Author: Brix
Rating: R
Pairing: Sark/Sydney
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. Imitation is the highest form of compliment.
Spoilers: Through 3x04
Summary: Sydney’s life is a bad dream – and then she wakes up. She spends a lot of time in the kitchen. Caught in a world where everything is different, she must untangle Rambaldi’s Prophesy and realize that the only important thing in life is choice.
Feedback: Flowers need water and writers need feedback. Be kind, water a writer today. shadesofbrixton@yahoo.com
Archive: Take it anywhere, but drop me a line so I know where it goes.
Author’s Notes: Please see the bottom of the page for the near-endless thanks that I owe to several parties on this fic. For those of you who are reading out of fandom, visit ||The Fic Primer||


“If Gods love men they will certainly disclose their purposes to them in sleep.”
- Cicero



Sydney Bristow’s life was destroyed.

After she had woken up in that alley in Hong Kong, wearing a familiar sweater she thought she remembered from Francie’s closet and what felt like a whole lot of blood, her life had flipped like a magician’s table-cloth removal trick gone awry. Her mother was missing, a fugitive once more. Her father was behind bars. Her old partner, a man she had assumed she could rely on for anything at any time, had abandoned her to the ranks of executive placement.

Her lover was married.

It hurt more than she thought it would. Not as much as Danny; not that sucker punch to the gut and frame-wracking sobbing. But Danny’s death had embodied a sense of closure for her, and came with an assurance that no such tragedy would ever befall her a second time, unless she allowed it. She knew the consequences of having any kind of relationship in the job she was in.

She had fooled herself into thinking that someone who knew the risks as well as she did would spare her from that kind of misery.

Instead, there was violence. She knew what to do with violence, it fit like a winter scarf and kept her warm and comfortable and loose around him. But it was easy to let that hate simmer, because there was still so much more to see, to realize, to adjust to.

Her father came back, and he was marvelous and still loved her. Her father could be her guiding light and she could carefully avert her gaze whenever he offered her that look of compassion, that look of ‘now you know.’ They had always managed very well without having to say anything to one another.

Sloane, no matter what assumptions he had pulled over the eyes of the world, was still an evil, evil man. Will was missing. Francie was dead. Marshall was expecting.

The world had gone on around her.

When they brought her back in, she could see just how much it had. And how much they needed her. If she had been director, and Dixon in her position, she would have taken one look at him and ordered imprisonment and trial. But they trusted her where she did not trust herself, and she could see the novelty of it all crossing their faces every time she saw someone she knew from before.

She was assigned to Weiss, to be his pet project, and she could see how grateful he was to have something to do with a mystery this complex. And when she was put out in the field, she wanted to shake him and ask him why he trusted her, why he willingly put weapons of destruction in her hands when neither of them had any idea what she was capable of, what she might do despite herself.

When they got back, and she was debriefed as if no time had passed at all, as if she was just another agent, she could think for a few moments that things were normal. That it was Kendall staring down at her instead of one of the men she betrayed to save, and that her father was sitting at her side because he was the strongest person she knew, not because she had played dirty to get him there.

But at home – her new home, in a strange place with strange things in it – she had no choice but to curl up into a tiny ball and cry until the comforter was sodden and disgusting with tears, or until she fell asleep, exhausted and unspeakable.

Sydney Bristow’s life was destroyed; it was all confusing, and horrible, and nothing made sense.

Until she woke up.

* * *

The ringing in her ears from the alarm clock let her know that everything was going to be normal when she opened her eyes, because she could still feel the press of the pillow under her cheek, and that was very, very different from the texture of asphalt and concrete.

Only the alarm clock did not sound right. It sounded like a heart monitor. And okay, maybe she had been taken to the hospital for something. Weiss had found her in her apartment, maybe, with the pills she had thought of using but wasn’t quite brave enough to. And everything was going to be just fine, if she could just move her legs.

Her eyes flickered, and hurt, because would it kill the hospital so much to turn down the damn lights a little? And then something was in the way, blocking the halogen, and if she squinted it was…no good. Still blurry. But the voices sounded so familiar…

“Syd, you…oh my god. Somebody call a doctor!”

“What the hell is going on in – ”

“Arvin, she’s awake, if we could – ”

“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to – ”

The alarm was shut off, and then tubes were being pulled out of her arms, and new ones put back in, and the last thing she was sure she saw before she passed out again was Sark, being forced out of the room by two nurses.

* * *

“I don’t regret moving on with my life.”

He says it with a straight face, so she can’t doubt him. If there’s anything she’s learned about Vaughn since she’s known him, it’s that he chooses his words carefully around her. And she can feel the hot well of tears that she’s been carrying with her since she saw the wedding band climb up her throat and into the section of her mouth that tells her when Mexican food it too spicy.

She knows, logically, that it would be impossible for him not to move on. Only the insane and fanatical would carry a dead girlfriend with them everywhere they went. It would have driven him mad – Vaughn was strong, but it wasn’t the kind of strength that could harbor love’s loss for the remainder of a lifetime. But the heady sense of betrayal is still there, and she knows that she should be saying something, but this is where he’s supposed to gather her in his arms so they can break against each other.

It is impossible to know what he is thinking now, when she used to be able to read his face as well as she could read Sloane’s or Dixon’s. She used to rely on that ability to survive. The intonations in his voice, his posture, have changed to accommodate some other woman.

She suddenly feels a lot closer to her father.

“Syd,” he says, and she wants to remove his privilege to use that name. She wants him calling her Agent Bristow. She needs that detachment if she is to leave this office without breaking down, without slumping over the graffitied desks to let her body shake and her eyes spill what has lurked and threatened for days now.

But his voice is stern, and he is very carefully not touching her. “Syd,” he says again, and she manages to get her eyes far enough off the floor to be polite. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Their gazes meet, and she stuffs her breaking heart as far down as possible. The empty space it leaves is filled with rage and anger and she knows she could break his face in four different places with just one hand, if she let herself.

“I have a class,” he says quietly, by way of explanation, and turns away from her.

* * *

When she woke again, it felt easy and natural until she saw his face. She tried jerking her arms up and found herself bound in hospital restraints, and catching his attention.

“Sydney,” he said, with a touch of reverence that had always been there. “You’re awake.” He reached one hand out and brushed it delicately across her lower arm, afraid to make her jerk again, but she knew how to still her muscle reflexes when she absolutely must. There was something in his face that didn’t fit.

She knew what he looked like as he put bullets through people. It was hard to see anything other than that expression after.

“Sark,” she said, but she didn’t know why. She felt wary and wanted to pull away. But he had her bound, and the feeling in his eyes…was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Relief.

“You remember,” he said, and tightened his grip on her wrist in a brief squeeze. “I was so worried. The doctors were afraid…” he trailed off, glancing down at the end of the bed to compose himself. When their gazes met again, the stark emotion she read there scared her. She had never seen him show his emotions so thoughtlessly before. Sydney schooled her face blank and frowned. “But you’re fine now. And we can go home in a few days.”

“Home?” she said, and her voice was very small.

“Home,” he echoed with a smile. “Home and into bed. I’ll take care of you. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Sydney blinked up at him, at how he threaded his fingers through hers. “Oh,” she said, stunned. “That’s good.”

A bustling outside the door drew her gaze away from their hands, and she could see Weiss leading two nurses into the room. He looked good, thin, and his happy face was refreshing from the confusion she felt swirling in her gut from finding Sark next to her. The latter withdrew his hand to stand up, and as the nurses flanked her bed, she watched him embrace Weiss with a hearty squeeze.

“I told you she’d wake up,” Weiss said with a grin over his shoulder, and winked at Sydney. Sark’s response was lost in a bit of brotherly shoulder punching and good-natured curse words.

Sydney’s eyes went wide and she let her mouth slacken before she realized she was staring, and pulled her lips together. What the fuck is going on?

Sark turned to her with a wry smile. “You know Eric. Always wants to be right.”

“Eric,” she echoed dumbly, and then snapped her head toward him. “How long have I been here? How long has Sark been –”

Sark grabbed her hand again, gently, and said with a voice to match, “I’ve been here the whole time.” The nurses were unfastening the straps on her wrists and ankles, and she felt the kiss of hospital air on balmy skin.

Sydney decided there and then that she was going to keep her mouth shut until she could figure things out on her own. Starting with how long Sark had been calling where she lived “home.” And then possibly why he was calling Weiss by his first name.

Making the decision suddenly cleared things up a lot: she was alone, and she always had been. There was no change in that. It was just a different set of people who surrounded her, new people she couldn’t trust who she would have to act in front of. She would listen and watch carefully and as soon as she could move her legs again, she would decide what to do next. She would find her father. Together, they were invincible – she knew she could rely on him to help her think her way out of any situation.

But first she had to get out of this hospital and away from these people. She looked up at one of the nurses. “How long have I been here?”

The nurse shot the two men a disdainful look. “They didn’t tell you. Of course not.” She shook her head, and looked down at Sydney. “You’ve been here for three weeks,” she said kindly. “You were in a car accident. Do you remember that?”

Sydney shook her head. It was a safe reply, this early on, and the nurse nodded sympathetically. “Temporary amnesia is perfectly understandable at this stage. But since you remember who you are, and most things around you…” She paused to let Sydney contradict her, and then went on when the silence meant an affirmative. “You’ll be fine, given some time.”

Sydney was nodding. That was good. She could work that to her advantage. “And when can I get out of here?”

Sark had come to the bedside again, and had wrapped his fingers around the metal railing. “I’d like to take her home as soon as possible,” he put in. “Would it be possible to have a nurse observe her at the house in lieu of additional nights at the hospital?” Sydney turned and took the opportunity of his distraction to examine his eyes for telltale signs of DNA duplication.

The nurse frowned. “I’ll have to check with the doctor. This is highly unusual.”

Sark’s back stiffened in a gesture so familiar, Sydney was sure his next words would be accompanied by the business end of a pistol. Whoever this was, they had studied Sark for a long time. “I’m sure you’ll find extenuating circumstances in this case if you only check the medical charts,” he said smoothly. The nurse, taken aback by his barely concealed shift toward hostility, looked confused for a moment before grabbing the chart off the end of the bed and sweeping out of the room. She was followed by her attendant.

Sark didn’t relax until the door closed, and then he turned to Sydney. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes downcast and his hands wringing the metal.

Weiss put a hand on Sark’s shoulder and frowned. “Totally acceptable given the circumstances. It’s irresponsible of them not to be familiar with a patient’s history, anyway. Especially considering how long she’s been here. It’s not like they haven’t had a chance to find out about…” He looked embarrassed, and Sydney was torn between a compulsion to ease the mood and a curiosity to find out what exactly constituted such an unusual medical history.

“It’s fine,” she ventured, and forced herself to reach out and put her hand over Sark’s. “It’ll be…fine. I just need to get out of here.” It was the right thing to say because it was the truth.

Weiss nodded and backed away. “I’ll let you guys have some time. I’m sure you’ve plenty of questions, Syd.” Sydney almost snorted at that. “I’ll try and work on getting you both out of here.”

And he left, and then she was alone with him.

“Do you…” Sark started after a moment of silence, and had to stop to clear his throat. “Do you remember anything from before you woke up?”

Sydney cast about for an answer to that. “I remember waking up once before,” she said. “And I heard voices.” She looked up at him, and cast him a falsely reassuring smile. “I remember hearing your voice. You were scared.” That, alone, unsettled her even more. Sark scared didn’t compute in any reality. Even if this was a dream, she couldn’t imagine why she’d dream that.

Or any of this.

“That was last night,” Sark was telling her, tucking the blankets in around her in nervous motions. “You woke up for the first time last night. The doctors took you off the machines for the first time in three weeks. They wouldn’t let me back in the room until you fell into a natural sleep.”

“Three weeks is a long time,” she said lamely.

“We’ll get you some physical therapy,” he offered. “You don’t have to go to work. They wouldn’t expect you back until you’re ready. And you’ll have plenty of friends at your beck and call.”

He was smiling hopefully at her, and she took his hand between hers again, looking at the IV that came out of one hand and wanting to pull it out and run away. “Thank you,” she said, the words feeling thick and wrong, so wrong. Not what she wanted to ask him – Where is my mother? What are you doing? Did you know about Allison? Was it you?

He ran his thumb over the small bones in the back of her hand, feeling the pulse in her palms. “Do you have anything you want to ask me? Questions?”

“Later,” she promised, and closed her eyes because she didn’t know what questions she was allowed to ask yet.

“Any time,” he promised, and let her hands slip from his. “I’m going to go and check on Eric. He’s probably seducing the nurses.”

Sydney cracked a weary smile at that. Some things didn’t change.

* * *

She wasn’t sure why it surprised her, but they were living in the house Weiss had helped her move into. She had realized it halfway home from the hospital, watching the joggers on the street and seeing how normal everyone looked. She had half expected – well, she wasn’t sure what. But the familiar route unsettled her more than the things that were different had.

The house was the same, almost to the element. Except there were suits in the closet, and a second laptop set up across from hers, and piles of photos splashed across the coffee table in a plethora of Kodak moments. She would be sure to go through them when he left her side for more than thirty seconds.

In the meantime, he was brewing tea in the kitchen. Her feet were propped on what she assumed to be her side of their lush king bed, the television tuned to the evening news – even the news anchors were the same. There was a plate of toast resting on the coverlet next to her, but looking at it turned her stomach, and the television was giving her a headache, so she shut it off.

Casting her gaze around the bedroom, she felt the same way she did before she left on a mission. Restless, helpless to expedite procedure, and wholly ignorant of what could happen to her in the next hour. She needed something to help her feel like she was doing something. Not like she was accepting this situation.

Her eyes found Sark’s wallet, hastily tossed on the bedside table, and she reached for it, flipped it open. Bypassed the money for smaller pockets that might hold clues to something interesting. But there was nothing but dry cleaning stubs, scribbled local phone numbers, and movie rental cards.

She wondered exactly what movies she and Sark had watched together.

On a whim, she flipped to the driver’s license, and felt her breath catch. Then, feeling insanely guilty, she shoved the wallet back on the table, her eyes darting to the floral patterned spread below her hands. She plucked at the downy quilt uneasily, her stomach clenching.

He has a name.

“Sergei Lazarey,” she whispered.

“Uh oh,” Sark said, using his side and his elbow to crush a book to his torso, a tray with a tea pot and cups in his hands. He staggered into the room and dropped the book on the bed. “I’m in trouble now.”

“What?” she blurted, watching him place the tea on the dresser and pour a steaming cup. The smell of mild chamomile filled the room and her stomach made approving noises. She very pointedly kept the toast out of her sight.

He shot her a half-smile as he added a drop of cream to one cup. “You only call me that when you’re mad.”

Sydney worried the flesh of her lower lip between her teeth for a moment before forcing her hands still. You can do this. You do this all the time. He’s not trained to see through you. She made a show of looking embarrassed. No, another voice popped up, he’s just always been really good at it.

He was looking at her, real worry on his face. “What is it?”

Bingo. “I don’t…” She peaked up at him, furrowing her brow and wringing her hands into the blanket. “I was trying to figure out how why you’re called Sark.” She watched a warm smile cross his face at the memory, and plowed on with, “I want to remember. I’m sure it’ll come back in a few days, but – ” He was carrying a cup of tea to her now, and handed her the one with the cream. “I want to know now.” The hint of frustration was real. He sat down on the side of the bed and took a long draught of tea.

“Drink up, if you can, Sydney,” he bade her. “Doctor’s orders.”

She looked down at the tan swirl in her cup, and had to remind herself that this man was not a master of international espionage. Currently. Forcing her stomach back down her throat, she took a small sip.

Waited.

And did not die from immediate poisoning.

“Mmm,” she said, with a cheery smile. “Feels good to have something with taste.”

His eyes lit up, and her stomach lurched with a twisting combination of guilt and suspicion for this man in front of her. His fingertips brushed the comforter next to her leg, and he asked “May I?”

She nodded and took another sip to hide her amazement. He’s asking permission to sit next to me? But again he simply looked grateful, and tucked one leg up underneath a thigh, his socked toes wriggling him into a more comfortable position at her side.

“We had a discussion about pet names. You told me how your father never called you anything but your own name, and now you couldn’t stand it when anyone called you ‘honey’ or ‘sugar’.” He rested one hand on his crooked knee, leaning slightly forward in a position of comfortable familiarity.

“Sounds like my father,” she supplied. He chuckled.

“Of course it does,” he agreed. “So, after you took your Anthropology class, you found out about the power of names. And how having a Familiar can make you closer to a person.” He paused and smiled as Sydney nodded. She remembered the lecture well, from her sophomore year. “Well, we got absolutely smashed that night…” he grinned at her, remembering. “Completely Weiss’ fault, of course. And we were all out at that little pub on the corner, the one that isn’t there anymore?”

“Phillipe’s Foote?” Sydney supplied, her stomach bottoming out. What does he mean, ‘we’? That was with Danny…and Francie…

Sark snapped his fingers. “That’s the one. See, things are coming back.” He spared her a quick grin before settling back into his story. “So there we were, in a booth at Phillipe’s Foote, and we’re telling Weiss about the lecture. And he decides there and then that we need to come up with a name for me, or you’re going to call me Pooky, under his strict orders.”

Sydney forced a grin. “Pooky?”

“Utterly unacceptable,” Sark said gravely. “So I had to come out with it. Serik.”

“Serik?” Sydney prompted, to stall for time. If Sark noticed that she had developed an odd parroting habit, he didn’t mention it.

“The ‘loving’ form of Sergei,” Sark supplied. “Only you couldn’t pronounce it, you were so out of your mind.” He motioned to himself with the teacup. “Hence, Sark was born.”

Sydney nodded, settling back into the pillows. “Thank you,” she said, and the weariness in her voice was real, too. “I’m starting to remember. But it helps when you tell me some things.” She took a last sip of the tea and put the cup on the table, keeping her hands from shaking with great effort. “I think I’m going to sleep now, though.”

