Title: Carnival Town
Author: Alli [prettynpink55]
Timeline/Spoilers: Post "Resurrection"
Author's Note: Yeah, so, this story actually isn't going to be too long, maybe four chapters or so. Something along those lines. Also, parts of this chapter are flashbacks, which I think you'll probably be able to figure out.
Feedback: Makes my world go round :)
one.
carousel, i.
Round 'n round
Carousel
Has got you under it's spell
Moving so fast...but
Going nowhere
-Norah Jones, Carnival Town
The problem with revenge is that it never feels as good as you expect it to.
It'll never be like it is in the movies, books, television shows, plays. It'll never be The Princess Bride fantasy. You know The Princess Bride fantasy. You know how nice it must sound to slice someone through and through with a sword while repeating over and over "My name is Inigo Montoya/You killed my father/Prepare to die."
Retribution is such a beautiful word for something so revolting You're left with someone else's blood on your hands and no amount of scrubbing will ever wash that away. No amount of scalding showers will melt it into nothing.
He had a dream that his hands were bleeding someone else's blood. He woke up to find himself beside the sink with the water running.
Out damn spot/Out I say.
The showers he takes at night are scalding hot or freezing cold, hopes that one of the extremities will wash away this layer of skin that he wishes he doesn't have.
---
He feels a pang of guilt while clenching the steering wheel tightly, beginning to realize just how long it's been since he last drove to visit her. A few months since he stared out over the dark road with Lauren's fingers laced through his own. It was a little too warm for comfort that night, but he liked the way her hair blew back slightly next to the open window, the way she laughed slightly at something on the radio, the way each street lamp they passed under lit up her engagement ring, like a spotlight an a mirror.
They had been supposed to get there at 5:00 but stumbled in more around 10:30, results of late conference calls on her part and classes going overtime on his part and the traffic, which wasn't really either of their faults but he wanted to blame on her. She was charming around his mother, but then again, she was charming around everyone. Something, he realized later, that was probably taught to her. Fake fake all fake. He wonders how she was trained. If she was taught when to laugh and when to be understanding and when to be vulnerable and when to cry. If she was told exactly how to fix her hair and which clothes she should wear and how she should kiss him, touch him. Maybe it's a class. Seduction Of A CIA Officer 101.
He wonders how many of those engaging little anecdotes she told his mom were true and how many were figments of her imagination. She talked about her parents' farm and family vacations to London. Marie recounted summers in Fleury and the times that Michael would crash his bike into the neighbor's cars and No Maman, don't tell her that story, she doesn't want to hear that one...
"No, I do!" Lauren grinned.
She woke him up the next morning before the dawn had reached up and whispered that she had to go. Robert Lindsey oh that bastard called, I'm so sorry, I have to fly out to Barcelona in two hours, I'll take a cab to the airport, thank your mom for me and tell her what a great time I had meeting her, I'll make it up to you I promise, love you.
He was still half asleep at that point, murmuring slightly incoherently. "Love you, Lauren," he meant to say.
He said the wrong goddamn name.
She kissed him goodbye and didn't mention it.
He should've noticed the cologne on her clothes.
---
He passes by the carousel that's been there since he was a kid. The paint on the wooden horses is chipped and fading where it used to be thick and vibrant. The music they play is the same, a tinkering kind of melody that he can't quite identify. The man who runs it died some fifteen odd years ago and his son has since then taken over, sitting behind a ticket booth from noon to seven every day. Maybe he had a different job before this. He now dispenses small pieces of heavy paper to families for admission and ushers kids on and off.
The man probably took the job because it ran in his family and his father did it and because he feels a sense of pride, despite that fact that his life's hell thanks to his goddamn father and his goddamn job and this isn't the life he wants to lead...
Family honor.
That's all it is.
He wants to feel like he's doing this all for a better reason than the man behind the ticket booth at the merry-go-round.
But is there a difference between working at the CIA and working at a carousel if they're both for the same reason?
He pulls the car over.
---
He helped his mother clean the dirty dishes from breakfast, tracing his fingers over the ugly floral pattern that adorned the edges. They were a wedding present, she explained when he asked her once why she didn't just buy new kitchenware.
"::What did you think?::" he asked, soaking up the excess moisture from the tea cup with a hand towel.
"::About what?::"
"::About Lauren.::" His tone was slightly more exasperated then he meant it to be, but Jesus, what else would he be talking about?
"::Oh.::" She reached for the next dish. "::She seemed very nice. Funny. Sweet. I liked her. Beautiful, too.::"
"::Yeah,::" he responded after a moment's hesitation. "::She's very pretty.::"
Beautiful was a word he reserved only for Sydney.
"::We're getting married, Maman.::"
He expected smiles and tears and hugs and kisses and "congratulations" and "have you set a date yet?"
He expected reaction.
Instead, she reached for a clean sponge, picking up another dirty plate from the pile.
"::Did you hear me?::"
She ran the dish under the hot water and winced as the cone of water splashed out slightly, leaving dark droplets on his t-shirt.
