damndest… but he probably wouldn't have succeeded.
"Please, Vau…"
There was the plea he had been waiting for and dreading, shredded not by static, but the sudden cessation of speech, as if razor-sharp claws had reached down her throat, tearing the words from her before they had had a chance to make themselves heard. A sudden swell of panic crested within him, nearly bowling him over with its intensity but still not strong enough to keep his legs from carrying him forward. He would never be able to forgive himself if something happened to her because he had fallen prey to his own emotion, if she…
"Syd?"
Two seconds without an answer would have been more than enough to drive him mad, as his mind sprinted heedlessly after his imagination, struggling just to keep it within view. He never knew how he was able to let that amount double once, twice, three times before hearing her voice. Something that sounded like it could have been his name reached his ears, but it wasn't her; he had committed her exact tone to memory long before even realizing he had loved her, and this…
"Daddy?"
Vaughn froze. A moment ago, he wouldn't have been able to stop his muscles even if he had tried, and now even attempting to fathom how to get them moving again would have been like trying to recreate Einstein's Theory of Relativity using only a dull Number Two pencil, half a sheet of notebook paper and an entirely skewed set of measurements.
"Who… who was that?"
Somehow, as he fumbled for the words, something clicked and his body allowed him to take in his surroundings. He wasn't sure why he hadn't noticed before, could only see it now, but didn't question as his eyes jumped over the drab, nondescript building; fences, garage-like doors, partially broken storage crates and large metal drums…
A warehouse. Perhaps not the warehouse, not their warehouse, but still enough to send him lurching on the razor-like edges of memories, his skin already tingling as Sydney gave her answer.
"Ilya."
He took a breath, shuddering as the air wrestled its way into his body, searching for words to empower and not finding them ready. He could see what he had been blinded to before, understood why killing Bykov wouldn't have meant a damn thing if he wasn't alive to tell the tale, to return to Sydney and gather her into his arms, to one day pile their children onto his lap and explain to them how their mommy and daddy had loved them so much that…
"Do not move, Mr. Vaughn."
Ordinarily, this would have been a direct invitation to do otherwise, to somehow sneak a kick, a punch, a glance, even, at the unknown shadow looming over him. A rough hand reached for his comm.-link and wrenched it from his ear, dropping it to be pulverized beneath the heel of a boot before returning its fierce grip to Vaughn's shoulder. Vaughn didn't recognize the voice, but could place the accent: Russian, matching the make of the pistol that was suddenly digging into the flesh at the base of his skull, the click of the safety being removed all that was needed to give both it and its owner away.
"Bykov."
"The pleasure is mine," the voice growled in an English that was so heavily accented, the words nearly slurred together to make a language of their own, a soft dangerous hissing that too closely resembled a snake's for comfort. His painful grip did not relinquish as his topic of conversation took a drastic turn. "She loved him, you know."
"Who?" Vaughn spat, the word dropping as if it had had to spring from a tongue that had not tasted water in years, seeming to scratch blood from his lips as its sandpaper-like edges forced their way out.
"Devora," came the answer, Bykov's lips almost vibrating against his ear. "Loved him like her own son. She loved Katja, too, in her own way, thought that taking care of the little brat would make up for the fact that she sent her own daughter to her death. She was smart, the little bitch. I did not find out about her plans until the day before our scheduled operation."
The pressure on Vaughn's shoulder disappeared as the barrel of the pistol scraped across his face; Bykov slowly stepped in front of him, the gun halting on Vaughn's forehead. Vaughn would have recognized him anywhere: the smirking eyes, the leering lips, the livid scar that sliced right through them…
"Talks in her sleep," he continued with a snort of what could have been laughter, eyes glinting dangerously. "But I am sure you know how that is. Tell me," he snarled, leaning in closer, "has your precious Sydney relayed anything to you during those long nights? Alternate mission specs? A weapons cache you were not aware of? A secret lover, perhaps?"