Sark nodded, and smoothed out the blanket next to her. “I’ll be here when you wake up. Just give a shout if you need anything.” With that, he stood, and collected the plate of untouched toast. He made a face. “Sorry,” he said with a grimace. “A bit too early?”

“Just a bit,” she said with a weary smile, watching him carefully. “Maybe when I wake up.” He moved like the Sark she knew, the fluid, graceful movements from years of training and athletic ability. He talked like Sark, the refined voice and gentle jibing attitude. She remembered the differences, in retrospect, with Allison and Francie. There were no differences here.

He was nodding and deposited the cup and plate on the tray, and then easily lifted the leather bound book off of the end of the bed. “Would you like me to read to you until you fall asleep?

Sydney nodded gratefully, knowing she could use the time to think. Her brain wondering at the novelty of it all. What are we, she wondered as she shifted downward, married?

She froze.

Oh my god. She stared at him, his eyes scanning the pages for a place where he had presumably left off from an earlier session. Are we married?

She glanced surreptitiously at his finger, looking for ring lines or any differentiation in color. There was nothing, but that didn’t mean… she shook her head. Even if they were, there was nothing for it now. Sark sat down on the end of the bed, propped up against the footboard with his elegant legs in stretched in front of him and crossed at the ankle. He opened the book and began to read to her, but she barely registered the words.

There were more important things to think about. Like how to get home.

And that was when it all came slamming down on her, and she stifled a choking breath so that he wouldn’t stop his perusal and ask her what was wrong. It wasn’t a matter of escaping from a place and finding her way back home. It wasn’t about miles to cross or people to outrun.

She was home. It just wasn’t the right one.

Which mean that this was Sark.

Just not her Sark.

Taking a deep breath, she steadied her busy hands once more. Tomorrow, she would contact her father. He would help her sort things through. With two minds, she could make sense of this. Until then, she needed to not panic, and work on getting her legs back.

Part of her hoped, as she struggled against sleep to the lulled voice, that she would never wake again.

* * *

Sloane clasps her hands with a warm look, and Sydney finds it in herself to match that smile. But it gets harder every time he looks at her, and she can’t help but wonder when the time will come that she will not be able to see his face without thinking of ways she wants to kill him for taking away her life.

The way he looks at her is the way she always wanted her father to look at her. Proud, arrogant, self-assured. He wants to be her support, and wants her to trust him unquestioningly, as a daughter should trust her father, and he wills it all to her through these casual touches and familiarity. He wants to glean from her successes, and help take away the sting of her failures.

He makes her skin crawl.

Every time he does this, she wants to run into Marshall’s emergency shower and scrub her skin raw with steel wool and chemical solvent.

The way she looks at him is not the way she has always wanted to. When the day comes, the final day, she knows she will be able to look him in the eyes and he will see the truth in her, and it will make him shake.

She wants him to beg for his life, on that day. Just so she can say no. ‘ No,’ she will say. ‘Just like you said no to Danny.’ And she will take from him what he had the audacity to take from her.

But until that day, she will live the lie. She will let him touch her shoulders, her hands, places that will burn for days until she can stop thinking about him, until she can get as much geography between them as possible. Going on missions is easy. Coming back is the hard part. Knowing that she will have to face him in his office again, day after day, until she thinks she might burst from the unfairness of it all.

* * *

Sydney sat, phone in hand, on the sofa. She had sunken far enough back into the cushions to feel that it would take significant effort on her part to get up, and was therefore a bad idea. She was staring at the cell phone, wondering what she was supposed to do next.

She had called in her contact information, as she had been trained to do since her first field-approved mission. The phone had not even rung – simply switched over to a disconnect message. The line had either never existed, or no longer did.

There was no entry for Double Agent Hotline in the phone book.

She could call the CIA main offices, she supposed. In theory, her passwords were still valid. Or would be close enough for them to send a team to secure her. Or she could just start spouting off personal information about as many illegal arms dealers she could remember over the open phone line. In alphabetical order.

The phone was a dead animal in her hand, useless and heavy and mocking. She set it down next to the pile of photographs and could see the sweat in the shape of her handprint rapidly evaporate in the dry air. She leaned forward, studying the glossy prints that were spread on the table.

Two days later, and she had still not managed to call her father. She had woken in the same bed, of course, alone save for the book, resting pages down on the other side of the bed. A nurse had come to help her for the week, and they had gone through a slow and embarrassing routine of reintroducing the body to solids after three weeks. The rest of the day had been taken up by work in Syd’s personal gym, and it was with a deep gratification that she had fallen asleep that night, feeling much improved.

The following day had continued much the same, but it was after the nurse had gone home for the evening that Sydney realized some things. The first was that she hadn’t seen Sark since her first night home. The second was that the gun she kept stashed between the box spring and the mattress wasn’t there. Nor was it in the knife drawer. Nor was it taped inside the water tank on the toilet. It was simply gone. Or had never been there, just like her contact number.

The third was that Francie was staring back at her from the photographs on the coffee table.

She scooped the pictures together and stared at the top one, seeing herself and Francie with their heads together, whispering conspiratorially, one of Syd’s hands out, trying to block the shot. She smiled slightly, missing her lost friend, and then looked at the date at the bottom of the shot.

Four weeks ago.

She immediately began shuffling through the other shots. It was either Francie or Allison, but either way, she was still there. Still alive. Sydney looked at her telephone for a moment before she snatched it up and dialed the phone number.

Her mother’s going to answer, and you’re going to feel like an ass.

“Hello?”

Syd froze, her eyes widening slightly, her hand pressing the phone sharply to her ear. “Francie?”

“Syd! How are you? Girl, I’ve been meaning to call, but…”

Sydney let the familiar, happy rasp of Francie’s voice travel through her brain. She’s alive. She’s alive and I’m talking to her.

“Syd? You there?”

“Yeah!” Sydney startled. “I was just…hoping for some company.”

There was a puzzled silence. “Where’s Sark?”

She knows Sark, too. Sydney stared down at her lap, and saw a picture of Francie and Sark and Weiss staring up at her, wearing birthday hats, the white elastic cutting into skin.

“I haven’t seen him. It’s been a weird few days.”

Laughter from the other end. “Honey, it’s been a weird few weeks.”

Sydney forced a chuckle. “Yeah.”

She could hear Francie shifting the phone. “Look,” she said. “I’ll come over tomorrow night, and we can catch up, okay? A girl’s night. I’ll even cook.”

“Sure…” Syd was saying. At least she could get some answers, that way. She heard the front door open, and twisted awkwardly in her seat, feeling the mute pull of muscles in her back from her exercise over the days. She heard the sound of keys dropping on wood, and of fabric sliding over fabric.

“Syd, can I ask you something?” Francie was using her confidential voice.

“Of course,” Sydney replied distractedly, her eyes on the corridor.

“Is he still sleeping on the couch?”

“Who?” Sydney asked, listening to sounds of movement from the kitchen.

“Syd,” the voice was tired and disappointed. “Don’t joke. Sark.”

That got Sydney’s attention. “Oh,” she said. “Um.”

“Sydney?” Sark’s voice came from the kitchen.

“I’ve got to go,” Sydney said in a rush.

“Syd, don’t just – ”

“Come over tomorrow night. We’ll talk then. Bye!” Sydney made her voice extra cheerful before she disconnected.

Sark poked his head in through the door. “You okay?”

No, I’m definitely not. Her hand was clutched tightly around the phone and she forced herself to put it back in the cradle. “Just tired. The nurse was here today.”

He was leaning against the doorframe, a tightly wound coil of false calm. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said. It was the truth. “The nurse said she’d come for the rest of the week, and then I’d probably be able to work by myself.” He was nodding. “With supervision,” she added.

His eyes flicked up to hers. “Of course. I’d expect no less. I don’t mind spotting,” he said with a smile. “Who was on the phone?”

“Francie,” she supplied. “She’s coming over tomorrow for dinner.” And she wants to know why you’re sleeping on the couch. And so do I.

“Hmm,” Sark mused, mysteriously. After a beat of silence, he looked away. “There’s Chinese food, if you want it. I got soup?” He shifted his brow uncertainly.

“Sounds fabulous,” Sydney reassured him. “I can do soup.”

Later that night, when Sydney was pulling her legs heavily under the covers, she watched Sark pull off his loosened tie. He faced the closet, his eyes half shuttered, and had his other hand bracing the door of cream colored edgework. She had never seen him seem so worn down.

She wondered if this was the Sark that her mother got to see, but turned away the thought almost as soon as she had it.. He would never have let any employer see him like this. And everyone was a potential employer in his line of business, which meant the mask stayed on, no matter what.

The emotion looked strange on his face, and she liked that she could watch him without him feeling it. She found herself wanting it, just to see what he would do. The cool slide of the silk of his tie against the cotton of his shirt mesmerized her in the low lamp light, and his fingers deftly pulling his collar stays out made her gaze dance. The play of the muscles in his back when he tugged on a worn t-shirt, flecked with paint that matched the bathroom…

She glanced away when he stepped out of his pants, blinking. Okay, she thought. Bedtime Sark is new in this line of toys. Each sold separately.

But that weary expression was still there. Sydney couldn’t help herself when she asked, “Are you…” She cut out early, realizing that she was about to ask Sark, of all people, if he was alright. Which he clearly wasn’t. But it was still Sark.

He turned to look at her, offering a lopsided grin. “There’s trouble at work. They’re going to make me make cuts. It’s just…” he exhaled. “It’s too much work sometimes, Sydney. When all I want is to be home and making sure you’re safe.”

Sydney lifted her eyebrows. “Sark, I’ll be – ”

“Don’t say you’ll be fine,” he interrupted her, a hard glint coming into his eye. “I know you’ll be fine.” His voice softened, and he looked away, awkwardly pulling off one sock. “I just feel bad if I’m not here, that’s all.” He ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up in strange places as if of its own free will.

He padded into the bathroom on bare feet, her mind’s eye following him through the routine from sounds alone. When he came back out, Sydney pretended to be asleep, and she listened as he clicked off the light and headed for the living room. No sigh of defeat, no disgruntled annoyance. Just acceptance, quiet and calm, and exhaustion.

* * *

“Sark, this isn’t going to be a girl’s night if you don’t leave.”

Francie was pouring Marsala into a high lipped sauce pan, already simmering with a beef stew. She was poking at the meat carefully, adding flour to thicken the rue, and glaring at the blonde man as he settled himself easily on a stool at the island. The kitchen counter was littered with cooking implements – a small pot filled with water sat on a cold burner, a measured cup of white rice was waiting quietly next to it. Chopping boards and knives and spoons and dirty bowls were piled in and along the sink, soldiers waiting for their turn to be hosed.

“I can be girly,” he insisted, cutting up a loaf of French bread and stealing a piece. “Just don’t make me paint my toenails.”

Francie stopped stirring. “Why not? No one would ever see them. They don’t let you wear sandals at work, do they?”

Sark glared back at her. “Sydney!” he shouted. “Tell Francie I don’t own any sandals.”

Francie gave him an ‘oh, that’s mature’ look and shouted, “Sydney, tell Sark to get the hell out so we can watch ‘The Princess Bride’.”

Sydney came in from the living room, her arms full of clean laundry. “If you two aren’t going to let me do my laundry in peace, I’m going to kick you both out.”

Sark stuffed the unfinished slice of bread halfway into her mouth and pulled the laundry out of her arms, dumping it on one of the stools. “I’ll help. You, sit. Don’t wear yourself out.”

Sydney pulled the piece of bread out of her mouth with a contemplative chew and told him, “Stop coddling. I can fold laundry.” It came out too sharply, she knew it as soon as it was out of her mouth. Clenching her jaw and telling herself that scolding her enemy to death was going to be far less effective than playing along, she handed him a towel and a weak smile of apology. He nodded cautiously at her and took the towel.

She was getting better at blocking him out. She could focus on the things that were important, the things she needed to let herself feel. She felt warm and loved and just standing in the same room with Francie was amazing. Knowing she was alive, and breathing, and fine, even if this was a twisted world where Sark was her boyfriend and she couldn’t find her guns.

“Oh, now she doesn’t want help,” Francie said, suddenly on the same side as Sark. They made sarcastic eyes at each other as Sydney huffed, and planted herself in the stool Sark had just vacated. Together, they folded the rest of the laundry as Francie told them about her day at work. Sydney wasn’t even half listening, an old habit that she told herself she should probably break. Tomorrow she would call her father, she vowed. Tonight, she would try to find out everything Francie knew.

There was a knock on the sliding class door from the porch, and Weiss let himself in. “Syd, you’re looking alive. Congratulations.” He grinned at Francie. “I saw your car in the driveway.”

“Okay,” Francie announced, gesticulating with a wooden spoon. “That’s it. Two guys too many.”

“Francie’s cooking?” Weiss eyed Sydney warily. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay? This could be dangerous. You know she only know how to make, like, four things.”

“And Veal Marsala is one of them,” Francie insisted. “But there’s only enough for two.” Not that Sydney would be eating any, the shape her stomach was in. She didn’t want to reverse the process of two days of bland foods in one night alone.

“I brought alcohol,” Weiss offered, and held up a bottle of red wine.

“Maybe I can stretch it.”

Sark smiled conspiratorially at Sydney. “Magic words.”

The phone rang against the far wall as Weiss was rooting through the junk drawer for a corkscrew. He picked up the cordless and tossed it to Sydney, who caught it, two handed, against her chest.

“I like what you’ve done with the place since I moved out,” Francie was saying, as Sydney brought the phone to her ear.

“Hello?” she asked, frowning in Francie’s direction. Sark watched her, curiously.

The phone crackled. “Joey’s Pizza?”

“I,” Syd started, her eyes meeting Sark’s. He quirked one eyebrow up, and she shrugged back at him, the muscles in her shoulders tight with anticipation. “What did you say?”

Francie was looking at her now.

“Joey’s Pizza,” the phone repeated.

Oh, Christ. “Sorry,” she said into the phone and disconnected. Weiss took it out of her hands, oblivious to the tension, and began pulling silverware out of a drawer near the sink. I tried my contact number. It was disconnected. What if they’re trying to get in touch with me?

“Who was it?” Sark asked.

Sydney looked up at him and started formulating excuses. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get out of this house without him coming along. “Wrong number. Some pizza place. Um, you know, I think I – ”

“Do you guys need anything from the store?” Francie asked, grabbing her keys off the counter. “I just realized we’re going to need more veal.”

“What?” Sydney blurted.

“Just keep stirring, Eric, it’ll be fine.” She was halfway out the door, her coat hanging off one arm. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Less.” And then she was gone, and Sydney was staring at the closed door behind her, her mouth hanging slightly open.

“What’s gotten into her?” Weiss asked as he picked up the wood spoon and a towel, cleaning up some spatter next to the stove top.

“I have no idea,” Sydney said quietly. “But I’m going to find out.”

* * *

It had to have been a coincidence. They had needed more food. But it still wasn’t right. In fact, it was very, very wrong.

And Sydney couldn’t stop thinking about it all night long, even after Francie came back, with not a hair out of place. They had an amiable dinner, but it became more and more surreal as Sydney found herself wondering if she had ever looked a certain way after she came back from a meeting in the warehouse.

With a pang, she thought of Vaughn. It was hard to avoid thoughts of him – with Weiss over her shoulder and staring at Sark and knowing in her stomach that he was off somewhere happily married and employed. And in the right time and place. But remembering the warehouse…those first few missions, when she had hated him. She shook her head. There was no way she could have known where they’d end up. Everything had been too raw to deal with then, her passion for revenge had dwindled with time…

Which was why it had to be a coincidence. Because it wasn’t Francie who had found her newly enlightened fiancé draining vital fluids into a bathtub. It wasn’t Francie who had lied for years to her best friends about what it was that she was doing. It wasn’t Francie who had found out that her father was leading her on for her entire life, that her long-lost mother was really a Russian spy.

It wasn’t.

Francie’s pager went off in the middle of dinner, and she gave an apologetic smile. She rose from the table to make a phone call, and Weiss called after her, “You should quit!”

“I love my job!” Francie called back.

Sydney shuddered under her sweater, feeling a chill of familiarity run up her back. Weiss was busy rolling his eyes in her direction, and she offered up a weak smile of support.

“She really does overwork herself,” Sark murmured, twisting his fingers delicately around the stem of a wine glass. He glanced at Sydney out of the corner of his eye. “Both of you.”

Sydney gave a disjointed grunt, not sure how to properly defend herself without knowing her job.

By the time Francie came back in, Weiss was clearing the table in what struck Sydney as an admirable display of domesticity.

“Everything okay?” Sydney asked in a cheerful but quiet voice.

Francie sighed. “I’m going to have to leave. Can I give you a rain check?”

Sydney felt a strange wash of jealousy, and then cleared her mind. It doesn’t mean anything. The chances of Francie working for the CIA are slim to none. She’s a chef. She runs a restaurant. It’s a beautiful place, you’ve been there. You helped her pick out the chairs.

“Syd!” Weiss called from the kitchen. “When are you going back to the restaurant? They need you!”

Sydney blanched, swallowed, cursed irony, and turned to her friend. “A rain check is fine,” she said in a strangled voice. She cleared her throat a little and busied her face by staring into the water glass in front of her, watching the distortion from the overhead light trickle through the faux-crystal. She forced her gaze up to Francie and away from the water, which twisted her features like the surface of a lake disturbed. “I’m a little tired anyway.”

Francie laid a hand on her shoulder. “I know we haven’t had a chance to talk in a while,” she said in a low voice. “And we need to. You need to. I’ve been a bad friend – ”

Shaking her head, Sydney pulled Francie’s hand into her own. “There’s plenty of time later. I’ll be here. Go on.”

Francie gave her an uncertain look, but Weiss was coming through the door from the kitchen with a dish towel in his hands. Sydney let Francie’s hand go, and Francie gathered her things.

“Leaving?” Weiss asked.

