Title by Paramore, quote by AFI. Almost done, by god! Mega-thanks to all the readers & reviewers, as always.
XIX. Never Let This Go
"Are you in or are you out? You can't win either way," he said.
"But the fall will be fantastic and what's left is nothing less than perfection."
"Explain," she demanded with every bit of her father's intimidating growl. "Right now."
Sark was sitting next to her, at an almost puritanically safe distance, and Dixon was on the couch across from them. Her former partner glanced between the two of them, just briefly, as if he knew he'd missed something but couldn't figure out what it might be. Then, wisely, he commenced with the story.
"When Sark contacted us to negotiate your release, he offered us a deal: that if we agreed to his demands, he would help us to destroy the Covenant from the inside. For some time now, we've suspected the presence of a mole inside the agency, whose identity he was willing to uncover and disclose to us. In return, we agreed to a full pardon and part-time employment as an off-books agent, funded by the CIA's black budget."
"Part-time?" she echoed, part skeptical and part sarcastic. "What, like only 20 hours a week?"
Sark shifted slightly on the couch and spoke for the first time. "The arrangement is that my employment with the CIA will not prevent me from accepting other offers, should those offers be more lucrative. It wouldn't be a first for your agency, as you rather frequently employ outsiders to do your dirty work."
"Oh, like you're one to—"
"Syd," said Dixon, cutting off the makings of a venomous tirade. "Just listen. Your father was right—the Covenant wasn't happy about Sark turning them down, and they planned to either bring him into the fold or have him eliminated. Sark added the Rambaldi artifact to his list of demands to make it seem as if he'd planned to join the Covenant all along, and was only being delayed by his plan to use you against the CIA."
"He told them— ?"
"Yes, I revealed the information to Cole shortly after my conversation with Kendall and Mr. Dixon," Sark calmly explained. "I gather certain elements of the organization were none too pleased, but he went so far as to commend my creative thinking."
She didn't look at him. If she looked at him, she would . . . do something, and it would be physical and most likely violent.
"So," she said, carefully biting off each word. "You let Vaughn find out on his own, so the Covenant wouldn't become suspicious?"
Dixon nodded, then added unnecessarily, "Yes."
He looked more grim than usual. When he didn't offer anything else, Sydney raised her eyebrows. "And . . . ?"
"Agent Vaughn acted just as we predicted," answered Sark, unburdened by Dixon's guilt. "I admit, I was under the impression that he might take matters into his own hands, but it seems you were able to influence him to act otherwise."
She knew, listening to him, that he didn't particularly care whether Lauren was alive or dead, or that Vaughn had been devastated to learn the truth. If these things had even occurred to him, they were nothing more than passing considerations that might affect the overall scheme. The truly sick part was just how much she wanted to reach across the careful gap between them and hold his hand, with or without the intent of eventually letting go.
"Now what?" She intended to be abrupt, but the words were full of more anger than she'd anticipated. Unlike Sloane, she hated secrets— almost as much as she hated prophecies and goddamn Mueller spheres. There might have been apology in the look Dixon gave her, but she didn't feel like paying that much attention.
"As agreed, Sark will continue to work for us until the Covenant has been dismantled. After that . . ."
"Why the hell," she interrupted, "would you want to work for the CIA?"
She looked straight at Sark for the first time and told herself that his eyes couldn't actually be drilling into her brain, because that was impossible. His stare was almost unfocused for a moment, as if he'd forgotten what they were talking about, but the customary smug inscrutability came back almost immediately.
One corner of his mouth tugged up. "Perhaps I'm just a dog," he suggested, "looking for a new master."
And with the utter inappropriateness that characterized every aspect of Sark and Sydney, she felt her blood begin to overheat. Without precisely meaning to, she licked her lips, and she noticed that those blue eyes followed every detail of the gesture. Get rid of Dixon, she thought. Get him out now.
"Are we done here?" she asked, standing so quickly her head threatened to spin.
