In Berlin, Sydney and her mother walked slowly along the Ku'Damm together. Jack had already gone back to the safe house to collect their things; she was going to meet him at Tempelhof in an hour. They window shopped a little, talked even less. They didn't have an easy rapport with each other; years of separation and mistrust had seen to that.
"Sydney," her mother said just when Sydney had decided she couldn't bear the silence any longer, "Is everything alright between you and Vaughn?"
They stopped in front of a KDW display window full of nippleless mannequins modeling bikinis and sarongs, and stood facing each other. "Why?" Sydney's eyes narrowed, wondering what brought her mother's sudden concern on.
Irina cocked her head to the side and shrugged, "Your father said your health hasn't been so good."
"Oh," Sydney replied. "Yeah, it's fine now. I just…" She squinted a little, and looked to the side. "It's hard, my only having half my eggs, you know?"
Irina was silent. She hadn't intended for Sydney to have the same kind of life she'd lead. Jack had messed that up by testing the project on her, with the intention of protecting her. But Sloane had gotten to her first.
"I know this sounds completely obvious," Irina started, "But keeping secrets from each other will wreck your marriage."
Sydney just stared at Irina. She knew! He had told her!
There was the hot flush, and, ohhhh. Dizziness. She would've murdered Sark if he'd been there.
She sank down on the edge of a stone planter and put her head between her knees. A couple passers-by stopped and offered to call an ambulance, but Irina had deflected them, saying she was feeling faint because she might be pregnant.
Shut up, Mom! She thought. How embarrassing.
"Sydney," Irina pleaded with her, the palm of her hand warm on the back of Sydney's neck, "It's not my place to tell you what you can or can't do. I haven't been a mother enough to dictate that to you at this point. But why? Why do this?"
She sat up suddenly, her eyes full of hot tears. "You'll have to forgive me if I don't want to hear moral advice from you, Mom."
Irina pursed her lips. That was fair. She sank down on one knee, about eye level with Sydney. "Sweetheart, about Julian…" she trailed off. What did she even want to say? "I don't believe he will betray you. Not when it really matters. But he has very little in the way of connections to other people. Real connections, the kind you have with Vaughn."
Sydney felt like she might be sick to her stomach. The coffee churned with enough acid to etch glass in her midsection. It completely freaked her out that her mother called Sark by his first name. That she had slept with him, when Irina obviously practically thought of him as her son. Sydney's little brother.
"Mom, everything's been so messed up between us," she finally did allow the tears to leak from her eyes. "He wants to have kids and I don't, and I was pregnant but I lost it and I hadn't told him and—" She wasn't even sure what good it was going to do, telling Irina this, but whatever. The words came out in a jumble, spilling over each other in a barely coherent string. "And we're just so fucking normal on the surface, his mom doesn't even know what we do, and Dad's all weirded out by everything and underneath it's all just… sick," she finished, for lack of a better word. "I just can't anymore, it makes me sick to even think of it, trying to have a baby with us both being agents, what if something happened to one of us because I can't, I can't do it by myself."
Irina's eyes filled with big, fat tears then, too, and she forced herself to look away, at the display window of KDW to keep herself from crying. Sydney's desperation pained her in a way that she couldn't even fathom. It was so like the pain of her friends when they were undercover and things weren't going as planned.
"Sydney," Irina said softly, "You have to talk to him. He's only a man, not a mindreader. Does he even know how you feel?"
Sydney sniffed and shook her head. "We were supposed to talk when I get back."
"Honestly, sweetheart," Irina said, "Is talking to him worse than putting yourself through this stress? He loves you, you know that. Just talk to him."
She nodded wordlessly. It seemed so simple it might actually work. Sometimes she over thought things too much. She would talk to him—about the pregnancy thing, not the Other Thing Which Needed To Stay Secret.
"You need to meet your father," Irina said, handing her a Kleenex.
They hailed a cab, and hugged briefly before she climbed in. Once in awhile, her Spy Mommy came through.
Back in LA, Vaughn was just getting home from work. It was Thursday. Sydney would be home in the wee hours of Friday morning.
He'd been at Weiss's place for awhile after work, watching some hockey and generally avoiding all serious subjects. Weiss had been acting kind of weird towards him since Sydney's miscarriage, presumably because he felt awkward, knowing that they were trying to have a baby. But tonight hadn't been so bad. It had been just about like old times, when he and Sydney would hang out with Nadia and Weiss. Before Nadia had gone into WPP, after the whole blowup back in Sevogda with Elena and Sloane.
He was pretty nuts, he smiled, to have asked her to marry him right before they'd jumped out of the cargo plane into a city full of homicidal maniacs hopped up on Rambaldi juice. But she'd been right to tell him to wait. They'd pull through it.
Ask me again on the beach, she'd said. So he had. And she'd said yes.
Barefoot, he sifted through the mail on the couch. LADWP bill, letter from Sydney's alma matter asking for money, a card from an aunt who used to kiss him on the lips—until he was 21—and a brown paper envelope that had no return address.
