FAMILY MATTERS

Eyghon

WARNING: Allusion to disturbing stuff.

"Well, Nadia is pregnant."

"Weiss, did you have sex with Nadia?"

Chapter 14: Decision time

Saying Weiss was surprised was an understatement. He certainly wasn't expecting 'that' question. He shook his head, dumbfounded. "Not that it's any of your business, but no, we never went past…groping." He blushed like a teenager but it did nothing to quell the look of anger he bore.

Sydney sighed in relief. "Okay…"

"God, I feel like I'm back in high school. And why do you ask? Didn't you two use to tell each other everything?"

Sydney's breath caught in her throat. He had misunderstood her. "No, Weiss, I meant…recently."

"Recently?"

"Weiss, did you have sex with my sister since she got out of the hospital?" She asked voice significantly louder and strained.

"Oh my God…I cannot believe you just said that…" Eyes wide, he put his hands on the sides of his head, shaking it.

"So you didn't…" persisted Sydney, needing to hear it.

"No! God, no! What do you take me for, a pervert?" He was shouting now. "She can't even decide for herself what she wants for breakfast! It would be like having sex with an unconscious girl! It's called rape, Sydney!" The last part came out as a shriek. "God, how can you even 'think' that? About me?" He backed away, his hurt obvious.

She flinched at the look of disgust and betrayal he gave her. She didn't blame him for it though. "Weiss I'm sorry…"

"Don't…just don't…" He turned around, frantically looking for an exit. He looked like he was about to pass out, his face alternatively red and white.

"Weiss…" she tried to grab his arm, he jerked away as if burnt.

"Fck you, Syd," he said quietly. He violently pushed open the French doors and stepped outside, finally breathing in some fresh air.

Sydney stayed behind, crying for the friendship she had just ruined.

"I'm sorry sweetheart. He'll come around." Her mother was standing behind her, though she didn't dare to try to cuddle her. Sydney was thankful. She might just have hurt her. It was all Irina's fault. She had forced Sydney to call Weiss. The worst was she too had doubted Weiss. Talk about a messed up situation.

A few hours later, Weiss came back inside and went in search of Sydney. He was still angry with her, but he wanted some answers. The expletives he had in mind for his so-called best friend could wait until later.

Sydney jumped to her feet as soon as she saw him walking over. "Weiss, I'm so sorry, I just needed to be sure…"

"Sure? You needed to be 'sure'? Where the hell did that come from anyway?" He tried to keep his anger in check, but failed. He didn't care.

Sydney shook her head, trying to concentrate on Weiss and not on the fact that he had denied having sexual relationship with Nadia, which meant someone else had. Sydney would have hated him and probably hurt him pretty badly but at least…it would have been Weiss, not some stranger…

"Syd, why would you suddenly ask me if I had sex with Nadia?" Weiss asked, voice shaking with emotion. "Answer me! Did Nadia say something?"

"She's…she's pregnant Weiss." She lowered her eyes, unable to bear the look of horror that crossed his face.

"What…oh God!" He wailed, plopping down on the couch. Again, there was a pause. He was doing the same thing she had. Reviewing every time he was with Nadia, trying to figure out 'when', 'who', to see a change in her behaviour. In the end, like her, he didn't have a clue. "How could this happen?"

"I don't know. I never left her alone with anyone but you."

"And I never let her out of my sight, I checked on her every thirty minutes when she was asleep. No one ever came in, no cable guy, no plumber, no neighbour, no buddies…I swear I would have never let anything happen to her…" he went on, tears in his eyes. This was all so frustrating to him.

"Weiss, I know. Its okay, we did nothing wrong. There's just no way it could have happened after she moved in with me," started Sydney, finding some of her confidence back.

"Do you even know…when it happened? I mean, there's got to be a way to date…babies, right?"

"Yes," replied Doctor Varnina, who had stepped in the room undetected with Katya and Irina. Sydney and Weiss turned around, startled. The three women probably heard the whole conversation. The doctor looked at Sydney. "When did you notice your sister wasn't having her periods anymore?"

Sydney looked away, a little embarrassed as she checked in her head. "She never had them…Oh God!" She shook her head, furious at her stupidity. "I assumed it was the drugs…" She put her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming out in rage.

"I reviewed your sister's medical files. While certain drugs can cause nausea, rashes and the likes, it can disturb a woman's cycle but it cannot stop it."

"So what does that mean? That she was pregnant 'before' being contaminated?" Asked Sydney, frowning. Nadia had been with no one else but Weiss and she believed him about the two of them not getting past 'groping'. The term was so adolescent, so Weiss-like that he couldn't be lying.

