The Alias Fic That Wasn't
Returning to my topic of a previous post - Alias. This Sunday marks the return (yet again) of the show. But I've heard some very deeply disturbing spoilers for these next few weeks, and so before I run the risk of watching them come true and feeling my love for this show burn up and die away forever, there's something I ought to do.
I'm gonna post the Sarkney.
This is a fic that I started about 7 months ago, before Season 3 began. It's a Sarkney, that begins after the end of Season 2, and goes totally AU from there. This is not a happy fic. It's not really even a nice one, imho, but I'll make no apologies for that. Especially seeing as it's quite possibly the only Alias fic I'll ever write or post. Also, it's a great beast of a thing - 12,866 words at last count. So what I lack in fic quantity I apparently make up for in sheer verbosity. Yay me.
Oh - one last thing before I subject you to it: This is a WIP. Has been for months. I thought that maybe my muse was just taking the century off, but it occurred to me that maybe this thing is supposed to stay a WIP. I could only write it in disassociated chunks, and thread them together with a vague time line. I always told myself that eventually I'd make myself sit down and pound out the "in-betweens", as I think of the missing time, but now I'm not so sure they were ever meant to be written.
Yes, I know how stupid that sounds.
But my fic is already slightly... off... 'cause that's how Sydney demanded to be written. And so, in a way, the lack of smooth flow in my fic actually makes sense.
Yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. No pun intended.
Title: Untitled
Author: Fawkes
Email: Irish_fawkes42@hotmail.com
Rating: R-NC17ish at one point. Kids, be warned - it gets a bit naughty!
Spoilers: Not so much.
Time line: Post Season 2 AU. Sydney’s back from her mysterious disappearance, but no light was ever shed on the subject. Yes, Vaughn got married, bully for him. Sark escaped the CIA and has been evading them ever since. Sloane and Derevko are loose in the great wide world, and up to God-knows-what.
Summary: I could try to explain, but I’d probably fail miserably. If you read this, and want a detailed explanation, email me.
Disclaimer: They’re not mine. And I promise that when I’m done, I’ll dust them off and put them back where they belong.
Category: Odd.
Intro:
It begins with death. She supposes it’s as fine a place as any to begin, even fitting, in a way. Circle of life and all that rot, and isn’t it all just dust in the end anyway? Is there really any other way to begin, she wonders, or does she have it backwards, and it’s supposed to begin with life? Or is it that there can be no life without death, and vice versa, for that which is black defines what is white and we cannot know good without knowing evil? And isn’t that a paradox? Or maybe it’s a paradigm. A paragon? So she muses, and ponders, and even philosophizes. And in the end, she lets it begin with death.
The funerals are mercifully short. Solemn heads bowed under the weight of an endless blue sky. Words of comfort, spoken and ignored. Assurances that, surely now, they are in a better place. She is tempted to skip them altogether - been there, mourned that - but in the end she attends because, after all, she loved them. She considers, after, which is worse: Is it harder to stand beside the mourning widow of your ex-lover, and imagine the what-ifs? Or to stand stoically, for you, Daddy, a rock amidst the stream of condolences that flood you when you’re the last survivor of a battered bloodline? The can’t-haves, or the had-too-lates? The people and their tears come, the people and their tears go, and she thinks that she’s never seen such a beautiful day in her entire life. Which is worse? She decides the contest’s a draw, on account of surrealism.
And she wonders if they’ll haunt her.
Chapter #: Runaway.
The soft blare of the radio wakes her, and she rolls to her side to see the red digits of the clock face glaring balefully into the dark. 4:47AM. Time to get up. She reaches over to slap the thing to silence, and she can see the red glow between her fingers. Forty-seven, but not forty-five. Never forty-five. Normal times don’t work for her anymore; the standards of the hour, the half-hour, and the quarter-hour that mark the forward passage of life in this world. If you want 8:45, you get 8:36, 11:30 is 11:22, and just forget about every hour, on the hour. Won’t happen. She’s tried to reprogram, of course, but she failed, and so she’s been like this ever since she came back from… She drops the thought. Easier to be defiant than admit she still has no answers. Easier to pretend she doesn’t care anymore.
Fucking Rambaldi. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Not that that means much. Lately, she’s not even sure what way this way is, much less any other way it could be. That’s the trouble, she supposes, when you can’t keep track of the years. When time itself has cast you aside. Realities have this annoying tendency to not. stay. put.
She slides from under the covers and pads to the window. The sky is an artist’s study of black on black, with a few shadows thrown in for contrast. A hand to the glass, and she can feel the chill of the air outside, biting her hand through the pane. Pain. Briefly, she wonders what time of year it is, and then shrugs. Like it matters? The seasons here are heat, heat, heat, and heat. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, there’s a little rain thrown in, just because mudslides are so much fun. Kind of like living on the mouth of hell. City of Angels my ass. Somewhere, God’s laughing. Still, she’d best make an effort to find out, because in other places in the world, they still have variations in the weather with their seasons. Or so she hears.
She turns back to her bed, and the glowing red digits of the clock seem to taunt her. 4:49, they say. Give it a try. She stares at the clock, wide-eyed, and wills it to change to 4:50 as she watches. Just a simple, ten-minute increment, that’s all she asks. Just some sign that the darkness of the months since her return has been nothing but a string of very odd coincidences. Please. The red seems to glow with an inner fire, brighter, and brighter, and surely by now it’s been 60 seconds. But the clock still glares at her. 4:49, it says, 4:49 4:49 4:49. If it could, she thinks, she rather imagines it would stick its tongue out at her. Her eyes are beginning to burn now, and water, and the red is unrelenting. Finally, she blinks. And it’s just a split-second, just a fraction of a moment of a heart-beat. But it doesn’t matter. When she looks again, the clock says 4:52, and she wonders why she even bothers trying, anymore. This game, she’s long since lost.
She thinks, Surrealism. Noun. Defined by the American Heritage® Dictionary as a 20th - century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. That’s me. And the clock gives her a sly wink. 4:54. She suppresses the urge to throw the damn thing through the window, and turns away to dress.
When she’s done, she makes the conscious check of each article. Jeans, shirt, jacket, boots, bag. It seems ridiculous, and juvenile. She’s been dressing herself for years, after all. But she’d hate to walk out of here only half-clothed, and God knows she’s done that once or twice lately. The clock chuckles at her. 5:23, it says, gee, where does the time go? She walks over, grabs the beast, and rips its cord from the wall. The fiery numerals finally fade, and die away, banked by the force of her wrath. Or the lack of electricity. Either way, I win. She drops the thing in the middle of the floor, gives it a light kick for good measure, and leaves it in favor of moving to the front door. She stares down the path. Broken stones, lining the way to the great wide nothing. The sky is lighter now, a palette of navy and gray as the sun struggles to rise, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. Mission is go. Alpha team, move out.
Sydney walks down, and out, and away from her life. And around her, the birds begin to sing.
Chapter #: Flicker.
She’s too tired to fight by the time they start dragging her through the halls. The grips on her arms are bruising, and her fingertips are starting to tingle - first sign that her blood circulation is being cut off. The hallways seem interminable; endless stretches of beige walls broken only by beige doors, repeating, repeating. After a few minutes, she’s convinced they’re simply dragging her in circles for fun. But there, above that one door… A light bulb, flickering sporadically. Its light is strong now, she thinks, but time will tell. It will weaken as the days go by, and falter, until finally it burns out altogether. Pity. She’s quite certain she’s never been down this corridor before.
She keeps her eyes fastened on the light bulb as they pull her down to the end of the hall, and around yet another corner. Suddenly, she realizes she can hear other voices. Her guards tense. Anomaly, not in the program. She leans her head back and twists it around, and there, out of the corner of her eye, she can see it. One of the beige doors in this beige world, stuck open. There are men struggling with it; some pushing, some pulling, and some searching for the mysterious cause of the jam. Their luck seems limited at best. Her captors pause, obviously hesitant to take her past the open door, and she realizes that there’s something important here, if she can only figure out what it is. She can practically taste the reluctance of the two men holding her up. There’s a whispered word, a flurry of aborted hand gestures, and the two men tighten their grip. Her fingertips are numb now, and sparks of fire shoot up the nerves in her arms. Apparently, a decision is reached using this not-language, because the two men move as one, dragging her as quickly as they can, down and down and towards the door. She gives them points for evasive efforts, but still she manages a glance as they pass.