Vaughn's eyes darkened, his thus far carefully contained anger bubbling to the surface. He swallowed, trying to reel the rapid rush of red back in, knowing that his grip on rationality was sliding with each passing second, that he stood less of a chance of coming out of this alive. Thoughts of Sydney kept him sane, kept him quiet, kept his gray matter safely encased within his skull instead of sprayed haphazardly onto the asphalt…
The corners of Bykov's scarred lips curved even further upwards, gaining strength from the momentary escape of Vaughn's emotion, the propane that fueled his words to fire. "I am sure she must have whispered something once or twice. Maybe that one night about two weeks after you had returned little Ilya to the clutches of that devil woman, when you brought her to the heights of pleasure… how many times was it? Nine? Ten? Even I was impressed. I did not know you Americans had that sort of patience…"
Vaughn felt the color drain from his face as the memory crept its way back to him. Two weeks after… He could picture it exactly: the weather, her dress, even what she had ordered for dinner (although thoughts of his own meal and attire escaped him completely). They had still been reveling in the fact that they were going to be parents, had discussed plans for their wedding, everything that a normal, giddily in love couple would have.
They had been insatiable, still were now, but that night… He had barely been able to keep his hands to himself in the restaurant, had moved his chair next to hers because the length of the table had been too long, the centerpiece had kept getting in his way. They hadn't been able to make it to the bed when they had finally walked through the front door, and had still had yet to close their eyes in sleep when the sun had risen the next morning. Even he had lost count that night, but Bykov…
"Why you sick son of a…"
Metal was suddenly digging into his skull with such ferocity that it would surely leave a bruise. Vaughn stopped mid-sentence, not because that specific metal object happened to be one which could render him dead in less than a heartbeat, he didn't give a damn about his own life; but he couldn't leave Sydney, couldn't let his little boy grow up without a father, or…
Bykov was laughing now, a deep, throaty rumble that made Vaughn want to reach inside his chest and extract the man's lungs with his bare hands. Every breath that both he and that sorry excuse for a man took made that option seem more and more viable and the urge to perform it less and less likely to control.
"You have to be more careful of who you let into your apartment: delivery boys, the plumber, exterminators…" Bykov paused for a moment, waiting to gauge his victim's reaction, wanting his next line to sting more than anything else he had said. "And that bastard child of yours had such a promising life ahead of him..."
"If you go anywhere near my son," Vaughn whispered menacingly, not even waiting for the monster's words to trail off as he fingered his CIA-issued rifle, willing to risk taking a bullet in the head as long as he was able to embed one deep within this madman's heart first. "I'll…"
"You will already be dead," Bykov stated simply, evidently deciding that he had enough amusement and nodding toward Vaughn's gun. "Drop your weapon."
"I could kill you right now."
The raw venom oozing from Vaughn's words shocked even himself, must have been gathered from the bits of saliva sprayed upon him from Bykov's mouth and infused with the fury and passion that was still roiling deep within him. If Bykov was taken aback for a moment, he was able to continue unfazed; his own rage, after all, had had far more time to boil out of control, was irrupting from every pore on his body and mingling with perspiration.
"She loved him and she betrayed me. He will die, right alongside the precious girl you were meant to marry and your own little boy. I can kill you right now and spend the rest of my life haunting your fiancée's nightmares while she waits for her turn. One way or another, you will all die. There are dozens of men ready to finish what I have started. I am not alone here, you know…"
"Yeah, well neither is he."
Vaughn could honestly swear, with his hand over his heart and upon a thousand stacks of bibles, that he had never been as glad to hear Weiss' voice as he was at that moment. This outpouring of relief was alarmingly temporary, however; too many people had been put in danger already, and... "Weiss, get the hell out of…"
A shouted jumble of Russian stormed through him, stampeding over whatever other words he would have spoken. Seemingly out of nowhere, although part of his brain reminded him that they could have easily hidden behind the barrels and boxes strewn outside the warehouse, the Yudin brothers materialized and flew into action. Ioakim held Weiss at close-range gunpoint and had grabbed his headset before Vaughn had had the chance to take another breath. Sacha stood close behind his brother and an echoed snarling told Vaughn that their canine companion was not far off.
"You are outnumbered," Bykov growled, backing Vaughn angrily towards the warehouse wall before his demeanor suddenly changed and a malicious grin wreaked havoc on his already criminal facial features. "Although, I suppose we could even the ranks a bit…"
Without warning, he took his weapon from Vaughn's head and fired two quick shots, swiftly spinning and yanking Vaughn's rifle out of his stunned hands before he had a chance to react. Held at gunpoint once again, this time without the luxury of his own weapon, Vaughn watched as Sacha Yudin tumbled to the ground, his dark blood clouding a rainbow-glazed puddle, the scent of burning flesh mingling with that of oil and gasoline. Ioakim smirked and muttered something unintelligible, slowly circling around Weiss to spit on his brother's dead body.