"No, impossible. The solution she was exposed to would have terminated the pregnancy. She would have miscarried within days. How much time passed between her exposure and the moment you brought her to your home?"

"She spent about four weeks in the hospital. She was in an induced coma for the first one, recovering from a bullet wound. The next three weeks were spent…with exams, drugs…she's been living with me for six weeks now. You're saying it happened there, at the hospital?"

"It makes sense," commented Katya.

"It's a CIA ran hospital." Protested Sydney.

"Doesn't mean anything. Believe me, agents, US Marshals and all the others are no different than regular people, Sydney," explained Irina, remembering her experience in CIA custody.

Sydney sighed, exasperated. "That's not possible! I came everyday, I saw her, I saw what they did, the tests and all…and I left her there!" She burst in tears, recognising that what the doctor was suggesting was the only logical explanation. "I left her there, Mom!" Irina wrapped her arms around her. "How could I have not seen something? God, I'm a horrible sister! How could I leave her there for a whole month?" She shrieked, her mind going in overload.

Katya, Weiss and Amélia left mother and daughter alone and joined Nadia who was still in the kitchen, apparently lost in thoughts and not at all bothered by the drama going on in the next room.

Irina was intent on not letting Sydney scourge herself. "Stop it! Sweetheart, you're overreacting; we're not sure of anything yet. Even if someone at the hospital…did something to Nadia, you could not have known!"

"It doesn't matter! I was responsible for her! She was in the hospital because of me in the first place! She's my sister, my 'little' sister; I'm supposed to watch over her, to protect her! I didn't, I failed her!"

"You did not, Sydney. You did no such thing. And now we, you, Katya, Agent Weiss, and I are going to figure out exactly what happened to Nadia and who is responsible, and we'll make them pay. Do you understand?"

Sydney nodded slowly, regaining control over her emotion. "Yeah."

They moved to the kitchen to find Weiss staring at Nadia with a pained expression on his face.

Sydney got closer to him. "Eric?" He turned to her sharply, his shoulders slumping under her assessing guess. "Eric, I meant it earlier, I'm sorry for what I said…"

"Don't be. It's okay. Boy plus girl alone…you had the right to ask. I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"No I didn't. I knew it wasn't possible but…"

"I was thinking, your Mom was the chick you were trying to smuggle into your apartment the other day, right?" He wanted to stop talking about Nadia and what had happened to her. It made him sick.

"Yeah. Thanks for the help. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you what I was doing. I didn't want to get you in trouble."

"You know I had my suspicions you wouldn't just sit back and watch Nadia roam around the apartment like a zombie. I knew you wouldn't let her down."

Sydney smiled tiredly, thinking of her earlier conversation with her mother about letting Nadia down. She wished she had had the same faith in Weiss. The look on his face when he had realised what she was asking…a look of profound pain, anger, betrayal.

"So what did you find?"

"A vaccine. At least we think so. We were about to test it on Nadia when…Amélia here discovered Nadia was pregnant and that's why I called you here."

"Oh." There was an uncomfortable silence. "Well can we still do the procedure?"

"Actually," started Amélia, "as I told…your friends here, the vaccine has been irradiated with Cobalt-60. It's mildly toxic to the human body but…if the embryo was exposed to it, Nadia would miscarry."

Weiss nodded solemnly, swallowing audibly. The idea of Nadia carrying a child bothered him greatly. "But why do we care about it?" Four pairs of eyes looked at him strangely. "I mean…she didn't want that child, right?" He added the latest part with more difficulty. "She was raped…"

"We need to find out what happened," interrupted Sydney, voice hollow. "I'll call Marshall." She didn't care about Varnina or her anonymity anymore. All she cared about was Nadia.

One hour later, Sydney's laptop beeped, shattering the heavy silence that had settled over the room after Sydney's phone conversation. Irina, Katya, and Weiss looked at her expectantly. Amélia Varnina was in Tanya's room, playing with her little girl while she still could. The woman would be quite busy with Nadia soon. Sydney checked the screen, and here they were, waiting on her ftp server…video and personnel files that would reveal to her the monster who had impregnated her sister. She swallowed hard, uncomfortable. "I'll be in my room," she whispered, taking the laptop with her.

"Sydney, if you want I can…" interfered Irina.

"No. I don't think Nadia would…you're her mother, you shouldn't have to see that." She shuffled out of the room, clutching the flat item. Nausea was already building up in her throat as she imagined what she was about to see.