Impressions. Splatters, she thinks. Yes, the red and brown and red would be blood splatters. She scents heat, as well, and that unmistakable crawling in the back of her sinuses means burnt flesh. And there, hanging limply over the edge of a glittering metal table, the back of a head of blond hair that seems awfully familiar. Impressions. She could figure it out, she knows, if they would just give her half a sec. But she’s already yards beyond the door, and the chance is gone. As they take yet another beige turn, she can hear faint laughs, and shouts of triumph. Then a quiet slam, and now the only noises are the harsh breathing of her guards, and the slick slide of her legs on the ground.
Finally, the guards slow down. Beige, beige, beige. This door must be hers. The men stand her up between them, and she watches, incredulous, as the one to her right reaches out to the doorknob. When it comes to Sloane, the standard operating procedure includes bars, and lasers, and locks. But the knob is perfectly round, smooth, normal. There are no key card slots, no digital keypads, not even a damn keyhole. The hand grasps, twists, and the door opens. Easy? She wonders why she should feel insulted.
Later, she would confess that she had been expecting more beige - never anticipate - and so was utterly unprepared for the positively medieval looking dungeon that is waiting for her. The floor, walls, and ceiling are all rough-hewn, unpolished stone, and there are actually chains fastened to the walls. Trite. A small heap of tattered blankets and a lone bucket mark one corner, and she knows where she’s going to be spending her days. Suddenly, she finds she’s not too tired to struggle after all. They’re waiting for this, though, and the battle is lost before it’s even begun. She’s pinned down, and her hands are cuffed behind her back and fastened to the chains in the wall. Her legs are bound, as well, just tight enough that she cannot slip them through her wrists to bring her hands in front of her. Damn. A piece of cloth is shoved between her teeth, and she can feel a few strands of hair being pulled as the gag is knotted tightly behind her head.
Finally, they’re gone, and she lays there feeling like so much trussed turkey. She shifts her hips and shoulders, and angles her head to find the door. If they really have no locks, she thinks, she may yet stand a chance. She wonders, though. Are they really that confident that these chains will hold her, or are they just…
Oh, shit. Well that certainly explains it.
There is no door. At least, not one that she can see. The wall where the door should be is smooth, blank. Sure, it all makes sense now. You don’t need a lock on your doorknob if there is no goddamn doorknob. And she could only begin to hazard a guess as to where the doorknob should even be.
Her hands are entirely numb, now, and her shoulders already beginning to feel the pain of their new strained position. And it occurs to her that she may be in a bit of trouble.
The days that follow are a blur.
They always keep the lights on, of course, and they randomly change when they feed her and empty her bucket. But she notices, if she can imagine in blocks of time, that it always goes something like: rest, torture, rest, rest, torture, rest, torture, rest, rest, torture, etc, so on and so forth, ad infinitum. The torture is a pain, of course, but she finds that the real issue is that they don’t seem to be torturing her for any particular reason. There is no, “Where I can find the XYZ,” or “Tell me who you work for”. Just the silence, the loneliness and the hurt, and the aching question of Why? Soon, she finds herself looking forward to the scraping of stone on stone that signals the arrival of a captor. Not right. She hides it, of course, but she realizes that the yearning for human companionship is doing a better job on her will power than mere whippings and broken bones ever could. She realizes that she’s dying to tell them something, anything, if only they’d ask.
If only there was someone she could talk to.
She begins using her chains to scratch letters into the stones. This is difficult with her hands cuffed behind her, of course, but it’s not like she’s in any great rush. She doesn’t even have anything to say, really, no great pearls of wisdom to pass on to the next fellow who gets himself caught and brought in here. Just letters, disjointed and unconnected, but communication in their own right. She gets a sick satisfaction at the thought of Sloane’s men studying the walls, and working for days on end to break the code there that doesn’t exist. A small victory, she thinks, but she’ll take what she can get.
She’s not sure when the fever sets in, or even why. A wound gone bad, perhaps, or maybe an allergic reaction to one of their drugs. Does it matter? All she knows is that no torture can hold a candle to the misery she’s feeling now. She longs to sleep, yet fears to, lest she lose the battle she’s endlessly waging to keep the contents of her stomach from making a repeat appearance. She reminds herself constantly to beg the guards to remove her gag the next time they come. It would be an ending unsatisfactory to everyone involved, she thinks, should she choke to death on her own vomit in this nothing of a cell. Not right. She fights, and fights, and thinks that nothing in this world ends up the way one would think it should. She doesn’t know if she ever speaks to the guards - she sees nothing but pinwheels of bright flashing colors, and can’t think past the constant roaring of the silence in her ears. Her cell seems to spin endlessly, and she’s pretty sure she’s losing that battle with her nausea.
And then, inevitably, there’s nothing but the darkness, and she would swear that she could hear the birds singing.
Chapter #: Conversations with Dead Men.
The first time she sees Vaughn, What took him so long?, she’s laying with her back to the wall. She opens her eyes to see him sitting beside her, his head leaning back against the stones, fiddling with a bit of cloth. At first she’s sure she’s dreaming, but she can feel every bump in the floor beneath her, can sense the damp and cold that creeps, and creeps, until it pervades every cell of her body. She feels the metal of her cuffs, abrasive against chafed wrists, and she knows that even in her darkest dreams she could never imagine the utterly foul aftertaste of her gag. Besides, she thinks, she’s too tired to be asleep.
So then she figures it has to be a lingering effect from her fever, or the myriad of drugs flowing through her veins. But she doesn’t feel feverish, and the symptoms, if symptoms they are, do not match any drug known to her. Perfect lucidity while hallucinating? Don’t think so.
So she’s left with the conclusion that she’s out of her mind. Which is, of course, the first thing he addresses when he turns his head to look at her.
“You’re not crazy,” he says. She chokes on a laugh. Prove it, she thinks fiercely. He leans over and gives her a gentle kiss on her brow. “It’s okay Syd, you can speak to me.” He holds up the object he was fiddling with, and she sees it’s her gag. The relief she feels is so great, she immediately leans over and retches into the bucket beside her. Tired. Vaughn smiles sadly, folds the gag into a neat little square, and places it on the ground between them. She notices that it’s a very pretty shade of blue. “Syd,” Vaughn says, “you’ve had better days.” She glares at him, because this is not news to her. He continues, “Sark’s here too, you know.”
Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. “I know.”
“If you could find him, talk to him, work… something… out. Much as I’m the last person who wants to say this, you would stand a much better chance of getting out of here alive with him at your side.” And she sighs, because this, too, has already occurred to her.
“The problem,” she begins slowly, “is that it’s Sark.” She takes a deep breath. “I mean, what would the government think, and the CIA? We both know that extenuating circumstances are rarely taken into serious consideration in these scenarios. Allying with the enemy is simply allying with the enemy. And last time I checked, Sark was definitely on that list.” She leans her head back against the wall, and closes her eyes briefly. “Then again, I’m starting to think that I’m not going to make it out of here without some sort of help.” She opens her eyes to see his brow draw into its familiar furrow. “Stop it,” she says. “You’re dead, so you don’t count anymore.”
“Syd, I agree that these are all things to take into consideration. But you also forgot to mention one other point.”
“What’s that?”
“I know you, Syd. Or I did. So I’m just wondering, how would you feel?” She gives him a blank look. “How would you feel, knowing what you do about what they’re doing to him, about leaving Sark behind if you do manage to get out? Could you really do that?”
Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. She doesn’t answer.
“Okay,” he says. “Obviously this is difficult for you. I’m going to play devil’s advocate, here, and break it down. Option A: You and another operative make a strategic alliance with the end goal of getting the hell out of Dodge. Option B: You stay and suffer, on account of moral ambivalence and what a government agency might think. A government agency, if I may remind you, that you’ve already turned your back on. You’re not CIA anymore, Syd, or had you forgotten? But, yeah, you’re right. This is a tough call.”
So tired. They sit in silence for a while - who knows how long, really? Finally, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Can’t,” he says. “That’s against protocol.”
She sighs. “Yeah. I figured.”
“Whatever you decide, though, decide it soon. Tick-tock, Syd, ‘cause time is running out.” Tick-tock, she hears, echoing in her mind. Tick-tock. Exhaustion is dragging at her now, lapping greedily at the edges of consciousness. Vaughn gives her a half-smile. “It’s probably safe to sleep,” he says. “If they follow the pattern, they won’t be back for hours yet.” She gives him a look, but cannot bring herself to say the words. He knows anyway. “It’s alright. Don’t worry about me. We’ll talk again.” He gives her a full smile, then, and his eyes are green, bright. Alive.
So very tired. She thinks, When I wondered if they’d haunt me, I didn’t mean literally… And then the blackness comes.
