A/N: I apologize for the gap! I realized all too late last week that I'd missed posting, and then found I had to do some editing to get it ready. Thanks for reading and I hope everyone is still safe and warm!
Part 17
No one could have predicted the phone call. It wasn't a ring but a vibrating buzz against the wooden desk that pulled Flynn's head up from what he was doing, momentarily saving the ring finger on Sydney's right hand. He let go of the digit and rose, crossing the room to pick up the cell.
The group in the conference room listened with rapt attention to the one-sided conversation.
"Yes sir, I think it's gone quite well. I'm sorry I wasn't able to get the intelligence you asked-" he must have been interrupted as his sentence abruptly ended, and he walked around the room with the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder in full view of the camera.
"She's tough enough to go one more day. I'll stick by my schedule if you-" another interruption; expecting to see frustration, they saw obedience. "You're sure?"
Flynn began nodding, and while everyone hoped that Sydney had been able to glean any words from the other side of the conversation, she'd spent the better part of another hour with her eyes tightly closed trying to regulate her breathing. Whatever compartmentalization she'd been able to do the past six days was gone, and she was unfortunately useless as a source of information. She no longer had the wherewithal, stamina, or ability to fight, and her attention was not on the man in the room but on herself as she tried to mitigate the waves of pain cascading through every inch of her body.
"If you're sure. My team and I can be out of here in an hour."
All eyes flew to the director, the man propping his elbows on the table and burying his face in his hands. He was the only one that could direct the team in the van down the street to proceed with extraction or wait to attempt recovery, and though he'd been hoping there would be no need to make such a decision, that time was nearing.
"Well there's battery mode, is that what you're asking?" There was a pause in the conversation, Flynn made his way to the camera and dragged a finger across her shoulder as he went, the tightening of the muscles from her flinch making her whimper. "Looks like...one hour and a few minutes of battery life. We could just leave it plugged in if-" interruption.
"Oh, yes sir," he said through another devilish grin as his eyes focused on the bound, struggling agent. "I can do it. Do you need me to clean up?" Another gap in the conversation setting the conference room on the edge of their seats.
Nothing so far in these sessions had panicked Jack more than that single mumbled sentence. He knew what it meant; he'd asked it before as an interrogator for both CIA and SD-6 black operations. 'Do you need me to clean up' was on repeat through his brain giving his eyes a glassy, unfocused sheen.
Flynn nodded despite the fact that the man on the other side couldn't see. "That works for me. I'll expect payment as usual by midnight. I'll get things prepped on this end and be out in an hour, tops. Also, I'm going off the grid for a bit. The next time you have a job like this: don't call." He hung the phone up and tossed it back on the desk.
He sat for probably two full minutes of silent contemplation, his swollen face a mask of thought. His eyes darted back and forth as meandering thoughts pulled his attention away from the present. Cradling his broken hand for a moment, he reached into the drawer to extract another syringe of morphine. The soothing relief came in the next minute or so, and he listlessly tossed the needle into the corner of the room as fatigue slumped his shoulders.
A yawn opened his mouth, though a wince and the gentle cupping of his bruised and offset jaw made him cut it short. It also snapped him back to the present. He pushed off the desk and squared his shoulders, a cocky grin tilting his stitched upper lip.
"Time's up, love. Anything you want to tell me?" He slid his left hand completely into his pocket, but the right was covered with the bulky wrap leaving only his fingers to fit in the other side.
Sydney swallowed hard against the emotional bubble constantly pressuring the back of her throat. A part of her soul flooded with relief that it would be over soon, and that part was larger than the little chunk that wished she had more time. The little chunk was louder, however.
'They need more time to find you. Tell him something.' The panicked primitive part of her brain still fought for survival.
'I'm not telling him anything. They know where I am and they aren't here - they decided it was too much of a risk.' She closed her eyes and dipped her head low.
'Tell him something. You're supposed to have one more day.'
'I don't want one more day. Not like this.'
He saw her lips move, though no sound was audible, so he leaned forward a bit, tilting his head to hear. "What was that?"