“Family emergency,” Francie supplied seamlessly. But Sydney could read tension in the lines of her back, the way her fingers moved restlessly but gracefully across her key chain, as if making sure they were all still there.

Weiss tossed the towel on the table and said, “I’ll walk you out,” a little too eagerly. He flashed a grin at his hostess. “I’ll see you soon, Syd.”

“Night, Syd,” Francie echoed, and the door closed behind them.

That night, after Sark left her to sleep, she heard him leave the house. And she spent the next two hours ferociously tearing the bedroom apart, searching for any clue at all as to what kind of person she was. She found no childhood photos, no high school year books, no college diplomas, no stray Christmas cards.

But she found her address book.

* * *

She hates lying to them. She hates that they can’t see it in her eyes when she feeds them story after story. Sometimes she thinks that Will might be catching on, because he has the intuition and the natural deception that it takes to pass for go in her line of work. But then he shrugs it off, takes her word, and lets her be. She broke him too well when she ordered him off Danny’s case. Now he’s afraid to ask any questions at all.

Francie is oblivious, but it’s not because she’s stupid. It’s because she’s got too many other things to worry about – a fiancé who abandoned her for another woman, a best friend who is never around to help her with her life, a business she’s trying to get off the ground without any assistance at all.

But she still blames them, because they don’t ask her what’s wrong often enough. Sometimes she wonders how many times they would have to ask her before she would finally answer. She wonders if she turned up the music and pulled Will into the shower, would he take it better than Danny did.

And then she gets sloppy, because she wants to tell them so badly. She leaves her gun lying around. Airplane tickets in her jacket. Answers the phone on missions. Uses them to feel better. If they can’t figure things out after all these clues, she tells herself, then they aren’t ready to know yet.

She’s protecting them.

She’s protecting herself.

It’s the same thing, lately, and she’s not really sure how she ever told the difference. They are part of her public image, the mask she wears as she goes off to The Bank in the morning and comes home from Taiwan at night, with different colored hair and a new family lineage to memorize.

Francie never asked her about the bloodstains, the gunpowder residue, the missing teeth. Will never pressed about his sister’s credit card beyond the fact that he wanted to help – he didn’t want to know. She tells herself it is because they are normal people, and normal people don’t look for bullet holes in car upholstery, or colored contact lenses dried and stuck to the sink basin near the drain.

She used to keep cyanide in a Tylenol bottle in the kitchen cabinets above the microwave. She used to leave a knife taped underneath the table. She used to burn ruined clothing in the hearth in the living room. And they never caught on. And she can’t stop blaming them.

* * *

The next morning in the shower, free from a hospital nurse-observed regiment of exercise, Sydney realized that she shouldn’t have the scar. Rollerblades clattered noisily on the cracked concrete of the sidewalks outside, and the cicada sound of bicycles filtered in through the open window in the bathroom. The water beat down on her for minutes, growing tepid, as she stared at her stomach.

She had plenty – from various times in her life. Getting stabbed, getting shot, or ones from her childhood – falling out of trees, scraping her knees after falling off her bike. Ironically, all injuries that her father had helped her deal with. Perhaps that was why she realized the scar didn’t fit in with the others.

It lay ugly across her abdomen, and she remembered waking up after Hong Kong and wondering what had caught her so viciously to scar her so badly. It was huge and fresh, still pinkish white, compared to her other scars that had tanned and faded over the seasons, like weathered monuments. She drew her fingertips across it delicately, as if she was afraid it would peel off under the water; so much cornstarch and glue and Halloween costume latex.

She wondered if Sark still had his scar from where she had thrown a pick axe in his knee, and her thigh winced with sympathy pain.

Rapidly shutting down that train of thought with the water, Sydney berated herself.

Don’t think about Sark while you’re in the shower.

Don’t think about Sark’s scars.

Don’t think –

She dressed mechanically, pulling her head viciously through the hole in a sweater. It was getting colder out, and she wished briefly that she didn’t live in LA, and that she would get to watch snow coming down outside the window. Or that she could pull logs in off the side porch to kindle a fire in the fireplace. Things that would make her feel warm outside, at least, if not inside.

Drawing the address book into her lap, she could make few conclusions. All she knew for sure was that she was not married to Sark – or that if she was, she hadn’t taken his last name. The sight of “Bristow” penned delicately in the upper left hand corner of the inside cover was the last comforting sight.

Her father wasn’t in the book. Not where she had written every one of his ever-changing work numbers (before her world had turned on its head) under ‘Bristow, Jack’, not under ‘Dad’, or even under the emergency contact spaces. She frowned.

* * *

Sydney Bristow knew how to kill people with her bare hands.

She knew six different languages, and Morse Code, and enough weapons knowledge to put a Marine to shame.

She did not, however, know how to cook.

“Fuck,” Sydney muttered for the third time as she jabbed the cookbook again, running her finger down the ingredients she was fairly sure she had already put into the pasta sauce. She was even wearing an apron – she looked the part. But, she sighed, this was more knowledge than she could feign. There was no way she was going to be able to pull off living this life if she couldn’t even figure out how to do her own job.

Plus, Sark was looking more and more exhausted when he came home at night. Too exhausted by far to cook.

Not that I’m cooking for Sark, she reminded herself. They both had to eat, after all.

But Home Economics 101 had never been part of the CIA (or SD-6) recruitment package, and Sydney was sadly lacking in the kitchen skills. She tried hard to remember her mother ever cooking for her, and thought that perhaps there was a chicken dish that she liked as a child. But it had been, strangely enough, her father who had done the majority of the food oriented family history.

No wonder I lived with a chef.

With a wry smile, she stirred the sauce, added two bay leaves, and tasted.

“Ugh,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “Like batteries. What the hell…?” She scanned the list yet again, and double checked that empty cartons of each ingredient lined the trash bin. It was just marinara – it only had five fucking ingredients, for Christ sake. And she couldn’t get it right?

A key jiggled in the lock to the back door, and Sydney had her fingers halfway curled around the meat cleaver before she realized it was Sark. What disturbed her even more was that she was setting the cleaver back down, and it was Sark. His head came first, a shock of blonde, and then furrowed brow and sunglasses. He was reading something over in his hand, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he looked up and saw her standing at the stove with a wary smile on her face.

“Sydney, what are you doing up?” He crammed the piece of paper back into the outside pocket of his briefcase and pulled off his glasses. His eyes flicked to the stove. “And cooking?”

“And cooking,” she affirmed proudly. Doesn’t mean it’s edible…

Sark came over to inspect the dish. He bypassed the slaughtered remains of tomatoes on a cutting board for the pot itself with nary an eyebrow twitch, lifted the lid, and inhaled. And then looked at her pointedly.

“What?” she squeaked. And cleared her throat.

“Spoon,” he clarified, his gaze flicking to the counter.

She had the distinct feeling she was about to fail some ritual of familiarity. But she handed him the spoon anyway. He dipped slowly, scraping the bottom of the spoon on the rim of the pot carefully, and lifted it to his mouth without shedding a drop, and closed his eyes in blissful anticipation. “Mmm –” he started, and then his eyes opened. “Mmm?” The noise was that of a disgruntled, goosed cow.

He pulled the spoon out and looked at it, offended. “How long has this been on?” He asked gravely.

“An hour,” she said meekly. It had taken her that long to get all the ingredients in the pot, at least. She still couldn’t understand why it was so liquidy.

He made a contemplative noise, and grabbed a spatula. “Late dinner tonight, then. No worries…I’ve got paperwork, anyway.” And he proceeded to scrape the bottom of the stockpot in long, flowing strokes with the utensil.

Sydney’s cheeks flushed as Francie’s words from her first year at the culinary institute came rushing back all at once – you’ve got to let it simmer for, like, seven hours before it tastes right! It’s the most worthless dish ever – now I know why people buy it bottled.

“This is for tomorrow night,” Syd decided.

Sark smiled at her as if he’d just been given a toy. “Really? Incredible. Because I’m starving.” He took on a cautionary tone. “Not that I would have said anything otherwise. You know I’m a love slave to the red sauce.” He gave another slow scrape with the spatula, and the marinara shifted lazily along the enamel sides of the pot. “But I’m famished.”

“Me too,” Sydney muttered. Working with food for an hour had done nothing to abate her apatite. She went over to the refrigerator and yanked it open, the jars rattling dismally. There wasn’t much she knew how to make – beyond boiling water for pasta and pouring cereal. She spotted a package of ground meat. “Hamburgers?” she offered.

“American,” he said, and sounded pleased. “Just the way I like my meat.”

She turned around and scowled at him, and he cracked the hugest grin she had ever seen on him. “Get out of my kitchen,” she said, whacking at him with a towel from the counter top.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, his face not at all repentant. “That was sexist and evil. Don’t banish me from the kitchen.”

“Out!” She commanded, the silly grin slipping its way onto her face. Another whack with the towel made him dance across the Spanish tile to the threshold into the dining room.

Sobering, Sark pulled his briefcase up off the floor. “Let me know when we’re a bit closer, and I’ll set the table, hm?” With one last half-cocked smile, he slipped into the other room and out of sight.

Sydney was still smiling and shaking her head at him when she realized what had just happened. And then she almost dropped the towel onto the lit burner. “Shit,” she muttered, frown slipping into place as she turned down the heat. She clonked the lid back onto the sauce pot and stared at the hamburger meat, not to be intimidated.

It’s not the same, she said to herself, her teeth worrying the inside of her cheek. He’s different. He’s not really Sark. He’d suspect something if it was any different. You’re not having fun – you’re being responsible until you can figure out what to do.

She had spent the day going through the files on her laptop and learning as much about the restaurant and her business as possible. It hadn’t been particularly helpful, nor had a rummage through the desk helped things much. She didn’t have a mind for restaurant business, and so didn’t understand the tally sheets and shorthand she had used when she’d made the notes. She was only slightly satisfied that she had identical handwriting in both worlds.

She should have paid more attention to Francie when she had the chance, she realized balefully as she squashed the meat into patty shapes.

But the fact remained that, in the meantime, she had a perfectly acceptable, nice, funny, caring, long-term…boyfriend. Who just happens to have a really, really unfortunate face. Her lips quirked upward. Not that unfortunate. Okay. But – oh, hell. She looked down at the meat in her hands. Can’t you even do this right?

* * *

When Francie came by the next morning, Sydney knew something was amiss.

Sydney had left Sark the night before passed out face down on his laptop, the keys pressing into his skin. She had thought about rousing him, but it seemed cruel to wake him just to bid him pleasant dreams on the cold, cramped sofa, so she left him alone. When she woke the next morning, he was gone, and Francie was standing in her living room, looking severe.

“Let’s hang out,” Francie said, jingling her keys. “At the restaurant.”

It was still early enough for the establishment to be closed, and she and Francie had an amiable enough time taking down the chairs from where they rested like a pile of porcupines for the night. They had spread linens and flowers together as well, chatting about life and weather and traffic and construction until Sydney forgot who was chef and who was not, even though she ended up making the coffee.

Francie was slicing a cheesecake for breakfast – “Nothing better than empty calories in the morning, Syd.” – when Sydney finally blew the whole thing.

Sydney poured the first of the two cups of coffee and slid it across the bar to Francie, and then picked up the pot again. “You know who I haven’t seen in ages?” Sydney said amiably.

“Who?” Francie mused, pouring cream into her cup with a measured dip of her wrist.

She took a sip from her own cup, and squinted across the room at a painting that looked vaguely crooked. “Will.”

And almost as the word left her mouth, she realized her mistake.

Their eyes met in a flash, mirrored expressions of severity and cool.

And then she could see the color drop, cartoon-like, from Francie’s face as the words registered and processed and swam around in their heads.

Francie put down her coffee, and reached with a steady, slow hand for her purse. She took out a pen and clicked the top.

“How do you know about Will?” she hissed, leaning dangerously close across the table.

Sydney leaned close, too, after a breath of time, committing herself to the task. “I know his birthday is March 8, and he was born in Texas. I know that he can speak Spanish and that his sister, Amy, is a goth, but she’s a really nice girl. I know that he shoplifted a Snickers bar from a drug store when he was twelve and that his father has been in jail three times for misdemeanors. I know a lot. I know we’re going to need to talk in a more private place because that pen is going to run out in – ” she checked her watch “ – twenty three seconds. Why the hell is my restaurant under surveillance? And you’re going to listen to what I have to say because it’s a matter of life or death.” She watched Francie’s unwavering stare.

“Please,” she added as the pen beeped.

“You’re going to spill that coffee everywhere, Syd,” Francie said in a forced cheerful voice. The fire in her eyes burned brightly, and Sydney nodded.

“Shit,” she said, and clattered a pot on the table next to her. “I don’t think I can do this right now, anyway. Drive me home?” Francie already had her keys in her hand.

The drive to the warehouse was silent, and Sydney was surprised it was faster from this side of town. She wondered if Will lived in Vaughn’s neighborhood – in his house, even. She didn’t have time to consider the fact that she hadn’t seen him in over two years (even if it only felt like a little over a month), or that he could be a completely different person, the way Sark was.

There wasn’t time to consider things like that. Not with Francie looking at her the way that she was, and knowing that they were under surveillance until they got there, and wondering where Francie hid her weapons and how many she had on her body.

The warehouse was much bigger than she remembered, and she spared a thought at its vastness inside – she had never inventoried it, never knew what it was exactly that was supposed to be stored in such a large area. All she knew was that it meant safety, for the moment, and she was glad to feel the coolness rising from the poured concrete floor again. She had missed the warehouse – when her mother had been taken and the base of operation had shifted, the locations had changed.

Of course, by then, the counter missions were not so difficult to transfer, either. She hadn’t written on a paper bag for months before she disappeared and lost two years. She and Vaughn hadn’t had to call any secret meetings, any rendezvous points. Since the fall of SD-6, they had become careless and dangerous.

Sydney grimaced as Francie planted herself on a desk, and offered Sydney a metal skeleton stool.

“Talk,” said Francie.

So Sydney talked. She told Francie all about their friendship, their living together, her recruitment and training with what she thought was the CIA. She told Francie with surprising ease about Danny’s death, and learning the truth about what she and her father had done with their lives. About meeting Vaughn, fighting Sark, finding her mother, and helping to bring down the Alliance. She sketched out what she knew of the missing two years in her life, and about the new elements that had come into play during her absence. She talked about waking up from the coma, here, and being as confused as on that side street in Hong Kong. She talked as fast as she could.

It reminded her of her statement to the CIA, when she had first met Vaughn and Weiss. She hoped someone was recording it, because she didn’t think she’d be able to do it again.

But the most miraculous part was that Francie listened. And when she was finished, she had no questions. The woman stared back at her from russet eyes and said, “You’re insane.”

Sydney barked out a laugh that definitely didn’t help her argument. “Probably. Yeah.”

Francie was shaking her head and pulling out her cell phone. She punched one number on it, said, “I’m bringing a walk-in for statement verification,” and hung up. She looked at Sydney. “Can you give me directions to the nearest safehouse?”

Sydney nodded. “Right on Cass, down Woodbridge. The homeless guy intels your license plate when you drive by. You wait and park in the doughnut shop, there’s a sewer maintenance entrance that’s guarded by an abandoned ATM. Punch the code, the door opens.”

“Shit,” Francie said.

* * *

Three hours later, she was rubbing absentmindedly at the peel-off glue that had held the nodes to her skin while she was interrogated. Francie sat across the table, well manicured nails spread evenly on the surface. Sydney was trying very hard to not look at the one mirrored wall. She knew she was being watched, and tried not to be irritated that they didn’t even bother to hide it from her.

The door opened, and Marshall walked in. Straightened his tie. Looked severely at Francie.

“Miss Bristow,” he said sternly, “we’re going to need some more time to review your statement. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to fill me in personally.”

Sydney blinked.

“You’re the Director?” she blurted as it clicked.

His scowl deepened. “I don’t have time for games, Miss Bristow. We’ve known each other for a long time – ” he glanced again at Francie. “But I won’t put up for a waste of the government’s time, just because you’ve invented some elaborate post-trauma fairy tale of action and adventure.”

Sydney felt her mind clamp down on the words and forced back the reaction that Marshall must be putting on an act. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked menacingly down at her. She glared shrewdly back at him and leaned slightly forward, her forearms resting on the cool metal of the table. “If you don’t believe me, then why am I still here?”

Marshall’s frown deepened, his significant brow working itself into furrows. Finally, he pulled out the chair next to Francie and sat down. The file in front of him flipped open with a quiet wave, and he rotated it and pushed it across the table at her. “The reason you are still here, Miss Bristow,” Marshall said to her.

She pulled the file closer to her and looked down at the small glossy photo that was paper clipped to a pile of papers. A familiar face grimaced up at her.

“Vaughn,” she said, taking in his forehead wrinkles and the slight stubble at his jaw. It looked like a slightly outdated photo, by the cut of his hair, but it was hard to tell how old Vaughn might be here.

“Michael Vaughn, yes.” She looked up at Marshall, puzzled by the tone in his voice. Francie looked equally confused.

“A very dangerous man, who we’ve been tracking for the past week. He’s been working for an undisclosed syndicate, and we believe he’s been responsible for the murder of two Russian diplomats in the time we’ve had him in our radar.” Marshall looked at Francie. “We were going to brief you tonight, to send you after him.” He glanced back at Sydney. “But it seems your friend has found him first.”

Sydney was staring at him.

“Vaughn,” she said again, disbelief lacing her voice.

“Yes,” Marshall affirmed in a frustrated tone.

“Michael Vaughn,” she said. “Is an international terrorist.” She closed the file. “I see.” She didn’t see at all. She knew she didn’t see. This was Vaughn. He would never…he couldn’t…

“We believe he may be trying to duplicate your father’s work.”

“My…” she blinked. “What?”

Marshall sighed and toyed with the edge of the table for a moment before continuing. “Your father was a spy for the KGB twenty years before his murder during your childhood. You were raised by a man named Arvin Sloane.”

“Sloane?” Sydney interrupted, her voice going a little hysterical. She pushed away from the table, as if separating herself from Marshall would discredit his words.

