(no subject)
The mission to Stockholm would be perfect for Nadia, and they all know it. She is as charming as her sister, as clever, as creative- yet it is Sydney who flies to Sweden with Vaughn on point to wear a blonde wig and giggle.
Nadia would not have passed for a Swede, not the look they were going for. As a child she had always assumed her parents were Argentinean, like she was. Her skin was was pale, which had others speculated meant that her family was Spanish (a blessing and a curse.) She had china hair and ojos del judía, dark and flashing.
She sometimes wonders what it would have been like, if she had been with one of her parents. Staying with her mother would have meant Laura Bristow, a different father, and a false full sister. She imagines this sometimes- mostly when Jack does the unthinkable without flinching for his daughter.
On the day of the Stockholm mission she slips into the room where they keep the alias gear- the dresses and wigs and jewlery and shoes.
She thinks of Emily, who she has seen a few times in pictures. She doesn't ask her father to talk about her, because he'll twist his wedding ring once and answer sadly and then fall silent.
Even in a blonde wig, she knows that while she could have fit into the Bristow family, but she could have never passed for Emily's daughter.
Sydney doesn't remember the trip from the East Coast to California. She'd been two years old, and she has some vague memories of graham crackers and a carton of her toys next to her in the backseat, but that's it.
In movies, families on road trips play car games and sings songs. Neither of her parents are the singing kind, but on the camping trip they had taken when she was five, they had indulged her and sang a few rounds of Bingo. (Her father didn't want to clap to replace the letters; finally, on the third round, when they got to G, Sydney got so upset at his lack of participation that she'd started to cry. Laura had then announced that someone needed her lunch and a nap. By the time they got back on the road Sydney had forgotten the incident, but Jack clapped anyway.) On the ride home no one felt much like singing- Sydney was on medication for her arm and wanted simultaneously to be hugged and left alone, and Laura had to sit in the back with her so that she would stop picking at the cast. She drew designs on it in thick black marker.
Sydney knows that there must have been more trips- she has a pair of Mickey Mouse ears with her name embroidered on the cap from Disneyland, and some pictures of her on the shore of a lake or in the mountains- but she can't remember them.
She knows for a fact, however, that their road trips never involved one of them being transported in a grain bin.
Her father's face is completely inscrutable, and Sydney stifles a near-hysterical giggle at the idea she has of asking him to sing Bingo. Her mother is folded up in a plastic barrel, and the heat outside is near unbearable. She doesn't have a broken arm, but the scrape on leg was bandaged by both her parents.
There is something she's seen before in movies with road trips, or, really, any movie with long journeys, and they're memories. Her parents had described a vacation they'd taken, the three of them, and Sydney could remember that a little, but the expressions on their faces had reminded her of much more.
Guilt is hot and slick and crawls up her throat like nausea, coming in waves.
She thinks sometimes that she should have given them all another chance, especially: 1. her father and 2. him. She would like to think is above seeking approval, and her desire to please is submerged beneath her desire to make her father proud, therefore she disappears without a trace, just like Daddy would have liked.
(She does not try to contact her father, because she is afraid, when she allows herself to consider it, that she will cry and let herself be convinced by his words.)
She instead calls his house, waiting three rings before hanging up, when it is eight o'clock in California, twice a week, sometimes waking early a day away from him.
He knows it is her, but only admits to it when he is alone.
Sydney, he'll whisper, his voice heavy, You need to come home, and she'll remain silent. He asks the same things- it makes him feel better. Where are you, to no answer; Are you okay, silence; Are you coming home?
He leaves that question for last because she hangs up.
Three weeks before her birthday (her age, plus two), when March is busy going out like a lamb, he roars into her op in a Ferrari that he almost drives into a wall when he sees her.
She runs, of course (it's what she does) and disappears in seconds. She knows that he will follow her, but she has been trained by the best to blend in, and just when she thinks she's lost him he comes around a corner.
"You should have stuck with the mission," she says
Sydney often wishes her father was alive for the very selfish reason of wanting to give him things. Sometimes they're big things- her affection, her trust, her confidence- and other times, they're little things, like the medallion she bought in Paris.
For their honeymoon, Sydney and Vaughn spent the night in Santa Barbara with Isabelle. There were plenty of people who would have kept Isabelle for the night- Rachel, Dixon's daughter Robin and the Flinkmans all offered, but in the end Vaughn, who didn't like leaving Isabelle to go to work in the morning, decided to take her along.
Their dream honeymoon, they agreed, was Paris. Sydney had never been there long enough to enjoy it and had a patchwork understanding of the streets and landmarks- a chase down the Champs Elysée, an escape from a hotel room on Rue de Rivoli, glimpses of the Eiffle Tower and the Arc de Triomphe were all that she could reasonably claim as experience in Paris. "It kind of make me sick," Vaughn said flatly, bouncing Isabelle "that with all the travelling you've done, you might as well have remained in L.A."
They go when Isabelle is three, with the understanding that they'll return when she is old enough to enjoy it. She's as good as gold on the flight from LA to New York, but has a difficult time with the transatlantic flight, whining tiredly.