Sydney couldn't do more than whisper - anything else was too difficult, her eyes staying closed as she frowned. "Quitter."
He laughed and squatted down in front of her, his hand on her knee making her jump, her eyes slitting open to let in enough light to illuminate the vague shape of him. "I'll really miss you, love."
She rolled her eyes in response but didn't speak.
"Since you can't give up what they want, they've decided they're done with you." He pulled the nodes roughly from her skin, those on her left arm and side making her cry out and clench her jaw. "And while I'd love nothing more than another day to make you pay for my face and fingers, I literally wash my hands of you. You've been a huge pain in my ass, and way not worth the price."
He stopped what he was doing and looked pensive. "Well, okay; maybe. I mean...one million dollars," he left off and moved back to what he'd been doing.
He packed up the machine, rolled his tools into their cases, and shoved it all into a duffle bag that had been stored under the desk. The two assistants hurried into the room to help scrub their presence away. The only thing left plugged into the camera was the ethernet cable, Flynn fiddling with the settings and unplugging the power cord.
"Mark the time, CIA, you have 1 hour and 17 minutes of battery remaining. The clock is ticking." He handed the bag off to an assistant as they hurried from the room, Flynn staying behind with a knife pointing down from the grip of his hand. The weapon made a small tap as he set it atop the desk.
"You sure you don't want to give me anything that can postpone this, darling?"
Sydney frowned and looked up, meeting his eyes. "Second thoughts?"
Flynn laughed, "not at all. I'm going to enjoy killing you."
"Then get it over with."
The Brit tisked, "maybe I did break you." He began one of his maddening slow circles, pacing the room with hands behind his back and voice soft and serene.
"You must be feeling very unimportant, Sydney. It's been six days and not one federal agent has broken down my door."
Flynn heard her small sigh, though she stayed quiet. It had been a while since she'd played the silent game with him, but he smiled all the same.
"Does no one love you enough to save you?"
She stayed quiet, her eyes staring at a dirty spot on the cement wall behind the desk as her pain-addled mind sorted through her thoughts.
"Are you really going to give me the silent treatment? I thought we were really getting on, Sydney."
"I...I don't have any delusions. No knight in...in shining armor is gonna come through that door." Each word was a pained harsh whisper, her voice dry, emotional, and raw. Whispering was easier on her sore throat, however, so she kept it up.
"You didn't expect a rescue, love?" He mocked, continuing his rounds.
Sydney's tongue tried to wet her lips though it was just as dry, and exhaustion felt like a lead weight pressing on her shoulders. "They made a choice."
Flynn stopped walking and flopped into the adjacent chair. "What choice was that? To let you be tortured to death? Your boss sucks, darling."
Sydney looked up into his eyes, "I'd make the same choice," she said quietly.
Flynn's eyebrows rose, "really?"
She didn't reply.
"You're telling me that if your partner was sitting where you are, and you were sitting where they are," he gestured toward the camera, "you'd not attempt a rescue?"
'They would have to lock me in with mom.'
"I didn't think so," the man said, not surprised by the look in her eyes.
"That's why I'm...not the boss," she winced as she absentmindedly shrugged her shoulder catching the left side of her body on fire, pain cascading to her extremities.
Flynn leaned forward to rest his arms on his legs, his face contemplative. "It seems to me like they abandoned you. Just like your mother, your father, your friends, hell," he scoffed, "even a lover or two, am I right? I'm sure your therapist spends a lot of time on abandonment issues."
A moment of silence passed between the two as they locked eyes, hers filled with pain and hate and his filled with cockiness, pain, and hate.
She swallowed before speaking quietly and clearly. "Your organization has the ability to...to incinerate part of a city block of innocent people." Sydney paused with a grimace as her fingers twitched. "So yeah...this was the choice. I'm...I'm supposed to sit between you and them so...here I am."
Flynn rolled his eyes, a guttural grumble leaving his throat. "You are annoyingly patriotic, love."
"He...he'd be here if it wasn't too much of a risk."
He made a noise with his mouth, lips buzzing his disdain over the fact that she was still thinking positively after everything they'd put her through.
