After the fiasco in Berlin, after the confusion and the painful step of calling back the local authorities (who were supposed to never have known about any of Sydney's actions that night), after her cracked ribs, there was a change in policy as well as a change in how Sydney lived. She took an apartment alone, in a different part of town. Those in higher ranks returned her to physical training for a few weeks, and made it that Vaughn was nowhere around, busy handling other matters, obviously not in line for physical training exercises himself. This was acceptable for Sydney. She was becoming comfortably used to researching a case for a couple hours in the morning, working out for the rest of the day, and then coming home to lie down and read, which always turned into a drowsy early night. Sydney took to sleeping on the couch in the tiny apartment, even though she owned a relatively comfortable double bed.
This went on for four weeks.
When the Marrakesh case opened up, a directive handed-down from national security authorities, and the CIA was called on one of their best information mines: Sydney. She would go to Morocco and gather the information on-site. There was no one better equipped at the moment; the city was a mix of palaces and slums, cars, animals and pedestrian traffic; the CIA would take chances only with someone like Sydney whose ability to slip through the cracks, take what she wanted, and slip back out again was frankly unparalleled.
The first time they slept together, they were staying at a small hotel in Italy, a CIA safe house that existed mainly to let operatives stay over a night or two and finish necessary communications before heading back to the states. Vaughn had been upstairs in the room directly above Sydney's, firing off emails to management about the successful mission, taking apart and storing weapons and equipment. He heard the shower running below his feet as he typed, and it reminded him to take a shower after the letters were finished; by the time Sydney had stopped running water, so had he. He knew her to stand under hot water for half an hour after a mission, easing bruised muscles and raw nerves.
It had been a dangerous trip, that Marrakesh job, that pair of days and nights in Morocco. Sydney came out of it with the necessary information, two more kills on her record (generic estate guards), a missing handgun, and large blue-black bruises on the back of her upper legs from a momentary assault involving an overzealous, heavyset guard and his steel baton. She was probably feeling a little sick (to her mind, as well as in her body) after the ordeal. It happened after every trip. She held a job that bred pain. Vaughn pulled on a black t-shirt, reached for his room key, and took off to see how she was doing.
This was, after all, his job. To look after her health. Mental and otherwise. To take care of her.
Vaughn let himself in with the universal room key the safe house had given each of them. In a drowsy, post-shower, low-adrenaline state, Sydney lay sideways on the bed, avoiding contact between the mattress and bruised flesh, watching Italian late-night TV with a very empty look on her face. She appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open.
"Are you alright?"
"I almost forgot."
"Forgot what?" Vaughn moved to her and sat down on the bed.
"What happened. I'm trying to forget about it, now, since we have what we came for." She rolled over, cautiously, and closed her eyes. The TV murmured in Italian. "I had these childhood fantasies that Morocco was a beautiful place, with palaces and white sand, friendly open air markets. My first boyfriend gave me a traveler's guide to Morocco."
"As far as dangerous missions go, this wasn't one of the…worst ones, I guess. It was moderate compared to Berlin. No one had to call off the Marrakech cops, or anything," he said, venturing a half-smile. He fought to prevent his mind from considering her first boyfriend.
"I'm trying to forget Berlin, too," she mumbled and rolled over again, tucking her arms behind her head and stretching out. Vaughn was barely touching her, his hand poised at her knee.
"How are the bruises on your legs?"
"They're alright."
"You sure?" he said, eyeing the line of her leg under grey linen pajamas as it lay next to him on the bed.
"What time is it?" Sydney said in reply, attempting to jettison the subject of injury.
"Sydney, if you're really in pain, you need to tell someone. Remember Berlin, and your ribs?" Sydney lifted herself into a sitting position.
"Relax. It doesn't hurt that much," she murmured. He reached out and placed a hand on her leg, gently. She winced.
"Jesus, Sydney," he said, "I barely touched you. 'It doesn't hurt that much', what." Getting to his feet and looking in the bathroom cabinet for a plastic bag, Vaughn took some ice surrounding water bottles in a bucket next to the TV, filled the bag, tied it and handed it to her. "At least put on some ice to get the swelling down."
"Thank you." She looked close to tears. Vaughn noticed, then, that her hair was wet and irregularly wavy from the shower, that she had not quite rubbed the day's makeup off her eyes; they were slightly shadowed. He noticed, for the first time, how thin her pajamas were, how they fit like tissue paper on this woman who wore black turtlenecks, power suits, leather pumps. How fragile she was, outside the heat of battle. "This work is exhausting, sometimes. I forget why I do this," Sydney said quietly, slowly moving the ice along the back of her leg, wincing once again.
"Did something happen you're not telling me about?" He asked her, his voice close to a whisper. He was terrified that if he returned to a normal tone he'd be sent away by this other version of Sydney that appeared after a fight had ended. He
"Don't worry about it," she said, sitting up, moving a hand to his side, her palm to his ribs. "These things will never change. I might not crack my ribs and almost get killed every time, but they're not going to become natural. Everyone near us gets killed. That will never be natural." Sydney pushed the bag of ice off the bed with her foot and rested both her hands around Vaughn's torso. "It's up to us to make it as natural as possible."