He’s gone when she wakes up, of course, and she’s sure it was all a fevered dream after all. But there, on the ground beside her, is her pretty blue gag, folded into a neat little square.
Chapter #: The Other Shade of Freedom
She figures the guards have gotten more confident, because this time when they stop, they just leave her there, and move a few feet away. She stands, swaying gently in the breeze that isn’t there, and staring at the wall in front of her. Beige. She makes a solemn vow never to wear khaki again. The ebb and flow of the conversation moves over her, around her. She thinks she might have known this language, once upon a time, and if she tries, maybe she’d know it again. But that’s far too much work, and she prefers to let her mind flicker like the light on the far wall.
Flicker… Wait just a damn second, here. She turns her head slowly to the side. The hall she’s in is like the top left side of a T. From the long hall that intercepts her corridor, a light emanates, fading in and out in random, rapid bursts. She thinks, I know that flicker. And if she’s right, that means that… She turns her head to the other side. Beige, beige, beige, there! A door. Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. She knows that door.
Her guards are still ignoring her, and she starts inching her way down the hall. The door can’t be more than a yard away, she figures. But at this rate it might as well be a mile. Closer, closer, closer… Her fingers reach out, so slowly her arm trembles with the effort. Her eyes are glued to the guards. They’re still talking, but looking anxious to start moving on. Tick-tock. Closer…. There! Her skin brushes cool metal, and now her fingers are grasping for purchase on the knob. Her digits are sweaty with anticipation, and she realizes how hard it can be to open a door quietly. But the good news is that his door, too, must lock from the inside, because when she finally grabs and turns, she feels the latch slide back. The door swings open, slowly, slowly, and she takes a chance and glances inside the room.
It’s different from her own. This is no medieval dungeon, this is a science lab. Wires and hooks and tables and tools and lord knows what-all else. Everything glitters. In the far corner, she spots a heap that might resemble a person, if unfolded correctly. The guards are shifting now, and ready to move on. She has to go. But she risks one last look over her shoulder, and is violently startled to see the heap looking back. Looking back with very cold, very clear, blue eyes. She nods - just the slightest lift of her chin, and the eyes nod back at her. Closer. She turns and slides her way back to where they left her before. Sark’s on his own, now.
She makes it back to her swaying spot just as papers change hands, and her guards return to her. They’re still muttering bitterly about something, and don’t pay her any more attention than they would a rug.
Hands fist about her arms again, and then they’re dragging her off. She wonders when they’ll realize that she’s not fighting back, and that all this unnecessary force is just, well, unnecessary. They turn down the hallway with her light bulb, as she’s come to think of it, and she fixes the small glass globe with a fond gaze. She assumes they’re going to drag her on past again, but instead, they stop at the door right underneath her light. Flicker. A knock, a voice bidding enter, and then her guards are ushering her inside.
They emerge from a small, dark alcove into the main area. This room is not a cell, but an office. A rather lovely office, actually, with gleaming wooden floors and large picture windows. She notices it’s light outside. Odd. She would have sworn it was closer to 3 in the morning. Sloane is standing behind the large oak desk.
“My God, Sydney,” he says. “What have they done to you?”
She thinks she’s going to laugh. Or scream. Or possibly just cry. But she never gets a chance. There’s a rapid burst of gunfire from the hallway outside, followed by guttural yelling, and everyone’s head swings toward the noise. Sloane barks an order, and the guard to Sydney’s left drops her arm like it’s diseased, and bolts for the door. Before she even has a chance to think about it, she takes advantage of her other guard’s distraction. Her left hand curls in on itself, and she swings her arm as hard as she can. The heel of her palm collides solidly with her remaining guard’s nose, and she can feel it as the bridge above the soft cartilage shatters, driving tiny splinters of bone up into his vulnerable brain.
He’s dead before he hits the ground.
As his body brushes against hers on its way down, her fingers lash out and wrap around the butt of his pistol. She lets the guard’s downward momentum pull the firearm from its holster for her. There’s the tiniest fraction of a second when it catches on the ex-guard’s uniform, then it’s free and clear, and she’s got herself a weapon. Closer.
There’s a noise from the shadows of the door, and she spins and fires, not even bothering to check her aim first. God, it feels so good to be the one behind the trigger again. To be the one in control. Her returning guard jolts with the impact of bullets hitting flesh, then slumps over and slithers down the wall, trailing a bright smear of red behind him.
A shadow ripples in the edge of her vision. Her eyes narrow, and she swings the muzzle of her gun back towards Sloane. He freezes, hand in the drawer of the desk next to him. She makes a sly ‘tsk’ing noise. “You’re getting sloppy,” she hisses at him. “Time was, you would’ve had that gun out by now. What you got in there, Sloane? Sig Sauer? Glock? Colt? Time was, you would have shot me by now. Old age getting to you? Slowing you down? Making you think that keeping me locked up for - how long has it been, months? - and torturing me, maybe wasn’t such a fucking good idea? Because it wasn’t. I am going to end you.”
“Sydney. You must believe me when I say that I wasn’t here all these months. I didn’t even know you’d been captured! My chief of staff failed to inform me of that point, believing you to be an irrelevant player. I only found out this afternoon, and I had the guards bring you immediately. I would never have permitted -”
“The hell you wouldn’t!” But the seed of doubt is planted. It would explain why the guards never asked her anything. They had had no knowledge of who she was, and so would have had no jumping-off point for their interrogation. Damn him, it makes sense. She tightens her grip on the gun. Whether it makes sense or not, he is so not getting off that easy.
“Sloane, I swear to god I-” A shuffling noise at the door makes her drop her sentence and yank her head around once again. Her arm is not a split-second behind, but this time she hesitates before she pulls the trigger. The shadowed form of a man slides through the door, steps over the corpse at his feet, and pauses just inside the entry. Sydney finds herself nearly hypnotized by burning blue eyes that emerge from the darkness just moments before the rest of him. Eyes that pin her to her spot, and ask her just what the hell she’s doing pointing a gun at him.
Her first instinct is a knee-jerk reaction. Kill. But instead she lifts her hand up, and to the side, and he walks into the room. It occurs to her that she’s just let Sark out, and he’s armed and gunning for some retribution. He - the unflinching killer that he is. She hears a drawer slam, and realizes her distraction has allowed Sloane to retrieve his gun. Well, she thinks. This should be interesting. Closer.
They stand there, the three of them, and every Mexican standoff she’s ever seen runs through her head like a gag reel of bad Westerns. She’s suddenly very unsure about the choice she’s made. And from the looks that are being shot her way, the two men know it. She watches the guns trained on their targets. Sark’s on Sloane, and Sloane’s on her. Her gun can’t seem to decide between the two, and so her arm gently swings, back and forth, back and forth. But this is no good. She can only pick one before time runs out. Tick-tock.
“Sydney,” Sloane begins, “come on. Let’s think about this. You’ve known me your whole life - I’ve always been there for you, in the background. I looked out for you, stood up for you. When no one else would help you find your mother, I did. Think about this.” His voice is warm, coaxing, tender even, if you can apply such a word to such a man. And if you listen - Oh! Just there - you can hear the beginnings of the edge of fear.
When Sark’s voice comes, the contrast hits her like sheets of ice water to her senses. “Ms. Bristow,” he says, and his voice is cool, fluidly modulated, and utterly toneless. “Tell me something. Do you fancy living?”
She looks at him then, finally, and perhaps really for the first time. The blond hair is disheveled, streaked and matted with god knows what. The fine features of his face are barely visible beneath the bruises and the dirt. His bare feet are planted firmly, as if to assure himself that the ground hasn’t moved since the last time he checked. His clothes are ragged, bloodied and torn. Mockeries of their former glory. She realizes she can barely see the skin of his bare chest through the cuts, burns, and blood of wounds that have broken back open, or that never healed at all.
But his eyes are iced blue steel, and his aim never wavers.
And she knows that there’s only one man walking out of this room alive. Her arm settles on a target, and she cocks her head to the side. “Shall I even dignify that with a response?”
His eyes flick to hers then, fast - so fast. Glance gone before she’s even sure she sees it. But she knows he knows she made her choice. His long, slender fingers caress the trigger of his gun, and his aim, if possible, becomes even steadier. “Well then?” he says.
The small rivulets of blood have begun to pool at his feet now, and she knows from experience how distracting the sensation can be. Nothing like having your leg tickled while you’re facing down a psychopath. But he never blinks, and he doesn’t look down. Admiration fills her. Admiration she doesn’t want to feel, but is too honest to deny. And the thought, God, to be such a man, is there and gone before she knows what it means. But the small pools of blood are spreading, joining, becoming puddles, and now time really is running out.
