"Strange Customs in Far Places"
FINALLY! I did it! I wrote Sarkney! Please keep in mind that this is my first time reading these characters, although that really shouldn't be an excuse, seeing how many Sarkney fics I've read and compiled and reread and how many times I've watched the Sark and Sydney episodes :)
Title: Strange Customs in Far Places
Ship: Sarkney (Sark/Sydney)
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Alias and its characters belong to J.J. Abrams.
Summary: A woman has the right to want the dream.
He moved over her so slowly and exquisitely, there was no mistaking that he wanted to prove something. She tried to make him feverish, to set the pace at the explosive, frantic, and often desperate joining that they were both more accustomed to, but he only pulled his mouth away from hers with a gasp and shook his head.
What did he want to prove, that they could be different? That they could be more? Her hands moved down his back, caressing the taut muscles and soft skin slick with sweat.
She shuddered and shook with her release, and then she woke up on a stolen breath that made her choke for air when she opened her eyes.
***
In Cairo, she was confronted with a van pulling up to the southwest exit of the bazaar, and she pushed past tourists and locals alike as she sprinted forward. She cleared the last hurdle of a tour group to see him unceremoniously shoving the contact aside and tossing a briefcase inside.
A flash of eyes meeting, and then he stepped into the van smugly. He twisted his upper body out of the car window and fired two shots at her.
She raised her gun in response, but the van was already careening away.
***
Cairo was hot, warm in the evening, and then a lukewarm chilliness at night. The hotel was modern and air-conditioned, devoid of the local spices, incense, and unknown smells.
She charmed the boy at the front desk into giving her a spare key with a story of how she wanted to surprise her fiancé, and the entire charade is exactly that, every pretended feeling of excitement at finally seeing her lover without having to wait for his business trip to end was affected with perfection and detachedness.
Her intention to surprise him was derailed when he opened the door and yanked her inside, dripping water onto her arm. The dark blond hair was even darker when wet, and his eyes seemed bluer, more electric, more awake as he came at her, instead of that languid smugness he displayed when they were outside, standing across from each other, confronting each other.
But this was also a confrontation, she reminded herself as he crushed his mouth to hers and closed his teeth around her bottom lip with a pressure that didn’t break the skin, wasn’t done to hurt her, but to set her on fire. Sydney could almost smell the kerosene as his lips abandoned hers for the hollow at her neck and she breathed in deep the scent of the French soap he had probably brought with him to Cairo because he didn’t trust the soap Egypt had to offer…
He wrecked her train of thought, and she picked it up again. It was a confrontation, only this one was a mutual burning, a lesson in collisions and gravity and acceleration and free fall. Everything they are defied laws of clearheaded science, but Sydney was sure she could, if she tried, to chart and graph the physics of their falling.
They stumbled towards the bed, and Sark followed her fall onto the mattress. He made away with the towel knotted around his waist and thrust a leg between hers, and she remembered the dream (that felt like a memory) of him easing his knee between her knees and how she had tried to lunge up to meet him, but he had gently held her back.
He didn’t do it this time though (he had never done it because it was a dream); as she rolled him over and straddled his legs as she reached for the hem of her shirt. She kept her eyes locked with his. She settled down deliberately on him, and he reared up to pull her down even before her shirt touched the floor. No patience tonight (or ever, when it came to this), no slow sureness of touch. Just driving need.
Sark! was a hoarse scream and not a sigh.
And while it was nice, incredible, she pandered afterwards to him, she couldn’t help but miss the dream.
***
As she lay silent and still beside him, legs tangled together, hip pressed to hip, she thought that he probably had the item somewhere in the room, just like she had felt the indention of the gun beneath the pillow under her head when she’d slipped in beneath the covers.
She had noticed that Sark had never really been a tactile person. He preferred the distance of guns to the intimacy of hand to hand combat. He was remote and unreadable, and when he was clearly at a disadvantage, he gave in quickly to maintain that space. He used his stillness as a weapon and his words as a tool.
So it surprised her to find that in sleep, he seemed to favor the closeness.
***
The places and time passed by and the line between dream and memory became less fine and distinguished. In Cabo San Lucas, they met for drinks; the motel offered little else. Montpellier and London, both the same urgency and straining for completion. In a little unnamed town on the west coast of Japan, they had tiny fish over rice.
