Well after Vaughn was sleeping, she crept again to the phone and dialed the Las Palmas again.

Following the same protocol as the night before, she waited for him to answer the phone.

"Good evening, Sydney," he answered before she could speak.

"Listen," she whispered, ignoring his stupid assumption that it would be her calling, "I need to meet with you."

"Ahh, they always come back," he teased, egging her on. "You're quite persistent to call me two nights in a row."

"Don't flatter yourself," she sighed. "There's a park down the street from me, next to a school. Meet me there in 45 minutes, or I let the CIA know where you're staying."

Click. She beat him to hanging up this time. So there.

LA was cold after dark, year round. She'd slipped on her running shoes without socks, her suede jacket over her nightshirt, no bra. Momentarily she thought about Sark's hand on her breast, free of its tether, and then shook it out of her mind. Business. You're working.

She jogged off down the street. She liked to run, she had always been a runner. It was one of her few hobbies that actually did her some good on the job. And she hadn't been running much, since the… Chechnya. It felt good, the strain in her thighs as she thumped down the hill around the block towards the playground.

She stopped jogging when she saw him sitting in his rental, a green Chevy Malibu. It was such a sub-par ride for him, she mentally noted, not like his usual expensive tastes.

He saw her and flashed the lights, once, twice.

Yes, I see you, she thought with irritation. And now so does the rest of the neighborhood.

She walked, catching her breath, in an unhurried fashion, to the passenger side of the car. He hit the automatic lock and she slipped into the passenger seat beside him.

The radio was playing, a Norah Jones song. She thought Ms. Jones was getting a bit overexposed, but whatever.

Underground I'm waiting, just below the crowded avenue

Watching red lights fading out of view

Oh the air feels heavy

Everything just passes by and I think that I'm a little shy

Meet me outside, above ground

I'll see you on your way

I'll be with you someday- someday1

She ignored the obvious irony of the song, and looked at him. He was the most casual she'd ever seen, in dark blue jeans, those Adidas soccer shoes, and a dark blue sweater that zipped up the front. She could see a t-shirt under the sweater, hanging out around his waist.

"Well?" he was all business despite his attire.

"I need to talk to you about your mother," she began. "I can't piece together Daniel Wells's whereabouts without having more context about her, why he might want anything from her, or from you."

His eyes were steady as he looked at her and said, "I don't know anything about my mother."

She rolled her eyes. "How about you stop wasting my time."

"When have I ever wasted your time, Sydney," he looked amused. "Surely not recently." Her ears burned as she thought of them, together.

She couldn't meet his eyes; she tried not to think about how close they were. Closer than she and Vaughn slept to each other. It was always strange to actually be near enough to someone else to touch them. When she considered it, she had gone through her life with relatively little physical contact. Her dad hadn't been a sensitive type; her one grandmother lived clear across the country, mother gone.

"I think you know more than you're telling me. At least, about why your mother was with Lazarey in the first place," she explained, still not looking at him. "What would a man like Lazarey have to lose that someone might want from him? He didn't have power. He was never going to have power."

"If my father couldn't remain loyal to his wife," Sark smirked, "I don't know what a second woman could give him that the first couldn't. Too bad we killed him before I could have a little heart-to-heart with dear old Daddy."

"You tortured your own father," she accused him, "Before trading him to us, and then you had Lauren shoot him anyway."

"I tortured a man who laid with a woman," he said, his voice low, "Who happened to get pregnant, and give birth to me, yes." He stopped, and looked straight ahead at the swings moving in the gentle breeze. "If I were you, Sydney, I wouldn't confuse Lazarey with a father. Birth parents are not the same as real parents. Such as your mother, for example."

Ouch.

"What if it weren't a coincidence," she asserted, ignoring his cruel implication about Irina. "What if she had been sent specifically to Lazarey."

She was good, so good. He could barely keep from smiling. She thought like her mother. He knew most of this already. Irina had filled him in on most of the details. Just not the little part about his inheritance.