“You should know these things,” he told her under the weight of his stern gaze.

“Well,” Sydney said bitterly, “surprise. I don’t.” Sloane raised me. Sloane is my father.

My father is dead.

It made her thoughts white-out for a moment. She could hear ambient sound in the back of her head, see the sun filtering through a small window at the top of the far wall.

Jack Bristow is dead. Arvin Sloane is my father. She bit the inside of her mouth, until she tasted pennies. The faster you can figure this out, the faster you can set things back to normal. Dad, and Vaughn, and everyone else…

She did some quick crosses in her head and looked deliberately at Marshall. “Sloane’s a double agent for you?”

Marshall’s jaw set. “You know things you shouldn’t, and the things you should know, you don’t.”

“Christ,” Sydney said, leaning back in her chair. “Sloane…” she shook her head.

Francie was frowning. “Everything she’s told me has had a parallel. It seems impossible, but it might not be. There might be a way to explain it, or…I don’t know.” She turned to Marshall, and started speaking with fierce speed. “If this Vaughn guy is really as dangerous as you say he is, I’m going to have to go after him. If we can find the parallels, and figure out the puzzle before I have to go, we might have a leg up on him. We can figure out what he’s going to do.”

“It’s too risky. We can’t trust her with that kind of thing. We don’t know that the parallels are that tightly woven,” Marshall replied.

Francie’s voice rose. “That’s my decision, if you’re sending me so freshly briefed – ”

“Hey!” Sydney broke in. They both turned to her, surprised. “I’m still here,” she spat out. Marshall blinked, and uncoiled slightly. Francie pressed her lips together. “Look,” she said with a sigh. “It might not be such a bad idea, at least trying to pattern this out.”

“Like a flow chart,” Francie suggested.

“Yeah,” Sydney agreed. “That way, at least, I could figure out who I can still trust around here. And it might help you on your mission.” She looked at Marshall. “You’ve seen my readings during my statement. They’re level, aren’t they? They say I’m telling the truth.”

Marshall hesitated, and then said, “It says you’re telling what you think is the truth. There’s no way to test for delusion.”

“I’m not deluded!” Sydney cried. “What do you think I did, read Vaughn’s name in my tea leaves?”

Francie made a noise of frustration. “Look,” she said, “this is going in circles. We’ve got to make a decision, and either way, we’ve got to get her back before Lazarey notices she’s gone.” She shared a meaningful look with Marshall that stretched into awkward silence. Marshall was the one who broke it, to look at the mirrored wall and nod.

The door behind him opened, and Marshall stood up. Will hovered in the threshold as Dixon marched past him, hefting a large dry-erase board. Will and Francie were staring at each other.

Marshall looked at her. “I’ll be back in an hour. I need to think.” He paused, his hand on the door handle. “Can you shoot a gun?”

“Top of my class,” Sydney replied.

“In this world?” Marshall asked her acerbically, pulling the door closed behind him.

Sydney scowled. So he doesn’t believe you. Make him. She turned to Dixon, who looked…a mess. Her eyebrows went up and she had to press her mouth shut to keep from smiling. So this was what had happened.

“Hi!” Dixon chirped. He stuck out a hand, shifting the dry-erase board awkwardly under one arm, and letting the pens clatter to the table. She shook it quickly. “I’m, um, Marcus Dixon. I head the technology department. Oh…” he lost his grip on the dry-erase board and they both caught different ends of it. “Thanks,” he gushed, shoving it up on the table. “I tried to find a, um, what do you call them?” He smiled. “You know, with the three legs, and it holds it up…” he was snapping his fingers.

“An easel?” Will guessed.

“That’s it!” Dixon said. “Anyway, I’ll go and look some more. And, oh, I brought – ” he motioned to the table. “Colors. In case, you know, you need to color code.” His huge smile infected his voice. “Anyway. Okay! I’ll be back!” He waggled his eyebrows and clamored out the room.

“Oh, my God,” Sydney was biting on her lip to keep from laughing.

“He can be a little much,” Will admitted, scrubbing a hand over his bare chin, as if he was still feeling the ghost of a beard.

“It’s not that,” Sydney said. “It’s just that…Marshall and Dixon are…” she made a vague movement with her hands. “Reversed.”

Will made an undignified sound of amusement and picked up a red pen. “Well,” he said. “I suppose we’d better try this.”

* * *

By the time she got home, the sun had long since sunk below the skyline, and the inky well of night had closed in on her. Francie’s car was escorted by an unmarked SUV in front and back, and with orders, Sydney was sure, to watch her house for activity all night. Marshall had only agreed to let Sydney return to her house on the condition that come back early tomorrow morning for further questioning.

Time is always a commodity, came the unbidden thought as she turned her key in the lock. She felt a well of acid climb up her throat, because that was something her father had said. Her father had said a lot, over the years. She just hadn’t known to listen for too long, and then when she finally did, she had wasted so much time hearing the wrong things.

And now he’s dead.

She scrubbed ferociously at her cheeks as she came in through the kitchen, noting the cleaned dinner dishes resting in the rack next to the sink. Dim light from the living room shone through and reflected tiny moons on the tile, and Sydney toed off her shoes for a stealthier entrance before continuing.

Sark was already looking up expectantly when she came in. But his face was lined with worry, not anger, and as soon as he saw her body posture he stood, and dropped a legal pad onto the small table next to him. “Sydney, are you…”

She shook her head, her lips spread too thin and pressed together too tightly to reply with words. Her arms pulled up to her chest and on her face and she couldn’t cover enough of herself at once, so she it only seemed right to keep walking toward him, to use his chest and hide.

For at least five seconds, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. And then they came around her back, enveloping her wing bones and she had never felt so delicate as she let her chest hitch and she pulled the fabric of his shirt around her face. She could feel the curve of his neck fit over her head as she made herself smaller, the sleeves of her shirt swimming over her hands, and her face pulled into a rictus and she cried.

She could feel him lowering them both, and she willed her knees to bend but wouldn’t let go, and they teetered on the edge of the sofa before he pulled her closer, and she wound up somewhere between and on his legs. She never knew his arms were so long.

Or maybe it was that she was that small.

She peeled her face away from his shirt, glad that it was dark and she wouldn’t have to see the dampness she’d left, and shivered into his grasp.

“Will you be alright?” he asked hoarsely, and she could hear how much pain he was in, and it scared her. It also scared her that he asked such accurate questions. Not ‘are you okay.’ Because she clearly wasn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

His arms relaxed a centimeter.

“What brought this on?” Not ‘where were you.’ Because it didn’t matter.

She sniffed again, the mucus rearranged itself in her head and she felt disgusting. She couldn’t answer for a moment, but he was content to keep his arms around her, his cheek pressed against her hair. She could feel him blink, and he did it a lot, trying to keep something at bay.

When she finally spoke, her voice was thick. “Have you ever regretted losing something you never had in the first place?” The logical part of her knew that she had not lost her father – merely misplaced him, as it were, in a different timeline. But when she compacted that with everything else, it became more than she could deal with. Her body gave another shudder and she felt Sark’s arms tighten again.

His voice was gentle, but the strength surprised Sydney out of her self-indulgent reverie. “I don’t believe in regret,” he said.

She pulled her head away from him with an almost physical effort, and looked him in the eye. They regarded each other silently for a moment before she said, “No. You don’t.” The shadows from the dim lamp played long and soft on his serious expression, and made his eyes black. “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” she whispered.

One of his hands stilled on her back, and she felt his muscles tense. She looked up at him, bewildered, and saw the masked hurt in his face. “Oh,” she said, and grabbed the closest forearm. “No,” she said quickly. “No, not…not this. Just…my life.” She almost laughed at the hysteria of it all. The last thing I need now is a messy breakup scene.

He gazed down at her, pacified but not unshaken. “What can I do?”

And the least fair thing about it, really, was how good he was to her.

“Nothing,” she said resignedly. He did not look pleased. “I have to figure this out on my own,” she reassured him as best she could, and released his arm to wipe at her face. She began to gather her wits, berating herself immediately for the breakdown in front of him. I’ve grown too careless…

She could still feel his frown. “What do you believe in?” she asked quietly.

“Survival,” he answered without hesitation, steel lacing his voice.

Her eyes flickered away into the depths of the room, and she twisted herself halfway out of his grasp.

“Will you be alright?” he asked again.

She was silent for a moment, and thought about not answering, but it seemed cruel. “Eventually,” she said. She felt the remaining hand on her back slide away, and it was only after she found herself on her feet that she realized she had pulled away, and not him.

She wavered for a moment in the dark before he stood up next to her. “You need sleep,” he said, and it surprised her how his voice hadn’t changed at all despite the abrupt shift in topic. He nudged her carefully toward the bedroom door. “Go get settled in. I’ll…lock up and come read to you in a moment.”

Nodding, she managed to pull her eyes off the floor, and brushed the briefest of touches against his hand before he turned away. “Thank you,” she said. He gazed at her for a moment before nodding, and moving off into the kitchen.

Getting ready for bed didn’t take long – she couldn’t find the energy for much more than dropping her clothes in a pile in the bottom of her closet, pulling on something her brain stem deemed suitable for sleep, and crawling beneath the cool covers. She was already halfway to oblivion when he settled himself in his usual position, feet toward her, at the end of the bed. His voice carried her the rest of the way…

“Captain had been broken in and trained for an army horse; his first owner was an officer of cavalry going out to the Crimean war…”

* * *

She can feel the bones in his neck under the sole of her foot as she catches him in a round-about, and hears the music in her head that makes this an interpretive dance instead of a fight to the death. He bows to her and tries to take her legs out from underneath her, but she jigs backward in time and they shift ninety degrees and begin again.

This time she aims lower, tries for his stomach and knows that if her heel can get through his hands, he will not leave with anything less than a broken rib. He blocks her with both hands, and she uses his momentum to slam into his face while his hands are occupied. It doesn’t have enough power in it, though, and she has to go at him again from the side of his head. He manages to block her sideswipe, turns her, and lashes out with his leg.

She drops.

It’s a bizarre waltz, but she’s learned the steps well and had a long time to practice. She has learned not to wonder who might never know when he falls tonight. She has learned not to imagine his family standing and watching in this alley with her. The ghosts of daughters and wives and sisters no longer follow her on missions.

She’s not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Back on her feet, they start for a third time. She is running out of time and energy and has lost count of the seconds she has until the alarms go off.

He has grown confident now that they have evened the score, and he gives her what she thinks he must figure is a smile, but looks more like a grimace to her. He swipes out at her arm, but his moves have not grown desperate yet so she must dodge and weave and wait for her moment. She clears her mind as her trainers have taught her and watches his movements slow as a pattern reveals itself.

The detachment allows her to find the hole in his rhythm, to remove the error in his cadence. Her hand can get nearer to his body than the tempo should allow, and she closes his windpipe long enough for him to stumble.

He catches himself against the brick wall, his chest heaving, and the music in her head pulses into a down arc.

She ends their dance by slamming the end of her decoder into his face, and his body collapses.

* * *

Marshall was staring at her.

It was unnerving. His steady gaze, his unblinking focus, was so far away from the Marshall she had grown used to. She had become accustomed to seeing him only in fast-motion, or tracking only the blur of his all-brown wardrobe as he moved. To see him so completely at rest was strange.

Not that he was relaxed, she noticed. In fact, he looked aggravated. His stare finally broke from her and moved to the dry-erase board that lay on the table between them. He seemed almost hopeful that if he waited long enough before he looked at it, the information on it would change.

It didn’t.

They had already spent an hour reviewing the parallels. And it had become clear that, while not every comparison was valid, most were close enough to be suspicious or useful. Sydney suspected that Marshall thought they were the same.

“You can’t mean that you haven’t given any thought as to why this happened,” Marshall accused her.

Sydney willfully concealed any frustration in her face. “Of course I want to know why this happened – I want to go back home. I want to see my family and friends again and know that I’m not going to have to kill them. I want my life back.” It was building up to be quite an impassioned speech when Will cut in.

“I think what he’s trying to say is that…well…why did you wait so long to tell us?” He pointed to the board, tapping a specific name. “I mean, you’re living with your most dangerous enemy. Didn’t that…unsettle you?”

“Of course it did,” Sydney said, exasperated. “But what was I going to do? Have my first thought be, ‘Oh, I must be in Bizarro World?’ I don’t think so. I told you this already, when I saw Agent Weiss, I thought – ”

“And another thing,” Marshall cut in. “This Weiss fellow – ”

“Excuse me,” Sydney interrupted back. “Don’t talk over me, if you want to hear what I have to say.” Her eyes were hard, cold stones as they bore into the Director’s face. The silence grew heavier as the two forces clashed silently, and Francie shifted in her seat awkwardly.

“Okay,” Francie piped up for the first time. “This isn’t getting anywhere. What if we took a different angle?” Sydney and Marshall both relaxed incrementally, but kept their sights locked. “What if we looked at…I don’t know…instead of trying to figure out how she got here, why don’t we try and figure out why she got here?”

Will frowned. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Well, you’re always talking about how the CIA has deciphered those Rambaldi prophesies – ”

She was cut off as two pairs of eyes locked on her and Marshall said “That’s classified” and Sydney said “Rambaldi!” Then they turned back and looked at one another again, a new kind of glare.

“You’ve got the Rambaldi prophesies?” Sydney asked cautiously.

Marshall scowled before saying, “We’re still working on translating them. Some of them were easy enough – the ones with descriptions and images. But the straight text we’ve had a bit of a problem with. There’s some Rosetta stone that we haven’t been able to figure out…” He drifted, wondering if he’d said too much.

“Dixon is working on it now,” Francie said. “He said it’s supposed to be cracked with some kind of Binary code, but he hasn’t been able to figure it out yet. Personally, I don’t understand how someone who lived in the 1400s could possibly figure something like that out – ”

Will shook his head, continuing the conversation that was already familiar to Sydney. “He’s been right too many times. We can’t just discredit that.”

The room lapsed into silence as they all regarded the neatly printed chart that Sydney had made for them. Some of the connections were tentative at best, but it was impossible to know who else she might encounter here. Who might be alive, or dead.

“So your Sark…” Francie interrupted their collective thoughts.

“Evil,” Sydney said, poking the dry erase board that had found itself an easel. “Snarky son of a bitch. Wants me dead.”

“That’s…” Francie searched for a word. “Not impossible. But very strange to hear.” She looked sharply at Sydney. “You’re living with him. That must be awful.”

Sydney shook her head. “It hasn’t been that bad. He’s been sleeping on the couch. Very distant, except for when he’s doting. He works hard, and I have a lot of time on my own. To figure things out.”

Francie exhaled in a rush. “Oh, Syd… No wonder you didn’t know, when I asked you about the couch. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Shrugging, Sydney picked up her cup of coffee. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a little strange…even though I know he’s harmless, there’s a lot of Sark that still comes through. Little things that he did back…” she drifted for words. “Back in my world. He’s very devious.”

Francie looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Syd, it is a big deal.” Her voice was soft and cradling. “The reason he sleeps on the couch.”

Sydney lifted an eyebrow over the rim of her mug. The coffee was lukewarm and needed more cream.

Her friend shook her head and looked at her hands on the table. “There’s no other way to say this.” Their eyes met, and Francie’s face was twisted in apology. “You lost a baby, Syd. Two months ago.”

Sydney’s hand flew to her abdomen, and she could imagine the phantom of the scar through her sweater. “His?” she choked. As if that would make a difference.

Francie nodded. “You were both…devastated.” She paused for a moment to think, and Sydney let the silence wash over her. “He was sleeping on the couch after that, for about a month. You couldn’t stand to have anyone touch you without crying…”

“Oh…” Sydney’s voice cracked, her eyes huge, her hands covering the lower half of her face. As if this pain had really happened to her.

“And then there was the car crash, and…you were dead. For a split second, before the doctors brought you back by the side of the road. And he was so broken, Syd. You should have seen him in the ambulance…” Francie was shaking her head, her voice low and soft. “We all thought we lost you.”

“You did,” Sydney said brokenly, and suddenly conscious of all the people in the room. Watching her. “You did lose me. Or, her. Because I’m not her. I’m someone different.” She sighed, and leaned her forehead on her hands, staring down at the small table they shared. “Poor Sark,” she added on, wistfully. Then she laughed. “I never though I’d say that.”

“You’re in shock,” Francie said wearily.

“Probably,” Sydney agreed. It was a little much for one day. “But there’s not a lot you can do about it.”

Will broke into the conversation cautiously. “I think what we have to consider…I mean, if we can fix this? If we can turn it back?” Everyone was looking at him now, and he seemed to falter. “Is it better to have Sark as a bad guy, or Vaughn?”

Nobody had an answer for that.

Francie sighed and pushed the coffee pot closer to Sydney. “So did Vaughn…Sark, I mean. Did Sark ever go after…me?”

Sydney pushed Will’s question to the back of her mind and considered. “You mean do I think I’m in danger of an attack from Vaughn?”

Her friend nodded. Sydney took a deep breath. “Definitely.”

* * *

They let her drive herself home the next night, but there was still a cable repair van parked outside her house. She briefly contemplated going up to it just to make the people inside nervous, but figured it probably wasn’t worth toeing the line in the long run. So she shoved her way in through the back door with a weary shoulder as she had the night before, and found Sark and Weiss at the kitchen table – her kitchen table, she corrected herself – playing chess.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Sark asked Weiss.

“I’m sure,” Weiss said, rather snappishly.

“Are you sure you’re sure?”

“I’m sure! Christ! Move, already!”

“Check,” Sark said, and replaced one piece with another.

“Shit,” Weiss muttered, and dropped his head and squinted, as if getting closer to the board would allow him to see exactly where he’d gone wrong. He made a tentative move with a bishop, and was about to take his hand off the piece when Said,

“You’re sure?”

Weiss glowered at him, and lifted his hand.

“Mate,” Sark said.