She avoided the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel in L.A.
That was understandable, of course, because there were always eyes and ears in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was the city of celebrities and starlight, and everything happened because it was possible in L.A. So if she hadn’t met him in L.A., he could have connected it to the risk.
Then she missed Melbourne, Taipei, Genoa, and London again, and if he hadn’t known by then, he would have realized it when she disappeared immediately after the missions in Madrid and Rome because he had places there.
***
He raised his voice, being the complete and utter asshole that he was. “Agent Bristow, do you remember San Antonio?”
Spine arching into the wall. Hands closing on hips. Yanking his charcoal cashmere sweater over his head so that later on, he found several threads stretched and shook his head ruefully at her.
Weiss whispered at her, befuddled, “The dead drop mission?”
She was unable to answer him, her eyes on the man stalking below on the ground floor.
He pitched his voice another decibel higher: “Let me refresh your memory. Your disguise, and it was a very good one, was a college student working on her term paper.”
“I hope your professor awards you top marks for your paper,” a familiar, mocking voice said.
Her eyes snapped to his and her lips flattened to a thin line.
His hand going to the zipper of her skirt stopped whatever words she was about to say. “This skirt looks good on you.”
“Syd, what’s he talking about,” Weiss asked urgently.
She swallowed and tasted dry lips. “I don’t know,” she said faintly.
Sark’s voice echoed through the warehouse, which was too big and too open. This was not an ideal situation to have a talk with Sark.
She wetted her lips again. “I’m going down. Cover me.”
She was halfway down the ladder when a man ran into the warehouse.
“Ta men zhai zhe li!” They’re in here!
She dropped the rest of the feet down and glanced around. Sark had vanished. She was unsurprised. She turned reflexively to her left at a shadow that was definitely not box-shaped even as she heard sounds of engagement between Weiss and the Chinese security guard.
Sark rose to his knees and lunged at her, knocking her sideways. Sydney crashed her hip hard into the floor.
His voice was colder than the cold metal of his gun that dug into her neck. “Let’s talk, Sydney.”
“Get off me,” she snarled, snapping her elbow into his abdomen.
He grunted but sustained the blow, wrapping strong, lean fingers tightly around her wrist, reminding her that he wasn’t weak and that the bones in the wrist were fragile. His legs tightened around her, trapping her and forcing her down under his weight that was familiar in the way it shouldn’t have been.
“No,” Sark said thinly. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I’m not suicidal or crazy. Normal people tend to stay away from terrorists.” She thrashed under him.
“You know what I mean.”
“It was just sex,” Sydney hissed at him. “Don’t mistake it for anything else.”
He sounded genuinely surprised. “I haven’t. I know what you want. Do you?”
It was a tossed out question with no forethought or agenda behind it. He was groping for a reaction in her, honed instincts signing to him that there was something unsaid.
“No,” she lied. “I just got tired of it.”
“You never said anything about being unhappy with our arrangement.”
Arrangement. Such a neutral word. Not affair. Not even sex, which spoke of lust, at least.
“I wasn’t unhappy, I was bored.”
His eyes were hard and annoyed. “I see. And you lacked the courtesy to inform me of this fact.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” She shot back.
He didn’t even bother dignifying that with an answer, only stared back down at her patiently, studying her as though he had all the time in the world to try and solve her. The memory came back and she shivered.
He kissed her with a feeling as though he would much rather kill her, and he ended it too soon.
When he spoke again, his voice was dry. “Yes, Agent Bristow, I can tell you’re bored of me.”
The next burst of gunfire sounded too close, and she struggled against him again, meaning to jab her fingers into old pickax wound. She heard Weiss call her.
He let go of her on his own accord, but not before he bent his head low, his lips at her ear, and hissed, “Rio de Janeiro. Be there.”
***
Kendall announced that Echelon picked up key words indicating possible terrorist activity in several locations: San Juan, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro.
She picked Rio de Janeiro.
“I think something might be there,” she mumbled stupidly.
Kendall said only, “Come back in one piece.”
***
He found her.