She glides across the floor towards Sark, her movements slow and deliberate, so as not to startle him. Good rule of thumb? Don’t make the killer with the big gun jumpy. Her own weapon she keeps most definitely trained on Sloane. When she reaches Sark’s side, she raises her hand up and Gently, now! places it on the side of his neck. His pulse is rapid, thready, and his breathing is labored, though the laboring is well-hidden. She doesn’t need to look down at the floor to see growing puddles. Tick-tock, Syd, the voice whispers. Tick-tock. And she says, “Well then.”
She spares one last glance for Sloane, and she finds it in her to pity him, if only for a moment. Because, after all, this is just another conversation with a dead man, and this time there is no escape.
Sark stands, every ounce of his being poured into maintaining his concentration. And his balance. Though his eyes are only for Sloane, he finds that he knows when Sydney moves to stand next to him; senses when she reaches out to him. He’s ready, then, to flinch from the pain that human contact brings. But her touch is but a caress, fluttering across his skin to stop at the pulse point under his jaw, and suddenly he finds he can breathe again. She’s just taking his vitals, he realizes. Still, her touch burns like a firebrand against his skin, and he knows it’s because his body is freezing, and rapidly heading towards black-out. “Well then,” she says, and he feels himself wanting to grin, but doesn’t.
That edge of fear in Sloane is still there, he sees, and growing razor sharp. But the man hasn’t gotten this far by giving up easily, and he’s not about to start now. “Sydney, come on. Don’t let this happen. Don’t make this mistake. I love you, Sydney, you know I do. I’ve tried to be like a father to y…” His voice stops, abruptly, like a record whose needle has been lifted.
Sark feels Sydney’s fingers spasm once, reflexively, on the side of his neck, and it feels like firebolts in his veins, keeping the cold at bay. Fool, he thinks viciously, you killed her father! And every person in the room knows it. Game over. This time, when Sark feels the urge to grin, he does.
He senses Sydney lean up, lean in, and she murmurs in his ear, “Don’t be long.” And then she and her burning hand are gone, and he’s finding it hard to breathe again. His skin feels cased in ice, and his feet are beginning to lose purchase in the blood, and he knows he may not make it out of here alive after all. And that’s okay, he thinks, because everyone who matters knows that he won.
He cocks the hammer back, and winks at the man who was once feared by half the world, and is now just so much flesh, and bone, and empty nothingness.
And he pulls the trigger.
Sydney can’t control her sudden reaction to Sloane’s words, and she only hopes that she hasn’t startled Sark with her convulsive movement. She stares at Sloane, and he stares back, and she’s content that he knows he’s just sealed his own fate. Such careless words from such a habitually careful man, she thinks. Ah, the vagaries of fate. She looks up to see the edges of Sark’s mouth curve into a wicked smile, and she knows he knows it, too. She angles her head towards Sark’s ear. “Don’t be long.” He says nothing, does nothing, gives nothing. But she knows he hears her. Then she spins on her heel and walks in steady strides towards the hall. When the shot rings out, she doesn’t look back.
She thinks about running, of course, in the few moments while a closed door is between them. But she’s tired, so tired, and she remembers blue eyes, and a battered body.
When Sark finally stumbles out of the room, she’s waiting for him, there in the beige shadows. And after all, she thinks, as she helps him down the hall, it’s not as if she has anywhere left to run to.
Behind them, a light bulb flickers and burns out. And outside, the birds continue to sing.
Chapter #: Not Surrender
The building goes up in a glorious fountain of smoke and flame. The wrenching and screaming of the rubble as it collapses in on itself is music to her ears. The melodic sound of a perfect plan reaching culmination. She can’t deny, that despite so many years of protesting the stress that being an agent put on her life, she had been a damn good operative. And apparently, she still is.
Her body is trembling slightly now, from the adrenaline let-down, and the air flowing through her lungs seems all the sweeter for the smoke and grit. She smiles, and a voice says, “Well, Sydney?” Sark stands to her side, silhouetted against the blinding flames of the fire. His shirt is torn nearly in half, his leather pants smudged and cut in places. The graze from the bullet on his arm is closing, and the blood trails down his arm are drying, and darkening. His gelled hair is mussed, the spikes sticking out all willy-nilly. And she thinks she might hate him, because he should be miserably uncomfortable, but isn’t, and he hasn’t even smudged his eyeliner.
She cocks an inquisitive eyebrow at him, and relishes in the sensation of the cool night air caressing her overheated skin. “Well what?”
His eyes are sparking, alternately light and dark in the fickle light from the flames. “What do you propose we do now?”
And damned if mind-numbing sex isn’t the only answer she can come up with. He doesn’t say no.
Their first kiss is entirely unapologetic. His lips crash on to hers, and take, and take, and take. She’s relieved. She doesn’t think she could stand it if he went about this half-assed. Instead, she’s immediately lost in the taste of him. The urgency she feels is unexpected. Her body slams against his, and he traps it there, arms of steel holding her to her actions. She can already feel how much he wants her, and the knowledge is a rush that makes her giddy with power. “Now” she growls at him. He shoots her a quizzical look, and then glances around them. The fire is still burning, burning, and they’re the only people around. This small glade behind the knoll is well-shielded from view, assuming there was anyone out there to watch. And, quite frankly, she’s not sure that she cares even if there is.
He claws at the laces of her bustier, and she finishes shredding his shirt. The feel of bare, human skin next to her own is almost enough to undo her. It’s been so long… Sark’s got her down on the ground, now, and part of her is amazed that he’s actually capable of acting so uncontrolled. Finally, the leather and whalebone is gone, and her breasts spring free. Her mouth fastens on the base of his throat as he turns his attention to stroking her chafed peaks. Oh… god… Her skirt is gone, now, she has no idea how, and she’s so very glad that she couldn’t wear underwear with this outfit. She’s naked, completely open to the man before her, and she tries not to read too many levels of meaning into that. Sark’s pants are off in record time, and she notes in passing that the bullet graze has broken back open. Blood and sex, she thinks. Isn’t that just the way of it? And then forgets why it should matter, as he slides two fingers into her to see if she’s ready for him. Oh, thank god, she thinks. Skipping the foreplay. She’s not sure she could stand foreplay right now. Luckily, Sark seems to understand that. His fingers slide in and out, once, twice, and damn if she isn’t ready, wet and hot and dying for him. He leans over her, tip of his shaft poised at her entrance. Her hips buck, and she looks up into his eyes. Raging blue eyes, framed by flawless black eyeliner. She throws her head back, and he plunges in.
It almost hurts. He’s… well, much larger than she would have guessed, and she’s always been a small girl anyway. Add that to the fact she hasn’t been with a man since - no. There’s no way she’s thinking about him now. About anyone other than herself. Point is, he fills her utterly, strips everything away so that there’s no room in her for anything but him. She rakes her nails down his back, feels slick wetness well up under her touch. Blood, she thinks. Bleed for me. A twist of his hips and now he’s moving in her, making her move, making her feel. Lights pinwheel behind her eyes, and she’s drowning in it. Pleasure, such intense pleasure, all twisted up with that faint, hinting promise of pain. The sensation is instantly, mindlessly addictive, and she knows that this… whatever it is… is not ending with tonight. She won’t let it, because this feels too damn wrong, and too damn good, and he’s making it impossible to know the difference. Then rationalization is gone, and she can only lay there, mesmerized by the firelight shifting over his golden skin, as he thrusts again, and again, and again. Pounding her into a trembling mass of nerve-endings and pleasure-sensory nodes.
Streaks of red mark her torso. His blood, her blood, blood of the slain. The crabgrass is ruthless against her soft skin, and there is a very sharp, very knobby tree root digging inexorably into her kidney. The heat of the inferno nearby melds seamlessly with the heat of their passion, and the warmth is suffocating, overwhelming her nearly to the point of being nauseating. His teeth sink into her shoulder, and she thinks she may have died and gone to heaven. Then the first of her orgasms rips through her with brutal, blinding force, and she’s sure of it. And she screams like she’s never screamed before.
Interlude #: Musings
He gently kisses the scar on her abdomen, lightly trailing his fingers up and down the puckered ridge of flesh. She wonders, not for the first time, if he knows more than he’s let on about where those two years were spent. But she’s never asked, and he’s never told. And that’s okay, she tells herself, because she doesn’t really want to know anymore anyway.
