Sark lay in the bathtub of the hotel in Los Angeles. By now the desk clerk downstairs gave him a real smile when he came into the lobby. He'd been slipping the guy fifties to keep Sydney's calls coming through.
He felt rash, impulsive. His checkmate, sending Vaughn the first ring, was hopefully going to speed up the intel he needed from her on Wells. Irina didn't know where Anastasia was. She had been alive after all, but then dropped off the map several years back.
Sark's blonde hair stuck up in several places on his head, and he shifted so that his bad shoulder was fully submerged. It always started aching after he'd been flying.
He dried his hand on a towel and picked up The English Patient.
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up, as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for this all to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map, like the names of rich men and women on buildings.
His mind wandered. He thought of Sydney. She would have a really interesting body map one day. She wasn't one to become tied down, attached. Not unlike himself.
After 30 minutes and several calls to his cell phone that went unanswered, Sydney was beginning to get worried that something had happened to Vaughn.
Finally, she hailed a town car from the taxi stand and gave the elderly man her address.
"Are you just coming home," he'd tried to make conversation with her.
"Yes," she smiled, "I'm just getting in from a business trip." See. Like that. Normal. You can play normal just fine.
So not normal, she told herself.
She put the limo on her agency credit card, not feeling a trace of guilt that she was using taxpayer funds to pay for a limo to get home from a trip that wasn't actually pertinent to national security.
The lights were still on in the house. It was 4:30 in the morning. Maybe he'd forgotten to pick her up, and was waiting up for her?
She opened the side door, by the garage, which was left unlocked.
"Michael?" she called out. The TV was on, the lights were on, but he wasn't in the kitchen or the living room. She flicked the TV off and the sudden silence of the house creeped her out.
She walked down the hall to their bedroom, where she could make out the shape of him lying on the bed. His clothes were still on, and he wasn't under the covers. She shook her head but smiled; every once in awhile he and Weiss tore it up and he'd come home and sleep in his clothes.
She turned off the kitchen light and quickly undressed. She'd get under the covers- it was a too little chilly not to. Just as her head hit the pillow, she felt something under it, under her hair.
What? She sat up and turned around.
Her ring.
Lying on her pillow.
She'd always thought it was dumb when people said their heart had stopped, but she knew what they meant by it now. It was like any beat might be her last, and her heart would just… cease beating.
She fainted then, in anger at Sark and out of sheer exhaustion. The trip, her little breakdown to Irina, and now this?
There was only so much even she could take.
When Sydney awoke, she couldn't tell how long she'd been unconscious; it felt like years, but then, it always felt that way when she had fainted, as though she'd slept 100 years. She glanced at the clock: 5:47.
Ok, she hadn't been asleep that long. Her ring was back on her finger, had she done that? She couldn't remember. Michael was no longer next to her.
She lay still, trying not to breathe heavily, lest she pass out again.
How could he have done this? She was working on her end of the bargain, she was trying to hunt down Wells, and Sark had done this anyway? What was wrong with him?
He has very little in the way of connections to other people. Real connections, her mother had said. This statement presumed that Sydney had real connections, something she was beginning to doubt.
Just then, she heard a noise in the hallway. Vaughn.
He appeared in the doorway, and they both froze when they saw each other. He put his hand up on the door frame and leaned on it, still looking at her.
She could see it, in his eyes. He had already pieced together what had happened, at least between her and Sark.
"Hi," she tried.
He came over and sat down beside her on the bed without a word. Now he wouldn't look at her.
"Michael," she started, but he cut her off.
"Don't," he whispered. "How long?"
"How long what?" she was honestly confused in her faint state.
"How long," Vaughn's voice was low, quiet, "have you been seeing him?"
"It's not like that." Did he really think she might have been carrying on a long-term affair with Sark?
"Really?" his voice was sharp with anger now. "So tell me, what is it like? Is it better? Was I just not enough for you? Because honestly, Syd, I don't get it."
"I haven't been seeing him," she pleaded, "Until last week, I had no idea where he was. But…"
She could see Vaughn's eyes were filling with tears. She could only remember him crying one other time.
"We only…" She trailed off, realizing that they weren't a 'we', she and Sark. "It was just once."
"Then that's once more that I've cheated," he looked at her finally, "God, Syd, I thought you and I… We aren't like that. You can tell me stuff, you know? Two years ago, when we got married, I meant it when I said I would look after you for better or for worse, in sickness and in health and all that crap—how could you not do the same for me?"
"We made a deal," she tried to explain, knowing any explanation she could offer wouldn't be enough, "That I get him intel and he wouldn't send my rings home—he'd already taken them anyway, he knew about Chechnya, how I—" Her voice caught in her throat, in the beginning of a sob, "I only meant to play him, but—"
"But it went too far?" Vaughn wasn't surprised by this at all. Sark's specialty was pushing people that last little bit they needed to do something really terrible to another person. Like killing Francie. Or seducing Lauren. Or Sydney.
She curled on her side in a ball and nodded. She closed her eyes then, and Vaughn hated the thought that she was probably thinking about fucking Sark. It killed him a little, inside, somewhere in his chest.
Vaughn heard himself asking the question before he'd really consciously decided he wanted to know the answer. "So he likes it, too—how you are?"
"Michael," she sighed, her eyes still closed.
Yes. Yes, he likes it rough.
The unspoken words hung between them, killing Them, killing Vaughn's fantasy of her as somehow belonging to him, of her as a mother to his children, of them growing old gracefully together. She was irreconcilably different than him.
The person he loved was like one of her aliases to him, a fleeting, temporal thing that cannot ever be fully grasped, because as soon as you get a hold of it, you realize it never existed in the first place.
She had gone to the shower then, and he'd stood at the door, watching as she'd taken off her clothes. He noticed for the first time, as she pulled down the waistband of her pants, the line of peculiar bruises that went from below her belly button, next to the scar from the Covenant operation, down to where her underwear normally started.
From… him. He refused to even think of Sark by name.
When she'd turned away from him, to step into the shower, he saw the bruises on the back of each of her shoulders, four little round dots from his fingertips.
I wish for this all to be marked on my body when I am dead.
He'd left her alone when she started sobbing, audibly, over the sound of the water. He couldn't share the grief of someone who was like a stranger to him.