Weiss shoved his chair back from the table. “That’s it. I’m never playing chess with you again. Ever.” He turned to Sydney for appeal. “Have you ever played chess with this man? He’s insane.”

Sydney gave a small smile, unsure of the answer, but Sark was waving Weiss’ words away. “She’s learned her lesson. She’ll never play.”

“I can see why,” Weiss grumbled.

“Spending a lot of time at the restaurant,” Sark commented, setting the pieces on the board up for another game.

“What are you doing?” Weiss asked him. “What are you – stop that. I’m not playing another game.”

“I’m thinking of changing some things around before we reopen,” Sydney said, pulling an apple out of the fruit bowl on the counter and changing the subject deftly. “Eric, please play him again. Keep him out of my hair until dinner.” His first name still felt awkward over her tongue.

“Over my dead body.”

“That can be arranged,” Sark said with an insincerely diabolical smile. Sydney hid behind her apple to keep reacting to the words.

“Sydney, honestly, I don’t know how you put up with this,” Weiss said as he moved one of the pawns forward.

Sydney put up her hands defensively. “I’m staying out of this. So far and completely out of this it’s not even funny. In fact, I’m so far out of this, I’m going to go and work out. Let Eric make dinner, he’s over here so often.”

“Unless you have microwave hot dogs, that’s probably not the best idea.” Sark carefully slid forward his first pawn.

“You sure you want to do that?” Weiss mocked before Sark could take his hand off the piece. Sark favored him with a withering glare.

“Boys, play nice,” Sydney told them before retreating to the bedroom to change into clothes suitable for treadmill and free weights. She left a trail of clothing on her way to the bathroom and hopped to get into socks, hoping that if she just kept moving, she would not think about the insanity of the situation.

Federal Agent Eric Weiss was playing – losing – a game of chess to a man who was bound to be on the FBI’s most wanted list by the end of the year, who she was supposed to be romantically involved with, in her kitchen.

She took a deep breath, and tied her shoes.

As long as we’ve got things in perspective, she thought to herself with a mental smirk as she stepped onto the treadmill.

According to her mileage, she was halfway to Rendondo Beach when Sark came in.

“You look ravishing, all sweaty,” he said. His tone was sarcastic, but when she whipped her head over to the side before she could cover her reaction, and met his eyes, there was something gold mixed with the blue.

There was something she was supposed to say here, and she was going to get it all wrong. So she changed the subject.

“Is Eric gone?” She kept her tone light and completely without insinuation that if the answer was yes, she had plans for their being alone. Because she didn’t. At all.

“With his tail between his legs, yes,” he said, and extended to her the towel that he had draped over one shoulder. “Shame he didn’t take you up on that offer to make dinner. The batteries in the smoke detector could probably use some testing.”

Sydney slowed her pace to a brisk walk and accepted the towel, blotting her temples and knowing that it wouldn’t really do any good; she was going to need to take a shower before she did anything else. Especially if it involved going out in public.

“I wanted to let you know,” he added in a tired voice, “I’ve been called in to work tonight.”

“Is everything alright?” she asked.

He shrugged and shook his head at the same time. “I’m not really sure. Something about an emergency research project. It’ll probably go all night…”

Slowing her pace again, she gave him a reassuring smile. “I’ll be fine. Really. When you get back in the morning, I can scramble eggs.” I hope. Scrambled eggs were another of Sark’s bizarre American affinities, she had learned from Francie earlier that day.

Sark gave her a grin that said Christmas came early, and said, “I’d like that. I’ll see you in the morning then.”

* * *

She shot awake as soon as the door opened, her heart ratcheting into her throat and back down again so fast her body didn’t even have time to respond. She hadn’t even moved, not even opened her eyes, but she was abruptly and unexpectedly hyperaware of everything going on around her. Every noise was louder – immediate, harsh, sharp enough to spread her an echolocated map of the room and his movements. She could hear herself gasping rapidly in her head, and was thankful for the sheer luck that she had managed to keep herself silent.

What she wasn’t expecting, though, was the hand he laid delicately on her forehead. It was a familiar movement, just the slight brushing of fingertips, and she clenched her eyes shut even tighter, willing herself not to breathe.

The fingertips hesitated, and withdrew. “Sydney?” he whispered. “You’re shaking.” There was a question in his voice, but she didn’t know the answer to it.

“Nightmare,” she lied, her voice rusted over with sleep, and she let her eyes open to the darkness of the room. “I think you startled me out of it.”

“Then I won’t apologize for waking you up,” he said, keeping his voice low in the dark, attempting to keep the illusion of serenity that quiet lent the bedroom. His fingertips brushed against her forehead again, this time moving strands of hair from her skin that had stuck there in an anxious sweat she didn’t even know she had.

“I am shaking,” she said, surprisingly herself. She lifted a hand and rubbed briskly at her arm, trying to physically remove the sensation. It was disconcerting to feel it but not able to do anything to stop it. “I’d just fallen asleep.”

“It’s late,” Sark said, and she could hear the frown in his voice. “It must be exhaustion?” But he didn’t sound sure.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she told him, and shifted hands to rub at the other arm. The moonlight filtering in through the window cast shadows of silver and grey across the bedspread, and melted everything but his face and hands into the ink of the dark side of the room. “How was work?”

“We found what we were looking for,” he said, and sounded pleased. It occurred to her, strangely and in the filtered reality of night, that he was proud. Proud that he could accomplish something. It made her want to know everything about him, instantaneously, and without qualms. “The project director said it would provide worthwhile information.”

“They must’ve needed it pretty badly, to call you in this late,” she said sleepily, and shifted onto her side, facing toward him. The dip that the curve of her legs made opened space on that side of the mattress, and he sat, his back against her thighs.

“It’s always an emergency,” he told her, his hand still in her hair. “Why couldn’t you sleep?”

“If I knew, I’d be asleep,” she said crankily, scooting further under the comfortable weight of the sheet and blanket that draped her.

He made an amused sound, and toed off his shoes. “I’ve got you classically conditioned in only a week.”

She could feel the fuzzy edges of some dreamscape pulling at her again, forgetting to even wonder what it was that set her heart racing into oblivion in the first place. This was warm and soft and here and now, and too enticing to ignore when she was this tired. “What?” she managed, after a longer pause than was appropriate, had she not been between wake and sleep.

She heard his fingers brush against the familiar leather binding of the book, and felt the mattress shift as he went to the other side and turned on the small, mellow light he used for reading.

The underlying lull of his voice washed her completely into sleep, and as far as she could remember, she did not dream.

Sydney woke only once more that night, naturally and without the terror of her first interruption. Sark still lay propped up on pillows on the bed, book held cracked across his chest, his other hand open and vulnerable as it flopped upward over the landscape of the blankets. She leaned over and pulled the book from his hands, marking the page with a scrap of paper, and tugged a spare edge of blanket up over his bare feet.

Extinguishing the light, she settled in to sleep again, wondering how the hell she was going to explain this to herself when she got home.

* * *

She remembered as soon as she saw Dixon, and couldn’t figure for the life of her why she hadn’t thought of it before.

It was late morning – she had slept longer than she had anticipated, but Sark had turned off the alarm with a disapproving noise and flopped back over onto his side, one of his arms weighted lightly across her ankle, and it was too much effort to raise her head off the pillow before another three hours had passed.

When she had finally woken up, she had spent as little time looking at Sark as possible. And what it might mean that he had slept in that bed with her.

What it might mean that he looked like he belonged there.

Because of the hour, the offices were crowded and buzzing with activity by the time she got in, walking quickly toward the conference room where she had been meeting and researching with any Agents that could be spared.

Her mind steadily on other things, it was a surprise what popped into her head, and she stopped dead in her tracks, right in front of Dixon, and barely registered the worried look he was giving her. “Are you alright? You look a little…um…not that you don’t always look fine. I mean, not that I look. I mean, of course I look, because I’ve got eyes, but you know I didn’t mean that – ”

“Dixon,” Sydney said impatiently, and he gave an inaudible squeak and shut his mouth. “Did you say something about a binary code?”

“Um,” Dixon said, eyes casting about for a moment. “Yes.” It was the most definite she’d heard him – this Dixon, anyway – since they had started working together. Then he looked back at her. “Why?”

“About two years ago,” Sydney rushed with it, now that she had a firm grasp on the idea and a break in the conversation to use to her advantage. “Did Francie get a binary code in a deal with K-Directorate? Which was then a series of longitude and latitude points?”

“Not under those exact circumstances…”

Sydney grabbed his arm. “Do you still have the binary code?”

Dixon was already pulling her toward his lab, and she let go of him before she was tugged off her feet. “You think it might be what we’re looking for? Rambaldi’s never reused anything like that. I mean, the chances of it being that easy are slim to none.” He spared a significant glance at her. “We’re not usually that lucky.”

“I know,” she said grimly. “But it’s all we have right now.”

“I’ll get to work on it,” he said rather breathlessly, excited at the prospect of having something productive to do.

The rest of the day was spent under the watchful eye of both the Agency and the doctors at the hospital. She had been instructed to return for a check up after one week, and they were not pleased that she had put off their recommendation.

“You’re healing up just fine,” her doctor had told her reluctantly. “But you should be staying off your feet.” This information she relayed sarcastically to Sark, chopping vegetables for a chicken soup and proudly displaying her feet, and how she wasn’t staying off them.

“They tell you that for a good reason, you know,” he said drolly. “It’s in their best interest that you don’t up and die.”

“I’m not going to ‘up and die’,” Sydney snapped, flourishing the knife in her hand at some innocent carrots. “I just don’t want to feel helpless anymore.”

Sark looked momentarily stricken. “I didn’t know you felt that way. I’m sorry.”

Scraping the decimated carrots into the pot of simmering stock, she looked up at him. “What? I don’t…” It surprised her how it never became less disturbing, when he seemed cowed by his own actions. “It’s not you,” she insisted, even though it mostly was. “It’s the restaurant. I’m worried about it.”

If Sark realized that the change in topic made no sense, he held his tongue. “What are you worried about? Is the reopening not going well?”

She shook her head. “That’s fine – it’ll probably be open next week. I’ve hired additional management, because I can’t really focus on it right now…” That was an understatement. They regarded one another silently for a moment before she asked, “What would you do with it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Probably run it into the ground. I’d be an awful manager.”

She stifled the smile that threatened her mouth. “No, not…not as a manager. I mean, if you took it over. Or if I was gone. Would you keep it?” Morbid curiosity drove her questioning further.

“That’s an awful thing to say,” Sark said, decidedly ending the conversation by coming around the table and relieving her of the knife and an onion that was next to be executed for the good of the soup.

Sydney was still searching for something to break up the awkward silence when a telephone rang. She looked curiously at the house line, and then at her cell phone, before she realized Sark had answered his own.

“Tonight?” he was saying. “Again?” His face was grim but strangely determined. “What I gave you last night didn’t work out.” A long pause. “I see. Then I’ll simply have to try again tonight.” He disconnected and looked down at the phone in his hand with an expression of distaste. “The problem with these things is that you can’t slam them down when you hang up on someone.”

“I didn’t know you had a cell phone,” Sydney kept her tone innocent and mildly curious.

“They insisted I have one at work,” he said. “For the current project. I’m giving it back as soon as possible.” He placed it far away on the table, as if proximity could put them both in danger. “I don’t like being so easily accessible,” he said, sounding somewhat disturbed by the idea.

“You have to go back in tonight?” she asked, changing tactics again.

He made a noise of disgust. “They’ve either botched the research or lost it. I’ve no doubt that what I did was right.” He hacked the onion in half, and considered. “Or, at least, only needs retooling. The concept is sound, it’s the execution that’s giving them the trouble…” He resumed his methodical slicing and Sydney made herself useful by washing celery.

“What is it that you’re researching?” she asked, honestly interested.

He gave her a wry, half smile. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

She laughed weakly, and didn’t meet his eyes for the rest of the night.

* * *

Sydney had to go to the restaurant. There was no getting around it. She and Francie had devised several ways for her to travel from the bistro to the CIA-cell building where they had been working diligently over the past few days, but it was becoming impossible to ignore the fact that she was supposed to be running an open, successful restaurant.

She was also reminded of the unsettling fact that there may be another Sydney playing her part elsewhere. When they switched back, Sydney didn’t want to have left the restaurant in ruins.

Assuming she hasn’t gotten herself killed in my world.

It was still early enough that the restaurant was well and truly deserted – not slated to open until early afternoon, the morning hours gave Sydney time to prepare a menu, speak with the chefs and managers about what was working and what was not, and devote a significant amount of time haggling with a florist over the price of carnations.

The elegant clock in the front entrance had just struck one p.m. when her private office line rang. The caller ID was an unknown number. One of the managers was watching her curiously from across the room, so she hastened to pick up the line.

“Hello?”

“Joey’s Pizza?”

Oh, for Christ sake, Sydney thought before saying, “Wrong number,” and hanging up. Today, of all days? I’ve got way too much to do, and not enough time to do it in… She grabbed her keys and was out the main entrance without so much as a by-you-leave to the rest of the staff. It didn’t occur to her until she was halfway to the rendezvous that she was more upset about being interrupted than she was excited by the prospect of a breakthrough.

* * *

They could hear Dixon talking before he even got into the room.

Sydney doubled up on her attentiveness, chastising herself for temporarily – only temporarily, she reminded herself – losing herself in the role of playing in someone else’s life. Even if that life was technically her own. And, minus the recent CIA intervention, much, much more stable than the one she normally lead. Actually, she thought wryly, even with the recent CIA intervention, it’s more stable than the one I normally lead.

“Dixon, Dixon, slow down,” Marshall was saying, actually physically restraining the man by tugging on one arm so he didn’t flail and break something. “Start at the beginning, now that everyone is here. Now that you’re here,” he added.

Dixon took a deep breath, and Sydney felt her nerves notch up a bit. Then he laughed, a little shaken, and apologized. “I haven’t slept in a few days,” he said, his eyes darting across the room to Will and Francie. “But this is just…remarkable. Incredible.” His eyes latched on Sydney, bright and excited. “The binary code you recommended was exactly what we needed.”

Sydney frowned. “That’s so…convenient.”

Dixon barked another nervous little laugh. “Actually, it wasn’t exactly what we needed, you know, there were…um…I had to put it into a matrix format and find equilibrium and transform...um...forty-seven times…” He drifted off when he realized no one else knew what he meant.

“What does it say?” Marshall asked sternly, emphasizing the last word.

“Right,” Dixon said as he breathed outward. He clicked on the remote that would activate the overhead projector, and an image of ancient and battered parchment filled their view. With a laser pointer, Dixon pointed at the top line. “What it says is…‘The four deaths and seven artifacts will first reveal Rambaldi’s Rift. On the Day, the final Choice will then heal the Rift’.”

“What Rift?” Marshall asked.

“What Day?” Will asked.

“What Choice?” Francie asked.

Sydney didn’t say anything.

Dixon pointed the laser pointer at Marshall, nearly zapping him in the eye. “Oh…sorry, sir. I’ll just…” he put it down, and then looked back up at them, excitedly. “Okay. The Rift.” He pointed at Marshall. “The Rift I figured out. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if we didn’t have living…um…proof, sitting right next to us. No offense, Sydney.” She smiled up at him reassuringly, and he used it to build momentum in his explanation. “Okay, has anybody seen the episode of Star Trek, the original series, ‘The City On The Edge Of Forever’?” He nodded slightly at each of them in turn, and received nothing but blank looks. Taking a deep breath, he went on, “McCoy falls through an arch that calls itself the Guardian of Forever, and he changes history so that The Enterprise never exists, which is, you know,” he chuckled, “pretty bad, and so Kirk and Spock have to go in after him, and they have all kinds of…like, they’ve never seen cars, and then there’s a bit with streetlights, where – ”

“Dixon,” Marshall said. “What does this have to do with the Prophesy?”

Dixon looked like the wind had just been taken out of his sails. “Well, okay…it’s like…Rambaldi is the arch, okay? And Sydney is…um…McCoy. Her very being here is creating a Rift between the two worlds, between actual, spatial time.”

“Are you sure?” Will leaned forward. “I mean, Rambaldi’s usually pretty vague about this stuff, isn’t he?”

Dixon shook his head. “Not with this. There aren’t even alternate word meanings for this one. He wanted whoever deciphered it to be able to tell what it meant.” He tilted his head, and considered. “I think.”

“So what happens to the Rift?” Will asked. “After forty-seven days they get switched back, and what happens?

Dixon snapped his fingers and pointed at Will. “That’s it! That must be the Day part, forty-seven days afterwards.”

“The man’s got a bit of a number fixation,” Francie said sardonically.

“He was a genius,” Sydney muttered.

“Oh, well, that explains it.”

There was a moment of contemplative silence before anyone spoke. “So we’ve got to assume that the four deaths and seven artifacts refer to Sydney as well?” Marshall guessed.

“It would make sense that the forty-seven day count initiated itself after the fourth death,” Dixon said. “But there’s also got to be something to have to do with the artifacts…I still haven’t figured that part out, but there are another two pages to decipher.”

“Doesn’t the CIA have some kind of artifacts database?” Will was writing something down on a piece of paper. “We can try and find out of how many of them she may have come into contact with.”

“Perfect,” Francie said, pushing back from the table to stand up. “Let’s get to work.”

But Sydney was frowning down at the table top. She turned suddenly to Dixon. “What about the Choice?”

Everyone went quiet, to see what he would say. He was nodding. “That’s McCoy. He had to make a choice to stay happy, and forever alter history, or do the right thing that would leave him miserable and knowing it until he died. Not that the choice you have to make will be anything like that,” he went on in a rush. “But…um…well, you’d better be prepared.”

You’ll finally get to shoot Sark, her brain told her sadistically. Her lips twisted into a mockery of a smile. “I guess we’d better get to work figuring out what that is, then,” she said resignedly.