His mouth fell open, then, and he allowed himself to pull her closer, just to look at her, to make sure it was the same woman, that he was not asleep in his room dreaming this. Dreaming the concern was mutual.
"Go on," Sydney whispered, and kissed him, holding the back of his neck with her cupped hand. A moment later she pulled back, breathless. "Waited long enough."
To this day Vaughn never knew if she had meant she'd waited long enough, or he'd waited long enough, or that they both had waited long enough.
He had never known that the searing sexual tension was mutual. He had known that after Berlin he'd gone to his room and thrown up five times in a panicked wave of sickness following Sydney's brush with death and serious injury. Her face, wet with tears and blood, and her arms wrapped around her stomach like that, it was too much for him. He threw up and screamed for a few minutes, working out the neurosis so he could see her and be with her calmly.
But this wasn't Berlin. It was a small town in Italy, a hotel safe house, a room and a bed and the linen sheets and Sydney's linen pants and the brush of skin on skin. Vaughn smelled Sydney's shampoo and his own bar soap mixed together, heady, confusingly sharp. He wondered again if the whole encounter was really happening.
Soon he found himself on his back, Sydney poised on top of him, kneeling astride his torso and fiercely kissing his neck. He moved his hands to her hips, running hungry palms against her back and stomach, laying her down on top of him. She braced her hand on his shoulder, they kissed again, slower, a prelude to more intense things. The TV illuminated Sydney's closed eyes and her back arched as Vaughn pulled off her shirt and then his own. She moved away for a moment so they could undress fully.
The sex that followed was both intense and controlled. Intense, because for both of them it was the final manifestation of hours of fantasies, and controlled because Sydney's legs were horribly bruised. When it ended, a gasping Vaughn sat up and lifted an equally breathless Sydney into his arms, laying her carefully at his side on the bed. He'd slept with enthusiastic women in college and as a young civil servant, but no one who was so well-tuned physically as Sydney, whose body had seemed to recharge with electricity each time she had shifted around him.
"What do we do now?" He said, laying an arm on her stomach. He spoke into the curve of her neck. "Sydney, I don't want to go home, anymore."
Sydney rested a hand on Vaughn's stomach as they lay on their sides facing one another. "I don't know. I have been waiting for this. And it's here, you're here. But I don't know what we do now, either."
"I'm sorry they hurt you," Vaughn said, kissing her throat and collarbone and leaning on an elbow to glance at her bruised leg.
"Michael, it's not your fault," Sydney replied. She let out a deep breath, a slight moan of contentment, watching the smile cross his face as she did so. "You can't apologize for every threat anyone you love happens to face," she replied, and blinked for a long moment, as if to assure herself that he was real. "Boy, do I want to keep working with you. I mean, it isn't as if I would have said the opposite before. But now I can't understand what I would do without you."
"If we weren't working together we'd never see each other again, would we?" Vaughn suddenly said. "That would be the end of it."
"Don't say things like that."
"Sydney, since I've known you, I've been thinking things like that."
"Fatalistic things?" Sydney asked, brushing her fingers back and forth along his upper arm. "Sexual things? Or unrealistic things?"
"Dramatic things. The extremes. After Berlin I got sick, I was so worried over you. I used to get sick all the time when you were operating double. I used to think about your death long before I thought about sleeping with you. I thought about how if one of us got fired, it would be like we were dead to each other. The pressures of this business."
"Michael and Sydney aren't the same people as Agents Bristow and Vaughn. "
"I think I understand that, by now," Vaughn murmured, feeling an internal organ or two go loose inside him after hearing her mumble his first name in bed.
"You going to stay here until morning?"
"If you want me to."
"Please? No one's stayed till morning since Danny. There would be nothing better," Sydney said, the shake in her voice quickly revealing how important his answer was.
"I'll stay, then."
The next morning found the two agents in the shower at six thirty in the morning, pressed together like teenagers about to get grounded for months, starting the next day. When Vaughn finally made his way out of her room, wet-haired, red-faced, his body humming with adrenaline, he was beginning to slowly panic about what he would do at work the approaching days and weeks.
How, exactly, was he going to avoid touching her?
On the plane back to the States, Sydney read with her arm pressed against his. She kissed his ear after each murmured comment. He stared unabashedly. He began to feel as if the oxygen would leave the air when they were around authority once more. But when they touched down in LA and the cabin depressurized, they both assumed serious expressions to meet Dixon at the terminal gates. A few hours later, debriefings over and evidence handed to the proper lab technicians, Vaughn pulled Sydney aside on his way out of their building and into the parking garage.
"I'm coming over to make you dinner."
"What! What if someone sees?"
"No one is going to see. Don't tell me you don't want me to."
"Well, I can't, at least not honestly." She gripped his forearm. "We are making a mistake…be careful. See you around seven, ok?"
"You will." He strode to his car, got inside, rested his forehead on the steering wheel. Why why why why. Pick the only woman you can't really have, right?
He drove home in a distracted fog, remembering her arms clenched around his ribcage in their one-time Italian bedroom.
Any love beginning with this level of potential destruction was going to be downright delicious.