Mystic Chords of Memory Chapter 5: pt 5, an alias fanfic

A/N: Thank you to yumytaffy for the beta. Thank you to Jasmine for the encouragement. And of course, Jasmine—UPDATE! It's just not right that I'm updating twice before you do. We were supposed to alternate. And finally…. Wow, it hasn't been two months yet and I'm updating. Must be my avoidance of studying at work.

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"What do you know? Truthfully. And no more lies." You glance once more at your coffee cup and give her a pointed look. You're not sure if you're supposed to be afraid or not.

Her eyes are glaring at you with the utmost hatred. It could have rivaled the look Sydney used to have in her eyes whenever she mentioned Sloane. It's making you want to fall back and retreat, but you don't. You might have back when you were still Sydney's handler, but you've toughened with life's emptiness and have learned the secret to staying calm in emotional situations that Jack mastered. Things don't bother you as much as they did. You don't scare easy. The scariest thing has already happened in your life—you're living it right now. Nothing else can compare.

She grits out words that you don't understand. "I know you're lying. I know that you've become an amazing liar. The Michael Sydney told me about would never have lied to me about his love for her."

You feel like you should inject a few words in your defense, but you're perplexed by her sudden change of attitude. You wonder what she's talking about. No, you did not lie about any of the situations with Sydney. You might have skimmed over some parts because it was classified Omega-17, but other than that, you did not lie.

She continues, "Or maybe she was so disillusioned by the love she felt for you. You had me there, and I believed you for a second. Sydney was lucky enough to have never had you come back. She wouldn't be able to stand who you are now. You're a liar, and you're deceiving. You probably already moved on and are just acting a part to make us feel better."

You decide that that accusation is unwarranted and enough. "Look, you asked me for answers. I'm giving you answers. I was truthful. I loved Sydney. I still love Sydney. I never moved on. Why do you think I'm here now? I came here for answers myself, not to put myself through more hell than I'm already in—"

She doesn't hear anything you say. She's caught up in her emotional whirlwind. "—or maybe make me feel sorry for you. You knew what happened, and you never came. You are the lowest of the low in my mind. I really hoped you were a better person than I thought you were. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. And it backfired on me just like all my other dreams. I guess I was wrong." She sniffles slightly as she rants. "I want you to leave."

You see a passion behind her eyes that you have seen before. You know that everything will end badly if you don't leave now. "Look, I didn't lie about my feelings for Sydney. I don't understand what you're telling me. I loved her, and I lost her. God, I loved her. And don't tell me otherwise. You have no idea what I lost." Your threat is thinly veiled, but you realize that your words have no impact on her as you search her eyes. They're still the same, scowling at you with invisible daggers. You notice that she has suddenly built up a wall around her heart so that her emotions won't be taken advantage of. It's a stubbornness you know well.

She's pointing at the door, and there are tears in her eyes, but she's not letting them fall out. You know that's because if they do, it would be considered letting the emotions completely overtake you, and you lose control. 'Never sacrifice your hold on your emotions,' is something you taught yourself after Sydney's death.

Seeing this young woman in front of you with her chest heaving, obviously distraught by your words, make you realize how taxing emotionally your conversation has been on her. You don't know why. You just need to head toward the door before something regrettable happens.

"Sweetie, are you alright in there?" you hear Jonathan's concerned voice echo as he crosses over the threshold from the kitchen to the living room with the toddler in his arms.

"Yeah, just fine. I'm just showing Mr. Vaughn the door."

Jonathan, seeing his wife upset, gives you a fierce look. You know that look well. It had been on your face a couple of times. "Mr. Vaughn, I suggest you hurry up and leave. I don't need you here upsetting my family."

You nod, understanding what just happened. What he just did strikes a chord in you—he acted just like you would have acted if Sydney was hurt. You recognize the love for his wife in his eyes and the overwhelming need to protect her any way he possibly could with every step he takes towards you.

You get up from the seat and open the door and leave. You have some answers, but you're confused as to what they mean; you've once again ended up with more questions than you'd have liked.

What did Catherine mean when she said you knew? Was she saying that you knew Sydney was alive? It would be impossible. You never knew, and if you had known, you would have found her straight away, just like you've been trying to find closure for the past twenty-three years. And the way Catherine spoke sounded like you had missed your second chance at happiness.

--break--

You get back in your car and drive. You have no destination, no specific route to follow. All you need to know is to continually exchange between the accelerator and the brake, and to turn the wheel in the same direction the car in front of you is going or to follow the dotted white lines. There are no thoughts to your actions except the word 'drive' running through your subconscious. To escape what—you're not sure yet.