“What happened?” she asked wearily. She had been walking all over the city, she had sand in her shoes, and her forearms were sunburned.
“My hotel is down there,” he responded easily.
She bristled, but he wasn’t looking at her.
The night was salty. The cobbled road seemed to retain the heat from the day’s sun, but the ocean’s wind was cool, a salve on her burnt skin.
He wore a soft brown jacket over a loose white shirt, and his designer sunglasses had been pocketed a street back.
His hotel room was on the top floor and afforded a glorious view of the beach. The soft drapery around the canopy bed waved back and forth gently. Sounds of the nightlife floated up from the street below. The room was done in rich tones of burgundy and wine and seemed oddly complementary to their location.
“What do you want?” he asked matter-of-factly.
She wanted him to give her chocolate and a tin of coffee beans. She wanted the dream of what could be.
She said instead, “What happened? What did you get this time?”
He shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it on the back of the armchair. “Nothing happened. There’s an arms trade negotiation taking place in Barcelona, if that’s what you mean,” he said slyly. “I’m afraid we’re both sitting out on this one. If your superiors become too bothersome about it, you can blame me,” he added magnanimously.
“Very clever.” She rolled her eyes. “What do you want, Sark?”
He moved forward, sure of his step in the dark. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and it was such an odd gesture that it gave her pause.
“What was wrong with the status quo, Sydney?” he asked softly, and this close to him, she could see his eyes were dark.
She shook her head, unwilling to reveal any more weakness to him. Why break your scars in open water?
“We need this, Sydney,” came his voice from behind her, his lips caressing the back of her neck. “It helps.”
Helps what? She wanted to ask, but she bit back the words.
Somehow, she acquiesced. And when he laid her out on the bed and the cool sheets, his hands moved a gentle and slow balm along her sunburned skin.
A/N: I wrote this entire fic while listening to "Twister" by Remy Zero on repeat. I've uploaded it via YouSendIt, so feel free to grab it :)
Oh yeah. That one line of foreign dialogue is Chinese pin yin, and please excuse me if I got it radically wrong. As streetscribbles is so fond of telling me, I suck at pin yin.
Psst! Also! See my cool new deep purple and pale lavender layout that is so frosty and so Sarkney? My birthday gift from _bubbleforest. I'm in love.
Title: Strange Customs in Far Places
Ship: Sarkney (Sark/Sydney)
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Alias and its characters belong to J.J. Abrams.
Summary: A woman has the right to want the dream.
He moved over her so slowly and exquisitely, there was no mistaking that he wanted to prove something. She tried to make him feverish, to set the pace at the explosive, frantic, and often desperate joining that they were both more accustomed to, but he only pulled his mouth away from hers with a gasp and shook his head.
What did he want to prove, that they could be different? That they could be more? Her hands moved down his back, caressing the taut muscles and soft skin slick with sweat.
She shuddered and shook with her release, and then she woke up on a stolen breath that made her choke for air when she opened her eyes.
***
In Cairo, she was confronted with a van pulling up to the southwest exit of the bazaar, and she pushed past tourists and locals alike as she sprinted forward. She cleared the last hurdle of a tour group to see him unceremoniously shoving the contact aside and tossing a briefcase inside.
A flash of eyes meeting, and then he stepped into the van smugly. He twisted his upper body out of the car window and fired two shots at her.
She raised her gun in response, but the van was already careening away.
***
Cairo was hot, warm in the evening, and then a lukewarm chilliness at night. The hotel was modern and air-conditioned, devoid of the local spices, incense, and unknown smells.
She charmed the boy at the front desk into giving her a spare key with a story of how she wanted to surprise her fiancé, and the entire charade is exactly that, every pretended feeling of excitement at finally seeing her lover without having to wait for his business trip to end was affected with perfection and detachedness.
Her intention to surprise him was derailed when he opened the door and yanked her inside, dripping water onto her arm. The dark blond hair was even darker when wet, and his eyes seemed bluer, more electric, more awake as he came at her, instead of that languid smugness he displayed when they were outside, standing across from each other, confronting each other.