PART TWO: http://nightfawkes.livejournal.com/3686.html#cutid1
Because this thing is so gigantimous, I have to chop it into bitty bits. Next post, next half.
I'm gonna post the Sarkney.
This is a fic that I started about 7 months ago, before Season 3 began. It's a Sarkney, that begins after the end of Season 2, and goes totally AU from there. This is not a happy fic. It's not really even a nice one, imho, but I'll make no apologies for that. Especially seeing as it's quite possibly the only Alias fic I'll ever write or post. Also, it's a great beast of a thing - 12,866 words at last count. So what I lack in fic quantity I apparently make up for in sheer verbosity. Yay me.
Oh - one last thing before I subject you to it: This is a WIP. Has been for months. I thought that maybe my muse was just taking the century off, but it occurred to me that maybe this thing is supposed to stay a WIP. I could only write it in disassociated chunks, and thread them together with a vague time line. I always told myself that eventually I'd make myself sit down and pound out the "in-betweens", as I think of the missing time, but now I'm not so sure they were ever meant to be written.
Yes, I know how stupid that sounds.
But my fic is already slightly... off... 'cause that's how Sydney demanded to be written. And so, in a way, the lack of smooth flow in my fic actually makes sense.
Yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. No pun intended.
Title: Untitled
Author: Fawkes
Email: Irish_fawkes42@hotmail.com
Rating: R-NC17ish at one point. Kids, be warned - it gets a bit naughty!
Spoilers: Not so much.
Time line: Post Season 2 AU. Sydney’s back from her mysterious disappearance, but no light was ever shed on the subject. Yes, Vaughn got married, bully for him. Sark escaped the CIA and has been evading them ever since. Sloane and Derevko are loose in the great wide world, and up to God-knows-what.
Summary: I could try to explain, but I’d probably fail miserably. If you read this, and want a detailed explanation, email me.
Disclaimer: They’re not mine. And I promise that when I’m done, I’ll dust them off and put them back where they belong.
Category: Odd.
Intro:
It begins with death. She supposes it’s as fine a place as any to begin, even fitting, in a way. Circle of life and all that rot, and isn’t it all just dust in the end anyway? Is there really any other way to begin, she wonders, or does she have it backwards, and it’s supposed to begin with life? Or is it that there can be no life without death, and vice versa, for that which is black defines what is white and we cannot know good without knowing evil? And isn’t that a paradox? Or maybe it’s a paradigm. A paragon? So she muses, and ponders, and even philosophizes. And in the end, she lets it begin with death.
The funerals are mercifully short. Solemn heads bowed under the weight of an endless blue sky. Words of comfort, spoken and ignored. Assurances that, surely now, they are in a better place. She is tempted to skip them altogether - been there, mourned that - but in the end she attends because, after all, she loved them. She considers, after, which is worse: Is it harder to stand beside the mourning widow of your ex-lover, and imagine the what-ifs? Or to stand stoically, for you, Daddy, a rock amidst the stream of condolences that flood you when you’re the last survivor of a battered bloodline? The can’t-haves, or the had-too-lates? The people and their tears come, the people and their tears go, and she thinks that she’s never seen such a beautiful day in her entire life. Which is worse? She decides the contest’s a draw, on account of surrealism.
And she wonders if they’ll haunt her.
Chapter #: Runaway.
The soft blare of the radio wakes her, and she rolls to her side to see the red digits of the clock face glaring balefully into the dark. 4:47AM. Time to get up. She reaches over to slap the thing to silence, and she can see the red glow between her fingers. Forty-seven, but not forty-five. Never forty-five. Normal times don’t work for her anymore; the standards of the hour, the half-hour, and the quarter-hour that mark the forward passage of life in this world. If you want 8:45, you get 8:36, 11:30 is 11:22, and just forget about every hour, on the hour. Won’t happen. She’s tried to reprogram, of course, but she failed, and so she’s been like this ever since she came back from… She drops the thought. Easier to be defiant than admit she still has no answers. Easier to pretend she doesn’t care anymore.
Fucking Rambaldi. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Not that that means much. Lately, she’s not even sure what way this way is, much less any other way it could be. That’s the trouble, she supposes, when you can’t keep track of the years. When time itself has cast you aside. Realities have this annoying tendency to not. stay. put.
She slides from under the covers and pads to the window. The sky is an artist’s study of black on black, with a few shadows thrown in for contrast. A hand to the glass, and she can feel the chill of the air outside, biting her hand through the pane. Pain. Briefly, she wonders what time of year it is, and then shrugs. Like it matters? The seasons here are heat, heat, heat, and heat. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, there’s a little rain thrown in, just because mudslides are so much fun. Kind of like living on the mouth of hell. City of Angels my ass. Somewhere, God’s laughing. Still, she’d best make an effort to find out, because in other places in the world, they still have variations in the weather with their seasons. Or so she hears.
She turns back to her bed, and the glowing red digits of the clock seem to taunt her. 4:49, they say. Give it a try. She stares at the clock, wide-eyed, and wills it to change to 4:50 as she watches. Just a simple, ten-minute increment, that’s all she asks. Just some sign that the darkness of the months since her return has been nothing but a string of very odd coincidences. Please. The red seems to glow with an inner fire, brighter, and brighter, and surely by now it’s been 60 seconds. But the clock still glares at her. 4:49, it says, 4:49 4:49 4:49. If it could, she thinks, she rather imagines it would stick its tongue out at her. Her eyes are beginning to burn now, and water, and the red is unrelenting. Finally, she blinks. And it’s just a split-second, just a fraction of a moment of a heart-beat. But it doesn’t matter. When she looks again, the clock says 4:52, and she wonders why she even bothers trying, anymore. This game, she’s long since lost.
She thinks, Surrealism. Noun. Defined by the American Heritage® Dictionary as a 20th - century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. That’s me. And the clock gives her a sly wink. 4:54. She suppresses the urge to throw the damn thing through the window, and turns away to dress.
When she’s done, she makes the conscious check of each article. Jeans, shirt, jacket, boots, bag. It seems ridiculous, and juvenile. She’s been dressing herself for years, after all. But she’d hate to walk out of here only half-clothed, and God knows she’s done that once or twice lately. The clock chuckles at her. 5:23, it says, gee, where does the time go? She walks over, grabs the beast, and rips its cord from the wall. The fiery numerals finally fade, and die away, banked by the force of her wrath. Or the lack of electricity. Either way, I win. She drops the thing in the middle of the floor, gives it a light kick for good measure, and leaves it in favor of moving to the front door. She stares down the path. Broken stones, lining the way to the great wide nothing. The sky is lighter now, a palette of navy and gray as the sun struggles to rise, and it’s going to be a beautiful day. Mission is go. Alpha team, move out.
Sydney walks down, and out, and away from her life. And around her, the birds begin to sing.
Chapter #: Flicker.
She’s too tired to fight by the time they start dragging her through the halls. The grips on her arms are bruising, and her fingertips are starting to tingle - first sign that her blood circulation is being cut off. The hallways seem interminable; endless stretches of beige walls broken only by beige doors, repeating, repeating. After a few minutes, she’s convinced they’re simply dragging her in circles for fun. But there, above that one door… A light bulb, flickering sporadically. Its light is strong now, she thinks, but time will tell. It will weaken as the days go by, and falter, until finally it burns out altogether. Pity. She’s quite certain she’s never been down this corridor before.
She keeps her eyes fastened on the light bulb as they pull her down to the end of the hall, and around yet another corner. Suddenly, she realizes she can hear other voices. Her guards tense. Anomaly, not in the program. She leans her head back and twists it around, and there, out of the corner of her eye, she can see it. One of the beige doors in this beige world, stuck open. There are men struggling with it; some pushing, some pulling, and some searching for the mysterious cause of the jam. Their luck seems limited at best. Her captors pause, obviously hesitant to take her past the open door, and she realizes that there’s something important here, if she can only figure out what it is. She can practically taste the reluctance of the two men holding her up. There’s a whispered word, a flurry of aborted hand gestures, and the two men tighten their grip. Her fingertips are numb now, and sparks of fire shoot up the nerves in her arms. Apparently, a decision is reached using this not-language, because the two men move as one, dragging her as quickly as they can, down and down and towards the door. She gives them points for evasive efforts, but still she manages a glance as they pass.
Impressions. Splatters, she thinks. Yes, the red and brown and red would be blood splatters. She scents heat, as well, and that unmistakable crawling in the back of her sinuses means burnt flesh. And there, hanging limply over the edge of a glittering metal table, the back of a head of blond hair that seems awfully familiar. Impressions. She could figure it out, she knows, if they would just give her half a sec. But she’s already yards beyond the door, and the chance is gone. As they take yet another beige turn, she can hear faint laughs, and shouts of triumph. Then a quiet slam, and now the only noises are the harsh breathing of her guards, and the slick slide of her legs on the ground.
