"Our friend is gone."
"Where?"
"Don't know. When we were ready to leave we found out that he had already left."
There was silence on the phone. Alex didn't particularly care, the man on the other end didn't intimidate her. It was all business.
"Make a few calls," he told her. "if any of your contacts see or know where he is get them to let you know."
"I will, and as soon as I hear anything you'll b – "
"You'd better."
The phone went dead. Alex just rolled her eyes. Cryptic mysterious bastard. Shrugging it off, she realized as long as she got paid, she didn't care. But why was she curious?
Why is he getting involved with this?
He had checked out of the hotel without Sark or Alex knowing about it, and just left. Spyros had given him some leads and he decided to start right away. Getting to Amsterdam was easy enough and setting up the meeting took a few hours but he was not feeling like he was heading anywhere.
If he had been more aware of what was going on around him he might not have gotten into any trouble but coming off another drinking binge didn't help matters for him.
The meeting started with no problems but then, without any warning, it took a turn that Vaughn didn't even see coming.
They had done their homework and knew he was CIA. It didn't matter to them that he had been forced to take leave. They had wanted to know why he was there. Vaughn had tried to tell them as much as possible but the more he tried to convince them that he wasn't there for anything else other than information, the more it seemed like they were toying with him. They were playing a very dangerous game with him.
Suddenly he started to wonder if he was going to get out of this alive. Just as quickly, a tiny voice told him that he didn't really care but he pushed that voice away. He needed to find out what had happened to Sydney.
In the end Vaughn had been able to leave with no problems and with very little information. His brain was trying to figure something out, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He knew there was a connection somewhere but for some reason it wasn't coming together for him. He did know one thing for sure, if Sydney was still alive there were people making sure that she was hidden well.
XXX
He was in another hotel room, alone again. When he was like this all he could do was think about her. How did things get to be so extreme? Did it start when he shot Lauren? Or did it begin even earlier than that?
When he found out that Sydney was alive after thinking she was dead for almost two years he couldn't believe it. He had gone through the motions of getting on with his life but he missed her. He might have stopped talking to her out loud but he still had the conversations with her in his head. Lauren's job may have been to get Vaughn to go back to the CIA when the Covenant asked but it was Sydney that got him to make up his mind.
There were times when he couldn't tell who he was more mad at, Lauren for allowing the Covenant to use him or himself for thinking he could move on with his life in the first place.
Lately he had begun to see Sydney in his memories that should have featured Lauren. He supposed it was the alcohol but right now it was all he had. He honestly thought that things would be better for him and Sydney once Lauren was dead but they weren't. In fact they slowly got worse.
That night, Sydney took off from Palermo and wouldn't tell him where she was going. When she had returned she was different. It was like she didn't know who she was. He noticed that she cut off any communication to her father which had surprised him until she had told him why. Sydney had been a child involved in Project Christmas, a spy in training since birth, lied to for all these years.
About a month after that the nightmares had started. The first night he saw what was going on scared him more than he liked to admit. They had fallen asleep, he could feel her body relaxing, her breathing getting deeper. He had missed that more than anything and at that moment he honestly thought things would be fine. Suddenly he was woken by screaming so intense he didn't know where he was for a moment.
Sydney was in a sitting position, rocking back and forth, her hands flailing around her. He couldn't get close to her for a few seconds, getting hit by her but it was the sound that was coming from her that chilled him. The sheer terror that he could hear coming from these screams was something that he couldn't protect her from. He had finally managed to calm her down and as quickly as she had sat up, she had fallen back in bed.
The next morning she had no memory of it. When it continued happening on a more frequent basis Vaughn became scared.
It was when she snubbed her sister's invitations that others began to notice the change in Sydney. She wouldn't socialize with anyone. Weiss tried to get her out a few times but she always had an excuse. There was no desire to get to know Nadia or repair her relationship with her father. She was cutting herself off from everyone and she didn't seem to care.
All he wanted to do was help her so he made himself available to her whenever she needed him. Soon they were together most of the time. When a mission was compromised due to an error on both their parts, they had been asked to take a leave of absence from the CIA.
He had his nightmares too, not as often as Sydney did but he could remember his very clearly. Replay of him shooting Lauren but when she had risen he hadn't seen it. He would be woken up by the sound of her gun shooting Sydney. Neither of them realized the downward spiral they were both on. They had isolated each other from the world, relying on a dependency that was not healthy.
When Sydney had told him about her involvement with Project Christmas, Vaughn had gone ahead and tried to find out more, if he could. There wasn't a lot of information available to him, especially now that he was on leave and didn't have access to anything. He thought if he could only find out what happened to her exactly, then maybe there was a chance.