"Daddy doesn't even know where you are."
"I'm in L.A." She deadpanned, the shock on his face making her grin lopsided against the swollen left side of her mouth. "And they know because it...it's easy to blink morse code into a video camera."
The Brit's eyebrows shot up as surprise replaced cockiness for a moment. "I underestimated you, Sydney."
"From day one," she agreed.
"How did you figure it out tied in that chair?"
"Does it matter?" She countered.
Flynn shrugged and looked at his watch, "One hour and four minutes of battery remaining. I'm really just curious."
Sydney swallowed a couple of times against the dryness of her throat, though it didn't help slake her thirst. "You said…'here in my field office'. My office is in L.A., so it...it wasn't hard to put together."
He looked at his watch again. "That was nearly two hours ago. Where are they?"
"You should be," she grimaced, her voice going back to a raspy whisper, "be worried about leaving."
He grinned and rose, though something in her exhausted but still fiery gaze made him quizzically tilt his head. "Why is that?"
"Because...they're...waiting for you. And I wish I could see...your...face," she ground out, "when they toss you into the back of a windowless van and...and take you to the field office's holding cells."
"You're serious," he chuckled. "Sydney-"
"You asked for this, Flynn. Isn't this what you...you wanted?" She saw a small amount of worry in his eyes, so she'd added a mocking inflection to his name. "You wanted to teach my dad a lesson, but did you really think that...that he wouldn't find me?"
Pushing down the rush of blood that went from his heart to his head, adrenaline making his heart beat fast against his sternum, Flynn decided to push back. "You're suggesting that your father has known where you were but...but hasn't tried to rescue you." He tisked, "damn, darling. That's cruel, even for Jack Bristow."
Sydney smiled best as she could. "That...little...fear-filled tremor in your voice...is delicious." Hearing his own threat repeated made him wonder why he was still lingering.
Flynn made a show of lifting the knife from the edge of the desk, the metal handle cool in his palm. From what she could glean, which was blurry and unfocused at best, it wasn't the same blade he had used on her before. This was longer and a bit wider, but seemed to only double the length of his fist. Maybe four or six inches?
'That would be a big hole. Not great,' her brain chided, but she continued to poke at him despite that fact.
"You set up the camera. You showed your face. You gave the hints." She took a few deep breaths against the ache but didn't stop. Truthfully, she wanted him to make him snap one last time. "But I…I'm sure the government thanks you for your...million dollar donation," she laughed, though it was cut off by a wince as the bouncing wiggled her dislocated shoulder and adjoining broken arm.
He moved around behind her, her eyes following as much as she could. His breath was whistling through his damaged nose in short, noisy pants, and she knew he was unraveling.
"You think you can be like me?" She panted against the effort of speaking louder than a whisper. "Do you really think you can...last more than a couple days with my...my father?" She paused and swallowed against the dryness at the back of her throat. "You think he...he doesn't have punishment set up for you?"
His voice was tense behind her. "Do you think you could have gone one more day, Bristow?"
'He only calls you that before he breaks. Keep pushing and you're gonna get stabbed,' the Bristow side of her brain warned, but she'd honestly been done listening to that side for a few days now.
"The cells are...actually pretty nice, you know. The not so nice part will be meeting my friends, my father, co-workers-"
"Your crush?" Flynn jumped into the conversation.
"I'd avoid him. You'll...do better with my father," she said softly. "It won't be six days. It'll be years. And if this wasn't my...my last stop - I'd enjoy seeing every drop of blood you're gonna spill."
A stinging fire slammed into her damaged right side, his unbroken hand stabbing the knife between the bottom two ribs. The suddenness of the attack stole what little air she had left and a pained scream from behind clenched teeth scraped painfully from her dry throat. When she could finally take a breath she wasn't able to get in more than a shallow watery gasp, the Brit breathing fiercely with his own adrenaline coursing excitement through his veins.
Everyone in the conference room gasped simultaneously, wincing at her ragged sobbing gasps.