* * *

Sydney put down the pile of photocopied pages she was carrying and stared at the second white board that had been moved into the room in her fifteen minute absence. “What’s going on?” They had spent all yesterday rifling through old tomes and ream after ream of Prophesy translation, trying to identify the seven artifacts that she may have come into contact with, but it was proving harder than they had expected. Today hadn’t been going much better, and she was thinking about throwing in the towel for the afternoon and going home early.

Francie didn’t turn from the white board, where she was drawing a thick black line, lengthways. “We’ve got to figure out the timeline of this thing. The deaths. You’ve only got 47 days from the fourth death to make what ever the important choice is, so your time is already on the clock. If we can figure out how much time we’ve got left, we’ll be a lot better off.”

“It’s even possible the fourth death hasn’t happened yet,” Dixon said, stooped over a tiny circuit board at the far end of the conference table. There were bits of wire and copper and other important looking pieces scattered around him in a half halo of technology. It reminded Sydney of when she used to play with Legos as a child, and would lay out all the pieces and the instruction booklet and work meticulously for hours. She would leave the pieces out overnight and her father would step on them during his insomniac pacing, and would threaten to throw them all out of she wasn’t more careful. She never was, and he never did.

Dixon was still talking. “…I mean, it is possible that with all the different situations in life, how are you supposed to know what constitutes a Death? Technically, when we sleep, every time there’s a REM stage, we slip a little closer into, um, into Death. Okay, not actually Death with a capital dee, but there’s still a little kind of not living there. But – ”

“Dixon,” Francie said patiently. “Why aren’t you working in your office?”

He looked up from the table, appearing startled. “Oh,” he said, and Sydney believed that he had honestly just remembered, “I needed to take Miss Bristow’s measurements.”

Sydney raised her brow.

“Completely on the level,” Dixon stammered, and Sydney could see his desire to pull his collar away from his throat with a hooked finger. “It’s for the body suit I’m making.”

Frowning, she came closer to the table and saw it covered in white, filmy material. “What body suit?”

“We finally got intel about the compound in Turkey where Vaughn is holed up,” Francie said.

“The chances of him still being there – ”

Francie stopped her. “I know. But there’s bound to be something there, and we’ve got to get the information somehow.”

Sydney made a skeptical face. “And they’re going to send me in? You’re the field trained agent.”

“I don’t write the assignments,” Francie said by way of dismissal. She didn’t seem upset, and Sydney was relieved. Taking over Francie’s job was not what she had intended when she had asked her friend for help. Of course, you didn’t plan on being part of a complex Rambaldi Prophesy in an alternate timeline, either.

“It makes sense, actually,” Dixon said, fiddling with two pieces of copper and a pencil sized blowtorch. “I mean, if Sydney gets caught, it’s her father. He wouldn’t kill his own daughter.”

Francie and Sydney just stared at him.

“Would he?” Dixon asked, his eyes darting back and forth between them.

Sydney swallowed. “Tell me about the suit.”

Dixon tried his best to wipe the worry out of his forehead, and actually shook his head briskly. “Okay. The suit. Right.” She could almost hear his brain switch into Tech Mode. “The only way in or out of the compound is through an entrance room, which is monitored by cameras. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, I’d just do my business,” he tickled the air with his fingers, simulating typing on a keyboard, “and we’d be fine. But, ah, there’s a hold up.” He looked at them both apologetically, even though Sydney was fairly sure Francie already knew this, judging by the neutral expression on her face.

“The entrance way is not only monitored by cameras. They have a new heat detection system. If a body enters the room, they know it. So the suit will …um…refrigerate you. For five minutes. Any longer and your body will go into shock. Again, normally not a problem.” He held up one arm of the flimsy suit and she saw that it had no hand on it. “The problem this time is that the keypad to get out of the entrance room is a palm print encoder. So we’ll have to make you cold to get through the cameras, and make you hot to get past the keypad. Not…um…not hot, but…” He stammered and would have blushed, but Francie cut him off.

“What can we do?”

“I’m working on it,” Dixon said. “Quickly,” he added.

“Whose palm print will open the door?” Sydney asked.

“Our intelligence reports that the guards can open the door. So take out a guard, and use the gelatin mold – ”

“Um,” Dixon said, and he looked up from under his eyes, and then back down at his hands. “That won’t work.”

Francie frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. “Why not?”

“They take at least three weeks to make,” Dixon said apologetically. “That’s three weeks we don’t have. But like I said, I’m working on something…”

“That’s good, Dixon,” Sydney said, hearing in her head how strange it was before she even said it. “I’ll come by your office this afternoon before I leave and you can do the measurements then, okay?”

“Great!” He broke into a relieved smile, and Sydney wondered, not for the first time, why Dixon – or whoever, names didn’t really matter anymore – always acted as if he had just been spared the death penalty for another day. But she didn’t have much time to think about it, as he swept the various bits and pieces off the table and into a shoe box top, and made his way hastily out of the room.

“I always feel like I’ve been hit and run when I have a conversation with him,” Francie mused dryly. “Is it the same…?”

“Mmm,” Sydney affirmed, watching the doorway that had just recently been vacated. Turning to the other woman, she said, “Now, what about these deaths?”

“Right,” Francie said, and picked up a pen. “Okay. Here, we’ve got your death by the side of the road where you were revived.”

“You’re sure that counts?” she asked. “I was clinically dead?”

Francie gave her a look. “Trust me. Sark pressed the point.”

Sydney had to accept that. Sark wasn’t one for exaggeration. “Okay, so the side of the road. And we’ve got my death in the fire, if that counts. They matched DNA of me to a dead body, so I think…” she squinted, contemplating. “So maybe I asphyxiated?

“I vote yes,” Francie said, writing it on the time line that was shaping on the board. “And?”

“And…” Sydney thought about it. “There had to have been something that coincided with the coma. Your Sydney must have flat-lined at some point. I was tracking Sark…” She shook her head, frustrated. “I don’t remember. But it’s possible that I…” she drifted off, not sure she could finish the sentence, as surreal as it was.

Francie considered. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t flat-line, but we can have Dixon check the medical records. So if that was the most recent one, we’ve still got…” she checked her watch for the date. “That’s still thirty-six days, at least. And if the fourth death hasn’t happened yet, then we’ve got unlimited time.”

“We could only be so lucky. Mark down that third one, would you?” Sydney picked up the pile of papers she had been carrying and started shuffling through them, trying to find out where she had left off.

“Okay,” Francie said, marking down a third notch. “So that’s two in your world and one in ours, for sure. Rambaldi likes parallelism. So the fourth one was probably here…in this world, I mean. Even if it wasn’t in the hospital.”

Sydney frowned. “How am I going to find out if I’ve ever died here? I mean…I don’t know, you know?”

Francie tapped the capped pen against the dry erase board for a few seconds. “We can check hospitals for any entries…” Her voice sounded strange, uneven.

“Why do I feel like you’re about to say ‘but’?” Sydney asked darkly.

“But,” Francie conceded. “Arvin Sloane would know.”

Sydney felt a small tremor wrack her body. “I could ask Weiss. Weiss would know – he remembers everything.” She knew she sounded desperate, but was powerless to keep the pitch out of her voice. “Or Sark. Sark would tell me.”

Francie looked at her pityingly. “Weiss and Sark would also want to know why you couldn’t remember the history of your own personal injuries.”

Sydney closed her eyes and tried to think of anything other than spending time with Arvin Sloane.

“He’s the one who would be able to tell you, Sydney,” Francie said in a pained but comforting voice. “He knows you the best out of any of us.”

“That’s the problem,” Sydney said, her arms crossing her chest in a motion that seemed less stand-offish than sheltering. “If there is anyone who is going wreak havoc with this façade, it’s going to be Sloane. He loves to play with this kind of thing in a public venue…he’ll put me on display just because he thinks its fun to watch me…squirm. That bastard.” She spat out the last word with every ounce of venom she felt toward the man.

“Well you can’t call him that, for one thing,” Francie said, laughingly. “Seriously, Syd, I’ll go with you. And Sark will be there. I can steer the conversation if things get to be too much. We’ll keep it safe. Okay?”

Sydney glanced desperately up at her friend, hoping some kind of last minute brilliance would strike her before she had to resort to this. But it was their only chance – or at least their fastest – and time was absolutely of the essence. They weren’t even sure how much they had. “Okay,” Sydney gave in. “I’ll call him tonight and ask him if we can see each other soon.”

“He’d probably like that,” Francie said. “He hasn’t seen you since the coma, and he was so worried…but you know how it can be. He’s been overseas.”

Sydney nodded thoughtfully, trying to blank out that the person they were talking about was Arvin Sloane, for God’s sake. She looked up abruptly. “Was he the one who got the information about the entrance in Turkey?”

Francie hesitated before nodding.

“We can’t trust it,” Sydney said automatically.

“I knew you’d say that,” Francie said with a dramatic sigh. “So we had it confirmed.”

“He could doctor the information in the confirmation, too,” Sydney said in a rush. “You’ve got no idea what he’s capable of, there are only so many…” She drifted off after she saw the look on Francie’s face. Disappointed, sorry, sad. “But there’s nothing we can do,” Sydney said dejectedly. “God, I hate this.”

“I know, Syd,” Francie said, patting her arm. “I’m sorry. We’ll figure this out as soon as we can.”

* * *

“We’ve got a problem.”

Francie and Sydney looked up together, to see Will standing in the door. He was carrying a file, a beverage holding tray from McDonalds with three cups of coffee, and a frown.

“What is it?” Francie asked, taking the file from his hand. Will popped the cups out with a shuffle of cardboard against cardboard, and passed around the pure acid that would keep them awake. But Sydney could already see by the look on Francie’s face exactly what it was.

Trouble.

Nothing can ever just be easy, can it.

Francie passed her the file, and she flickered her glance down at it, not even needing that short amount of time to confirm who it was. She burned the roof of her mouth on the coffee, pulled the top off to let it cool more, and looked back at Will, waiting for him to say something.

“You knew he was alive?” Will asked, clearly more interested than aggravated.

“I had a hunch,” Sydney said, pushing the picture of her father away from her. “How is this trouble?”

“How isn’t this trouble?” Francie asked acridly.

“Specifically,” Sydney clarified.

Will sat down next to Francie, and she handed him half of her stack that she had been sifting through. Sydney added a few sheets from her own, not to be out done. “All Marshall has told me so far is that he’s been spotted leaving a heavily guarded building in Turkey.”

Francie frowned. “Vaughn just called together his men in Turkey.”

“So he’s working for Vaughn now?” Sydney asked, the incredulity in her voice opaque.

“He’s doing something,” Will said. “I’d say that’s a lot more than we expected, considering he’s supposed to be six feet under and twenty years past right now.”

“Point,” Francie said.

“So what’s the plan?” Sydney asked, even though she was already making her own.

“Meet with Arvin Sloane on Thursday as scheduled. Marshall has given me authorization for you to be wearing a weapon at all times now. You can stop by the third floor on your way out to pick up a standard issue on your way home. All we can do now is wait.”

“You’re not going to try to bring him in? He’s killed – ”

“He’s worth too much,” Will cut Sydney off, and she decided quite quickly she didn’t like it when he interrupted her. “If we try and go after him now, we risk losing the ability to follow him. See where he goes, right after twenty years out of the game.” He picked up the first piece of paper on the pile. “Is this supposed to look like this?”

“At least it’s not written in crayon,” Sydney said wryly.

Will rotated the paper ninety degrees and held it up to the light. “I don’t know, that might improve the legibility.”

“Have we gotten back the translations yet?” Francie was leaning over his shoulder, frowning, and tilting her head slightly in a surprisingly birdlike way.

“Some of them. Nothing new so far – there are only so many ways you can rearrange the words. Eventually a permutation is going to mean something and we will be back in business,” Will reassured her. “Until then…” He picked up another piece of paper and compared it to the first. Where the initial page of Rambaldi’s Prophesy had been straight-forward, the second two pages were a constantly mutating creature of confusion. “Keep plugging along.”

* * *

He’s her father, and she doesn’t even know him.

That’s all she can think as she stares at him in the graveyard, a brand new cell phone sitting in her hand. She can feel the warmth from his palm and the battery, and she knows that it will ring as soon as he leaves and a whole new chapter of her life will start. And it will be because of him.

But there are so many things that she doesn’t understand – things that she wants to ask him but she knows he won’t answer. She wants to know where her mother is, and why he has tried to keep her safe for so long, and why that meant letting her work against the very people she had been trying to stop for so long. But most of all she wanted to know why he was willing to go to such extreme lengths to protect her.

She has never been close to her father.

Even when her mother was alive, and they had been a complete and – so she had thought until yesterday – normal family, he hadn’t been around very often. Of course, when she factored in now the fact that he was an spy, and not a salesman, it made a bit more sense. She wondered if he had ever had the weakness to tell her mother the truth about what he did. Her stomach twisted sickly. Would the CIA have done this to Danny?

And twisted again: Did the CIA kill her mother?

But she knows it isn’t true because her father is not that weak, and will never be that weak. He is the strength in her life, and she tells herself that it is better that they are not close, because if he was felled at the hand of some imaginary enemy, and she had nothing left at all, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to carry on.

It is better to have nothing and be indestructible than to have anything and have weakness, she tells herself. And she thinks that maybe this is what her father thinks, too, as he hands her the cell phone and welcomes her in the warmest way he knows how to his world of intrigue and danger. A whole new spiral in the tattoo of her life.

She wants to tell him that she understands this, as he stands brooding at her, with his too big ears and his strangely shaped head and the way he shifts on his feet, strangely unsure – he wants to stand next to her and show her how to mourn a spouse, but knows he is not welcome. She cannot find it in herself to tell him otherwise, because it isn’t true yet. But she thinks that some day, maybe in a few years, she might ask him again.

They will come to this cemetery together, she tells herself, in a few years. When SD-6 is just a vague memory and they are both retired and scarred, and she is a teacher and none of her students will ever suspect. Then they can come, and she will bring flowers, and he can teach her what it means to lose something as gigantic as love to something as miniscule as national security.

He’s her father, and she doesn’t even know him. And he doesn’t even know her. But she thinks it might be okay – because one day, he will.

* * *

“Sydney!”

She knew the voice instantly as it stiffened her spine, and she gripped the counter top of the serving area behind the bar, her fingers clenched on the black marble, not sure if the red she saw was instinct or the color of the wall. Exhaling deeply through her nose, she plastered on the smile she had always reserved for her former employer. She turned to the bar, smile calmly in place, and said, “Hi…Dad.”

The word was sweet poison in her mouth, but if her surrogate father noticed, he said nothing. Instead, he climbed amiably aboard one of the stools adorned by a puffy, black seat.

Despite Francie’s promise to attend the meeting as buffer, Sydney had been forced to stage at least this preliminary meeting on her own. She needed to know that she could deal with this man. If I can take him, I can take anything. She watched him look back at her though his idiotic tinted sunglasses. Of course, you thought the same thing about Sark, didn’t you? And look how well you’re getting along with him.

“Interesting stuff, this Prophesy business.” It was early afternoon, though the place was busy, and his direct attack of the issue at hand made her antsy enough to check surreptitiously to see if anyone was coming. Sloane had always been very comfortable talking about private things in public, and she thought it might be his downfall, in the end.

But this is the wrong Sloane.

“It’s complicated,” she answered him.

“Ah,” he said, and it carried the heavy precision she knew both the familiar versions of her father and her Sloane to posses. “I find it interesting, then, that you choose to address me as ‘Dad’.” He said the word with a hint of satisfied mockery, but not enough for her to justify the hackles raising on the back of her neck.

“I wasn’t sure how much you knew,” she said hoodedly.

He was leaning forward over the bar toward her. “Considering that I know your father very well, and that he chose me to take care of you – ”

“Makes you just as much a suspect in my eyes as he is,” she sniped at him, leaning forward on her hands. She flexed her shoulders back, subconsciously widening her stance in defense. “I also find it interesting that you act this way towards the person you’re the guardian of.”

“Surely you aren’t so distrustful of the man who cares for you in your reality.” He had a smarmy smirk on his face, peering at her over the tops of his glasses.

“You don’t know my family very well,” she said stonily.

“I’m afraid I do, Sydney,” he said, relaxing into the tiny back on the stool as if it were a throne and he was a King returning from a long and wrongful absence. “Otherwise, I would be in Nepal, trying to figure out what your father has up his sleeve with Vaughn, instead of here, answering your questions.” He looked pointedly at his watch. “Which, by the way, you haven’t asked any of yet.”

“I only need to know one thing,” she said, through clenched teeth.

He interrupted the breath she was drawing to continue with a knowing, confident smile. “I could answer lots of your questions, Sydney.” He spoke just as salaciously, for a man who was acting as her father, and it made her flesh heave and shiver in adamant protest.

She ignored him as best she could, and asked, “I need to know if the girl you raised – your Sydney Bristow – ever suffered any seemingly mortal dangers.”

He was nodding thoughtfully, as if this were all in line with his plans. Then he asked, “You mean incidents where your life was in real danger? Or a moment when you were actually dead?”

“The latter,” she clarified.

“That’s a little morbid, isn’t it?” He seemed surreal in the daylight – the neon lighting worked better for his sallow, intimidating demeanor.

“If I didn’t need to know,” Sydney said, “I wouldn’t have asked at all.”

“You would have liked that very much, I imagine.” He fell silent, obviously thinking, and she did not bother to disabuse him of his opinion that she had wanted to avoid seeing him. “There was only one time,” he said finally. “You were in a kiddy pool, and you drowned. I had to give you CPR.”

“Ugh,” Sydney said, her lip curling.

Sloane shot her a “do shut up” look and added, “You were only four at the time, if that makes a difference.”

Sydney regarded him for any evidence of dishonesty. “It may,” was all the praise she allowed him. “I believe I would be…remiss…not to ask you to dinner.”

“Can you cook?” Sloane seemed genuinely interested.

Sydney allowed him a tight smile. “I’m learning.”

