Title by Alanis Morissette, quote by Sarah McLachlan.
XII. Surrendering
Memory seeps from my veins. Let me be empty and weightless,
and maybe I'll find some peace tonight.
When Sydney stumbled downstairs to make tea the next morning, all her muscles ached and she was mind-numbingly tired. She hadn't gotten much sleep after waking up from the nightmares, and she basically felt like death. Even the bruise on the back of her head was throbbing again. But it wasn't just that. She felt as if she was walking on eggshells in her own mind. Those hellish hours of nightmares had been more harrowing than some of her actual captivity.
A man in her British Lit class used to stretch rubber bands when he was thinking. It had driven her crazy. She would get to the point where she was completely fixated on the band, stretched to its limit, and she would hope desperately for it to just break already, just get it over with.
Sooner or later, they always broke.
She stopped in the middle of the dining room and stared speculatively at the table. More specifically, the chairs.
With barely an instant of hesitation, she strode across the room and hefted one of the chairs in her hands. It wasn't too heavy for her, but it was well-made. Solid. Exactly the sort of chair she would need. She lifted it experimentally, rotated it, seeking the best grip to allow for an abrupt release.
She turned at the waist, extending her arms to the right, her fingers wrapped securely around the most expedient chunks of wood. Then Sydney turned almost a full three hundred and sixty degrees, too fast for the eye to follow, using the chair to gain momentum until she released it at the last possible moment, sending it crashing into the nearest window. The impact was predictably loud, but it seemed almost deafening in the heavy silence.
Nothing happened. At least, not to the window, which she assumed was made of bulletproof glass. Two of the chair's legs broke off.
As she examined the furniture's remains with a detached, clinical air, Sydney realized she desperately wanted to do it all over again. She could make her way through the house until there was nothing left intact that she could lift. Perhaps, she mused, picking up a chair leg, she would be able to get a bludgeon or a crude stake out of the bargain as well. At the moment, though, that aspect didn't matter much to her.
In a general, unfocused way, she still considered escape as a viable option. But when she tried to concoct an actual plan, it was difficult to get around the fact that she really just didn't care anymore. Let Sark return her on his own schedule, for his own reasons. At some point during the night before, she had snapped, just like one of those fucking rubber bands. She was putting herself back together like a puzzle, but all the pieces had reconfigured, and she didn't know what shape they would make when she was through. Until then . . . well, until then, all she really wanted to do was break things.
Without a single sound passing her lips, Sydney swung the main body of the chair up into the air, then smashed it into the window again, over and over, until she was only clutching white-knuckled at the back piece. She dropped it down on top of the other pieces and stared down at the debris.
Well. That was extravagant.
A strangled laugh tumbled from her throat, then twisted into a sob. Her mood swung back like a pendulum, weighty and unstoppable.
She fell to her knees right there at the base of the stairs, crying, and it all started coming back to her, good old overemotional Sydney Bristow, who grieved the loss of the last two years and generally just sat cooperatively in chairs rather than wreaking splintered destruction.
But even as she allowed herself to experience that grief, she wasn't foolish enough to believe it was so simple. She knew, like quiet thunder in the corners of her mind, that those feelings would return, and with them the urge to destroy until her rage had been satisfied, her vengeance fulfilled.
She welcomed it.
Until then, however, it seemed best to inhabit the more peaceful middle ground between sobbing and smashing.
Sydney took a few long, deep breaths before standing up. Nothing like a little bit of a breakdown before breakfast. She thought halfheartedly about cleaning up the rubble that used to be a pretty nice chair, but decided against it. Making tea seemed like a much more productive use of her time.
While the water boiled, she ate another apple, on the off-chance that one a day would keep away not only doctors, but violent psychotic urges. Then she ate a biscuit with clotted cream and butter and jam on it, just because it was delicious and she had yet to find acceptable clotted cream in Los Angeles.