Finally, the guards slow down. Beige, beige, beige. This door must be hers. The men stand her up between them, and she watches, incredulous, as the one to her right reaches out to the doorknob. When it comes to Sloane, the standard operating procedure includes bars, and lasers, and locks. But the knob is perfectly round, smooth, normal. There are no key card slots, no digital keypads, not even a damn keyhole. The hand grasps, twists, and the door opens. Easy? She wonders why she should feel insulted.
Later, she would confess that she had been expecting more beige - never anticipate - and so was utterly unprepared for the positively medieval looking dungeon that is waiting for her. The floor, walls, and ceiling are all rough-hewn, unpolished stone, and there are actually chains fastened to the walls. Trite. A small heap of tattered blankets and a lone bucket mark one corner, and she knows where she’s going to be spending her days. Suddenly, she finds she’s not too tired to struggle after all. They’re waiting for this, though, and the battle is lost before it’s even begun. She’s pinned down, and her hands are cuffed behind her back and fastened to the chains in the wall. Her legs are bound, as well, just tight enough that she cannot slip them through her wrists to bring her hands in front of her. Damn. A piece of cloth is shoved between her teeth, and she can feel a few strands of hair being pulled as the gag is knotted tightly behind her head.
Finally, they’re gone, and she lays there feeling like so much trussed turkey. She shifts her hips and shoulders, and angles her head to find the door. If they really have no locks, she thinks, she may yet stand a chance. She wonders, though. Are they really that confident that these chains will hold her, or are they just…
Oh, shit. Well that certainly explains it.
There is no door. At least, not one that she can see. The wall where the door should be is smooth, blank. Sure, it all makes sense now. You don’t need a lock on your doorknob if there is no goddamn doorknob. And she could only begin to hazard a guess as to where the doorknob should even be.
Her hands are entirely numb, now, and her shoulders already beginning to feel the pain of their new strained position. And it occurs to her that she may be in a bit of trouble.
The days that follow are a blur.
They always keep the lights on, of course, and they randomly change when they feed her and empty her bucket. But she notices, if she can imagine in blocks of time, that it always goes something like: rest, torture, rest, rest, torture, rest, torture, rest, rest, torture, etc, so on and so forth, ad infinitum. The torture is a pain, of course, but she finds that the real issue is that they don’t seem to be torturing her for any particular reason. There is no, “Where I can find the XYZ,” or “Tell me who you work for”. Just the silence, the loneliness and the hurt, and the aching question of Why? Soon, she finds herself looking forward to the scraping of stone on stone that signals the arrival of a captor. Not right. She hides it, of course, but she realizes that the yearning for human companionship is doing a better job on her will power than mere whippings and broken bones ever could. She realizes that she’s dying to tell them something, anything, if only they’d ask.
If only there was someone she could talk to.
She begins using her chains to scratch letters into the stones. This is difficult with her hands cuffed behind her, of course, but it’s not like she’s in any great rush. She doesn’t even have anything to say, really, no great pearls of wisdom to pass on to the next fellow who gets himself caught and brought in here. Just letters, disjointed and unconnected, but communication in their own right. She gets a sick satisfaction at the thought of Sloane’s men studying the walls, and working for days on end to break the code there that doesn’t exist. A small victory, she thinks, but she’ll take what she can get.
She’s not sure when the fever sets in, or even why. A wound gone bad, perhaps, or maybe an allergic reaction to one of their drugs. Does it matter? All she knows is that no torture can hold a candle to the misery she’s feeling now. She longs to sleep, yet fears to, lest she lose the battle she’s endlessly waging to keep the contents of her stomach from making a repeat appearance. She reminds herself constantly to beg the guards to remove her gag the next time they come. It would be an ending unsatisfactory to everyone involved, she thinks, should she choke to death on her own vomit in this nothing of a cell. Not right. She fights, and fights, and thinks that nothing in this world ends up the way one would think it should. She doesn’t know if she ever speaks to the guards - she sees nothing but pinwheels of bright flashing colors, and can’t think past the constant roaring of the silence in her ears. Her cell seems to spin endlessly, and she’s pretty sure she’s losing that battle with her nausea.
And then, inevitably, there’s nothing but the darkness, and she would swear that she could hear the birds singing.
Chapter #: Conversations with Dead Men.
The first time she sees Vaughn, What took him so long?, she’s laying with her back to the wall. She opens her eyes to see him sitting beside her, his head leaning back against the stones, fiddling with a bit of cloth. At first she’s sure she’s dreaming, but she can feel every bump in the floor beneath her, can sense the damp and cold that creeps, and creeps, until it pervades every cell of her body. She feels the metal of her cuffs, abrasive against chafed wrists, and she knows that even in her darkest dreams she could never imagine the utterly foul aftertaste of her gag. Besides, she thinks, she’s too tired to be asleep.
So then she figures it has to be a lingering effect from her fever, or the myriad of drugs flowing through her veins. But she doesn’t feel feverish, and the symptoms, if symptoms they are, do not match any drug known to her. Perfect lucidity while hallucinating? Don’t think so.
So she’s left with the conclusion that she’s out of her mind. Which is, of course, the first thing he addresses when he turns his head to look at her.
“You’re not crazy,” he says. She chokes on a laugh. Prove it, she thinks fiercely. He leans over and gives her a gentle kiss on her brow. “It’s okay Syd, you can speak to me.” He holds up the object he was fiddling with, and she sees it’s her gag. The relief she feels is so great, she immediately leans over and retches into the bucket beside her. Tired. Vaughn smiles sadly, folds the gag into a neat little square, and places it on the ground between them. She notices that it’s a very pretty shade of blue. “Syd,” Vaughn says, “you’ve had better days.” She glares at him, because this is not news to her. He continues, “Sark’s here too, you know.”
Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. “I know.”
“If you could find him, talk to him, work… something… out. Much as I’m the last person who wants to say this, you would stand a much better chance of getting out of here alive with him at your side.” And she sighs, because this, too, has already occurred to her.
“The problem,” she begins slowly, “is that it’s Sark.” She takes a deep breath. “I mean, what would the government think, and the CIA? We both know that extenuating circumstances are rarely taken into serious consideration in these scenarios. Allying with the enemy is simply allying with the enemy. And last time I checked, Sark was definitely on that list.” She leans her head back against the wall, and closes her eyes briefly. “Then again, I’m starting to think that I’m not going to make it out of here without some sort of help.” She opens her eyes to see his brow draw into its familiar furrow. “Stop it,” she says. “You’re dead, so you don’t count anymore.”
“Syd, I agree that these are all things to take into consideration. But you also forgot to mention one other point.”
“What’s that?”
“I know you, Syd. Or I did. So I’m just wondering, how would you feel?” She gives him a blank look. “How would you feel, knowing what you do about what they’re doing to him, about leaving Sark behind if you do manage to get out? Could you really do that?”
Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. She doesn’t answer.
“Okay,” he says. “Obviously this is difficult for you. I’m going to play devil’s advocate, here, and break it down. Option A: You and another operative make a strategic alliance with the end goal of getting the hell out of Dodge. Option B: You stay and suffer, on account of moral ambivalence and what a government agency might think. A government agency, if I may remind you, that you’ve already turned your back on. You’re not CIA anymore, Syd, or had you forgotten? But, yeah, you’re right. This is a tough call.”
So tired. They sit in silence for a while - who knows how long, really? Finally, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Can’t,” he says. “That’s against protocol.”
She sighs. “Yeah. I figured.”
“Whatever you decide, though, decide it soon. Tick-tock, Syd, ‘cause time is running out.” Tick-tock, she hears, echoing in her mind. Tick-tock. Exhaustion is dragging at her now, lapping greedily at the edges of consciousness. Vaughn gives her a half-smile. “It’s probably safe to sleep,” he says. “If they follow the pattern, they won’t be back for hours yet.” She gives him a look, but cannot bring herself to say the words. He knows anyway. “It’s alright. Don’t worry about me. We’ll talk again.” He gives her a full smile, then, and his eyes are green, bright. Alive.
So very tired. She thinks, When I wondered if they’d haunt me, I didn’t mean literally… And then the blackness comes.
He’s gone when she wakes up, of course, and she’s sure it was all a fevered dream after all. But there, on the ground beside her, is her pretty blue gag, folded into a neat little square.