"One more thing," said Dixon, also rising to his feet. He eyed her warily, and she could see the bad news coming from a mile away.
"What?" She tried, and failed, to sound less than belligerent and exasperated.
"Another condition. Mr. Sark" — and here Dixon's mouth twitched with what could only be called hatred — "requests you as his handler in all of this."
That's all?
"Fine."
Her former partner stared at her, stunned, while the new one seemed to have become immobile on her couch.
"If there's nothing else, Dixon, I'll see you in the morning."
He outranked her, but he'd also been her friend for years, and Dixon knew better than to impose himself in Sydney's home on official business when she didn't want him there anymore. "Yes. I think that's everything."
"He's staying here." She pointed at Sark and raised her chin, silently daring Dixon to question or comment upon her decision.
Clearly caught off guard, her former partner looked back and forth between her and Sark. "All right," he finally conceded without a trace of inflection. "There will be a guard car in the street, whenever you're finished. Marshall made some modifications to the watch Cole gave him, so we can fool the tracking device, but we still need to be careful."
It was on the last word that Dixon betrayed himself. He didn't give a damn if the man who helped to murder his wife died in the most brutal way imaginable—in all likelihood, he was leaving Sark at Sydney's mercy in the hopes that she would exact some minor but painful revenge on her former captor—but he was going to do what he had to do. It was testament to the menace of the Covenant and the CIA's estimation of how useful Sark could prove to be.
She walked him to the door. As soon as she'd shut it behind him, Sark spoke.
"Sydney . . . I think you should know that I—"
"Shut up." After locking the door, she went to the window and watched the CIA's conspicuously nondescript sedan make its way down her street and disappear around the corner. Only after the red glow of the taillights were long gone did she turn to look at Sark. He was sitting quietly in the exact same position, observing her every move with his head tilted back against the couch, his eyes curious and alert.
She crossed the living room in three quick strides and stood over him, looking down at him with her hands on her hips.
Sark straightened his posture without ever breaking eye contact. "I realize you—"
"Shut up," she snapped. She had no interest in listening to him speak, a fact she emphasized by dropping into Sark's lap and kissing him with bruising force, pressing his head firmly back against the dark fabric. She propped one elbow on either side of his face for balance. He'd groaned in shocked arousal at her first onslaught, but soon he recovered as much composure as it was realistically possible to maintain under the circumstances.
It was a familiar battle for them, with their usual tactics. His hands tangled in the long curtain of her hair; Sydney pinned him lengthwise on the couch, resisting his attempts to roll her under. He finally managed a half-victory, pressing her sideways into the couch's back cushions, but in short order she pushed him back with too much of her strength, sending them both tumbling to the floor. Sark landed on top, a position she was willing to relinquish as long as he kept biting her neck like that.
She writhed between him and the hardwood floor, unsure of what she was trying to accomplish but incredibly frustrated by her inability to get as close to him as her body demanded. Her arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, and their kissing became increasingly desperate, a rough clash of lips and tongues and inarticulate noises evincing their mutual hunger.
"Sydney," he choked, struggling to catch his breath. She didn't give him a chance. In one swift movement, she flipped their positions once again, shoving his shoulders hard against the floor as a wordless and firm reprimand.
"Shut up," Sark interpreted correctly, panting against her chin, his eyes a glazed cerulean. "Right."
Without waiting for confirmation or further rebuke, he used both hands to pull her mouth back down to his. They held each other so tightly that the pressure verged on pain, but they wouldn't let go, or couldn't. Sydney tilted her head for better access and knew they would have to separate to remove their clothes. She was just too caught up in the sensation of his body against hers to put the thought into action. Damn him for feeling so good. So right.
Finally the moment came when she just couldn't stand it for one more fucking second, and she reared back, clawing off her shirt and bra before she'd even made it to her feet. This was not her. She was not this person, this out-of-control woman who needed him more than anything else in the entire world. She genuinely believed that to be true, but right then it didn't matter. He was the anchor now, the precarious scaffolding keeping her together until she remembered how all her pieces had fit together in the first place. And that job currently required him to naked, fast.