The yellow light in your dashboard finally catches your attention, but you don't know where you are, nevertheless where a gas station is. The sun has moved quite a distance from when you first started driving and is now almost blinding you as you drive toward the west. You look around and find yourself on a suburban road with a park nearby. You pull yourself into a parking lot and look around.

You know where you are. You were here nearly twenty four years ago, back when the novelty of your relationship with Sydney had slightly worn off; you started "dating" only a month before. You were here for a one-day meeting at Langley and decided to look around before going back on another flight. You were playing with a jewelry box in your pocket as you leaned against a wooden fence. The velvet was smooth against your thumb as you snapped it open and shut. It wasn't a ring—you weren't ready for that yet. You both were waiting for SD-6 to fall. It was a simple necklace. Nothing too fancy. It just held great meaning. The pendant had been your great grandmother's. You were supposed to give it to the woman you loved, but you never got the chance. You never worked up enough courage to give it to her when you got back to LA; or actually, you were waiting for the perfect moment. It never came. It's now in your safety deposit box in the bank. You doubt anyone will get the chance to wear it now. It's been untouched for so long. You've considered giving it up to the sea, but you haven't worked up the nerve.

You're back to the beginning; the moment when you knew that Sydney was the one you would spend the rest of your life with. Your life had been short. The Michael Vaughn you used to be is gone.

You remember sitting down in an empty CIA conference room and listening to the recording of Sydney's last mission. Your memory of that night is etched so deeply in your mind that you remember every breath she took and how she uttered your name.

"Boy Scout?" Sydney's hopeful voice booms from the speakers.

You tense as you realize this is the last time you'll ever hear her voice. Sydney's recordings are always destroyed—the CIA never left hard copies of audio or visual evidence of the important cases because of security issues. Instead, after a video or audio recording is made and after debriefs are written, the cassettes are shattered then burnt. So you need to make this last. You make sure you catch onto every breath she takes and every hitch of her voice in her sentences.

"Sorry, Mountaineer. Your lover boy is off taking a break in France with his mommy. He's a momma's boy. It's just you and me. Maybe we'll liven things up for this op, and you'll be coming to me instead of the scrawny boy," you hear your friend's voice. You try smiling as he jokes with Syd. You fail.

"Hey, Weiss. You know I'll take you over a scrawny boy any day, but I just have to check with Vaughn. I'm sure he'll have a word to say in this matter; you know, office protocol and all. I just might get a lecture from him about proper conduct." You can hear her smiling, and you know the irony in that statement. Her voice shreds your insides apart even more. Just one more smile would have been all you wanted; one more chance to say 'I love you.'

"You keep telling yourself that. I know you'll come running to me one day."

"Sure I will, Weiss. And for the record, Vaughn's not scrawny." That shut him up and no doubt surprised him, you think to yourself.

You listen to her boots pad softly on the ground, making as little noise as possible. She lets out a long sigh—a trademark you've learned to recognize as her signal that she's preparing herself to slip into her alias. You have always viewed it as her letting go of herself and all her worries.

"Okay, Weiss. I'm in the facility. I should check in with Dixon; going radio silent for a second." She flicks the button on her watch as she pretends to read the time.

You wait the thirty seconds out, waiting to hear her voice again. You don't know when the guard injected her; Weiss hadn't told you. You hear her come back online and you expel your breath forcefully and fast.

"So you need to take a left then a right after seeing the second hallway, then up the stairs that should be on your left."

"Weiss! I know where I'm going. We've gone over the plan more than a few times, and then another time when you insisted."

"Okay… okay. I'm just… nervous because if you get hurt, Mike's gonna kill me."

"Then tell me a story about Vaughn." She's trying to not be obvious, but you smile nonetheless. It's so like her to go hunt for more information about you, and Weiss would be a wise choice, you admit.

"Alright. Let me think. Back in college Mike was quite the partier."

You have a feeling you know which story he's going to tell, and it isn't one you would have Sydney know about if you had a choice.

"This isn't going to be a let's-see-how-many-girls-he-could-lay-in-one-night story is it?"

"No. Mike would never do that. You know him. He's too serious about having a committed relationship sort of thing. I, on the other hand, never agreed. A bachelor's life is the best life has to offer. You get the girls, you get the parties, and you get the alcohol."

"Weiss, please. Spare me."

"You're the one who asked."

You picture her adorned in her black combat gear and her smile.

"Good point. Tell me something I don't know about Vaughn then." You hear the giddiness in her voice. You've come to recognize it every time she gets prepared to hear something about your life.

There's a slight lull in the conversation, and you hear Sydney's combat boots lightly padding along the floor.

"Okay, I got one. There was this one time in college when Mike was really drunk, like wasted-before-three-o'clock-in-the-afternoon sort of drunk. It was after an all-night party that bled into part of the afternoon, and he had been dared to chug upside down on the keg—you know, keg stands. We had a political inquiry class around four, and he couldn't even write out his own notes—"

"Oh, no, he did not. He hit on the professor didn't he?"