"He said he should have done that years ago," Bykov translated with a laugh. "Now, hand over your weapon, Mr. Weiss."
So many scenes and scattered incidents passed before Vaughn's eyes in that quarter of a second that he had no idea how he was able to grab onto one and make sense of it, didn't know why out of all the moments he could have been reliving, might have wanted to see before they all ended forever, this was the one that…
Throw the gun, make him reach for it…
He couldn't think of a way to make Weiss understand, his mind's failsafe clicking in and setting to automatic shutdown. He tried desperately to grab onto a thread of coherent thought, to think of a plan, but the scraping of metal against asphalt brought all attempts to a screeching halt.
Even given a dozen instant replays, each slowed more than the next, and all the time in the world to ponder the intricacies of them, Vaughn would still not have been able to describe what happened next. As Weiss' weapon skidded across the ground and Ioakim reached for it, something inside of Vaughn snapped, his animal instincts smothered any fiber of rationality and he transformed from man into ravenous beast: rabidly waiting for the kill, hell-bent on protecting his mate and their young, would do anything and everything within his power and beyond to…
The smacking and scraping of skin against skin, metal and blacktop; heavy boots splashing in puddles of oil and rainwater; the dog's jaws snapping and sinking deep into the flesh at the back of his thigh; grunting, gasping, shouting, snarling; even the stink of blood, as it trickled from them all, mingling with sweat and dirt and the thunder of bullets being fired....
Each noise, no matter how large or small, each scent, every sight and those few sensations that crept their way through his suddenly numbed exterior added jarring notes and chords to a frightening soundtrack he had never heard or felt before: a rhapsody in urgent reds and raucous blacks as sound and sense and emotion and thought alternately fused together and were ripped violently apart.
… Be careful…I need you to tell me…Bahn… You're going to be a… You told me you'd be careful… I couldn't fall asleep without you… How was work?... Be careful… Vaughn, I… Daddy?...
"Mike! No!"
Weiss' words echoed in his ears a few moments after they had been spoken, at the same time he felt the familiar metal of a weapon back in his hands, saw Sacha Yudin facedown in a puddle of blood and…
But the bullets spewed from his barrel in rapid succession, surprising Bykov as they whizzed right by him, following the trickling path of liquid from Sacha's corpse to the not-so-carefully stacked pyramid of metal drums waiting against the wall of the warehouse.
Vaughn felt a soft and heavy weight being slammed against his body, heard the surrounding sounds soar into a shrieking crescendo as a hand yanked on his shirt, pulled him violently underneath something that he couldn't make out, shapes and colors and sights completely losing meaning. Even sound had stopped, melting into a silence he somehow knew was artificial but didn't think to question, couldn't think at all.
All he saw, felt and heard in the instant before a fierce, blistering wave of heat slammed against him, cracking his skull against something that shot sparks before his eyes and quickly fizzled to black…
I love you, Vaughn.
… was Sydney.
The seconds quickly spun out of control, multiplying so rapidly that Sydney wouldn't have been surprised if she had blinked and a hundred years had passed. But without Vaughn, a hundred years would have been an eternity in the most blistering corner of hell. Not even two years ago, her vision of hell would have included Arvin Sloane and every upstanding member of the Alliance; as a child her thoughts would have turned to fire and horned demons. It was almost amusing how something so seemingly unchangeable, could change so drastically, without so much as a warning or lingering thought.
Fourteen minutes and thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine… seconds had passed since the explosion, when it had seemed such a short time ago that she had kissed him goodbye. Surely it hadn't been long enough for all of this to happen, wouldn't have been enough time to laugh through a childish incantation of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious much less put the right letters in order to spell it or lose the only man she had really ever loved…
But it had been and it was… forty-six one-thousand, forty-seven one-thousand, forty-eight one-thousand… She passed the time as she had during so many different instances before, counting the seconds as they added one on top of the other, never seeming to be able to make note of the exact time before it changed again.
Fifteen minutes, two, three, four, five… seconds without a word from him and she was already dying. There had been transmissions from the team, punctured with crackles and hisses, those interruptions giving her the hope that she so desperately searched for, helping her believe that she hadn't heard right, that they weren't telling her that there was no sign of him, that bodies had been found… bodies mangled so hopelessly beyond recognition that…
"Sydney."