Never let it be said that Sark was a man to shirk his responsibilities.
They ended up on the couch again, a fact that only dimly registered in Sydney's mind, greatly overshadowed by the sensation of bare skin and the abominable ecstasy of him inside her. Both knew it wasn't going to last very long, but that was all right. They were along for the ride, the thrill of the finish and the long pleasant silence that would follow. To lie in each other's arms and wish there was nothing else.
Even in the end she wouldn't let him speak; she swallowed her name from his lips and dug her fingernails into his scalp and screamed down his throat. Too hard, too fast, too uncomfortably contorted on the perpendicular lines of the couch. Later they would move to the bed and they'd get it right.
She brought them horizontal on the cushions once again. He tried to move, but she slung one lazy, proprietary leg over him. "Stay," she ordered softly.
"Of course." His eyes searched hers, and she wondered what he was looking for, and if he found it.
She meant to stay awake, but it was so warm and comfortable tangled with him, and all higher thought processes were still obliterated. Her hand at the back of Sark's head felt separate, disconnected from her control. And at some point, as she listened to the slow steadying of their ragged breathing, she drifted off.
On waking, the first sensation she recognized was the gentle touch of his fingertips, brushing from the inside of her elbow to the palm of her hand and back in slow, repetitive movements. By the time she opened her eyes she'd realized that he must have carried her to the bed, and that Sark was lying behind her back with his chin resting on the curve of her neck. Even though she couldn't see his eyes, she intuited that he was observing the pattern of his hand traversing her skin. For a while, she watched too. Then she snapped her fingers shut like a bear trap, clamping down on his wrist, and enjoyed his jerk of surprise.
"Sydney," he said, his voice quiet and the essence of calm. "You're awake."
She couldn't help grinning at the deadpan way in which he stated the obvious. "Glad you noticed."
Before he could come up with a suitably haughty comeback, she twisted under his arm to face him. She ignored his obvious physical reaction in favor of examining those enigmatic (currently grey) eyes of his. "Thanks for staying," she murmured. It always surprised her, though he'd never done otherwise.
He shrugged his eyebrows and traced a zig-zagging pattern on her shoulder. "You did ask me to."
"What if I hadn't?"
There was the enigmatic smirk she knew and . . . well, knew. "I suppose we'll never know," he remarked, but softened the words by kissing her, slowly and deliberately. The way he usually did, when she thought about it. Sydney was usually the one to start the wrestling matches. When she wasn't feeling quite so enthusiastically physical, she liked the fact that he kissed her this way.
"Mm. I . . . liked you better . . . when you were shutting up," she shot back, completely without venom. Her lips were already tender and swollen, but the strength of her addiction wasn't ready to succumb to such insignificant obstacles. As if to defy her own body, she pulled Sark even closer— a move that left him momentarily breathless. In her more languid, thoughtful moments, she wondered how much of it was desire and how much was power play. She forced him to concede the power she held over him, but not without admitting that she wanted him. And he knew exactly how much that cost her.
Sark's head ducked down and his lips brushed the side of her breast. She closed her eyes, took a sharp breath. This kind of sex always felt so much more dangerous. It was submission, surrender. Weakness. It destroyed her barriers and left her so devastatingly vulnerable to him. It made her . . .
It made her love him.
The thought wasn't new, but she'd held it at bay so forcefully that the deep ache of it hit her all over again. It didn't seem important to figure out whether or not she was actually in love with Sark. What mattered was that right now, in this instant, she loved him so much that her body seemed unable to contain it. Her legs trembled beneath his warm, gentle hands. She wanted to run away from him, but she wouldn't. Was it because she didn't have the strength?
His fingers, then his tongue, so painstakingly thorough it felt like a ritual, something pure and dark and sacred. She buried her hands in the pillows above her head and shut her eyes tightly because she couldn't bear to look. She whispered his name, her fingers clutching for anything, and made a sound like a sob—
no. It was a sob, because she was crying. A tear slid down her cheek to her ear. "Stop," she choked, pressing her eyelids more tightly shut.