But this was also a confrontation, she reminded herself as he crushed his mouth to hers and closed his teeth around her bottom lip with a pressure that didn’t break the skin, wasn’t done to hurt her, but to set her on fire. Sydney could almost smell the kerosene as his lips abandoned hers for the hollow at her neck and she breathed in deep the scent of the French soap he had probably brought with him to Cairo because he didn’t trust the soap Egypt had to offer…
He wrecked her train of thought, and she picked it up again. It was a confrontation, only this one was a mutual burning, a lesson in collisions and gravity and acceleration and free fall. Everything they are defied laws of clearheaded science, but Sydney was sure she could, if she tried, to chart and graph the physics of their falling.
They stumbled towards the bed, and Sark followed her fall onto the mattress. He made away with the towel knotted around his waist and thrust a leg between hers, and she remembered the dream (that felt like a memory) of him easing his knee between her knees and how she had tried to lunge up to meet him, but he had gently held her back.
He didn’t do it this time though (he had never done it because it was a dream); as she rolled him over and straddled his legs as she reached for the hem of her shirt. She kept her eyes locked with his. She settled down deliberately on him, and he reared up to pull her down even before her shirt touched the floor. No patience tonight (or ever, when it came to this), no slow sureness of touch. Just driving need.
Sark! was a hoarse scream and not a sigh.
And while it was nice, incredible, she pandered afterwards to him, she couldn’t help but miss the dream.
***
As she lay silent and still beside him, legs tangled together, hip pressed to hip, she thought that he probably had the item somewhere in the room, just like she had felt the indention of the gun beneath the pillow under her head when she’d slipped in beneath the covers.
She had noticed that Sark had never really been a tactile person. He preferred the distance of guns to the intimacy of hand to hand combat. He was remote and unreadable, and when he was clearly at a disadvantage, he gave in quickly to maintain that space. He used his stillness as a weapon and his words as a tool.
So it surprised her to find that in sleep, he seemed to favor the closeness.
***
The places and time passed by and the line between dream and memory became less fine and distinguished. In Cabo San Lucas, they met for drinks; the motel offered little else. Montpellier and London, both the same urgency and straining for completion. In a little unnamed town on the west coast of Japan, they had tiny fish over rice.
She avoided the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel in L.A.
That was understandable, of course, because there were always eyes and ears in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was the city of celebrities and starlight, and everything happened because it was possible in L.A. So if she hadn’t met him in L.A., he could have connected it to the risk.
Then she missed Melbourne, Taipei, Genoa, and London again, and if he hadn’t known by then, he would have realized it when she disappeared immediately after the missions in Madrid and Rome because he had places there.
***
He raised his voice, being the complete and utter asshole that he was. “Agent Bristow, do you remember San Antonio?”
Spine arching into the wall. Hands closing on hips. Yanking his charcoal cashmere sweater over his head so that later on, he found several threads stretched and shook his head ruefully at her.
Weiss whispered at her, befuddled, “The dead drop mission?”
She was unable to answer him, her eyes on the man stalking below on the ground floor.
He pitched his voice another decibel higher: “Let me refresh your memory. Your disguise, and it was a very good one, was a college student working on her term paper.”
“I hope your professor awards you top marks for your paper,” a familiar, mocking voice said.
Her eyes snapped to his and her lips flattened to a thin line.
His hand going to the zipper of her skirt stopped whatever words she was about to say. “This skirt looks good on you.”
“Syd, what’s he talking about,” Weiss asked urgently.
She swallowed and tasted dry lips. “I don’t know,” she said faintly.
Sark’s voice echoed through the warehouse, which was too big and too open. This was not an ideal situation to have a talk with Sark.
She wetted her lips again. “I’m going down. Cover me.”
She was halfway down the ladder when a man ran into the warehouse.
“Ta men zhai zhe li!” They’re in here!
She dropped the rest of the feet down and glanced around. Sark had vanished. She was unsurprised. She turned reflexively to her left at a shadow that was definitely not box-shaped even as she heard sounds of engagement between Weiss and the Chinese security guard.
Sark rose to his knees and lunged at her, knocking her sideways. Sydney crashed her hip hard into the floor.
His voice was colder than the cold metal of his gun that dug into her neck. “Let’s talk, Sydney.”
“Get off me,” she snarled, snapping her elbow into his abdomen.