"What are you saying," he played along. "That my mother was a spy as well?" He already knew Irina had known both his mother and Lazarey's wife. They had been comrades at the training agency for female KGB agents in Moscow as teenagers.

"Think about it," she was trying to convince him. He loved listening to her, quite honestly. When she thought she was figuring something out. Like when they'd bargained in Paldisky, how he wanted Sloane, and she wanted to get the antidote she'd risked her life for, to save Vaughn from the virus that was killing him back home in LA.

No, he'd said. Sloane first. Then you'll get back your precious antidote. i

She had grimaced, like it was the hardest decision in the world.

She'd nodded then, desperate for him to turn off the sprinkler system in the decontamination room, and she had looked devastated. When she realized she was willing to kill for Vaughn. It certainly helped that she thought it was Sloane who had ordered the execution of her fiancée. But it also played right into Irina's plan of getting Sloane out of the Alliance so that they could take the Rambaldi artifacts for themselves and bring down the Alliance.

"What if the KGB needed leverage on Lazarey for something, so they sent your mother to seduce Lazarey and possibly get pregnant, so that they'd have him in their debt?"

"Mmm," he said, "But what could a petty diplomat like my…" he deliberately hesitated to use the word 'father', "Like my father have had, that the KGB would so desperately want."

He knew, of course, perfectly well. Lazarey was a petty diplomat- that was true. He was a party member, an apparatchik, but he was also of Romanov descent.

"That's what I'm asking you," she said, triumphantly. He could smell her perfume- what was that? Something light, a little floral. Awfully coy for someone who could fight hand-to-hand better than most men, he mused.

"When the CIA released me from its custody," he said, not a little bitter about that day when the NSC had butted in on the trade they were going to make with the Covenant and he'd nearly been killed, "And handed me over to the Covenant, they wanted me for one thing- my money."

He looked at her. She narrowed her eyes.

"I bargained my life for my inheritance." He wasn't lying. He'd signed over the eight hundred million dollars of Romanov money that he was due, to the Covenant. His funds had gone to finance their operation to assemble and use the Rambaldi device.

"What?" she sounded dubious. "What inheritance, I don't understand."

He looked at her. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, but she had the same kind of hair as Irina. It was long, thick, straight. It smelled good, too, he thought, and then pushed the thought of how he'd come to know that out of his mind. Business.

"My little portion of the Romanov family fortune," he said wryly. "The inheritance is patrilineal."

Of course, it made perfect sense, she realized. Natashya's mother had failed to have a boy. Send second agent, a mistress, to supply the much-needed heir to bleed the Romanov money from its owners and use it for the government's own devices.

Except that the government hadn't lasted long enough to see the plan through.

"Anastasia was a plant," she breathed. "She was sent to seduce Lazarey and have a son who could inherit his fortune."

"Very good," he said. "I knew you were bright enough to put it together."

"Spare me your bullshit," she snapped. She was starting to get cold, even inside the car. Her skin was slightly sweaty from running. "Now we need to find out what happened to your mother after you went off to boarding school."

"If I can't praise you for a job well done, Sydney," he grabbed her hand then, and forced her open palm to his lips. "Then let me at least tell you how sexy you are when you're working."

She stared, frozen with surprise as he kissed the center of her palm without looking away from her eyes. She wasn't even able to move her thumb from where it rested on his cheekbone, not even when she willed it as she felt his teeth scrape her life line, to gouge him in the eye.

It was so blatant, so… predatory. Like a cat staring at its prey before it pounced. She wanted to move, to hit him, scratch his cheek, but she just… couldn't.

"Stop it," she whispered. "Let go of me."

He huffed and dropped her hand as quickly as he'd grabbed it. "You should be getting back to your husband, I suppose." Bored Sark. "Just don't forget about our agreement," he threw in as she opened the car door.

"Fuck you," she said as she slammed the door.