He stopped. She knew Sark was staring down at her, could feel it as easily as she'd felt his body. She didn't open her eyes.
"Sydney . . ."
She'd heard him say her name that way before, more times than she could count. And she was almost certain she knew what it meant. Tell me what to do, he was asking. Because I'm in over my head and I have no idea what you want from me. Either that, or he was just saying her name, and didn't have much of a plan beyond that. But the thing about following your instincts was that you couldn't always stop to consider whether you were right or wrong.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice still a rasping whisper. "Just . . . not that."
Here was a grand topic for her next session with Barnett. You see, it's all fine and dandy as long as we're fucking in elevators—I've got no problems when he bends me over a table in a Tokyo hotel room—but if he's going to start acting like he really cares about me . . . forget about it.
"I guess it's not all that surprising," she mumbled to herself, wiping at her tear-dampened face.
"Sydney?"
She opened her eyes and looked at Sark, now lying next to her again with a careful lack of physical contact between them. As if to prove that she just couldn't win, this brought an inexplicable pain to her chest. "It makes sense," she told him, allowing his eyes to entrance her so she wouldn't consider whether or not she actually wanted to tell him. "That I don't . . . that I'm afraid to be intimate. With you."
She didn't know which was worse— the flash of hurt that crossed his face, or that he'd actually dropped his guard enough for her to see it. Both seemed like strange artifacts from a universe that, according to all reason, should not exist. Could he truly not understand the reasons for her reluctance?
Even as she watched, Sark's mouth tightened, his chin lifted slightly. The muscles in his jaw clenched tight beneath the skin.
"I see." His tone was smooth, clipped. Professional. Like razor-sharp teeth sinking into her lungs.
"No," she whispered desperately, frantic to make him comprehend what she herself couldn't make sense of. All she knew was that he didn't see, and it was imperative that she explain as quickly as possible. She reached up with one hand to cradle the side of his face. "Please. Don't push me away."
The blue flame of a Bunsen burner had never scorched like his eyes. "Sydney, I'm afraid you can't have it both ways."
"I know." Again, the tears returned, spurred by her own mounting frustration. "I know, I just—"
Unsure of whether she operated on instinct or impulse, she used her hand to hold him in place as she leaned over and kissed him. It was the only solid ground she could count on between them: the movement of their bodies, perfectly in sync, perfectly capable of carrying on without the input of her conscious mind or conflicting emotions. After a few long, tense seconds, she felt his surrender, closely followed by his arms around her.
Of course, that didn't mean he was going to make it easy for her. Every move was torturously slow and soft, from his lips below her ear to his fingers twining with hers, pinning her hands on either side. Her skin felt burning hot, and she was already crying out his name as he entered her gently, prolonging every second. "Sydney. Look at me," he ordered, holding himself agonizingly still, buried inside her. He didn't move until she met his eyes.
Fucking was easy. Sex was relatively uncomplicated, when you got right down to it. But this . . . somehow, Sark had decided to make love to her, and she didn't know if she would survive it. Presumably, there was traffic outside, but she heard only her own voice and his soft moans, twining together in the stillness.
Before she stopped being able to think at all, she wondered . . . what if he'd been making love to her all along? Under other circumstances, quibbling over semantics would have seemed absurd. Call it what you will, they'd had sex. But . . . what if all this time, she'd misunderstood? Could Sark have been pouring his feelings—assuming he had them, whatever they were—into every single one of these encounters? Did he actually—
Good lord, he was going to have to stop doing that if she was going to think. She'd known men who couldn't do with their entire bodies what Sark could accomplish with just that agile pink tongue of his.