Chapter #: The Other Shade of Freedom
She figures the guards have gotten more confident, because this time when they stop, they just leave her there, and move a few feet away. She stands, swaying gently in the breeze that isn’t there, and staring at the wall in front of her. Beige. She makes a solemn vow never to wear khaki again. The ebb and flow of the conversation moves over her, around her. She thinks she might have known this language, once upon a time, and if she tries, maybe she’d know it again. But that’s far too much work, and she prefers to let her mind flicker like the light on the far wall.
Flicker… Wait just a damn second, here. She turns her head slowly to the side. The hall she’s in is like the top left side of a T. From the long hall that intercepts her corridor, a light emanates, fading in and out in random, rapid bursts. She thinks, I know that flicker. And if she’s right, that means that… She turns her head to the other side. Beige, beige, beige, there! A door. Blood. Fire. Pain. Blond. She knows that door.
Her guards are still ignoring her, and she starts inching her way down the hall. The door can’t be more than a yard away, she figures. But at this rate it might as well be a mile. Closer, closer, closer… Her fingers reach out, so slowly her arm trembles with the effort. Her eyes are glued to the guards. They’re still talking, but looking anxious to start moving on. Tick-tock. Closer…. There! Her skin brushes cool metal, and now her fingers are grasping for purchase on the knob. Her digits are sweaty with anticipation, and she realizes how hard it can be to open a door quietly. But the good news is that his door, too, must lock from the inside, because when she finally grabs and turns, she feels the latch slide back. The door swings open, slowly, slowly, and she takes a chance and glances inside the room.
It’s different from her own. This is no medieval dungeon, this is a science lab. Wires and hooks and tables and tools and lord knows what-all else. Everything glitters. In the far corner, she spots a heap that might resemble a person, if unfolded correctly. The guards are shifting now, and ready to move on. She has to go. But she risks one last look over her shoulder, and is violently startled to see the heap looking back. Looking back with very cold, very clear, blue eyes. She nods - just the slightest lift of her chin, and the eyes nod back at her. Closer. She turns and slides her way back to where they left her before. Sark’s on his own, now.
She makes it back to her swaying spot just as papers change hands, and her guards return to her. They’re still muttering bitterly about something, and don’t pay her any more attention than they would a rug.
Hands fist about her arms again, and then they’re dragging her off. She wonders when they’ll realize that she’s not fighting back, and that all this unnecessary force is just, well, unnecessary. They turn down the hallway with her light bulb, as she’s come to think of it, and she fixes the small glass globe with a fond gaze. She assumes they’re going to drag her on past again, but instead, they stop at the door right underneath her light. Flicker. A knock, a voice bidding enter, and then her guards are ushering her inside.
They emerge from a small, dark alcove into the main area. This room is not a cell, but an office. A rather lovely office, actually, with gleaming wooden floors and large picture windows. She notices it’s light outside. Odd. She would have sworn it was closer to 3 in the morning. Sloane is standing behind the large oak desk.
“My God, Sydney,” he says. “What have they done to you?”
She thinks she’s going to laugh. Or scream. Or possibly just cry. But she never gets a chance. There’s a rapid burst of gunfire from the hallway outside, followed by guttural yelling, and everyone’s head swings toward the noise. Sloane barks an order, and the guard to Sydney’s left drops her arm like it’s diseased, and bolts for the door. Before she even has a chance to think about it, she takes advantage of her other guard’s distraction. Her left hand curls in on itself, and she swings her arm as hard as she can. The heel of her palm collides solidly with her remaining guard’s nose, and she can feel it as the bridge above the soft cartilage shatters, driving tiny splinters of bone up into his vulnerable brain.
He’s dead before he hits the ground.
As his body brushes against hers on its way down, her fingers lash out and wrap around the butt of his pistol. She lets the guard’s downward momentum pull the firearm from its holster for her. There’s the tiniest fraction of a second when it catches on the ex-guard’s uniform, then it’s free and clear, and she’s got herself a weapon. Closer.
There’s a noise from the shadows of the door, and she spins and fires, not even bothering to check her aim first. God, it feels so good to be the one behind the trigger again. To be the one in control. Her returning guard jolts with the impact of bullets hitting flesh, then slumps over and slithers down the wall, trailing a bright smear of red behind him.
A shadow ripples in the edge of her vision. Her eyes narrow, and she swings the muzzle of her gun back towards Sloane. He freezes, hand in the drawer of the desk next to him. She makes a sly ‘tsk’ing noise. “You’re getting sloppy,” she hisses at him. “Time was, you would’ve had that gun out by now. What you got in there, Sloane? Sig Sauer? Glock? Colt? Time was, you would have shot me by now. Old age getting to you? Slowing you down? Making you think that keeping me locked up for - how long has it been, months? - and torturing me, maybe wasn’t such a fucking good idea? Because it wasn’t. I am going to end you.”
“Sydney. You must believe me when I say that I wasn’t here all these months. I didn’t even know you’d been captured! My chief of staff failed to inform me of that point, believing you to be an irrelevant player. I only found out this afternoon, and I had the guards bring you immediately. I would never have permitted -”
“The hell you wouldn’t!” But the seed of doubt is planted. It would explain why the guards never asked her anything. They had had no knowledge of who she was, and so would have had no jumping-off point for their interrogation. Damn him, it makes sense. She tightens her grip on the gun. Whether it makes sense or not, he is so not getting off that easy.
“Sloane, I swear to god I-” A shuffling noise at the door makes her drop her sentence and yank her head around once again. Her arm is not a split-second behind, but this time she hesitates before she pulls the trigger. The shadowed form of a man slides through the door, steps over the corpse at his feet, and pauses just inside the entry. Sydney finds herself nearly hypnotized by burning blue eyes that emerge from the darkness just moments before the rest of him. Eyes that pin her to her spot, and ask her just what the hell she’s doing pointing a gun at him.
Her first instinct is a knee-jerk reaction. Kill. But instead she lifts her hand up, and to the side, and he walks into the room. It occurs to her that she’s just let Sark out, and he’s armed and gunning for some retribution. He - the unflinching killer that he is. She hears a drawer slam, and realizes her distraction has allowed Sloane to retrieve his gun. Well, she thinks. This should be interesting. Closer.
They stand there, the three of them, and every Mexican standoff she’s ever seen runs through her head like a gag reel of bad Westerns. She’s suddenly very unsure about the choice she’s made. And from the looks that are being shot her way, the two men know it. She watches the guns trained on their targets. Sark’s on Sloane, and Sloane’s on her. Her gun can’t seem to decide between the two, and so her arm gently swings, back and forth, back and forth. But this is no good. She can only pick one before time runs out. Tick-tock.
“Sydney,” Sloane begins, “come on. Let’s think about this. You’ve known me your whole life - I’ve always been there for you, in the background. I looked out for you, stood up for you. When no one else would help you find your mother, I did. Think about this.” His voice is warm, coaxing, tender even, if you can apply such a word to such a man. And if you listen - Oh! Just there - you can hear the beginnings of the edge of fear.
When Sark’s voice comes, the contrast hits her like sheets of ice water to her senses. “Ms. Bristow,” he says, and his voice is cool, fluidly modulated, and utterly toneless. “Tell me something. Do you fancy living?”
She looks at him then, finally, and perhaps really for the first time. The blond hair is disheveled, streaked and matted with god knows what. The fine features of his face are barely visible beneath the bruises and the dirt. His bare feet are planted firmly, as if to assure himself that the ground hasn’t moved since the last time he checked. His clothes are ragged, bloodied and torn. Mockeries of their former glory. She realizes she can barely see the skin of his bare chest through the cuts, burns, and blood of wounds that have broken back open, or that never healed at all.
But his eyes are iced blue steel, and his aim never wavers.
And she knows that there’s only one man walking out of this room alive. Her arm settles on a target, and she cocks her head to the side. “Shall I even dignify that with a response?”
His eyes flick to hers then, fast - so fast. Glance gone before she’s even sure she sees it. But she knows he knows she made her choice. His long, slender fingers caress the trigger of his gun, and his aim, if possible, becomes even steadier. “Well then?” he says.
The small rivulets of blood have begun to pool at his feet now, and she knows from experience how distracting the sensation can be. Nothing like having your leg tickled while you’re facing down a psychopath. But he never blinks, and he doesn’t look down. Admiration fills her. Admiration she doesn’t want to feel, but is too honest to deny. And the thought, God, to be such a man, is there and gone before she knows what it means. But the small pools of blood are spreading, joining, becoming puddles, and now time really is running out.