Once the soothing scent of chamomile was wafting from the warm mug in her hand, she moved to the stereo system and skimmed over the meager stack of CDs with a deep sense of futility. One caught her eye simply because it was a blank silver disc in a clear case, utterly nondescript. A compilation? Sark didn't strike her as the type to sit around his safehouse making mix CDs in his spare time. She slid the CD into the stereo and waited, but nothing happened. The machine didn't even seem to be acknowledging the disc's existence.
Well, that was bizarre. Could it just be blank? Possibly, but why would a single blank CD be sitting around—
In a flash of inspiration, Sydney ejected the disc, crossed to the other side of the room and put it into the DVD player. After a brief search for the correct remote, she turned on the television, and an embarrassing amount of fumbling finally synched the TV to read the DVD instead of TV channels. By the time she managed all of this, the video was already playing.
It was a grainy video feed—security camera was her gut instinct—and she found herself watching a restaurant, either in Russia or another Russian-speaking country if the menus were any indication. She scanned the diners, looking for something remarkable, something out of the ordinary, someone important.
All of a sudden, she saw him. Lazarey.
His features were barely distinguishable in blurry black and white, but she was certain. He was sitting alone, reading a newspaper and eating some kind of soup. After a while, she went back to examining the other patrons. Lazarey had to be meeting someone there, but she didn't know who. She couldn't even determine when the video had been taken, though she assumed it had been at least two years ago.
The longer she watched absolutely nothing happen, the more she became convinced that either Lazarey's contact wasn't showing up, or someone had pulled video feed from the wrong day. He finished his soup, folded his paper, paid and left.
Suddenly the footage switched, becoming much clearer. Professional surveillance equipment, she was willing to bet. It observed from across the road, following Lazarey as he exited a restaurant—the same restaurant?—and made his way down the street. He was followed to his workplace, and then the video switched to security feed of his office. Still nothing remarkable. He made phone calls, worked on his computer, signed documents. There was no sound.
What the hell was going on? This was the most boring surveillance she had ever seen. The most scandalous thing Lazarey had done was picking at his teeth with his fingernail, and that had lasted for all of three seconds. She had to be missing something, but she just couldn't figure out what it was.
She kept watching, partly out of curiosity but mostly out of a stubborn refusal to leave the mystery unresolved. The remains of her tea grew cold on the coffee table as she saw Lazarey leave the building, the hours of office work having been mercifully abbreviated. Her frustration only grew when the feed switched again, now somehow concealed inside his home. A strange, uncomfortable feeling was building in the pit of her stomach, and she had no idea why.
Lazarey retreated to the shower, and the feed jumped to when he emerged, dressed in a dark robe, and moved into the kitchen. He poured a glass of vodka and sat at the kitchen table, looking over some of the documents he'd brought home. Even if something important was on those papers, it was impossible to discern anything on them at this distance. Sydney reached out and touched the screen as if it would provide a solution to her confusion.
She located and pressed the Display button. When she'd inserted the DVD, it had apparently picked up where someone—presumably Sark—had left off. This was two and a half hours into three hours and forty-two minutes of video.
Which, to her retrospective chagrin, was when the truth finally began to dawn on her.
This was not official surveillance. Lazarey was not meeting anyone, performing covert actions, or participating in anything more or less than the activities of his daily life. These videos were not proof of some past operation. This was evidence of nothing but a son seeking information about the father he'd never really known.
She practically lunged for the remote to turn off the TV. Though she'd been driven by nothing more than innocent curiosity, she wanted to apologize for what she had seen, and what she'd realized about Sark because of it. The churning in her stomach was stronger than ever, and now she could recognize it as guilt.
After two years in custody, he had probably completely forgotten that the DVD had been left out for anyone to find. Sydney couldn't even imagine what he would do if he found out that she knew about it. Almost any reaction seemed plausible, from utter indifference to murderous rage. But even if he didn't care, she did. She felt as if she had violated something crucial to the very existence of Sark.
Or was it just the construct of Sark that she held in her mind?