On second thought, Sydney decided to fully abandon thinking. She angled her hips into the movement of his thrust, to very pleasant effect. His hands tightened almost painfully around hers, and then suddenly he let her go, sinking his hands into her hair and kissing her completely breathless, over and over again until her lungs burned and she couldn't give voice to the scream that should have been building in every cell of her body. Instead she just clung to his warmth, gasping out multilingual profanities as she came and feeling in Sark's shudder what her release was doing to him.
"Please . . . Sydney . . ." It was so quiet, so raw and frantic that she didn't know if he'd meant for her to hear, and she didn't have the chance to find out, because soon he had collapsed on top of her with a strangled, inarticulate shout, spent and exhausted and so much dead weight until he was able to move again.
Only slightly closer to a clear-headed, conscious state, Sydney put one arm around his torso and stroked his hair with her other hand. Before clarity could bring with it nervousness and good judgment—before she could start to wonder if it was right, or if he wanted to hear it, or even if she really meant it—there was something she had to say. "Sark," she said quietly, her voice a rough, fatigued semblance of itself.
With the ease of practice, he nestled his face into the curve of her neck and made a soft grunting sound that might have been a response.
"Sark . . ." She closed her eyes, as if it made a difference. "I think I'm in love with you."
There was no initial response, only utter silence.
"Sark?"
Unfortunately, Sark was fast asleep, and after heaving a loud and long-suffering sigh over men in general and her personal homicidal and cuddly lover in specific, Sydney pulled the blankets over their bodies with one arm, caressed his neck one last time, and settled smoothly into oblivion.
x
There was always something unpleasantly disconcerting about waking up to discover that Sydney had left the bed. The faint hint of her scent on the sheets assured him that last night had been a reality, but it was hardly an acceptable substitute. Furthermore, 'her' side of the bed was completely cold, leaving him to wonder exactly how long ago she had gone. Normally, he slept so lightly that the slightest noise could wake him, but somehow his mind seemed to have catalogued the sounds of Sydney's movements and allowed him to sleep through them. Convenient in most cases, but not now.
It would also be something of a problem if she ever decided to kill him, but he preferred to believe his instincts would never be that dull.
After collecting his rumpled clothing from the living room floor, Sark was able to categorically determine that Sydney was not in the house. His speculation as to her possible whereabouts was interrupted by her arrival. Dressed in running clothes, she briefly froze under his gaze as if caught in the midst of wrongdoing.
"Hey," she said with a quick, darting smile. "I went for a run. Have you been up very long?"
"Not particularly." He shrugged with the tilt of his head, his hands still in his pockets.
Sydney knelt down to remove her shoes, then stood up and approached him with an air of purpose that set him on edge—with good reason. Her fist shot out with too much speed to be dodged, and the punch caught him squarely in the jaw, making him stagger backward.
"That was for letting me believe you were working for the Covenant," she informed him in a level tone, shaking out her hand.
"I see." Sark touched his face gingerly and carefully moved his jaw back and forth. She moved forward again, and he started to step back. He couldn't argue with her reasoning, but neither was he especially eager to be on the receiving end of her anger a second time, no matter how well-deserved.
But instead of making any threatening moves, to his surprise, she stepped close and hugged him tightly, standing slightly on tiptoe to rest her chin on his shoulder. Her skin was slightly damp and she smelled of smog, clean sweat and deodorant.
The gesture wasn't so much unwelcome as it was unexpected and relatively without precedent. They kissed, they had sex, they conspired to kill people . . . but they didn't hug. Until now. After a hesitation that probably lasted too long to be overlooked, he hugged her back. He had, after all, been the one who'd told her that she couldn't have it both ways. This seemed a small price to pay to avoid hypocrisy. A very small price. Miniscule, really.
"I'm going to try," she murmured, so indistinctly that he almost didn't understand. Her fingers briefly tightened on his shoulder, and then she stepped away.
With an almost disconcerting speed, the expression on her face changed to one of dangerous and cheerful mischief, one that he'd seen on several occasions in their time together and that always precipitated something acutely enjoyable. "Shower?" she suggested, smiling impishly and extending one hand.
Far be it from him to refuse a lady's request.