(no subject)
"This is goodbye," he says as he kisses her, and she thinks she believes him, in the part of her brain that isn't dizzy. The dizzy part is thinking that if this is what goodbye feels like, she would not mind saying it over and over again.
There's no room in the inn, which she would find amusing if it wasn't so uncomfortable. Some natural phenomenon, lost reservations, small things that pile up. As he negotiated, she pushed her hair back, strands sticking to her fingers, rain-wet and ruined. She had only a laptop carrier on her shoulder, and she leaned against the wall, her gun shifting. When he turned to her, there was no emotion on his face.
(Kissing him is like coming in from the cold, warmth making numb extremities tingle with life, like relaxing into sleep, like a sigh, like inhaling. It's more relief than anything.)
He acts as though he wants to protest her every move- putting down her bag, stepping out of her heels, pushing her hair behind her ear. She's too close, there isn't enough room, and he steps over towards the bed. The carpet feels gummy beneath her bare feet, feeling the well-known clench of her stomach due to reports on Oprah about germs in hotels. "I'm going to take a shower," she says
(They had played a game once in captivity. They figured they weren't in too much danger originally, as their team was outside the city, but it was two days before they were rescued, wherein they created "I would sell my soul for..." and they'd name an object. They started off easily- billions, yachts, immunity from wounds, and then things got more pathetic as time wore on. "Ice cubes," he had said, his face flushed and sweaty. "Lip balm," she had replied. "My soul for a stick of carmex." He had laughed a little. "You're easy.")
(She tastes like New Years Eve, an explosion of colored glory and flame.)
Vaughn didn't particularly like walk-ins. They were usually crazy- literally, though usually not raving and just quietly possessed with earnest eyes and insane conspiracy theories- but they all had to be given the same amount of attention.
Lisa down at the reception desk called up to tell them and gave the warning, "This one is really... out there." She didn't say anything else, but Weiss looked at Vaughn and immediately said "Heads."
If heads landed facing upwards, that meant that Weiss could monitor the statement, and Vaughn would be stuck sitting with the walk-in to explain how important it was for things to be analysed before they rushed right into bombing Australia or attacking Belgium and Switzerland. Sometimes they trashed offices and once, two doors down in James Wyatt's office, a walk-in threw a computer monitor out the window.
(It was much worse to have the second job, because when they were writing at least they were occupied.)
It was heads, of course, and Weiss did a victory dance, which was amplified to involve the cabbage patch once the walk-in stepped off the elevator. "whoooo boy. Ariel at ten o'clock. Your pretty office is going down." weiss is unusually bitter about the condition of Vaughn's office compared to his own.
Vaughn sighed. She did have Little Mermaid grade red hair, and her face appeared to be swollen. She didn't appear to be wild with insanity, but sometimes the quiet ones were the worse. "I'm going to get a sandwich. Talk her down."
Sleeping, she lays on the seat facing him. He's seen her so many times before- still, fighting, suffocating, burning- that this new pose, knees curled up and a hand under her face is almost jarring.
(In a few minutes she will wake up and go to the bathroom. He will listen to the sounds of water desperately, because this is all very new and he thinks she may still be dead and this is all some fantastic dream. She'll return refreshed, hands smelling lightly of soap, face red from rough paper towels, and she will look at him as though he has the power to change the world and doesn't want to.)
"Are you sure you're up to this?" Weiss had asked, his voice low with concern. He knew, a little, about the drinking and some of the dreams, about his trip to Europe and his desire to get lost and the dark circles under his eyes. Weiss would have gone if he had declined, somehow able to withstand the ache to see her that he didn't know he could feel anymore.
He knew it was her the minute he stepped in the door, the way she moved and the sound of her voice (her voice, real and vibrating,) the light kisses she pressed to his throat.
He was honorable and kept a distance after that. (What he wanted to do: cradle the base of her head in his hands, frame her face, feel her pulse and her heartbeat and check her breathing, feel how warm and alive she was, flesh over the bones, not just charred remains.) Now he touches her wrist every so often, takes her hands to look at her fingerprints, fingerprints he recognizes from her file, fingerprints that could, conceivably, be doubled, but aren't.
(The tranquilizer is starting to wear off, and she's started to move in her sleep. Once, when he was looking at her fingertips of her free hand, she had opened her eyes, looked at him and announced "My nail is broken." And it was, jagged and down to the quick. "I'm sorry," he'd replied, and she'd gone back to sleep.)
It’s an ad in the paper he notices, one he checks for subconsciously, never expecting it to catch his eyes. Standard way of initiating contact, he knows the protocol. Contrary to previous messages, however, this one had no code. No reason had been given, which could mean only one thing.
He waits for her in alley crossing the seedier side of London, his body taut with vigilance. He doesn’t let his breath catch when she comes out of the shadows.
“She’s been found,” she says, and her tone betrays no emotion. He wonders about this briefly, expecting joy or relief or something, at the very least, not this cold, exact slice of words.
He starts to say her name, but she stops him by holding out a hand. She has a scarf wrapped around her throat and head, and the sudden step she takes towards him causes it to tumble back, the glossy length of her hair gleaming in the feeble moonlight. Gloved fingertips hide the glow by readjusting the dim scarf. “Will you come?” she asks needlessly.