"::Maman, I said I'm getting married.::"
"::I heard you, Michel.::"
She shut off the water and passed the plate slowly to him.
"::Be careful with that one. It has a crack down the middle.::"
He stared at her for a moment before slamming the dish down on the counter. The hideous floral patterns exploded into a thousand shards.
---
The carousel starts again and Vaughn slowly walks past it, watching as the horses slowly revolve. Round and round. The horses never go anywhere, just round and round in a circle until they're back where they started, a full rotation. Occasionally they move up and down on the metal poles, but that's the extent of their movement.
His favorite one had always been the pale green one. He looks for it, but it's now a shade of mustard yellow.
Sydney had always like the way dried rice felt in her hands. He had never really understood that, but could see why she liked the feeling of things in her hands. Things were tangible and could be felt without actually trying.
He'll kill her. Oh God, he might just try to hurt her if she were standing here right now.
Lielielielielielielie.
Because he's constantly torn between wanting to kiss her and wanting to perform bodily harm to her and the former always seems to win somehow, no matter how much willpower he [pretends to?] have. This will drive him crazy and she will be the death of him, but she must know that somehow. She must like the reactions she can get out of him. She must like how he's the one thing in her life that she can manipulate. Unintentionally possibly, intentionally probably.
He flips through the pack of postcards slowly, letting his fingers hit the cardboard. He pulls off the tan rubber band and reads the back of each one for what must be the hundredth time, as if the hundred and first time will reveal something new.
But no, it's the same each time. Each one a message written in black magic marker with her familiar handwriting, neat and curvy.
WISH YOU WERE HERE.
---
The ocean looks like it's freezing, but the younger kids who have yet to understand the drastic differences between hot and cold and happiness and pain jump right in, shivering blue lips and all.
The wind gusts harder and his first reaction is to let the postcards go, fly away, let the breeze take them and never have to deal with this insanity again. He holds on to them. His pieces of Sydney.
He reaches into his pocket and fingers something small, round, cool. Weiss joked that he should just pawn it off, but quickly stopped laughing when he saw the look on his friend's face.
"You're right," he said briskly. "That's not funny."
Getting rid of it would be like admitting defeat. He threw it in the back of his desk drawer at his apartment and sped home later that night, breaking all of LA's traffic laws and probably a few more. He turned the key in the lock frantically [openopenopen] and raced back to his study. Jammed it on his ring finger so hard that he left a red mark at the bottom of it. He could steady his breaths when he wore it, twisting the piece of metal around. He felt almost whole again [almost.] He wouldn't take it off until work the next morning. It felt like something ripped out of his chest.
Vaughn stares at it now, letting the gold catch glints of the dying sunlight.
He could throw it into the water if he were really bold, watch as the waves carry it away into nothing. Because everything just drifts into nothing eventually, doesn't it?
No, he won't be rebellious today, not now at least. He slips the ring back into his pocket. He still likes the way the metal feels against his skin.
---
She dropped off the face of the planet after traveling to Wittenberg, although what she found there he never figured out. Two days of nothing drove him to the bank, but the box was already empty.His wife's last words weren't even words. Her dying breath was simply numbers.
Numbers are numbers are numbers are numbers. Yesterday, they were numbers. Today, they are numbers. Tomorrow, they will be numbers. Numbers can't lie and numbers can't hurt. They are figures and they are fact. He wants his life in numbers.
But no, no one knew anything about the young woman who had come in to the bank a few days ago, sorry sir. If there's anything else we can help you with, just let us know. And while you're here, would you like to start an account?
No, he does not want to start a fucking account. No, he does not want something to drink. But those bank security cameras...could I see the tapes?
We don't usually make it a habit of handing out bank security tapes, Mr. Vaughn.
Make it a habit, he found himself barking.
---
He used to think that the story of his parent's marriage was romantic, not because of how they met and the way they loved each other, but because their families hated each other. Despised one another. His mother's parents didn't understand why she couldn't marry someone that lived within their own country and oh Marie, he's American, and you know how they are. They're all about their bagels and their guns.
And William, Bill, my Billy, I know that I'm your mother and not here to judge, but couldn't you have found a nice...American girl to marry?
"No, Mom," he sighed, exasperated. "This is the one I want."
"I get it," Weiss once said. "You've got the Romeo and Juliet Syndrome. Understandable."
And so Thanksgivings were miserable and Christmases were even worse and Marie just stopped trying to pull both their families together for the holidays, because it would always inevitably end up with her father-in-law going, "Do you want to know what the problem with the French is?"
And that's just the way it was.
His last name was almost Vaughn-Rousseau, actually, a combination of both families' names, but no, the Vaughns would not have a grandson with a French last name. He'll forever be silently grateful for his grandparent's intolerance. "Vaughn" sounds better on Sydney's lips than "Vaughn-Rousseau" ever would.
It should've been raining on the day of his father's funeral. It should have been dark and gray and pouring. It always did in movies and TV shows and when he asked his mother why it always did, she would simply reply, "Because heaven is crying, Michel."