“I would like that very much,” Sloane agreed, and stood. “I know this whole experience must be very difficult for you,” he said in a suddenly intimate tone, and patted the table top with the pads of his fingers. “Did they…” he shook his head, and started again. “Does Sark know?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to know,” she said resolutely.

“Interesting,” Sloane said enigmatically. Then he seemed to shake himself off, and said, “Well, let me know if you need anything else. Otherwise, I will come by tomorrow evening.”

At her dismissive nod, he exited the restaurant with a tilt of the head toward the sky, as if greeting it after a long absence.

The only thing that kept Sydney from breaking into tears was the fact that a manager in training came up to her with a question – and after that she had too much to think about.

* * *

It made her skin crawl, the way Sark welcomed Sloane into their house. It was subdued but full of glee, as if they were trying very hard to act as men but wanted to throw their arms around one another in a bear-hug of welcome. Instead, they settled for slapping each other on the back for far longer than was really necessary. Sydney slammed the silverware down on the table where she was setting places for dinner, but ran out of cutlery too soon, and Sloane swooped upon her with a hug to break bones.

“How’s my favorite daughter?” he asked her with a skeletal grin.

“Wonderful…Dad,” she added through strained teeth.

“Good girl,” he approved distractedly, patting her on the back. “Something smells positively wonderful.”

“You know Sydney,” Sark said teasingly. “Always testing out some new recipe on us.”

“Poison, no doubt,” Sloane added in a jovial voice, but lashed Sydney with an odd gaze. She met it unflinchingly. Their eyes still locked, Sloane called to Sark, who had moved into the kitchen. “So, Sergei, when do you plan to make my girl an honest woman?”

Sydney willed a heart attack on him, but the only thing that happened was that Sark started laughing. He stuck his head back into the room and gave them both a grin. “I’m afraid that nothing I can do will ever make Sydney an honest woman.” He gave a her a conciliatory wink and she forced yet another smile, and stuffed down the overwhelming urge to smack Sloane in the back of the head when Sark pulled back into the kitchen.

Whatever Sloane’s next scathing remark was going to be, it was interrupted by Francie’s arrival. More greetings went around, but Sydney could tell Francie was focusing her entire purpose on distracting any subversive intent Sloane might have.

Sydney and Francie ducked into the kitchen together at one point to juggle the pots and pans and Sydney whispered to her friend, “Why on earth does he have it out for this operation? I thought he was supposed to be on our side?”

Francie spared a glance toward the door and said, “He and Marshall had words over whether or not you should be allowed to tell Sark…and Eric. To see if they could help with piecing together the Prophesy, that kind of thing. Since they know the old you. Marshall deemed it unnecessary.”

“Sloane doesn’t agree,” Sydney said bitingly.

“He agrees as little as possible,” Francie said, “but he does good work.”

“Well he’s about to do some very bad work, if he exposes Sark to this,” she hissed. “Can’t you do anything?”

“Other than stick at his side the entire time?” Francie said desperately. “There’s only so much I can do. Sark’s a naturally inquisitive guy, and…” she said Sydney’s frantic expression and nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you,” Sydney sighed, and turned back to the simmering pots. “You’d better get in there. I hate to think what they’ll get up to, left alone for too long.”

The rest of the evening went blissfully smoothly. Sloane grilled her with questions about the restaurant, but she and Francie worked in tandem to cover any holes in her knowledge. She still had to wonder, though, why it was that he wanted her to make a mistake so badly in front of Sark. Part of her understood it – he was testing her, to make sure that she was quick enough on her feet to be accepted into the Agency on only face value alone. But it worried her that he had such little faith in Marshall’s decisions, or in the fact that she was clearly not the daughter he had raised.

The conclusion that she eventually came to was simple – it was Sloane. If it had been her father – Jack, she clarified for her own peace of mind – he would have been doing the same thing. Unsettling a potential enemy. But she would keep her guard up anyway, and demand that Dixon supply her with any unusual phone calls or e-mails to or from Sloane’s corner of the world. He was too dangerous not to keep a close eye on.

* * *

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been handcuffed to the chair, when the door finally opened. She gummed at her gag in a sudden frenzy for some type of freedom, but all it did was frustrate and hyperventilate her.

She had been visited throughout the day by mute minions, fed one meal and had her restraints checked. It unsettled her – care of captives usually indicated a long term imprisonment. She hoped it was long term imprisonment, anyway. The alternatives made her skin crawl.

She should have known something was wrong when she went out that morning – the van was gone, replaced by an innocuous sedan, parked teenager-style too far from the curb. She was stooping for the newspaper when they got her from behind.

Whoever ‘they’ were. So far she had only seen faceless cronies.

So when the door opened she was half expecting one of the lackeys to return, and half expecting the man from Taipai who liked to pull teeth.

What she got was neither.

Her breath caught when he walked in the door.

He looked the same – so much so that it shook her. His hair was perfectly styled, less sloppily than when they had first met, with the ease and care of government requirements. He was clean shaven, the dulled angles of his face catching none of the shadows that tried to spill through the milky-filmed window. His suit was sharply pressed and dark, and his shirt looked as if it had just had a tie pulled out from the collar. She could see the bulge of a pistol tucked under his left arm.

“Sydney Bristow, my name is Mr. Vaughn,” he said, and opened his mouth to continue when she yelled at him through the gag. He looked immediately concerned, his eyes going doeish and brown and his forehead creasing delicately, and it made her blood run cold. This is the worst part – him looking the same. The same mannerisms. Only they all mean something different.

“I have to admit,” he said with mild curiosity, “I didn’t think you’d have anything to say to me.” His voice was thicker than she thought it should be, but it could be due to the fact that he’d probably been using more French than English in the past five years. She calmed her face into passivity, looked him right in the eye, and made sounds around the gag again.

His mild curiosity faded as he pulled off the gag. “You’re not crying,” he observed. “You should know that I’m going to kill you, Miss Bristow. I wouldn’t have told you my name under any other circumstances.”

She didn’t bother to answer that with any of the contrived things that popped into her head. It wouldn’t do for him to think that she was anything more than a restaurant owner who happened to be Agent Francie Calfo’s best friend. So instead she asked him what she already knew. “Why are you going to kill me? What are you going to do with me?” She hated that she was out of breath – she hadn’t even been struggling. But it would probably help her seem weaker, and the less faith he had in her abilities to rescue herself, the better.

He looked smug. It suits him, the role of the evil villain. She still felt strangely cold – as if she had a way out of this, an extraction team waiting just outside the building, or it was only a reconnaissance mission and there was still plenty of time to stay here because she was the one calling the shots until she found out all the information she needed.

It wasn’t the case, but deluding herself kept her from breaking down into hysterics.

“What I’m going to do to you, Miss Bristow,” he began, pausing dramatically, reveling in his role, “is steal your face and put it on someone else.” He came closer to her, and she drew back instinctively in her chair when his hand came to caress her jaw. “It’s a shame to do it, really, but it’s a requirement of the job. I’m sure you understand.”

“You’re full of shit,” she spat at him, and his hand gripped her chin viciously before letting it go. “That surgery’s impossible.”

He chuckled, but it sounded strained even to her. “You’re thinking in terms of Hollywood. I don’t plan to just steal your face.” He bent down so that their eyes met, even though she was studiously trying to not look at him. “I’m going to steal your entire body. I have some very convincing actresses who can pull off any job, with the right…wardrobe.”

“Lucky you,” she said, letting a little of her festering misery seep through into her voice.

“You have no idea,” Vaughn mused to himself. After another heartbeat, he rose to his full height again, and rubbed his hands together anxiously. “Well. We might as well begin. No time like the present, hey, Miss Bristow?”

She didn’t say anything, locked her jaw and defiantly looked past him at the door.

“You still don’t believe me.” He sounded amused, now, which was good. She didn’t want to know what would happen if she tried his patience. “Well, you will.” He turned his back to her and called toward the closed door, “Bring in the equipment. Start setting up.” The door opened and the same anonymous men began to cart in equipment. He flashed her a winning smile and said, “We’ll begin within the hour. If you have anything else you’d like to say, it had best be now – if the procedure doesn’t kill you, we’ll have to anyway, once it’s done. We can’t have two Sydney Bristows gallivanting about, now can we?”

“Michael?”

Sydney and Vaughn both turned towards the door, and the voice calling his name, as well they respectively could. Sydney tried to hide her confusion, and Vaughn broke out into an ecstatic smile.

“Hurry,” he encouraged the voice. “If you want to meet her ahead of time, it will have to be now. We’re about to begin prep.”

She appeared in the middle of his command, peering around the door, her face lighting up when she realized she’d found them. Sydney ground her teeth, the bones in her cheeks standing out from the tension. The blonde woman looked down at her and smiled perversely.

“So you’re who I’m going to be for the next six months,” she mused. She turned to Vaughn and pressed her fingers into his chest teasingly. “Think you can still bring that to bed with you?”

“I’ll manage somehow,” Vaughn replied with a smirk of his own, before capturing her mouth in a savage kiss.

Sydney turned her head away. Of course Lauren Reed would still be here to flaunt me in this world. I’m not lucky enough to be spared something like this. The affection stretched into noisy, unbearable seconds, and his distraction left her with her thoughts echoing in her head and trying desperately to block out the audio and visual in front of her.

If she was going to get out of here, it would have to be soon – the more doctors he brought into the room, the harder it would be to escape. Not to mention she was on a limited schedule – she had no doubt that Vaughn would orchestrate it so that the CIA received an anonymous tip after the surgery had started that a friend of an agent was in trouble. Her double would be rescued and brought back for debriefing, no one suspecting the switch.

This was the plan that she had laid out with Marshall the night before, and they had agreed to give her a homing device so she could be tracked, anticipating that she would eventually be taken. That way, the switch would never take place, and they could capture Vaughn and whoever it was that was supposed to double as her at the same time. She cursed her stupidity in assuming that they would have even an extra twenty-four hours to work out that detail, and wondered if they were already working on finding her. Security detail had undoubtedly reported her absence to the Director already, but she wasn’t even sure where she was, let alone where to start looking.

Which left her a little under an hour to figure out how to get out of the clutches of her evil ex-boyfriend and his skanky body replacement for her.

She tamped down tightly on that thought. There will be time for self pity later. Work on surviving now – then you can cry all you damn please. She didn’t realize how hard she was biting her lip until she tasted blood. Reluctantly, she released the abused flesh and cast her eyes around the room. The space where she was seated was clear of all other material that could have helped her.

Well, she thought ironically, you’ve done it before. You might as well do it again.

She waited until Vaughn sent Lauren away and was called out of the room – he was far too excited not to oversee each movement himself – and then tipped herself forward, landing on her knees with the chair still strapped awkwardly and painfully to her body. The handcuffs that were attached around each of her ankles, though, she slid off of the legs of the chair with ease.

“Help!” she called out. A guard poked his head in the door, ready to gag her again, and she looked up at him from under her fall of hair, pleading with her eyes. She saw the flash of sympathy and annoyance in his expression and tensed her thighs, getting as low to the ground as she could.

The guard trudged into the room and grabbed the back of the chair, hauling it upward with an exaggerated grunt of effort. As soon as she was upright again, she tipped back was far as she could and let her legs snag around his torso, and twisted. He made a noise of surprise and his shotgun went flying in the opposite direction, both of them clattering to the ground.

She was standing now, as he struggled upward, and she slammed the chair into his face, the metallic leg cutting open his cheek and misplacing several teeth on the left side. One popped out and clattered to the concrete floor with the sound of dropped coins on ceramic tile.

Another well placed attack with the chair leg to the stomach had him curled on the ground, and she dropped to an awkward angle over his body to grope for the keys at his waist. With a painful twist of her arms, she managed to unlock first the right and then the left handcuffs that held her to the chair. Her spine popped as she stood up. She grabbed the guard’s weapon, bound and gagged him, and dragged him out of sight of the door.

The whole skirmish couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, but she could feel her heart hammering in her chest, eyes darting back toward the door. This isn’t right at all. Vaughn’s supposed to be on an earpiece, waiting for me…my Guardian Angel… she could feel her lips wrench back over her teeth again, and shoved down the panic she knew was building in her. Then she surveyed her options.

She could shoot out the window. The problem was that it was painted over, and she had no way of knowing how high up she was – and even if it wasn’t all that high, there was still the question of not knowing where she was, or where she was going. She could try going out through the door, and take on whatever other guards happened to have been out of ear shot at the time. There would also, undoubtedly, be hired muscle, doctors, and Vaughn himself to get through.

That thought halted her mid-step, and her reflexes caught her balance before her brain registered that she had even faltered. Vaughn. What if I have to kill him?

Before she could debate further on a line of action, however, her options were narrowed for her – a body blocked the entrance to the door.

A body with a gun pointed at her head.

“Don’t move,” came the command in a soft, slightly altered British accent.

Sydney tensed, the gun in her hand clenched loosely at the stock.

Lauren came closer to her in measured, even steps. “I should’ve known that you’d put up a fight,” she said in an eerily calm voice. “I don’t know how you got out, or what you’re planning to do, but he didn’t take you seriously enough from the start.” They regarded one another with open animosity. “Any friend of a CIA agent has got to be on the inside, somehow,” she declared.

Sydney fought the urge to roll her eyes at the implication of conspiracy. There were too many instances where, under different terms and conditions, the woman in front of her would have been absolutely correct. Of course, if I was CIA right now, I wouldn’t be allowed to put a bullet through your abdomen. But noise was not what she needed right now, so she instead slammed the barrel of the shotgun into Lauren’s face, hearing her pistol drop to the ground and watching its skittering path along the grey concrete in the corner of her eye. She followed up the blow with a series of follow-up attacks, easily dodging and blocking any attempts at defense from the other woman.

She’s moving too slowly, Sydney frowned. She must have been drugged for the surgery.

She drove back the other woman far enough to slide home the heavy steel door that sealed off the room from the outside world, threw the bolt, and jammed the shotgun into the slide to keep anyone from opening it – for a few seconds at least.

Sydney snagged the pistol, stuck it into her belt, and used the chair to smash the window.

* * *

She hit the ground running.

The miracle of being outside and suddenly knowing where she was being held was as slim as Sydney had originally anticipated – and when she reached the pavement in the warehouse block she knew that she was, indeed, hopelessly lost. But she ran with intent, and soon found herself headed toward the building with the highest radio antennae.

She scaled to the roof as quickly as she could, up a service ladder that had been bolted to the rough surface of the building. Once she was up top, she used the mechanics to hide herself from anyone that might be watching. Down below, she could hear angry shouting and the sound of crunching glass, and instinctively crouched lower.

She made her way among the various technology bolted to the roof, until she spotted what she needed and did a sudden backtrack. It was an army issue radio control unit, with a digital display for frequency modification. She unscrewed the back with her nails, wincing as the metal bit into the skin of her fingertips.

Stifling a cry of victory, she prized the back from the front and lay it face down, examining the circuitry and trying in vain to remember what it was that Marshall had told her two years ago about radio technology.

Casting her eyes about, she pulled down a narrow antennae and snapped it in half, using the broken end to adjust the settings in the frequency coordinates grid to one that Marshall had said he had created. There was a slim chance that Dixon, here, had done the same – though she still felt slightly foolish as she tapped out the SOS Morse code into the transmitter.

It was a good thirty seconds before she had any reply, and even that was scattered and abrupt.

.. -..
.. -..
.. -..


“ID,” Sydney said to herself after the second time the signal came through. “How is he going to know my ID?” But she put it in anyway, muttering to herself to keep the code straight. “Short short long, short short short…”

There came no reply for an entire minute after that, during which Sydney checked how many bullets she had left in Lauren’s clip, and checked in every direction to see if she knew where she was at all. Judging from the throw of shadow, it was working steadily toward evening. If she could find a place to hide until nightfall, she probably had a good chance of escaping. But she was loathe to leave the transmitter.

It flashed at her, and she looked down at it.

Coordinates.

She snorted. If she knew where she was, she’d know how to get out without his help.

She ended the transmission with an air of defeat and scanned the buildings around her again. The good news, she told herself, was that she could see it was gated in. Which meant that it ended somewhere. And in the distance, she could see mountains. Calculating travel time, she couldn’t be any farther than Colorado or New Mexico.

A shout below her and a spray of brick chips flying where a bullet struck not more than a foot to her right made her duck below the lip of the roof again. She could hear another shout, and then Vaughn yelling, “Don’t kill her!”

More scuffling as Sydney inched her way along the rooftop to the opposite side of the building. She wouldn’t be lucky enough for there to be another ladder attached to the side, and she heaved herself over the edge of the roof and let the toes of her boots scrabble for purchase in the cinderblock siding.

Her fingers, sore from their impromptu screwdriver work, felt raw against the gaps in the stone, and she accidentally bit down on the inside of her cheek and tasted the coppery, astringent flavor of her own blood. To keep from crying out, she glanced down and ended up containing a bit of manic laughter. There was a car right below her, engine running. If she could just get to it before its driver got back, she would have a heavy advantage over her pursuers, even if she didn’t know where she was going.

She got as low as she could, as fast as she could, and steadied her legs for the jump down into the open bed of the Army issue Jeep that rattled and coughed its readiness below her.

The impact rattled up through her knees, but the sound of her feet colliding on the steel support bed made the driver, who had been smoking a cigarette underneath an overhang she had jumped from, turn with a shout.

She shot him in the head before he could let out more than a mottled yell, and his body slumped to the hard-pack that made up the road connecting the buildings. Ask questions later. She gunned the gas and headed in the direction she thought she had seen guard towers.

* * *

“Hold still,” Francie said for the second time, pulling her arm out straight and pouring rubbing alcohol over another wound. Will hissed in sympathy, and Sydney did her best to not react any further than yet another wince. She had never trained her nerves not to react to the initial jerk that came after decontaminating a wound.

“Gauze,” Will said as he handed over a bundle. “Damn, Syd, you scratched your hands up but good.”

“Yes, thank you, I noticed that.” Her teeth were clenched as Francie used small tweezers to pluck out the last of the gravel. “But we don’t have time for doctors right now, and I can’t let this fester.”