It sounded like his voice only because she so frantically wanted it to be; deep down she knew that. Knew that she could hear his exact intonation, the multifarious harmony that he was somehow always able to form out of the six letters of her name, weaving the two syllables as no one else could even when he seemed to be saying it no differently than anyone had before him. She knew, as her fingers ran incessantly through Ilya's hair, down his back and up again, that it wasn't Vaughn calling to her. She knew that it couldn't be, because there had been no sign of him; but maybe…
She turned, half hoping to find him smiling down at her, telling her that it had been silly to worry, half knowing that she was a fool to let herself cling to such childish optimism. But somehow, despite all of her agent training and common sense, her naïveté must have won out, because her face fell with a hitching sigh when she found her father's clouded eyes staring into her own.
"Agent Lee needs to take Ilya. Devlin wants to see him," Jack stated flatly, momentarily pulling himself away from the tumult that the Operations Center had seemed to become everywhere else but around his daughter.
Sydney handed the child over without a word, refusing to meet her father's gaze after the initial disappointment his eyes had provided. All things considered, she had behaved beautifully thus far, had followed all the rules perfectly, showing emotion only where and when it was allowed: nowhere and never. But inside, she was barely holding up, hardly able to catch herself as she tripped and tumbled along, toes snagging on one emotion after another, all of them sure to end in tears if she gave in, if she didn't catch herself and…
Jack cleared his throat and her eyes mechanically followed the sound without meaning to, bumping against her father's. She was startled by the whirlpool she found suddenly swirling within them, too preoccupied to comprehend the war waging within Jack as he tried to decide whether to play the part of a father or remain in his role of dutiful Director of Operations.
"I'm sure Vaughn is…"
"Dad… don't…" Sydney stopped him, the emotion catching in her voice, her gaze turning stern to counter it. She choked on the please that she had meant to follow, and the word never left her lips.
Even without it, Jack nodded, looked for a moment as if he would hug her, gather her onto his lap and into his arms as he hadn't done since she was a little girl. But he held back, squeezing her shoulder as he turned toward the voices that were calling for Director Bristow, immediately snapping back to his usual stoic self and barking orders left and right.
She understood now.
Understood what she had tried to before, but could never seem to grasp, what he had tried to explain to her that one night so long ago when he had held her tightly and whispered about the agony he felt whenever she was on her missions, when she had told him not to worry, that she would never leave him…
It was no wonder she hadn't been able to get it. There was no way Vaughn would have been able to paint this picture to her that night, or even over the course of the hundreds of others they had spent together since then. The waiting, the utter powerlessness, the way hearing became the only sense you even remembered you had, the mind filling in the blanks behind closed eyelids, disgorging pictures from books, television, nightmares you couldn't remember having but were far too vivid to have been made up on the spot.
There were no colors in life that matched those that filled the spaces between the sounds: misery and despair couldn't be found in a Crayola box, there were no finger charts for any instrument that would reveal the notes and chords of anguish. Every sound that had broken through the static, every breath that had whispered in her ear was bliss, something far too precious, that she hadn't realized the value of until it had been suddenly wrenched away.
Vaughn had always told her how he loved the sound of her voice; it was something she had always thought had been one of his many little quirks, one of the thousand pieces of perfection that he seemed always able to pluck from nowhere and hand to her. She had always been able to return the compliment with truth and intensity, hadn't realized that she couldn't have cleaved to the same amount of passion, that her words might have been the same but they couldn't have been spoken in the same way…
She understood now, as his voice weaved in and out of her head, pealing in her ears, saying her name, mission information, a simple thank you, singing the lullaby, whispering, murmuring, laughing, breathing French just as he would late at night…
Sydney, Sydney, Sydney…
"Sydney…"
She wanted to clap her hands over her ears and hum as loud as she could, would do anything to stop it from echoing louder, so perfectly that she swore every last person in the room could hear it. It was tugging at her head, trying to push her body in the other direction, but she didn't want to turn, didn't want to fall for it, not again. But her body turned itself around, not listening to the shrieking of her heart and mind as they tried to stop its motion. Her eyes closed as if that could make it all go away, as if by blocking her sight, this nightmare would end and she would awaken safely tangled in his embrace.
She squeezed her eyes shut as tight as she could so that all light and color was quickly extinguished and nothing could make its way in or out. Because she knew that when she opened them and didn't find him there, she wouldn't be able to catch herself this time; she would trip, and the tears would fall…