Heaven did not cry the day they lowered his father's body into the ground.
It's hard to imagine people eating at funerals, but their house was filled to the brim with casseroles and fruit baskets and cracker platters. Family and friends and people from work he had never seen before and some that he had sat in the living room and ate the excessive amounts of green bean casserole. He didn't understand how they could have such an appetite. He felt like the way he had when he got the flu in kindergarten.
He could switch between French and English without giving it a second thought when he remembered, but his parents would occasionally get a call or two from confused teachers, and yes, I'm looking at Michael's American Revolution report right now, I'm sure it would be very good if it were written in English...
"::Dad would be sad to see you cry, Grandpa::," he said softly at their house after the burial, a stupid eight-year-old who thought that maybe he could be comforting in a way. Wasn't even thinking about which language he was trying to console him in. Isn't comfort universal?
"Speak English, damn it! I don't know what the hell you're saying! Your dad died for this fucking country and you're a fucking American and you're going to act like one, goddamn it!"
Harsh words for a little boy who was barely holding it together as it was.
"::No, shh, shh, don't cry::," Marie whispered to him later on their porch steps. "::Don't cry.::"
"Why does he hate me?" he asked through tears, the demands for him to speak English still fresh in his mind.
"::He doesn't hate you. He loves you very much. He just misses his son.::"
"It should be raining," he said absently, squinting into the bright sun.
"::I know. Let's go.::"
"Go where?"
"::I don't know. I can't stay here anymore.::"
People in movies don't leave their houses while guests are still there, no, no, they certainly don't, but she took his hand and led him to their beat up blue Toyota with the scratch down its side.
But she had done her crying the night before and she'll do more crying tonight and she was not interested in hysterics right now, with people there, with people noticing her weakness.
"There are still people in our house."
"::I'm aware of that, Michel.::"
"We can't just leave."
"::Why not? Put on your seat belt.::"
He stared at her for a moment [my mother's lost her mind] but pulled the seat belt across his chest and listened to the metal click. He had never sat in the front seat before.
She drove him the ten minutes to the small pier near their house, the one with the carousel. He was the only boy on it in a suit and rode it nine and a half times. He would've gone for ten, but the motor broke down part of the way through. Wasn't fixed for another month.
---
The return to the office after Palermo was saturated with whispers and (in)discreetly pointed fingers, 'that's Michael Vaughn, did you hear about the other day, killed his wife is what they're saying and Sydney Bristow, oh where is she? Maybe he killed her, too...'He was now the murderer.
The Joint Task Force will always be more like high school than a work place. Always. By the end of the day, the rumor was that he had killed his wife and then found out that Sydney was carrying his love child, turned the gun on her, now he was just bidding his time until...
Jesus Christ.
"You need to get back to the hospital."
It was the first thing Weiss said to him upon his arrival, and for once he was grateful in the lack of questions.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're going to die of something stupid, like a collapsed lung."
"There are worse ways to die."
"You're driving us all up the fucking wall, Vaughn."
The inevitable inquiry came later, in Weiss's five hundred year old Ford that he had inherited from his grandmother when he was in college.
"Should I ask what happened?"
"No," Vaughn stonewalled, keeping his gaze on the cars driving past their own. God, Eric Weiss was a slow driver.
"Where's Sydney?"
"I found out she was carrying my love child, so I killed her. Do you think that was wrong?"
Conversation stopped after that.
---
He stares at the backs of the postcards, the parts that read, "Greetings From London," or "Missing You In Berlin." They're glossy and colorful and covered in his fingerprints from being handled so much, but other than that, they're just postcards. He wants them to be more.Vaughn has a map hanging back at his office, one that now contains half a dozen colorful push pins marking everywhere he's received a message from her. London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Rome...he searched for a pattern, not because he thought that there'd be one, but because he likes patterns. He likes statistics. He likes the way equations look on paper.
Funny, though, seeing as he got a D in tenth grade algebra.
"These grades will get you nowhere, Mr. Vaughn" was the collective sigh from teachers. "You're just not trying."
He should've moved in with Eric or rented a hotel room after he was released from the hospital that one final time ["We sure see you here a lot," one nurse remarked. The doctor clicked his tongue disapprovingly and locked the door to his hospital room, making sure there was no way they could have a repeat performance of what had happened just a day before] but he went home, slept in his own bed. He wanted to torture himself and didn't take down the pictures of the two of them and the smiling eyes of old photographs burned through him. He cut himself while trying to slice an apple and let himself bleed. He took out their wedding album and tried to play a game with himself, attempted to figure out which of the guests from her side had been Covenant. He counted seven that he recognized. Seven Covenant officials at his wedding. That one was in custody, that one was still on the run, that one was dead...he knew their names from smooth manila folders and had failed to make the initial connection.
She came home with pearls on one night, a necklace he didn't recognize. The next week it was a pair of diamond earrings. The week after that was an emerald bracelet.
Expensive gifts he had never bought her and other men's cologne.
He woke up in the middle of the night clawing at his hands. Damn blood.