"Oh, I know that sound, Sydney," Flynn ground out leaning close to her ear. "Look, love," he ordered, his eyes peering down, her own following to see the knife embedded to the hilt in the lower right side of her ribcage. "And from the sound in the back of your throat, that right lung was good and punctured. Can you feel it?"
She could feel it. While she was hoping he was mistaken, the warmth spreading as a tickle under her ribs above her side was a telltale sign of internal bleeding. She'd had it before. Catching a breath was difficult, and after thirty seconds, she was still unable to suck in any more air than through a quick pant.
'What do you expect - there's a knife in your chest.'
Flynn stood tall, the menacing gleam in his frosty blue gaze sparkling as he watched her close her eyes and try to regulate her gasps, though it didn't seem to be working. "Fifty-eight minutes until the battery dies, darling. If you want to keep everyone you know and love from watching you die, try and last at least that long."
He leaned back down to her side, though spoke loud enough for those on the other side of the camera.
"Maybe you can go for an hour with the internal bleeding that'll fill your chest cavity with blood. My experience has been that death won't come as quickly as you want, but I doubt you'll make the full time. You're too dehydrated and have lost too much blood already. But," he tossed his hands into the air, "if there's one thing you've delighted in doing this whole damn week, it's been proving me wrong. So go ahead, sweetheart. Prove me wrong one last time."
His grip was tight and he twisted slightly as he yanked the knife out, a squirt of blood following it as the side of the cotton tank darkened with blood. It soon traveled to her hip to soak into the top of her trousers before beginning to pool on the metal of the seat, a few drops landing with a 'pat pat pat' onto the grate below.
Grabbing his cell and the remaining morphine syringes from the desk, he headed for the door. "If it means anything, I respect you almost as much as I hate you, Sydney Bristow."
...
She stayed awake as long as she could, but forty minutes after Flynn left, she passed out. The blood had been flowing from the base of the chair onto the floor, though it tapered off to a drip as time wore on. The color drained from her already pale face, then neck, then chest, and the medical staff continually said that she wasn't going to last the full hour.
"There's only twenty minutes left. Have some faith." One of the doctors moved to the side of the room and put on a large pair of headphones, pressing them to her ears.
"She's still breathing, but it doesn't sound good."
Kendall pointed, "you tell me the second that changes."
They waited this way with Sydney figuratively dead to the world.
With about ten minutes left on the clock, she slowly gained consciousness. Her neck was stiff, but she was surprised at the lack of sharp pain radiating from her limbs. It took her brain a moment to realize that was probably a bad thing. Lack of feeling meant lack of blood, which, as she looked down at her soaked side at the sticky substance rolling down the edge of her leg to pool onto the chair, looked to be the right assessment.
Breathing was painfully difficult. Despite trying she could only get in a quarter of a breath with each attempt, and her shoulder kept her from sitting up straight to open her chest a little more. She felt a bit like a fish out of water. Spitting as best as she could, the blood landed next to the chair. She felt it in the back of her throat and wet on her lower lip and chin, the taste ever-present and nearly unnoticeable over the last couple of days.
The only good thing was that everything didn't hurt as badly as it had before. She wiggled her fingers, the pain throbby but not sharp, but at least they still worked despite the fact she couldn't really feel anything against the pads as they rubbed together. She blinked her blurry eyes looking slowly around the room to see that she was alone, her hazy gaze finally landing on the red light on top of the camera.
'Not alone.'
"Damn," she whispered, talking any louder was just too much strain. Her words were stilted along with the panting breaths.
"Kinda…
hoped I'd…
wake up in…
Cancun."
The edges of her vision blurred in and out, and blinking wasn't helping though she did it for a few more seconds before giving up. Her head throbbed in time with her broken left limb and she got the feeling that she was experiencing the death of a dozen brain cells each second as her chest struggled to let in oxygen, the inflation blocked by the blood and air inside and around her collapsed lung. If she didn't bleed to death, she was well on her way to full hypoxia.
'And then I suffocate. Hopefully I pass out and then suffocate.'