She glides across the floor towards Sark, her movements slow and deliberate, so as not to startle him. Good rule of thumb? Don’t make the killer with the big gun jumpy. Her own weapon she keeps most definitely trained on Sloane. When she reaches Sark’s side, she raises her hand up and Gently, now! places it on the side of his neck. His pulse is rapid, thready, and his breathing is labored, though the laboring is well-hidden. She doesn’t need to look down at the floor to see growing puddles. Tick-tock, Syd, the voice whispers. Tick-tock. And she says, “Well then.”
She spares one last glance for Sloane, and she finds it in her to pity him, if only for a moment. Because, after all, this is just another conversation with a dead man, and this time there is no escape.
Sark stands, every ounce of his being poured into maintaining his concentration. And his balance. Though his eyes are only for Sloane, he finds that he knows when Sydney moves to stand next to him; senses when she reaches out to him. He’s ready, then, to flinch from the pain that human contact brings. But her touch is but a caress, fluttering across his skin to stop at the pulse point under his jaw, and suddenly he finds he can breathe again. She’s just taking his vitals, he realizes. Still, her touch burns like a firebrand against his skin, and he knows it’s because his body is freezing, and rapidly heading towards black-out. “Well then,” she says, and he feels himself wanting to grin, but doesn’t.
That edge of fear in Sloane is still there, he sees, and growing razor sharp. But the man hasn’t gotten this far by giving up easily, and he’s not about to start now. “Sydney, come on. Don’t let this happen. Don’t make this mistake. I love you, Sydney, you know I do. I’ve tried to be like a father to y…” His voice stops, abruptly, like a record whose needle has been lifted.
Sark feels Sydney’s fingers spasm once, reflexively, on the side of his neck, and it feels like firebolts in his veins, keeping the cold at bay. Fool, he thinks viciously, you killed her father! And every person in the room knows it. Game over. This time, when Sark feels the urge to grin, he does.
He senses Sydney lean up, lean in, and she murmurs in his ear, “Don’t be long.” And then she and her burning hand are gone, and he’s finding it hard to breathe again. His skin feels cased in ice, and his feet are beginning to lose purchase in the blood, and he knows he may not make it out of here alive after all. And that’s okay, he thinks, because everyone who matters knows that he won.
He cocks the hammer back, and winks at the man who was once feared by half the world, and is now just so much flesh, and bone, and empty nothingness.
And he pulls the trigger.
Sydney can’t control her sudden reaction to Sloane’s words, and she only hopes that she hasn’t startled Sark with her convulsive movement. She stares at Sloane, and he stares back, and she’s content that he knows he’s just sealed his own fate. Such careless words from such a habitually careful man, she thinks. Ah, the vagaries of fate. She looks up to see the edges of Sark’s mouth curve into a wicked smile, and she knows he knows it, too. She angles her head towards Sark’s ear. “Don’t be long.” He says nothing, does nothing, gives nothing. But she knows he hears her. Then she spins on her heel and walks in steady strides towards the hall. When the shot rings out, she doesn’t look back.
She thinks about running, of course, in the few moments while a closed door is between them. But she’s tired, so tired, and she remembers blue eyes, and a battered body.
When Sark finally stumbles out of the room, she’s waiting for him, there in the beige shadows. And after all, she thinks, as she helps him down the hall, it’s not as if she has anywhere left to run to.
Behind them, a light bulb flickers and burns out. And outside, the birds continue to sing.
Chapter #: Not Surrender
The building goes up in a glorious fountain of smoke and flame. The wrenching and screaming of the rubble as it collapses in on itself is music to her ears. The melodic sound of a perfect plan reaching culmination. She can’t deny, that despite so many years of protesting the stress that being an agent put on her life, she had been a damn good operative. And apparently, she still is.
Her body is trembling slightly now, from the adrenaline let-down, and the air flowing through her lungs seems all the sweeter for the smoke and grit. She smiles, and a voice says, “Well, Sydney?” Sark stands to her side, silhouetted against the blinding flames of the fire. His shirt is torn nearly in half, his leather pants smudged and cut in places. The graze from the bullet on his arm is closing, and the blood trails down his arm are drying, and darkening. His gelled hair is mussed, the spikes sticking out all willy-nilly. And she thinks she might hate him, because he should be miserably uncomfortable, but isn’t, and he hasn’t even smudged his eyeliner.
She cocks an inquisitive eyebrow at him, and relishes in the sensation of the cool night air caressing her overheated skin. “Well what?”
His eyes are sparking, alternately light and dark in the fickle light from the flames. “What do you propose we do now?”
And damned if mind-numbing sex isn’t the only answer she can come up with. He doesn’t say no.
Their first kiss is entirely unapologetic. His lips crash on to hers, and take, and take, and take. She’s relieved. She doesn’t think she could stand it if he went about this half-assed. Instead, she’s immediately lost in the taste of him. The urgency she feels is unexpected. Her body slams against his, and he traps it there, arms of steel holding her to her actions. She can already feel how much he wants her, and the knowledge is a rush that makes her giddy with power. “Now” she growls at him. He shoots her a quizzical look, and then glances around them. The fire is still burning, burning, and they’re the only people around. This small glade behind the knoll is well-shielded from view, assuming there was anyone out there to watch. And, quite frankly, she’s not sure that she cares even if there is.
He claws at the laces of her bustier, and she finishes shredding his shirt. The feel of bare, human skin next to her own is almost enough to undo her. It’s been so long… Sark’s got her down on the ground, now, and part of her is amazed that he’s actually capable of acting so uncontrolled. Finally, the leather and whalebone is gone, and her breasts spring free. Her mouth fastens on the base of his throat as he turns his attention to stroking her chafed peaks. Oh… god… Her skirt is gone, now, she has no idea how, and she’s so very glad that she couldn’t wear underwear with this outfit. She’s naked, completely open to the man before her, and she tries not to read too many levels of meaning into that. Sark’s pants are off in record time, and she notes in passing that the bullet graze has broken back open. Blood and sex, she thinks. Isn’t that just the way of it? And then forgets why it should matter, as he slides two fingers into her to see if she’s ready for him. Oh, thank god, she thinks. Skipping the foreplay. She’s not sure she could stand foreplay right now. Luckily, Sark seems to understand that. His fingers slide in and out, once, twice, and damn if she isn’t ready, wet and hot and dying for him. He leans over her, tip of his shaft poised at her entrance. Her hips buck, and she looks up into his eyes. Raging blue eyes, framed by flawless black eyeliner. She throws her head back, and he plunges in.
It almost hurts. He’s… well, much larger than she would have guessed, and she’s always been a small girl anyway. Add that to the fact she hasn’t been with a man since - no. There’s no way she’s thinking about him now. About anyone other than herself. Point is, he fills her utterly, strips everything away so that there’s no room in her for anything but him. She rakes her nails down his back, feels slick wetness well up under her touch. Blood, she thinks. Bleed for me. A twist of his hips and now he’s moving in her, making her move, making her feel. Lights pinwheel behind her eyes, and she’s drowning in it. Pleasure, such intense pleasure, all twisted up with that faint, hinting promise of pain. The sensation is instantly, mindlessly addictive, and she knows that this… whatever it is… is not ending with tonight. She won’t let it, because this feels too damn wrong, and too damn good, and he’s making it impossible to know the difference. Then rationalization is gone, and she can only lay there, mesmerized by the firelight shifting over his golden skin, as he thrusts again, and again, and again. Pounding her into a trembling mass of nerve-endings and pleasure-sensory nodes.
Streaks of red mark her torso. His blood, her blood, blood of the slain. The crabgrass is ruthless against her soft skin, and there is a very sharp, very knobby tree root digging inexorably into her kidney. The heat of the inferno nearby melds seamlessly with the heat of their passion, and the warmth is suffocating, overwhelming her nearly to the point of being nauseating. His teeth sink into her shoulder, and she thinks she may have died and gone to heaven. Then the first of her orgasms rips through her with brutal, blinding force, and she’s sure of it. And she screams like she’s never screamed before.
Interlude #: Musings
He gently kisses the scar on her abdomen, lightly trailing his fingers up and down the puckered ridge of flesh. She wonders, not for the first time, if he knows more than he’s let on about where those two years were spent. But she’s never asked, and he’s never told. And that’s okay, she tells herself, because she doesn’t really want to know anymore anyway.
PART TWO: http://nightfawkes.livejournal.com/3686.html#cutid1
Because this thing is so gigantimous, I have to chop it into bitty bits. Next post, next half.