"Unfortunately not tonight," he said out loud as he watched her stalk away. Nice one, he prided himself. Keep her off balance. Keep her thinking about him.

It could've been nice, though. Here. In his car.

Oh, well.

He waited until she was out of sight before starting the car.

Back at their house, she'd slipped into the shower. She looked at her palm, where he'd put his mouth on her. The water poured over her, scalding hot. It felt like her hand had been branded. She had freakishly large hands, she thought, as she took the nail brush and scrubbed at her palm until it felt like her skin was going to separate.

She sucked in her non-existent belly and looked at the marks on her stomach. God, like he owned her, she thought in disgust. To leave a mark like that. He obviously had no respect for whatever it was that they had, this… Partnership? You didn't deliberately put your partner in danger. Ever.

She had grudgingly come to terms with her own behavior where her partners were concerned; she told herself that she'd kept Dixon in the dark to protect him as well as herself, when she'd been working as a double inside SD-6. It had cost him his wife's life, before he'd learned the truth.

Even she and Vaughn had had their rough patches, particularly when they were first working together. In retrospect, she had been more than a handful, ordering him around, jumping 5 steps ahead of where the CIA was guiding her, but they'd evened out. Obviously. Still, he'd occasionally pressured her into things that she hadn't been completely comfortable with, like using Emily's illness to get intel. That had really bothered her. She massaged the bruise on her scalp absently, under a glob of shampoo lather.

"Your father's been reporting Sloane's spending a lot of time at home…" Vaughn abruptly switched subjects from the Rambaldi manuscript. It was damp in the storage unit, the fluorescent light casting a greenish tinge on them both.

"Yeah," she conceded, "His wife, Emily—she's sick."

"You two used to be close, right?"

"We still are," she had corrected him, assuming he was trying to show that he had a personal stake in his role as her handler, "Less so since she was diagnosed—she's been a little reclusive. Actually… I haven't seen her since before I learned the truth about her husband."

"I think this is a real opportunity," Vaughn interrupted her thoughts about Emily, "We'd like you to call Emily, tell her you'd like to see her again, and get invited to their house."

"You want me to plant a bug," her forehead had crinkled in disbelief, "Vaughn, she's dying of cancer."

"Yes, I know—"

"So you're asking me to use this woman," Sydney wouldn't let him do this. Not Emily.

"She will never know," Vaughn's voice got hard, the way it always did when she questioned his authority.

"But I will!" she exclaimed.

"Look, we've been trying to plant a bug in SD-6, it's pointless—that office uses every possible counter surveillance technique, Sloane's house might be more vulner--"

"This isn't a logistical question, it's a moral one—"

"A moral one? Sydney, you're a spy, this is hardly the darkest decision you've had to make!"

They were talking over each other, the way they did when they disagreed, their sentences overlapping, one of them not letting the other get a full phrase out before interrupting to interject without even hearing the other out.

"But what you're not hearing is," she came around to her objection, "Emily is my friend, despite her husband, she is my friend, who is dying—does this not seem at all wrong to you?"

"Why does this seem wrong to you?" Vaughn clearly didn't share her hang-up about using her connection to Emily to bug Sloane's house.

"Because! She is innocent, she is a good person!"

"Well, then what she doesn't know, what she will never know, is that this is one of the last opportunities she has to do something good," he concluded, superior that he'd won the argument.

She'd pursed her lips, looked away like he'd convinced her, even as she'd steeled herself that she would not ever use Emily's innocence. Not even as a means to bring down SD-6 and the Alliance. ii

Of course she'd given in later. She always did, when he asked her to do something.

She stayed in the shower for a good 15 minutes. She'd used the guest bathroom, so as not to wake Vaughn. That was all she needed right now.

Songs:

1 "Above Ground." Feels Like Home, Norah Jones.

Episodes:

i The Counteragent. Season 2, Episode 7. Written by John Eisendrath.

ii Page 47. Season 1, Episode 15. Written by J.J. Abrams & Jeff Pinkner.