A/N: This was written after season 3, with spoilers for 3x10 Remnants and 3x22 Resurrection. I assumed Sydney discovered something rather different than we find out in season 4: a conspiracy involving those closest to her, concerning her early training and recruitment in SD-6. As usual, please read and review!
Entangled
He's back in custody, but really, what has she gained? There's still a hole the size of a train wreck in her head. Lauren is dead. But Vaughn is twisted now that he's felt the rage her father felt; that she has felt. She hid her own dark shadows from him, loved him for his light, his relative innocence that's gone now. And really, if she wanted a bad guy she'd choose someone more ambiguously gray, as cool and featureless as forged steel.
Sark's lips against hers, believing she was Lauren, hoping later to have Lauren wearing Sydney's face. While all this time Lauren was still screwing Vaughn who hoped to be with Sydney. How entangled can four people be? If she wanted to be honest with herself, she would admit that she had enjoyed it: both his soft lips on hers and that sense of power over him. She was playing the game and getting away with it.
She follows Lauren's directions. Curiosity overcomes enmity as usual. And what she reads only fuels that rage inside her that has been itching for a target. If she remembered, she would know who to hate and why. Suddenly her friends from two years prior, her friends again since her return, are her enemies. How many times can she tumble through the looking glass? She wants to cry but everything is dry as cotton balls.
"Sydney…"
Her dad's voice. She knows now that he's as bad as her mother. They all are.
In a hotel overlooking the Rhone she drinks vodka straight from the one ounce bottles in the mini bar and shivers though the room is perfectly warm. She rests her head against cool glass and wonders where it all went wrong, why her, how could he do that to his own daughter, how could they pretend all that time that they were her friends, her allies…
Her enemies have been more honest.
People talk about closure. Closure belongs in a logical world where causality reigns. Not in a place where a butterfly's flight results in a monsoon half a world away and a fifteenth century prophet scatters a puzzle across the globe that rules the life of a twenty-first century woman.
She wants out. Perhaps she wants revenge more.
And there he is, walking down the boulevard in a light morning mist while she plays with the croissant on her plate and drinks terrible, bitter black coffee from hundred-year old china. He meets her gaze from the sidewalk outside the small hotel and smiles. Sydney wonders if he sees her pain, if his glee is at the expense of her suffering. Another minute finds him standing at her table.
"Do you mind if I join you?"
"It's at your own risk, Sark," she sneers back at him, hoping to break that civil exterior.
"Yes, well…" he flags down the waiter and orders breakfast while Sydney fumes.
"I could report you. My father," and that last word came out with unintended force, "should still be in the area. I'm sure he'd love to get his hands on you."
"Somehow I doubt you'd contact him at this juncture."
There are pinpricks of heat in the back of her eyes. She bites her tongue to keep from crying, to keep the proper rage in place. The waiter arrives with Earl Grey tea and a croissant for Sark, and scurries off quickly, sensing the strained relationship between the two of them.
"I could arrest you myself. Or just kill you."
"I'm armed, if you had any doubts," Sark practically cuts her off. "And before you try anything rash, you should know you are at present in the crosshairs of a world-class sniper."
Silence followed. She scanned the building across the street and found a window slightly ajar on the second floor. Sydney took two more bites of her croissant, though she almost gagged at the smell of food. Sark drank his tea as if it was only natural that an international terrorist and a United States intelligence agent breakfast together in Europe.
"I killed Lauren," she blurted out, a low blow, but so satisfying. Sark stiffened momentarily.
"I tortured Tippin and had Francine killed." Sydney's turn to steel herself against the memories. She didn't cry, though, she'd never cry. He continued as if their little outburst never occurred: "But I didn't come here to reminisce."
"Then why are you here?"
"I have a proposal for you." Sark interpreted her silence as a cue to continue. "We have several enemies in common: your father, your former handler, much of the CIA. They've toyed with your life since you were born, Sydney. You deserve revenge."
"You came here to take advantage of my suffering."
"Don't trivialize this offer, Sydney." Now his voice came out more desperate, more genuine, though his face retained the haughty mask it always had. How entangled can four people be? Sark had just added another layer of complexity to her life. Her window of escape was closing fast, and he just had to try and bring her back into the game. "Through our alliance, we could construct a formidable empire."
And my defection would be punishment enough for the people I used to love. It went unspoken between them: that her desire not to work for the CIA was greater than her desire to work with him, that her desire for revenge was greater than her desire to be happy. That perhaps…
"I'm never going to be happy, am I?"
"That's rather off topic, is it not?"
"Yeah. I guess it is."