She stared at her reflection in the black screen, trying to scrutinize motives whose existence she was barely willing to acknowledge. It was as if she wanted him to remain mysterious and impenetrable, above and apart from the human emotions and desires that drove other people.
Yes, she realized. That was exactly what she wanted. Because goddammit, she was sick of seeing people in shades of grey. She didn't want Irina Derevko to love her and kill innocent people as the means to an end. She didn't want Arvin Sloane to have loved Emily so completely, to have treated her like his own daughter, when he'd had Danny killed, and Francie, and Dixon's wife. Was it too much to ask that Sark be nothing but a selfish, ruthless sociopath?
Apparently so.
It wasn't as if she now imagined him to be harmless and cuddly deep down, some kind of wretched, misunderstood soul. Oh, no. He was every inch a killer, and while he might not commit murder "like another habit" like that freak show Toole in the 80s, Sark was not a man to let anything stand in the way of his objectives. Still, finding evidence of any vulnerability on his part surprised her far more than it should have.
She wondered if Sark had ever felt that way about her in the past two weeks, had ever been caught off guard by her weakness, her flaws. Could he possibly be just as unsettled by this new and unfamiliar degree of intimacy? Doubtful. He was, after all, her captor, and the instigator of their current living situation.
Still, she liked to believe that it bothered him a little more than he let on. Since he did not, in fact, 'let on' as a rule, it wouldn't take much.
Sydney stood up and stretched her arms above her head, standing on tiptoe and extending her fingers until several joints had popped. With a satisfied sigh, she bent in half, laying her palms flat on the floor while keeping her legs straight. If she'd ever had the time, she would have taken some yoga classes, but as it was she'd just become a religious stretcher. It wasn't enough to be strong in her line of work—being lithe and flexible was incredibly valuable.
The ability to squeeze into embarrassingly tight clothing and run in four-inch heels also came in handy, but nobody advertised that in recruitment. No, it was all about serving your country and protecting the innocent. Then they handed you a dominatrix outfit and told you to get to work.
Outside, a light drizzle began to fall, and Sydney secretly hoped that all her M16-toting guards would get nasty colds.
Having stretched every muscle to her satisfaction, she circled the coffee table she'd sat on to watch the video and flopped down on the couch. It was long enough that her feet didn't even hang off the end. She would have pegged Sark for having the sort of expensive, spartan furniture that forced people to sit ramrod-straight, but his tastes seemed to run more towards large, comfortable pieces. Or perhaps those were Olaf's preferences.
It was strange, she mused, how an alias could take on a life of its own. She remembered Agent Lennox talking about his partner, how she feared losing track of herself in the midst of her assumed identities. It was something Sydney could definitely relate to. She'd never done really deep cover until her entire life had become a two-year-long deep cover assignment, and it changed her in ways she never could have anticipated.
She'd always privately thought that almost every alias was an extension of herself, in some way. The part of her that had delighted in the intricate logistics of multivariable calculus, or the part that secretly enjoyed snapping off orders like a spoiled heiress and watching people scurry. Or the part that liked to walk into a nightclub wearing clothes Sydney Bristow would never wear, feeling an exhilarating rush of power over the men whose eyes couldn't help following her.
Julia Thorne had become more than just an extension. She was an expansion, an addition, another layer to the composite.
As Julia, she had been colder—all her attachments cruelly severed, her grief tamped down. As a result, she was more efficient, more calculating, fiercer and possessed of a devil-may-care recklessness that annoyed Kendall and aroused Simon. She was ready for anything. She had to be. There was no guardian angel on her com, no protective father or loving friends. And for all her double-agent status with Kendall, at the end of the day she was utterly alone.