You groan in your head, but if you confess it to yourself, you're curious how much he told her about that day. You yourself don't remember much of what happened that day, only what Weiss chose to reveal to you.

"Yeah. Except he was calling our professor 'Professor Watkins.' Professor Watkins is a woman; Professor Evans, who is our political inquiry professor, is male. It was very hard trying to explain to him why Mike was disrupting a class of 200 students and repeating everything Evans was saying, and why Mike was calling Evans 'cute.'"

You hear her giggle quietly. You would tell her every embarrassing moment you've had in your life if you could hear that giggle again.

"Wow. He definitely was wa—"

Weiss is scrambling around. You pick up the soft but distinct beeping in the background. The happy moment is shattered.

"Sydney—there're guards there. You need to get out." Weiss is trying to stress his authority over her, but Sydney isn't one to be pushed, you know. She's stubborn, and only in the past year has she begun to explicitly trust your directives; and even then, she doesn't always follow them.

"I'm almost there. I can get to the vial before they're here. Just give me a few seconds."

"You don't have a few seconds. I'm ordering you to get out of there, Sydney. Mike is going to tear into me if he finds out that you got hurt under my watch." Weiss is panicking, and that only serves to tell you how bad the situation really is.

"I got it, Weiss. I got it. I'm looking for a way out now."

Now that she's retrieved the vial, you hear her calm voice underlining with panic when she begins to comprehend that she doesn't know where the escape routes are. This only makes you tense up more as you recognize that the end is near. This is too much like a previous mission from her beginnings as a double agent; the case that got you replaced by Lambert. You begin to wonder if she realizes that this is when her world is about to stop. If only you had been there. You keep trying to rationalize it. If only you'd been there, you would have been able to somehow get her out. Maybe through the heater system, or through another door, or just by staying hidden somewhere. You know these are worthless "what ifs" because the CIA had already checked out all these possibilities.

"Sydney! I'm looking up the escape routes. Damn it. Vaughn is going to kill me."

"He's not going to kill you. Just get me out of there. They're almost here. I've tried all the doors. The rest are locked; the only one open is the one they're about to come through." The words are coming faster and faster out of her mouth. Or maybe it's just your blood stream that's filled with adrenaline that's making it seem that way.

"I'm guessing that by getting into the room, a silent alarm was triggered. It just didn't show up on our schematics. And because the alarm was triggered, the facility is going into lockdown. You and Vaughn have gotten out of so many similar situations. I can do this. I can get you out. But crap, Syd… we don't have any information about this. Connect to Dixon, maybe he'll find a way."

"I think it's too late for that," she responds almost defeated. Almost.

You hear a gun shot and your heart beats even faster as dread overcomes your body. Then you hear Syd and several guards fight—a kick connecting to an abdomen or a punch connecting with a face or a man being tripped after a well placed strike to the head. Another gun shot and you hear silence before you hear a man is speaking in a language you don't understand.

Only then do you know for certain that this is the end, and apparently Syd does, too.

Her whispers carry so much regret. You wonder if she had a gun pointed at her head as she says, "Weiss? Tell Vaughn…"

And then static. No one at the CIA was sure why it turned to static all of a sudden, and they made sure they told you so before you came into this room.

So her last word was your name, or so you hope. You wonder what she wanted to tell you; what profound phrase she was about to reveal as her life was taken away from her. You want to know; your body has been left hanging at a state of limbo. You don't know what she was going to say. 'I'm sorry,' 'I love you,' but all of them seem so trivial. You just want her to be there, safe and nestled in your arms.

"The first thing you need to know is that we did everything that we could. Many people looked over Agent Weiss' counter-mission. We thought we had fooled proofed it," you hear words of the early morning meeting run through your head one more time. Of course it had been fool-poof. Weiss called you so many times before sending her out asking you if it was okay. You fashioned some of it yourself. But none of you had the plans for the extra security system; obviously SD-6 didn't either. You should have counted on Sydney's stubbornness, but you're not going to fault her. You should have remembered that she had a tendency to be stubborn when it came to completing a mission.

You hear the tape click, signaling the end. You realize that only twenty minutes have gone by and you are now expected to meet up with Kendall and Jack. You don't want to. Instead, you walk over to the other side of the room and press play again. You have this masochist feeling coursing through your veins right now. You need to hear her one more time. She's not going to be here for now on; that realization has hit you harder than you can ever imagine. It had always been a possibility, but you both had considered yourselves lucky. It was the feeling that she was invincible that allowed you to keep sending her into the field.

Just one more time is all you need. And then you'll give her up. This time, however, you let the tears flow as the world you thought you had figured out falls through.