He grunted but sustained the blow, wrapping strong, lean fingers tightly around her wrist, reminding her that he wasn’t weak and that the bones in the wrist were fragile. His legs tightened around her, trapping her and forcing her down under his weight that was familiar in the way it shouldn’t have been.
“No,” Sark said thinly. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I’m not suicidal or crazy. Normal people tend to stay away from terrorists.” She thrashed under him.
“You know what I mean.”
“It was just sex,” Sydney hissed at him. “Don’t mistake it for anything else.”
He sounded genuinely surprised. “I haven’t. I know what you want. Do you?”
It was a tossed out question with no forethought or agenda behind it. He was groping for a reaction in her, honed instincts signing to him that there was something unsaid.
“No,” she lied. “I just got tired of it.”
“You never said anything about being unhappy with our arrangement.”
Arrangement. Such a neutral word. Not affair. Not even sex, which spoke of lust, at least.
“I wasn’t unhappy, I was bored.”
His eyes were hard and annoyed. “I see. And you lacked the courtesy to inform me of this fact.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” She shot back.
He didn’t even bother dignifying that with an answer, only stared back down at her patiently, studying her as though he had all the time in the world to try and solve her. The memory came back and she shivered.
He kissed her with a feeling as though he would much rather kill her, and he ended it too soon.
When he spoke again, his voice was dry. “Yes, Agent Bristow, I can tell you’re bored of me.”
The next burst of gunfire sounded too close, and she struggled against him again, meaning to jab her fingers into old pickax wound. She heard Weiss call her.
He let go of her on his own accord, but not before he bent his head low, his lips at her ear, and hissed, “Rio de Janeiro. Be there.”
***
Kendall announced that Echelon picked up key words indicating possible terrorist activity in several locations: San Juan, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro.
She picked Rio de Janeiro.
“I think something might be there,” she mumbled stupidly.
Kendall said only, “Come back in one piece.”
***
He found her.
“What happened?” she asked wearily. She had been walking all over the city, she had sand in her shoes, and her forearms were sunburned.
“My hotel is down there,” he responded easily.
She bristled, but he wasn’t looking at her.
The night was salty. The cobbled road seemed to retain the heat from the day’s sun, but the ocean’s wind was cool, a salve on her burnt skin.
He wore a soft brown jacket over a loose white shirt, and his designer sunglasses had been pocketed a street back.
His hotel room was on the top floor and afforded a glorious view of the beach. The soft drapery around the canopy bed waved back and forth gently. Sounds of the nightlife floated up from the street below. The room was done in rich tones of burgundy and wine and seemed oddly complementary to their location.
“What do you want?” he asked matter-of-factly.
She wanted him to give her chocolate and a tin of coffee beans. She wanted the dream of what could be.
She said instead, “What happened? What did you get this time?”
He shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it on the back of the armchair. “Nothing happened. There’s an arms trade negotiation taking place in Barcelona, if that’s what you mean,” he said slyly. “I’m afraid we’re both sitting out on this one. If your superiors become too bothersome about it, you can blame me,” he added magnanimously.
“Very clever.” She rolled her eyes. “What do you want, Sark?”
He moved forward, sure of his step in the dark. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and it was such an odd gesture that it gave her pause.
“What was wrong with the status quo, Sydney?” he asked softly, and this close to him, she could see his eyes were dark.
She shook her head, unwilling to reveal any more weakness to him. Why break your scars in open water?
“We need this, Sydney,” came his voice from behind her, his lips caressing the back of her neck. “It helps.”
Helps what? She wanted to ask, but she bit back the words.
Somehow, she acquiesced. And when he laid her out on the bed and the cool sheets, his hands moved a gentle and slow balm along her sunburned skin.
A/N: I wrote this entire fic while listening to "Twister" by Remy Zero on repeat. I've uploaded it via YouSendIt, so feel free to grab it :)
Oh yeah. That one line of foreign dialogue is Chinese pin yin, and please excuse me if I got it radically wrong. As streetscribbles is so fond of telling me, I suck at pin yin.
Psst! Also! See my cool new deep purple and pale lavender layout that is so frosty and so Sarkney? My birthday gift from _bubbleforest. I'm in love.