Other aliases had been discarded, cast from her mind before the latest disguise was even back in its box. But Julia Thorne, she was beginning to realize, had been so much more. When the pain and the sorrow had threatened to swallow her, Julia had been the adhesive securing the fragments of Sydney Bristow. She could have become depressed, or even suicidal, but she hadn't. Because Julia wouldn't allow it. She was moving forward before Sydney could even gather the strength to open her eyes and see where she was going. They were entirely merged, never two separate women, but Julia's persona could be the protective shell when Sydney wanted nothing more than to curl up into a ball and weep.
She wondered where Sark had bought this couch. It was incredibly comfortable, really . . . and she was just so tired from last night . . .
"Julia?"
She turned her head but kept her fingers on the railing of the balcony. The sunset in Algeria was painting everything pink and purple and gold. "Yes?"
Simon emerged onto the small balcony, wearing a complimentary bathrobe from the hotel just as she was. He'd let her shower first. Now his hair was wet, the long part in front hanging in front of his right eye. He grinned at her. "There you are, love. I was starting to think you disappeared."
"No," she said, tucking a piece of damp blond hair behind her ear and favoring him with a slow smile. "I think I'll stick around."
He chuckled and shook his head. "Don't know how I got lucky enough to get this job, but I could kiss the bastard that hired me."
She walked straight up to him and looked him in the eye. She didn't feel like playing games. "Kiss me instead," she suggested, blunt and calm and reaching for the tie on his white bathrobe. They'd been building up to this moment for two days, and she wasn't in the mood for foreplay.
Because he wasn't an idiot, Simon kissed her, hard, and she met him with a ferocity that seemed to startle him at first, then excite him. They were moving back into the room, shuffling awkwardly but never breaking their embrace. She pushed his robe to the floor, ran her hands over the hard muscles in his arms. He wasn't as thin as— but her mind skipped over the name, forcing her into the present. Julia slipped out of the white terrycloth, feeling nothing but the reality of bare skin and urgent lips against hers.
They tumbled to the bed in the time-honored manner of lovers throughout the ages, tangled and squirming for the right positions. "Now," she ordered through gritted teeth, and he quickly obeyed. His cock slid inside her, drowning out the world, and a full-throated cry of relief erupted from her lips. He was moaning Julia's name, but she barely took notice, clinging tightly to his body and moving in time with every thrust.
"Julia," he croaked, his accent thick—and Russian.
She reared back and her mind was doused with icy horror, but the scream she felt in every fiber of her being refused to form in her throat.
Oleg Madrczyk stared down at her, bearded and scar-faced, his hands replacing Simon's on her breast, her back. "Julia," he repeated, moving inside her, leering just the way he always had, his breath hot and foul on her face.
With a desperate wail, Julia wrenched herself away—
—and Sydney slammed down on the floor in front of Sark's couch, sobbing and gasping for breath. She was shaking violently and couldn't stop. The feelings of repulsion, of utter violation, were too all-consuming to be subdued. Her fists clenched around thin air in a vain attempt to still the trembling of her fingers. Tears soaked her face, her nose was running, even her jaw was trembling uncontrollably. She wrapped her arms tightly around her abdomen.
She felt tainted—there was no other word for it. As if an indelible stain had been cast on her body and mind.
When it crossed her mind that Sark had his own bathroom on the first floor, she couldn't run to the back of the house fast enough.
She was already in his shower, undressed, being drenched by hot water before she could even come close to registering surprise that he'd left the bathroom door unlocked. At first she just stood, hunched over, still crying even though the tears washed away as quickly as they fell. Slowly she began to regain her composure, and when the wracking sobs were nothing more than occasional small jerks of her shoulders, she tried to breathe deeply, to calm down.
And once she was calm, she very calmly took the bar of soap and proceeded to wash herself until her skin burned and the water was turning cold.
One thing, at least, was abundantly clear, Sydney realized as she finally stepped out of the shower, skin salmon-pink. Her threat to Madrczyk could not be an empty promise. She would kill him, if she had to hunt him down like an animal. And he would die knowing that it was Julia Thorne who killed him.