She is downcast, he knows this, he can see it in the way she holds herself and the duck of her head. Something horrible has happened. “What is it?” he starts to ask, but the moment he attempts speech she hisses irritably, warning him ferally.
She’s arranged it, somehow: a backdoor, a locked entrance, paid off some lackey that got stuck on night duty, his face flushing brightly as she flashes him a false smile. He murmurs a time limit clumsily, blinded by her beauty and the cash she’s pressing into his clammy hand. It’s a hospital, he notes by the lackey’s scrubs, it’s a hospital and oh god it isn’t any warmer inside.
They don’t touch as they enter the room, and he suddenly knows where they are and what they’re doing there and he hopes, he prays, he begs that there is some other answer, but silently, silently, because the baby’s asleep and there she is.
She’s beautiful, still, in spite of the pallor of her cheeks and the color of her hair- an unnatural, surreal halo of sunshine that doesn’t belong in the sickly half light of this room- her lips pale and her complexion drawn. There is a vivid trail of scarlet from her mouth.
The sheet is drawn back only to her shoulders, and she’s dressed professionally- a suit, nicely tailored, expensive, and it’s spattered carelessly with drops of blood.
She is beautiful.
(He cannot speak.)
Beside him, the scarf has fallen again- baring her head in respect, and her fists are tightly clenched. If he could turn to her, he would see tears sparkling in the dim light of this hell, see the way the muscles of her jaw trembled and quivered under the weight of the distress she is desperately hiding, but he can’t, because she is his baby and he looked away once and lost her and now she is there and he can’t fix anything.
He reaches a hand to touch her, the alien gold that frames her face, the chandeliers that dangle carelessly, jauntily off her ears- never pierced, never pierced- the cheek that he’d once seen turn rosy pink in the cold, when she was nothing more than a baby and they lived where it snowed, and the time he took her skiing and the winter spent in a cabin in the woods and why isn’t she rosy now? There is no smile, no hesitant look of betrayal, no pain, no happiness, nothing, just the blank expression of death.
He had failed her.
He had broken laws, made alliances, doubled-crossed, betrayed, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, all in the name of finding his daughter. He had chased mere shadows of leads in the hopes of finding her, aligned himself with the vilest felons, trying to find a glimmer of his daughter’s specter.
It hadn’t been enough. Nothing had been enough, and there she was, his beautiful daughter, the little girl with freckles and sticky kisses that had grown up to be more mature and intelligent than he could ever hope to take credit for, lying dead because her father had failed to protect her all along.
He manages a strangled, “Sydney,” quietly, the vague memory of a wife shushing him, the baby is sleeping, in a pink nursery with teddy bears and dolls and a white rocking chair, wrapped in a pink blanket edged in satin, but not this, not this sick-smelling room with rows of corpses and a white sheet to cover her face.
She, the angel of death that stands beside him, the living and the damned, grabs at his arm, digging her fingers in. She is saying his name harshly, insistently, “It’s time to go, Jack,” and “Jack, it’s time,” or, more often, “Please, Jack, please.”
There was a time, when she was a baby, when she was afraid of the dark, and she’d cling to his neck when it came time for bed, Daddy, Daddy, it’s dark and scary don’t go and leave me, Daddy, keep the monsters away, Daddy, please stay with me, her baby voice as clear as a bell, never with a lisp, ringlets of hair still damp from her bath, clean and fresh and clutching a stuffed animal , and she is still his baby, his brave daughter that had let him go more often than not and chased away the monsters herself. Now, he would stay. Now, he would protect her.
And so he ignores the woman beside him, choosing instead to study the daughter who grew up without him, who faced life without him, who faced death without him, touching the smooth cream of her complexion in a caress he wouldn't have dared to give her before, haunted by the memory of when he had disentangled himself from her arms, firmly telling her that she would be fine.
“Jack.” Her voice is firm, she, who had prepared for it, who knew what she was in for. She had betrayed him yet again, leading him to believe there was a lead on their common goal, that the one golden thread that bound them, could be found. “It’s time.” Her touch is bruising. Five fingers, five letters. Judas. Irina.
He could feel it- couldn’t he?- the soft arms around his neck, the toothpaste-breath, Daddy, stay, Daddy, please, Daddy, Daddy…He shook her hand off. “No,” he said hoarsely. His weakness was Sydney, had always been Sydney, and if it was his death, so be it.
He shakes her hand off of him, violence lurking beneath the surface, the dim light shining on the scales. “I’m not leaving her alone.”
No. She would come home with him, have a proper burial, rest where he could see her, where he could keep an eye on her, not in some foreign country by herself, with no one who cared.
He imagines that her voice cracks- she does bite her lip, and her hand tangles in the folds of her coat protectively- as she whispers something so softly he can barely catch it, but it sounds like an accusation: “What kind of mother do you think I am?”
Then her tone turns sharp again, honed by pain and weariness, and she dares to touch him again, “She’s not alone.”
He almost laughs at the absurdity; no, she was not alone, not surrounded by other shrouded corpses, surrounded by the dead, his daughter who had shone so brightly amongst the living. The irony dies before it reaches his lips- parents should never outlive their children.
“He’s here.”
For a moment he is sure she has lost her mind- thinking that some indifferent God could possibly care enough to guide one errant, though precious, soul.
Then it dawns on him: by “him,” she is referring to the man who was with Sydney when he was not, who lived with her and died with her, as it should have been. There is a grim satisfaction in learning this.