Your emotions and thoughts are clouded with disappointment, frustration, and anger. The tranquility of this park is not the best place for you right now, but you know if you went somewhere busy, you would only lash out at someone. You breathe in and hold the air in your lungs until they start to burn. You lean against the fence for comfort. You still haven't learned to stop thinking about her, and the meeting earlier isn't helping. It's boggling your mind that she might have been here.

You don't know what to believe anymore. The pictures looked so real, and your heart is telling you that you've found her again, but your head is still hammering the doubt into your soul.

You wonder why she never tried to contact you. Yes, she was in WPP, but still, she's Sydney; she would have found a way. But you find yourself doubting your own heart. You hope that she did try to contact you simply because you think that she had to be as in love with you as you were her. And from the love that Catherine described to you, it sounds like Sydney did love you back. You just don't know how long she waited. You are a disappointment to her because you didn't find her; you're a failure to yourself for not trusting her.

Your mind jumps to another thought that has been nagging you since you left the house. She has a daughter. When you looked at the picture, you realized how similar they look—you just never questioned it past the fact that Sydney has a daughter. You already know Kate is a strong woman without ever meeting her, and you hope she isn't trapped in the world of espionage like her grandparents and mother.

You wonder who her father is. The way Catherine described her…

The autopsy revealed that the body was pregnant at the time of death.

You feel hope invade your body. It might be an inappropriate hope since you don't even know if what you're dreaming of is true, but you feel it nonetheless, and it just might hurt you in the end. It might have been a complete fluke that the body was pregnant, or it could have been your first clue. But if it was a clue, then your child should be around the same age as Kate. And if Sydney found out she was pregnant, that would have been a reason to be extracted. You just need to know why she didn't tell you that she was leaving and why she left you behind.

--break--

You knock on Catherine's door and hope you aren't interrupting the toddler's afternoon nap. You had stayed around a little bit longer next to the fence and stared at the squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees before acting on your emotions and your irksome desire to find out what happened to Sydney. You decided to come back to Catherine's house and ignored the fact that you might get thrown in jail for harassment. You have questions, and she has the answers. You're determined to figure this out before you leave again.

You hear Catherine's heels click on the floor, but she's still talking to Jonathan as she opens the door. You notice that her hair is darker than earlier—the highlights have been washed out. When she does turn to face you, her eyes are green, not the gray eyes she had before.

"Oh, shit."

You guess she never expected you to return.

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Antigone11: Not a lot of people like Catherine. You'll understand her point of view very soon. She has a reason for her actions. And at this point, she is supposed to be manipulative. Very manipulative. She's trying to get her own answers. Thanks for reading.

Valley-girl2: LOL. I don't even want to know what happened to Barnett. She's supposed to be at the task force still. We're in APO. I guess she never was given clearance. All the better I say—we don't have to hear her psychoanalyze them and have her report stuff back to the CIA. / Bombarding questions… that is so me, too. I have a great time doing it. It throws people off and makes their head spin, but then I get the answers I need. / Klepto? Umm… is that English::blushes: I don't know what that means. / Yeah, school is madness. But no, I don't end until June. Darn the UCs—they move fast and end late. / Thanks for reading. :)

Acetoorion: I hope you got my e-mail, because, seriously? You rock. Thank you for going through all those fics. It meant the world to me. Thanks for reading and reviewing each and every one of them.

PKgirl: Hehe. You'll figure it out soon enough. Not everything is as they appear… as I think you have already read. Yes, Jack knows everything… but does he share his knowledge is the question. Thanks for reading.

genevra: The train station scene in season 1 is right before Syd and Vaughn go to Taipei. She remarks about "normal people going to normal jobs." One of the major S/V scenes in season one. ;) / You haven't seen season 4? Oops. But no, they were very, very, very, very minor spoilers. They had no important context in the season. / Hey, look! It didn't take 40 days again… I don't think. Actually… it might have. Let me count… Yeah… actually, today is day 40. Sigh. I'll try to get better at it. / No one is supposed to like Catherine at this point. But hopefully, she'll grow on you. Thanks for reading.

Figoana: Thanks for reading. :)

AtruthLtakesItimeASVS: Oops. I'll try updating earlier and quicker… but I'm lazy. Sorry. It's my character flaw. Procrastination and laziness don't make good partners. Thanks for reading.

THANK YOU TO: faith angelli, Queen Qwenyvere, Leira Noxid, matthewperrysgirl, antz, sydofthesea, maggieann452, alllieee, valley-girl2, Ruby015, HandlesVartan, oOspuffy4everOo, Fair Cate, Aquarius4, sunshine231, PKgirl, livingArtemis, Princess Box, and lec for putting me on your author alert list. I means so much to me.