With comforting visions of Madrczyk's painful demise dancing in her head, she picked up her clothes from the floor and was about to put them on when she happened to glance up and see a robe hanging on the back of the door. Thankfully, it was dark blue, and made of a softer, thinner cloth, so it didn't shove memories of the dream back into her mind. Her train of thought was much more simple.
The robe must be Sark's.
Sark smelled good.
After carefully hanging the towel to dry, she approached the robe as if it might become hostile at any moment. Slowly, she eased it from the hook, then held it in her arms and buried her face in the cloth, inhaling deeply. It was . . . nice. Not comforting, she told herself firmly. Just very nice.
Nice enough to merit wearing it around the house, she decided. After all, Sark never had to know.
She thought about putting her clothes on first, but she hated the feeling of bulky clothing under a bathrobe. Instead, she slipped the robe on and headed upstairs with her armful of clothes to look for something more suitable. In the end, she settled on a camisole and a nice pair of black panties. It was sort of decent, as long as the robe was on over it, and it wasn't as if decency was the most pressing concern of a person in solitary confinement, anyway.
Apparently the most pressing concern was never falling asleep, lest one fall prey to one disturbing nightmare after another. With that in mind, she decided to go down to the study and read—in a very alert, wakeful fashion. Something cheerful, like Les Miserables or Wuthering Heights.
She settled for Love in the Time of Cholera, mostly to brush up on her Spanish. As the soft misting rain turned into a steady downpour, Sydney nestled into Sark's armchair with the book, a bottle of vodka, and a huge bowl of recently unearthed chocolate ice cream.
When Sark arrived at the gate of the safehouse, it was nearly midnight, and the rain was coming down so fast and hard that he'd had to curb his usual driving habits to avoid a crash. Visibility was basically nonexistent—he could barely see the gate right in front of his car as he punched in the access codes. He'd called ahead, and all the guards had left except for the team leader, Gonzales, who was huddling rather pitifully by the front door, trying to look vigilant.
He stepped out of the car and was immediately drenched. The ground felt like several inches of swamp. This, he recalled, was what he didn't like about Ireland.
"Hello, sir!" Gonzales yelled above the rain. He was still barely audible.
Sark waited until he was closer to speak. "Any complications?"
"None, sir! Everything was fine when I checked in on her, about four hours ago."
"Very well. If you'll return the sensor equipment, please. The deposit to your account has already been made."
"Thank you, sir. Pleasure working with you!" Gonzales added, unconvincingly, as he squelched his way to his own vehicle.
Since it was so late, Sark assumed that Sydney would be asleep, so he didn't bother checking the sensors. He did, however, draw the Ruger P-89 from his shoulder holster, and had it cocked and ready to fire as he stepped through the front door. As if, had she tried something, he wouldn't have hesitated.
It never became an issue, because she was nowhere to be seen. Aside from the rain pounding on the roof, the house was quiet and tranquil. Of course, most things not involving hostile gunfire seemed pretty tranquil when he finished a job. And how was it, he wondered, that he could possibly be seated near a screaming child every time he traveled in a commercial airline? He was beginning to consider emulating Sloane and buying his own private plane.
In the foyer, he immediately took off his shoes and hung his dripping coat on the rack. Aside from six inches at the bottom of each pant leg, the rest of his clothing had remained relatively dry. He wiped rain from his face with one hand and tried not to feel quite so drained.
After double-checking that the front door was securely locked, he went straight down the hall to his bedroom. His weapon was holstered, and his brain was settling into an exhausted haze that he only allowed himself in moments of solitude. The door of his room opened at a touch, a fact he was barely alert enough to find interesting. He'd left it unlocked to see what Sydney would do in his absence; it seemed that in the morning he'd be able to find out.
He had already shucked off his jacket and set his holster on the dresser before it came to his attention that Sydney was in his bed.
She was surprisingly inconspicuous, curled up tightly on the part of the bed he generally occupied. And unless he was very much mistaken, his robe was neatly draped across the footboard. Her hair spread out fanlike across the pillow she'd appropriated.
