Chapter 20: Botte De Paysan – a two-handed stab.
In L.A. Sydney felt the topic of Sark hanging over her head like a sword. The issue of the surveillance tapes of her home had brought a potential connection between she and he to the fore again. She knew for a fact that people were quietly mooting whether Sloane and Sark had bugged the house. She could see them muttering in groups, casting furtive glances at her, only for their conversation to fall quiet as she approached and then to pick up again as she passed.
With Sark back in the mix, any resolve she had felt to end her relationship with Vaughn had crumbled under the weight of her own fears, too scared to act in case of what people might say or suspect now the tapes had been revealed. She was beginning to loathe her own weakness, and she knew that if she wasn't careful she'd go totally rogue-bitch and start projecting all the blame onto Vaughn. Because that would give her what she wanted then, wouldn't it? The righteous belief that her inability to live her life the way she wanted wasn't her fault, but someone else's …
Poor Vaughn: sitting in the debriefing beside her, he looked drawn and battered as though the whole matter of the surveillance had somehow eviscerated him. He looked like a wrinkled, deflated balloon. She hadn't realised it till now, but he seemed to have stopped shaving properly too and was sporting a crop of grubby stubble … he looked like a hollowed-out shell of whoever he used to be.
She and Vaughn operated at different barometric pressures. Now that Vaughn had come in with her, he couldn't cope with the difference and was getting the bends.
The worst tape to have had to sit through was the one showing she and he having sex. Having to see it, knowing other people had seen it – not just Sark and Sloane, but worse, her colleagues and superiors in the CIA – had brought Sydney the closest she had ever been to 'breaking'. The sheer shame and sense of … betrayal; because everyone was right surely? – Sark had done this to her. Chase it back far enough and she would find his darkly glittering presence behind all this somehow.
Now she was in another fucking meeting about it, about it and the entire Caplan mess. It was as though Kendall loved dragging the issue of the tapes up again and again. Like he got some nasty little kick out of discomforting her. Well, she wouldn't give him the pleasure. She held herself aloof in the meeting, although a defeated Vaughn squirmed beside her.
"That's her!"
Sydney was jerked out of her bitter reverie when Marshall exploded half out of his seat, interrupting Kendall, finger pointing at a screen which showed at picture of Dr. James Caplan, shrieking, "that's her!"
Everybody looked at him.
"Marshall?" queried Kendall, for once too puzzled to be caustic.
Marshall carried on, unheeding. "That's her! That's Jimmy Dodge! That's the girl from my Quatzecoatl class!" He looked around him wildly, accusing them all with his upset stare. "Why didn't you tell me it was her?"
His audience was so stunned by his unfamiliar emotional outburst, that no-one knew quite what to say. In the vacuum Marshall ran on, "I went to college with her! Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"Marshall, you've been aware that this is the Caplan case?" That was Jack speaking.
"Caplan? Her name's Dodgson! Well it was when I … you never showed me her photograph!" He was almost in tears.
Sydney was up and around the table toward Marshall without even realising she was moving, her only instinct was to go and comfort him. Ordinarily Kendall would have ordered her to sit down, but Marshall's outburst was so uncharacteristic that people were jolted off their usual track.
"Marshall, it's okay," Sydney spoke low, half supporting him as he dropped back down into his seat.
" – but they never showed me!" Marshall's almost tearful hurt rang out.
The mood in the room had become unsettled, of all the people in it only Sydney seemed to know how to react. "Marshall, we're handling it. I'm handling it, okay? I'm on the case."
Marshall looked up at her. Ever since she'd saved him from 'Suit and Glasses' she was his unassailable hero, he believed in her totally. And besides, he suddenly remembered, they were dealing with Sark, and Sydney knew Sark, right?
"Sydney, he won't hurt her will he? Sark? He's not that bad a guy! You know him, right? He won't hurt her?"
Oh Christ Marshall, why did you have to say that?
Sydney forced herself not to flinch as she felt every eye in the room upon her as Marshall appealed to her as somehow being their resident 'Sark expert'. Her 'relationship' with Sark had never been publicly alluded to before, the topic had been too much of a loaded gun. Only an innocent such as Marshall, who saw no harm in it, would ever have been the one to say what they were all thinking: there's something between you and Sark. She sensed that Dad's, Kendall's and now Vaughn's glances held suspicion.
What could she say to comfort Marshall without getting herself into even more trouble than she was already in?
"Marshall, he's totally logical. He won't hurt her unless he has to."
Sydney had tried to keep her voice steady, as though being appealed to as SarkGirl was something perfectly normal, something that might happen on a daily basis to any female agent. Truth was, she was she was just about keeping a lid on a bubbling pot of mixed thoughts and emotions, chief among them being how the hell did she know what Sark would really do? Would he be professionally logical, or would he just hurt Dodgson anyway? How did she know? Did she, Sydney, really know him at all? He was a killer, a mercenary assassin, cold and ruthless. She'd held out private hopes that he could stun them all and turn out to be human, but all the time he'd been bugging her home and no doubt laughing at her having sex, stabbing her in the back.
Standing there, Sydney wanted to scream out her shame, grief and wrath about it all but she couldn't, if she started screaming and weeping out her grief-tinged rage then questions would be asked as to why.
Her sense of betrayal was total. Sark, how could you do that to me? You bastard!
She'd gone through hell over him, beating herself up over how she'd let him down, berating herself for having in some sense abandoned and rejected him, and this was the outcome? This was her reward? The revelation that he'd been a heartless bastard all along and that she'd been a fool all the time? It was irrational, she knew it, but she felt as though she had been holding out a fresh chance to him and that he had sneeringly flung it right back in her face. She wanted to weep, to keen out her grief, to mourn for something that had died, but she didn't know what it was that had died.
Why did people think she was the 'Sark expert'? Why did she have to carry the responsibility to understand him? Of all the people in the room, in the end when it came to Sark, hadn't she been the most deluded of all?
There was a twitching movement across from her: Vaughn. Poor, battered Vaughn. She felt a wave of pity for him, and a rage at Sark.
Mr. Sark, that gleaming ice-blade masquerading as a human being: could there be such a thing as an ice-cold laser? – if so, then Sark was surely it. Sark, a man who if the positions were reversed and he had been taped having sex, would have simply been sitting in this room now, dressed in one of his perfectly cut suits, legs crossed elegantly at the ankles, looking down at his no-doubt perfectly manicured nails and smirking in some barely-suppressed self-congratulation whilst everyone else squirmed in embarrassment.
Was it a bad thing that Vaughn couldn't be Mr. Sark?