Strangely, she wasn't scared. All she had to do was try and wait out the red light on the camera. She could do that. Of course, she had no clue how much time that was since she'd fallen asleep. Had it been a large or small amount of that hour? She had no clue.
'I'm not sure passing out from pain and blood loss and lack of oxygen counts as sleeping.'
If Flynn had been telling the truth, it hadn't been the full hour.
"I…
know you had…
had to choose."
Sydney hoped they could hear her as she realized that this would be the last chance to say goodbye, and that she should probably get it done before the light turned off. She leaned her head back a bit letting it rest on the uncomfortable metal top of the chair.
"It's okay. I…
it's okay."
Her eyes slipped closed and she sat quietly for nearly a full minute, onlookers thinking she'd fallen back to sleep. Kendall looked at his watch to see that just under six minutes remained, the nearly permanent crease in his brow getting deeper. The announcement a few seconds ago from the medical staff with the headphones pressed hard against both ears was that her breathing was critical, another doctor pointed out the blue tinge creeping into her lips past the blood and bruises.
Kendall picked up the radio, his voice solemn, "Alpha team, proceed to the entrance. Time remaining, 6 minutes."
"Copy," Weiss' voice crackled, then everything went silent again.
Her brow furled as a twinge of pain poked up from her ribcage before flaring into her shoulder. This reopened her eyes, and her head lolled a little as it became harder to hold upright.
"I…
I'm sorry."
Swallowing mostly blood, happy that it was something for her dry throat, she pushed down the lump of emotion as tears ran familiar tracks to her jaw.
"It's okay. Just…
I'm..."
The conference room felt the tightening in their chests as each person realized that she was trying to say goodbye. She had no idea that a team was just outside the door waiting for the camera feed to go down.
Sydney Bristow had cheated death as long as she could, and now that she was alone: she was done.
She slow blinked more tears down her cheeks, her eyes getting harder to hold open.
"I…
I didn't give…
them anything." she loosed a small smile as another wave of tears refilled the tracks previously laid.
Her head lolled a bit, a dribble of blood hitting her chin as eyes fluttered closed for a minute, every single person swinging their heads about to the doctor wearing headphones. She nodded with fingers showing 'ok', though the wet gasps she heard weren't going to keep the broken young woman alive much longer.
"I'm sorry…
I can't…
I…"
Swallowing, she found enough strength to look into the camera one last time as she fought the losing battle to stay awake.
"Do me…
one favor."
Her chin quivered through the whisper, "turn it off."
"You don't…
don't have to…
watch. Please…
turn it off." The plead ended in a sob.
The conference room sat in silence for a few seconds, and the surprised outburst from those around the table when the screen went black made Kendall look to his watch, the timer showing four minutes remaining. They'd overestimated; it was over. As he reached for the radio to signal Weiss to enter, the director swept relieved eyes across the room before spotting a young man standing next to the equipment with tears streaming down his cheeks and something clutched in his fist.
"It's...it's the one thing she asked us to do," Paul said, the skinny analyst holding the end of the cable in his hand, unplugged and flopping from where it had been in the laptop for the last six days. Kendall's stomach sank and his eyes turned back to the watch as he realized that time wasn't up.
"Plug that back in," one of the doctors ordered with a growl and a point.
Paul shook his head. "We already saw enough. Watching her die won't make it less real. We failed her...and - and we get to live with that already. Seeing it won't change that."
Voices were turned on Kendall, pleading, ordering, begging, but the director merely shook his head and sunk over the table with his weight pressing the palms of his hands against the cool wood. The arguments shifted to others in the room, though most of the aggressive words overlapped and became nearly impossible to decipher.
Those that agreed with the demand to return the feed to the screen moved to intercept Paul as he clutched the video cable against his chest, and those that agreed with him while wanting to honor Sydney's request held others back from throttling the man.
Kendall finally lifted his head and looked toward the doctor, his stomach dropping as he spotted her hand wiping at her cheeks while the other pulled off the headphones. Others followed his gaze and the cacophony in the room came to a sudden, eerie end.
She tossed them to the desk and shook her head with a sniffle, "she...she stopped breathing."
...