His mouth, Sark noted, was very, very dry.
Hallucination was unlikely, given his complete lack of exposure to psychoactive drugs, but unless he performed a complete bioanalysis on those rather dodgy airline peanuts, the possibility could not be totally discarded. Delusions were also improbable, exhaustion having never provoked such a reaction in the past. It wasn't as if he hadn't had dreams before that conducted themselves rather along these lines, but when, precisely, would he have fallen asleep?
On the other hand, all tangible evidence—not to mention Occam's Razor—would indicate that he had, in fact, come home to find Sydney Bristow in his bed, looking painfully beautiful and, judging by the thin straps on her shoulders, not entirely dressed.
It was almost enough to make a man take up religion.
He removed his damp socks and tried to take stock of the situation in a clear-headed, practical way. The problem remained that it made no realistic sense for her to be sleeping here. Sark walked over to one side of the bed and looked down at her. She shouldn't be here, but she was. Apparently.
Rather than allow these circuitous thoughts to continue, he decided to take the matter into his own hands.
"Sydney," he said, quiet but firm. He leaned over to shake her shoulder, and found her skin smooth and cold to the touch. "Sydney? You need to wake up."
And wake up she did.
The kick seemed to come out of nowhere, slamming into his side and sending him crashing to the floor several feet away. His ribs throbbed in protest. In the bed, Sydney sat up, wide-eyed, her heart surely pumping enough adrenaline to fight off a man three times his size. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on him. He stood up, slowly, not wanting to merit another attack.
"Sark?" Her startled, tremulous tone should not have excited him.
"It's me."
"Sark," she repeated, shoulders slumping, covering her face with her hands for a moment. "You're back."
It was difficult, especially when her face was concealed, not to focus on her long, bare legs, or the delicate lines of her collarbone. He stepped closer, which made her raise her head again, this time just to stare at him. As often as Sydney's face could be read with ease, this was an expression he could not decipher, one he was almost certain he'd never seen cross her face before.
She extended one leg until her foot touched the floor, then used it to stand up. He moved to give her space to stand, but her fingers caught the fabric of his shirt and clenched, dragging him back, and she kissed him again. It wasn't like the first. There was nothing soft or experimental in the gesture, and the burning heat behind it seared every nerve in his body, threatening to swallow him whole. She tasted like chocolate and alcohol.
Sydney tore open the front of his shirt. He didn't particularly mind. In fact, he wasn't entirely aware that she had done it, or that he'd even been wearing a shirt a few seconds earlier. She unfastened his belt quickly and roughly. He didn't care about that, either. At the moment, most of Sark's attention was occupied by the way Sydney moaned when he sank his teeth into her soft lower lip. Her fingers on his waistband came in a very close second.
She practically threw him onto the bed as soon as his pants were discarded. After wriggling out of her own clothing, she followed, pouncing on him, her gaze nothing short of feral. Her teeth scraped across his jaw. When he flipped their positions, it was only because she allowed him to do so.
Her hands splayed out, stroking up his back. Her legs wrapped around his hips from either side, and Sark felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his world, as if the only thing tethering him to reality was the sensation of Sydney's limbs encircling his body. She ran her fingernails over his scalp—once, again. He could only moan quietly, dropping his head in surrender until his lips grazed the skin of her neck. Drawing a ragged breath, he tried to regain the offensive, pressing desperate kisses against her throat as his hands skimmed along her ribs.
She gasped—quietly, unobtrusively. The warmth of her breath ghosted along his neck. "Sark . . ."
God, the sound of her voice . . . wrapping around that name as if it were the most intimate of terms . . . He thought he would never be able to hear her say it again without remembering this moment—and feeling, as he did now, so utterly overwhelmed. He was drowning, enveloped by her need and his own, losing focus on the existence of anything beyond this moment.
"Sydney," he whispered, his voice breaking, and succumbed.