Changeling
Summary: She'd just met him, and she hated his guts already. What she didn't know – what nobody could ever tell her – was what he once meant to her. What her life once was. AU, SV.
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"We'll find each other. We always find each other." – Sydney to Vaughn, "Crossings"
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Prologue:
It was another day, another mission. There were guns blaring from either side of her as she ran across the corridor and barely made her way into another room, falling to the floor and rolling under a desk for safety. The guns continued and she concluded that it had not been her that they'd been chasing.
It was one of those missions that had gone from bad to worse. Their intel had turned out faulty and it seemed, as if things weren't bad enough already, that Vaughn was captured too. Her worry for him pumped through her as a new type of adrenaline, giving her the energy and urge to go, though she had no idea where.
"Agent Bristow."
Her head snapped up, almost right into the table, and she went into a defensive posture as best as she could while under a table. "Who is this?"
"That's irrelevant, agent Bristow. You're worried. You don't know if Vaughn will be okay. Look around you, Syd." There was something commanding about the voice, even its mocking misuse of her nickname. "There's death everywhere. This is all there is, in the end. But it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be like this."
"What's your point?" She was frustrated, scared, and worried to death. Playing a game of God knows what with a voice she couldn't even put a face to was not particularly enticing.
"You could stop this. Just say the word, agent Bristow. You could change this all."
"How?" She didn't want to be drawn into these games, but she was anyway, still trying to figure out what on earth was going on.
"What if Credit Dauphine was nothing but a bank? What if you never were drawn into this whole thing? This wouldn't be happening. You would be safe. Vaughn would be safe."
She didn't want to give in. She didn't want to seem weak. She didn't want to admit to herself that she wanted to give in. She didn't want a lot of things. She didn't even believe the ambiguous voice, anyway. Nobody could change the past, right? She didn't know anymore. She was scared.
She answered.
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