Alternate Termination

Sequel to Alternate Existence and Alternate Infatuation. Sydney and Michael finally had a perfect life. A real family with no lies. Friends who knew the truth. And then they lost it all.

Chapter 9: Nothing Left To Fear

Disclaimer: No, Alias is not mine. Nor is Sydney, nor Vaughn, nor Irina, nor Jack, nor Khasinou, nor Kendall. But Jeffrey is! He's all mine! No touchy!

A/N: s, I admit I just up and decided, "Hey, I want Misty to go too!" like a pouty four-year-old. And as far as Syd not letting someone else in on this plot, you gotta remember that in this fic Syd has tended to have to rely on herself, so she would feel responsible for all the people she exposed to Sloane, Khasinau, ect., and hey, after Misty pegged her on her intentions, what could I make her do but allow Misty to come along? It should be in, shoot Sloane, out, nothing to it, right?


The first thing Weiss noticed when he awoke on the floor was how quiet the apartment was. The kids were still asleep, and apparently so was everyone else. Sydney didn't clatter pans in the kitchen as she had the previous morning, and there was no alluring smell to draw him up.

He rolled over and stretched, glancing around the room out of habit. Then he grinned. Looked like everyone wasn't asleep after all.

Jeff was sprawled hopelessly out across the couch, with Misty nowhere in sight. Weiss didn't hear her moving around inside, so he figured she must have been outside.

Vaughn wandered out of the bedroom a few minutes later, also looking around groggily as if counting heads.

"Where's Syd?" he yawned.

"Probably with Misty," Weiss commented, nodding toward Jeff's lone form as he hefted himself to his feet.

"Where's she?"

"Dude, do I look like I'm keeping tabs on your wives?" Weiss asked, laughing.

"What about his wives?" Jeff grumbled, slinging his feet to the floor and sitting on the edge of the sofa. "One of 'em's mine."

"They've apparently left us men alone with the kids," Vaughn said self-mockingly. "Syd's big on those open air markets. She probably just too Misty sight-seeing."

"Great," Weiss muttered. "Syd's taking my asset on a field trip."

Emily started crying in her carrier in the bedroom, and Jeff rose sluggishly to check on her. Vaughn followed, though he used the pretext of checking on Alex. A MIA CIA agent couldn't afford to have a cute little baby girl smudging his image.

Weiss went to raid the refrigerator, and that's when he saw the note on the cutesy sheet of paper trimmed in red flowers held in place by a plain round magnet.

Don't worry about us. We will come home. By the time we return, we'll all have nothing left to fear from one Arvin Sloane. We love you all, and take care of our babies.

It was signed twice, one line in Sydney's tight, compact handwriting, and the next in Misty's wide, loopy script.

Weiss whistled low as he fingered the note, rolling the magnet in the other hand.

"Mike, Jeff," he called. "You guys better get in here."

He met them halfway, and would have smirked to see Michael with Emily snuggled against his shoulder if he hadn't held out the note.

"Your girls didn't just hit the market for some tequila, guys. They went after Sloane."


Nepal is beautiful this time of year, Sydney though sardonically, turning her back to the pouring rain she could see through the dark window.

"Are you sure you can handle this?"

Misty twisted her hair up and shoved pins into it to hold in in place under the short black wig she held.

"I'm as sure as you are," she replied calmly. "Sydney, Alex is like my own son, and I'm as ready to kill any bastard that wants to hurt him as you are."

"Okay." Sydney paused, her nerves more to do with Misty than with the mission she'd planned out. "This is the plan. Once we get into the party in the lobbythat's our ticket inyou create a distraction." Sydney gestured absently at two long, elegant dresses, one red and one navy, with far less than necessary holding them together. "Have you ever been drunk?"

Misty shook her head.

"No. Well, there was this one frat party…some guys spiked the…"

"Good," Sydney interrupted. "Be drunk. Call-for-a-straight-jacket drunk." Sydney made one last adjustment to the longer straight black wig she wore and pulled a maid's uniform out of a green blue duffle bag, along with a holster. "Keep your gun on you, but out of sight. Keep the guards away from their stations at least two minutes so I can loop the security feed and let you in the service entrance." She indicated the uniform she'd thrown across the bed. "Which will attract a lot less attention because you'll be wearing this. And you'll have the tranq gun. Less mess if we use that to neutralize Sloane's personal guards."

"Hey, Syd?" Misty broke in when Sydney paused for a breath, looking at the array of weapons and disguises spread across the hotel bed. "Where'd you get all this stuff?"

Sydney couldn't help a smirk.

"Remember I was a double inside the KGB? Well, Lina Derevko had some damn good connections. It's amazing how quick the suppliers are when faced with the prospect of a renewed alliance with a presumed dead contact."


Jeff, Eric, and Michael stood in a line across the living room, all staring at vaguely the same indefinite point in space. Weiss juggled a squalling, squirming Emily. Vaughn had soggy spit up stains on his dark shirt. A puddle of juice soaked the carpet near Jeff's foot, the glass Alex had just knocked over still on its side on the floor. Alex alternately tugged on shirttails and hands and whined that he was hungry. The room looked remotely as if a twister had hit it, or perhaps an 8.0 earthquake.