M. Vaughn, the address said, and it was postmarked in London. It was one of those envelopes that was padded because it was comprised of several layers of paper rather than bubble wrap.
He slit it open with their letter opener, and looked inside. There was a note, folded in half.
He shook it out and unfolded in. It was creased into a little packet.
This is for my shoulder, it read.
Below it, Sydney's engagement ring was taped with Scotch tape to the paper.
What the fuck was this? He stood up quickly, then sat back down.
This is for my shoulder.
This is for my shoulder?
Did someone have her? His mind went crazy- call the office, find out where she and Jack had gone, had they checked in?
No.
No, wait--she hadn't had her rings on yesterday afternoon. She'd said they were already packed.
This is for my shoulder.
Sark. He had broken Sark's shoulder, and his nose when he'd been looking for Lauren and they had Sark in their custody.
But she hadn't been in contact with him. She'd only surveilled him. Right? That was the protocol for her mission to England. Surveillance only.
Vaughn pried the ring loose and inspected it. It was intact, it didn't appear to be damaged, or bugged.
He leaned back on the couch and thought about it. He didn't understand, what this was supposed to mean.
This is for my shoulder.
And then, another possibility occurred to him, but he pushed it down. No. There was no way.
Several extremely stiff drinks later, Vaughn lay on their couch in a haze. By this point his alcohol-soaked brain had imagined them in nearly every position he could possibly think of, and some other stuff to boot.
He didn't think Sark had raped her. Sydney was strong enough to have fought him off, especially with a bum shoulder. So, what then? He couldn't fathom that she would've slept—why did people say that, there was no sleeping involved—with Sark.
Things had been weird between them since the miscarriage, he accepted that. But they'd turned a corner. They were moving on from it.
"Sark asked you to come work with him?" He could barely believe that someone would stop in the middle of an op to try to recruit their enemy.
"Like it wasn't even a question, like it was a done deal," she'd confirmed. Then, a weird smile as she'd looked at her hands in her lap, "Sark is like the good-looking guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer."
He moved on—hearing her talk about Sark made him feel awkward. "Any suspicious reaction to the map you gave SD-6?i"
He realized, with a weird sinking feeling, that this was two of his wives that Sark had bedded.
That was why he'd broken his shoulder—for that cocksucker comment Sark had made:
How embarrassing it must have been, to learn that the woman who was sharing your bed was only using you as an unfortunate means to an end. But then, she wasn't sharing your bed lately then, was she? She was in mine. Or in my car. Or in the elevator. Or a garage. Or there was this one time- this is my favorite—we were engaged in an alley and she called to tell you she loved you. That woman was deliciously filthy. ii
Vaughn had shoved down on Sark's left shoulder then, at the same time holding Sark's arm behind him, twisted. Crunch.
He hated Sark, he decided. Hate with a capital "H", the kind you only reserve for child molesters and maybe… Hm, maybe for particularly awful dictators like Hitler, or Pinochet.
He'd already wanted to kill Sark when they were on that op in Paris, and he had tried to maneuver her into giving their mark some kind of kinky sex show. That had apparently been Sark's routine with Lauren. Goodness knows he'd never gotten any subversive action out of her.
He shoved the mental images of that down. He'd watched Sydney kiss Sark through his binoculars, from an upper level of the club. How she'd bitten his lip around the lime. Sark had the decency to look surprised, but he'd squeezed Sydney's ass as she'd bitten him. He'd liked it.
The first time Sydney had bitten his own lip like that, Vaughn had been surprised. He'd assumed it was an accident, until he had looked up at her. She had been sitting on him, in a tight t-shirt and tiny shorts. Just the thought of her in the tiny shorts kind of made him hard.
She had just stared at him, deadpan, and he knew it wasn't accidental. Still, he'd porn slapped her bottom, more like the side of her thigh, actually, but she kept looking at him.
Then she'd cracked him one across the face. Her slap was almost as hard as a punch, it was so sudden.
He remembered thinking for a second that she was out of her damn mind. You don't hit girls. Then the realization dawned on him that she wanted him to.
He felt bad about it for awhile, the violence of their sex life, but had adjusted to it. He'd never been with a girl like that, one who was harder than he was, so aggressive.
It was fine until now. It freaked him out to think they could conceive a baby, being so… so, what? He didn't even know what the word was for it. When he thought about his parents having sex, which was admittedly a subject he thought about as little as possible, their routine wounding of one another seemed completely incompatible with his notion of what parental sex should be like.
He couldn't imagine having a talk with his potential son or daughter, and trying to explain that sometimes, people in love liked to...
Dear God, his mental images of her with Sark tortured him.
He glanced at his watch. Their plane was due in an hour. No way would he be sober enough in time to pick her up.
Let her get a limo, he thought before Jack Daniels overcame him and he passed out.
Episodes:
i Dead Drop. Season 2, Episode 4. Written by Jesse Alexander.
ii Resurrection. Season 3, Episode 22. Written by Jeff Pinkner.