She sat stiffly at the desk's chair in her room and transferred the contents of her server to the computer. Marshall had sent the surveillance footage of every room Nadia had been into over the period of a month. It included a padded cell, a private room, and a CAT scan room, used weekly to monitor the progress of the waste particles in her brain. Along with the video files were the whole staff's personal files and the security logs. Each door in the hospital could only be open with a key card. One for each employee, which allowed Sydney to track an individual's movements throughout the facility. The time they entered a room and the time they got out was automatically registered by the computer along with their names.

Scrolling through the columns of hours and dates, she noticed that people had stayed alone with Nadia for abnormally long periods of time on several occasions. She then proceeded to watch the footage from inside Nadia's room at the times she flagged as suspicious.

She saw a doctor with his eyes riveted to the monitors as Nadia was undergoing an experimental treatment and needed to be watched closely. Two nurses changing the sheets, washing Nadia, and cleaning the room on several occasions. The same routine went on almost daily but she checked every file anyway. She also was careful to watch out for eventual tempering with the tape, meaning loop or time code discrepancies. She found none.

Sydney had ruled out her own key card ID number, which unsurprisingly appeared on multiple occasions on the log. Almost daily actually. She remembered herself sitting in the chair by the bed, eyes never leaving Nadia's face as she prayed for her sister to wake up.

All files revealed no suspicious activity, just people doing their job. All but one.

She looked pale when she came back downstairs, some thirty minutes later. She had been struggling to get out of her stupor and join the others for the past ten minutes. Irina immediately handed her a drink, for which she was grateful. She barely noticed every occupant of the room held a glass of strong alcohol of his own. They were waiting for her verdict.

"Doctor Varnina…" she started, voice barely above a whisper. She cleared her throat, starting again. "Doctor Varnina, can Nadia have an abortion without further risks to her health?"

The doctor blinked, uncomfortable. "It's not my area of expertise." Hesitantly, she asked, "how far along is she?"

Sydney's face tensed up. "According to the time code on…the video footage, eight weeks." She sniffled but bit her tongue to keep from bursting into tears. "It happened only one week before I brought her home."

Irina had her in her arms in one instant, knowing her daughter was holding back her emotions. She too was hurting, maybe as badly as Sydney was. It was a mistake to let Sydney watch the video files and track whoever had raped her daughter. She regretted not to have done it herself, to spare her eldest. But she was a coward. When it came to her daughters, she couldn't bear to see them hurt. And now her Sydney had seen her little sister being hurt in a way no one should be. Those pictures in her mind would never leave her. She was being eaten away with guilt and pain. They needed to fix this. "Shhh, it's okay sweetheart, you have nothing to reproach yourself."

"I wanted to prepare the apartment for her and her room…" Sydney mumbled through her tears, remembering shopping for a comforter and items to child proof what she wanted to be 'their' home.

"Sweetheart, I need to know," Irina started softly. She didn't have the courage to ask exactly what she wanted, or rather needed to now. Thankfully, Sydney knew what she wanted to ask and spared her the pain of formulating it into words.

"She was unconscious…I guess that's why the nurses who…took care of her didn't notice anything wrong."

"Because there were no marks to be seen," finished Weiss, looking paler than before. To him, it was a small relief, but it meant Nadia hadn't suffered as much as she would have had she been awake.

"I tracked…the guy's movements with his key card. It happened only once."

"Thank God…" whispered Katya, whom Sydney noticed seemed as distraught as Irina and she was.

"So what do we do now?" Weiss felt numb with grief, and the idea that Nadia was carrying the fruit of that rape made him even sicker than the thought of what had been done to her.

"She can't have that baby." Sydney released her mother to look at her in surprise. "We need to treat her 'now' and her pregnancy is getting in the way," Irina elaborated, jaw set, eyes cold. Her face didn't give anything away the turmoil she felt inside while speaking of killing her first grandchild and depriving her daughter of her firstborn. But someone had to make a decision, for Nadia's sake. It was for the best.

"But how can we decide for her?" Asked Sydney, thrown back by her mother's coldness. "How do we know what she wants?"

"She doesn't want a child from her rapist," spat Weiss, stepping forward angrily. "She probably won't know what happened if…when she wakes up. I don't see why we even bother to discuss it. The solution is pretty obvious to me."

"Doctor?" Asked Irina.

"I'm sorry but as I told you, gynecology it's not my field of expertise."

"I'm asking for your opinion as a doctor. This 'is' your field of expertise."

"The…law isn't precise in cases where the mother is unable to decide for herself. But, in the medical community, the general consensus is to…do what's best for the mother. The child comes second if it threatens the mother's life. To tell you the truth, we can't afford to waste any more time with Nadia. Like you said, she needs to be treated 'now'."

There was an uncomfortable silence, which Irina eventually broke. "I'll call for someone."

TBC