Above it all, the smell of charred black and crispy hamburgers permeated the air, along with the slightest hint of smoke.

"I miss the girls," Weiss deadpanned as Alex began tugging on his shirt tail again, his complaints rising in both volume and pitch, putting him, Weiss figured, well on the way to a tantrum.

Emily let loose a new round of howls, and Alex continued to rise in volume, hopping up and down now.

"Whatever Misty and Syd are doing, I hope they're having more luck than we are," Jeff muttered.


Sydney moved nonchalantly toward the door, holding her champagne flute lightly. She met Misty's eyes across the room, and Misty staggered once or twice, gaining some disdainful looks from those around her.

But getting herself arrested for public drunkenness would leave Sydney stranded. There were police everywhere, and Misty held no doubt that the experience would not be pleasant. She caught Sydney's eye again before she jerked suddenly around, beating at her back with her arms twisted up behind her head, screaming.

"Get it off get it off GET IT OFF!"

After a few moments, she let her legs collapse beneath her and fell to the marble floor, twisting and screaming. She lashed her feet around as much as the long gown she wore would let her, careful to keep the gun strapped to her thigh hidden.

"The spiders! I hate spiders!" she screeched. "SNAKES!"

Sydney smothered a grin as the guards were drawn away from the doors toward the quickly gathering crowd and the woman commanding the attention of every person in the sizable room. She slipped away unnoticed.


The security in the hotel sucked, really. She could see the cameras, even if she hadn't already hacked into the hotel's system and knew their exact locations, and could easily stay out of view of the cameras. Once in the out of the way and unmonitored janitor's closet she located easily, she quickly shed the navy dress to reveal a sleek black body suit underneath. Then she pulled a black ski mask over her face, allowing the ends of the long wig to flow loose beneath the reach of the mask.

She slipped out of the closet, being careful to stay under or away from the blatant security measures. There was no need to invade the security office, as she'd suspected, to loop the feed; the control panel was at the top of the stairwell leading down to the basement, and who would want anything in that filthy place anyway? There wasn't acamera anywhere near the door.

Syd wrenched open the control panel and studied the colored wires leading every which way. She had better then basic training in this sort of thing, and this was a pretty basic system. She pulled out a tiny pocketknife and stripped two wires, twisting them together before slicing clean through the wire that fed incoming images.

Replacing the knife in the loop at her hip, Sydney headed toward the service entrance, hoping like hell that Misty would know when and how to get away.

Misty accepted the glass of water the security officer offered her with an unsteady hand, laughing nervously.

"Gawd," she drawled, allowing her voice to tremble a little. "I haven't had an episode in years. It's a disorder, you see," she said to no one in particular. "My therapist assured me I was cured…" She sipped the water with a wan grateful twist of her lips.

"Madam," one of the guards said in heavily accented English. "Perhaps you should see a doctor. Or could we call someone for you…?"

"Oh, no, don't be silly," Misty said, a quick trill of laughter following. "Ya'll have done enough. My driver is just out front. Thank ya'll so much, but I should be going." She stood quickly from the chair she'd been helped to when she'd finally stopped flailing hazardously.

As soon as she was out of sight of the dozens of pairs of eyes following her, Misty kicked out of the high heeled shoes she wore and began to run, ducking quickly into the back of the van she and Sydney had driven to change. Two minutes later, dressed in the taffy colored maid's uniform with the black wig twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck, Misty pulled the van up to the service entrance.

Sydney was waiting.

"You were a-mazing!" she laughed softly, hissing the words out to avoid being overheard.

Misty grinned.

"That was almost fun," she said, and then sobered of all such notions. "You know, if I didn't have a gun strapped to my thigh and tranquilizer darts in my sleeve," she added, indicating the fluffy green sleeves.

Sydney nodded, the focused adrenaline pulsing through her system reminding her of the mission at hand. She took the gun and darts Misty handed her.

On the third floor of Nepal's finest hotel, the two men standing outside of room 378 slumped to the floor almost simultaneously, landing with dull thuds.


I swear, this whole amateur sleuth thing? It was written well before the latest Alias episode. I swear I didn't copy it. Wouldn't have used it if I'd seen the episode first. Sam…well, love the character, hate that they had to put him smack in the middle of a damn mission. What, Syd can't go out to a bar in LA and attract attention, may be make a, God forbid, friend that isn't CIA? Come on, JJ, throw us a friggin' bone here!

Okay, somebody review on the fic and stop me before I launch into a full account of the conversation I had with my sister during the episode…and I quote, "Didn't he program her to be a spy?" In the middle of a scene of Jack killing an unimportant baddie that appears to return in next week's episode, but surely not…anyway, Syd was no where to be seen in the scene, so my sister was asking a stupid question, while I'm sitting there going, "Shut u-…" Oh. Right. I'll let you go now…I'll try to have the next chapter up soon…