Will made a noise of agreement before picking up the stack of papers he had, until recently, been holding. “I should run these up to the offices,” he said. His voice echoed strangely in the warehouse, though Sydney thought it might have been that she wasn’t used to hearing three voices intermingling in the safe, caged area. Or these particular three, at any rate.

“You’ll be alright?” Will asked Francie, but shifted his gaze to include both of them. Sydney nodded and Francie gave him a small smile, and they shared a moment that Sydney was embarrassed to intrude on. Finally, Will took his leave and Francie began to bandage her hands.

“You’re just lucky Dixon had that channel open.”

Sydney snorted. “I’m lucky he had the channel open. I’m lucky there was an airborne helicopter unit nearby. I’m lucky you’re on good terms with the FBI. None of it is balanced by the absolute shit luck I’ve had regarding the fact that Vaughn wants to take my identity.”

“Well, not anymore he doesn’t,” Francie reasoned. “I mean, what would the point in doubling you be now? The Agency would be immediately suspicious.”

“Thanks,” Sydney said miserably. “I feel a lot better.”

Francie made a noise of compassion. “I’m sorry. You know I am. Tape.”

Sydney reached for the medical tape, tearing off a few long strips. Francie pressed the gauze down and held it in place. “I know you are. Oh, God. What am I going to tell Sark?”

“What do you want to tell him?”

“I’m tired of lying.” Sydney flexed her covered hand, making sure she still had enough mobility to function.

Francie began on her other hand, and Sydney flinched again as the alcohol seeped into her wounds. “Then you’ll tell the truth.”

Sydney quirked her eyebrow. “Which truth?”

“The real truth. That you were kidnapped, that the CIA happened to be on a coinciding drug raid, that we got you out safe and sound and have the kidnappers in custody. I said hold still.”

“I’m trying,” Sydney snapped, and then neither of them spoke for a moment while the tension worked its way under their skin and softened a bit. Francie finished up on her other hand and began clearing away her materials.

“Marshall says you should take some time off,” Francie told her. “We’ll be in contact with you if we need to pass on any vital information.”

“I can’t afford to take any time off,” Sydney insisted. “If we’ve learned anything tonight, it’s just how woefully unprepared – ”

“It’s an order,” Francie said in a steely tone.

They regarded one another before Sydney stood up. “Fine.”

Francie nodded twice, and stood, and they walked in opposite directions, shoes ringing out on the concrete in twin echoes as they got farther and farther away from one another.

* * *

She wonders how he does that to his hair. It’s just not natural, and it makes him look younger than he already is, and he doesn’t need that. The part of her that relies on disguises to survive also hates it, because it’s impractical and stands out, and it riles her that he can mock her in such a subversive way – he doesn’t need to hide badly enough to change something he likes about himself.

She thinks she would probably shave her head if the Agency asked her to, and she hates herself for that.

The other thing, she thinks, is the dip next to his mouth that forms when he’s thinking really hard. She uses it as a target when she lets her fists fly, as they so often do when she and he end up in the same room together.

But not this time. This time, it’s something different. He watches her, gauges her, and it makes her wary. Not nervous. Because she knows she will kill him if he gives her the chance, for all the trouble he’s put her through. The inconvenience that he’s heaped upon her life, and the number of times he’s tried to kill her friends or her family or her fellow agents.

A sick part of her would like to watch him fight Vaughn, even though she knows it wouldn’t be a fair fight. She won’t let herself think about why it wouldn’t be fair.

“Sydney,” he calls to her and she can hear the small irk in his voice when he thinks she hasn’t been paying attention. She’s glad that he can be so manipulated – that he can think she would dare take her eye off him for a second, even in this very relatively safe situation. When he sees that he has her attention, he continues. “You should come and work for me.”

“No,” she said mechanically. She gives no insults and no reasons, and he goes back to studying her because of it. She knows he is reassuring himself that his offer has not been as casually dismissed as she would like to make it seem.

The truth.

The truth is that she could never work for him not because it would be wrong or because it goes against her principles, but because she doesn’t know him. And she’s tired of working for what she doesn’t know. It’s all she’s ever done, and the CIA gives her a modicum of control over her own life, even as she’s being tapped and bugged and wired and painted and dressed up for whatever games they want her to play.

She will never work for him because it will mean giving up what she understands – and she only understands her life without him in it.

* * *

“I am never, ever letting go of you again.”

“Sark – ”

“Never.”

“Sark, I can’t breathe.”

He loosened the bone-crushing embrace long enough for her to catch her breath, and far enough for them to regard one another. Sark seemed to feel the need to catalogue every bone in her body, to make sure they were all uninjured. Reluctantly, he had to agree that what she needed most was a nice long bath and to not think about what was going on. He surrendered possession of her arms back to their rightful owner, and she tailed him into the bathroom, where he ran the bath water immediately.

Francie would be coming by later that night, to act properly shocked and comforting over what had happened to her friend. Weiss would be over as soon as Francie told him, no doubt, but would most likely wait for her friend’s story to make sure the two coincided down to the smallest details. She also had a suspicion that Francie was allowing her some time to herself. Not that she minded. But Weiss’ questions could too often be on the mark, and she was grateful that he was merely an inquisitive mind, and not another face that she had to watch for in a lineup.

As she and Sark ran the bath water together, it struck her as very odd that he would pay as much care as he was to the state of the bath, and small details that he was focusing himself on, like the proper bubble dispersion.

But the more she watched him, sitting on the lidded toilet with her bandaged hands pressed between her knees, the more she could see that he was a man grasping to the last vestiges of control in his life. He could not prevent his partner from losing her child, or being in a car crash, or suffering abduction from strangers, but he could still damn well draw a bubble bath.

His very sanity depended on it.

The space between her heart and her stomach stumbled through the strange waltz of ‘pity’ and ‘Sark’, and in the end she was nowhere closer to understanding the strange life she was living than when she had originally awoken in it.

Or it could be the fact that her brain was shutting down, section by section. And all she really wanted to do was sink underneath that warm, fragrant water and stare up at the world through a filter, protected for as long as she could hold her breath.

She was drawn out of her tumbling thoughts by the waterfall of silence that weighed after Sark turned off the taps and pushed himself to his feet, graceful as ever. They didn’t look at one another. Her hands went from between her knees to grasping the ties on the terrycloth robe she wore, which she suspected was his from its size but could not confirm since she had never seen him wear it.

He turned his back to her as she slid into the bath.

“I’ll just…” he put his hand on the door and glanced at her, making sure she was situated. “I’ll be right outside. If you need anything.”

Letting her eyes weigh shut, she felt the cool kiss of the porcelain at the curve of her neck, and stretched her toes triumphantly into the warm water. Safe. Her bandaged hands stayed carefully out of the suds, and she beckoned with one of them, a half wave. She couldn’t hear him moving. “Sark.”

His bare feet made a slight sticking noise on the tile.

“Stay?”

She could hear the run of his hand on the brassy doorknob, and the air he rapidly sucked in through his nose. Cracking her eyes open wearily, she shifted her head the smallest amount possible to be able to look at him, and saw him watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She let her hand drop to the rim of the tub again, and the movement seemed to spur him to turn, with a brief, uncertain nod. He dropped down onto the bathmat, and leaned against the tub, his head resting near her hand. She brushed her fingers over his hair, and she watched the muscles in his neck restrain him from whatever his initial reaction to that touch was.

The bubbles crackled, and she knew she was playing with a banked fire, but he looked too beaten to protest and she needed the company. She needed to know that she wasn’t going to be taken again, by the man in whose hands she used to place her life on a daily basis. Her life, and the life of her coworkers, friends, and family.

Betrayed didn’t seem like a big enough word. But it would have to do until she could regain her higher brain function.

“Wake me when the water goes cold?” Sydney asked in a murmur, her thoughts sliding away so quickly that she did not hear his response.

An indeterminable amount of time later, she felt the water begin to drain from the tub, and noticed in some small corner of her mind that her fingers didn’t feel pruney – didn’t even feel wet, so it couldn’t be time to get out of the tub yet; not when she was so comfortable and warm.

And then there were hands wrapping her strongly in that robe, careful of her dry hair and her not-wet hands, which felt strange for some reason that she couldn’t remember, but she didn’t have time to think about it because it took all of her concentration to make her legs put one foot in front of the other, and when she collapsed into bed she didn’t even notice that there were no lights on and no books to be read.

What she did notice, though, were the arms that wrapped themselves around her and held on for dear life, and the press of the torso that warmed her back beneath the blankets, and the shuddering breath that seemed to come from somewhere behind her that she knew meant an onset of tears, but she couldn’t think of who she knew that would cry.

* * *

When Sydney woke up the next morning, it was already well into afternoon, and she found herself mysteriously clad in her workout shorts and a paint-stained tee shirt. The robe hung menacingly from the hook on the back of the bedroom door, and Sydney felt her face go hot as she pulled on a sweatshirt and socks, trying not to think about the fact that she had let her guard down; left herself vulnerable in the face of this man who she was supposed to be watching.

But she could only watch so much. And now that there was Vaughn’s activities to keep an eye on – for her own safety as much as that of the country – she had to divide her time and her energy and still try and figure out how to get home.

Nothing can ever be easy, can it. She stared at her bandaged hands for a moment before resolutely shoving whatever had happened in the last twelve hours to the back of her mind, and concentrated on changing the dressings on her shallow wounds.

Weiss showed up while she was trying to finish her left hand, and not entirely succeeding because of the odd angle she had started the wrap of gauze at. She nodded his sheepish knocking in through the sliding glass door, and his smile matched.

“What do I say to a girl who’s just been kidnapped?” he asked her as he set down a bottle of red wine on the counter.

“What did you say to a girl who’d just lost her child?” Sydney said, knowing it would seem callous to anyone else but Weiss. He gave her his best grimace and took over the dressing of her wounds.

“Can’t believe Sark went to work today, after this. Thought he’d have you chained to the bed.” He looked up at her from under his eyebrows at the last few words, to make sure he hadn’t overstepped some unwritten boundary regarding sex jokes. She favored him with a self-deprecating smile.

“He probably needed to get his mind off of it,” she said. “I know I do.”

“Ah,” Weiss said triumphantly, and flourished the bottle. “That’s why I brought this.”

“Eric…” she began to warn him, and smacked herself mentally for nearly slipping in his last name out of reflex.

“No, no,” he shushed her, and began to rummage for wine glasses in her cabinet. “We’re not getting drunk. That’s why it’s only wine.” He spared her a grin as he pulled out the second glass, an pulled open a junk drawer to hunt for a bottle opener. “But we are going to get you silly and forgetful. Which is just as good.”

“Hmm,” Sydney said, the laughter in her tone letting him know that he had won the battle for self-decency.

“We could play chess,” Weiss offered, his face showing that he thought it was a stroke of sarcastic brilliance. “And I’ll even let you win.”

“You’ll let me win,” Sydney laughed, and leaned over the counter to pluck the bottle opener from the open drawer in front of him. He rolled his eyes as she handed it to him. “And what do you suppose will happen then? Sark will make me play with him all the time. Don’t encourage the man.”

“I don’t know how he stays so good,” Weiss grumbled, pulling the cork out with a satisfied pop. “You’d think after two years of playing only crap opponents, he would deteriorate just a little. But no.”

“Well,” Sydney said with a little dramatic sigh. “He’ll never get baseball.”

“Damn right,” Weiss muttered good naturedly and sloshed a bit of the pomegranate colored liquid into each glass. One he handed over to Sydney, and the other he raised himself. “Cheers,” he said, “to kidnappers with good taste.”

“Cheers,” she echoed, laughing, and they clinked their glasses together. “Heard the whole story from Francie?”

“All the sordid details,” he agreed. He looked strangely sobered for a moment and regarded her. “Can I ask you something?”

Sydney mustered up her most supportive smile. “Of course,” she said. Here it comes. Something else to lie about.

Weiss twirled his wine glass absentmindedly. “We’ve been friends for a while, right?”

“Yeah,” Sydney said cautiously, and grabbed an opportunity: “That’s your question?”

“No,” he said, scowling at her. “Hush. I have to be awkward and build up to this.” He took a deep breath and went on. “My question is, do you think me and…Francie would…” he looked up at her, desperately not wanting to go on. She fought valiantly to keep the laughter off her face.

“Eric,” she said, desperately relieved at such a small problem. “I don’t think you should…” she drifted off, and watched the spark in his eyes flare with disappointment.

“She kissed me.”

“What?” Sydney leaned forward suddenly. “When?”

Weiss squirmed under her scrutiny. “There was tequila. And ice cream. And…it…”

“Was weird,” Sydney supplied.

“I fucked up.”

She sighed. “You didn’t fuck up. It’s just that she…” He looked up at her miserably. “There’s another guy she’s interested in,” she said finally.

Weiss looked disgruntled, and picked up the wine glass. “I am trying so hard to be sophisticated right now,” he joked weakly.

“He’s from work,” Sydney said pityingly.

“I can’t believe she didn’t tell me,” he said.

“Come on,” she told him. “You wouldn’t really have wanted to hear that.”

“She told you,” Weiss protested.

Sydney shifted awkwardly in her chair. “Not…really. I just kind of figured it out.” Not completely a lie. Francie’s interaction with Will was as clear as she was with Vaughn, as much as it pained her to watch how completely obvious she must have been when she was trying to hide her feelings for him.

“I feel so stupid,” Weiss lamented.

“Hey,” Sydney said, putting her hand on his arm. “She still needs a friend.”

“Who still needs a friend?” called a voice from the living room, followed shortly by the sound of a door being kicked shut.

“In here,” Sydney called from the island. Francie poked her head in second later, lugging two grocery bags.

“Hey guys,” she said with a smile for each of them. Weiss averted his gaze to his wine, and slugged back the entirety of the glass in one swallow.

One of the bags she dropped onto the counter with a thump that proved there was something glass in the bag. The other she set on the floor next to Sydney, and a cursory glance told her that there were files in the bag that she would no doubt need to study later. She slid it farther underneath the island while Weiss helped her unpack the bag on the countertop.

“What did you do, bring enough food to feed an Army?” Weiss grumbled.

“I’m a firm believer in food therapy. Besides, I’ve seen how much you can eat,” she sniped back, and handed him a jar of Maraschino cherries. “Open these.”

“How’s work?” Sydney asked, and Francie gave her a cautionary glance. “You shouldn’t have taken the day off just for me. I know you’re busy.”

Francie shrugged. “It’s nearly the new year. I’ve got to use my personal days or they’ll just go to waste. What better excuse to play hooky than this?”

Weiss snorted. “Understatement of the century, ladies and gentlemen.”

Sydney made a show of rolling her eyes and picked up the paper bag at her feet, hearing the rustle of paper inside of it. She folded it shut and smiled brightly at them both. “I’m going to stick this in my bedroom. Excuse me?”

Francie waved her off, but she could hear Weiss ask her, “What’s in the bag?” as she escaped the room. She didn’t hear Francie’s answer because she was already shutting the door to her bedroom, and opening the bag to find out the real answer.

Inside, she found neatly folded blueprints. She pulled them out, and with a flourish had them laid out on her bed with only minor creases. The blueprints to Vaughn’s headquarters in Turkey. She wondered why he hadn’t taken her there instead, but focused on studying the blueprints while she had the time. She couldn’t be sure that Sark wouldn’t be next in the line of people barging into her home – even if he had a right to be there.

Keeping her studious gaze on the wide sheaf of paper in front of her, she stuck her hand back into the bag to see if anything else lay at the bottom.

Her hand struck silk, and the material startled her attention away from the blueprints. She pulled out the material, and with a start recognized it to be the suit that Dixon had worked on making her. There was a note taped to the front in his slanted handwriting. She would read it later. For now, she wanted to make sure it fit.

* * *

They meet for dinner at a casual Italian restaurant and she comes in ten minutes late, brushing rain from the sleeves of her jacket and flicking her fingers in disgust. Vaughn is waiting for her, looks eager and young and exactly what she needs every day to shake what they have to be at work.

They have had dinner here before, twice. For the first time, they will sit at the same table.

Her breath catches as he stands: all lithe, compact beauty in the lines of his body as he greets her in an embrace, pulls out the chair for her and smoothes her hair over her shoulders with subtle fingertips. He takes her coat and hangs it on a hook near their table, shielding her view of the door. She shifts automatically in her seat to accommodate this, and pays immediate attention to his smile.

She wants to take him home and keep him forever.

His hair shines under the dim lights, from rain and the gel he uses, and his teeth glint and his cheeks dimple and she wants to lunge across the table and lick something – anything – on his face.

They have been dating for a year, she estimates. Between late night calls and frenzied crying in remote locations she has stood up for him and fought at his side for months. They have tricked death and beat the odds and have cleared any enemies from the path with one fell swoop of a lathe. And now – now they can finally do all the couple things she told him she always wanted to do.

But right now, she just really, really wants to get him into bed.

Because as good as this tastes – this victory, this knowing she has won, feeling the walls coming down around her as tangible as the press of her flak jacket over her heart. As good as it feels to know that there are people watching them in public but it doesn’t matter anymore, because they are both invincible teenagers and will live until the earth turns to dust. As good as this is, she can trace it all to Danny. And it doesn’t make her sad, not anymore, but it reminds her that while they might have guns and gadgets and disguises; what they don’t have is time.

She is content to watch him, for now. Watch the creases his face makes when he pulls one side of his mouth into a smile, or the way his fingers brush the hair at the nape of his neck when he is self conscious. She knows he watches her in the same way, and she wonders which of her nervous tics he has picked up on. They are content in only the context of one another, she thinks. She needs him to make this real, to affirm she is not alone in their attempt to find normalcy.

She is so, so lucky. She knows. Lucky to be alive this long, lucky to not be the shell of single minded drive that she sees in her father and Sloane and the mother who she doesn’t know what to think of yet – that hunger to protect she both admires and fears. She is lucky to have this man who knows her, really knows her, twining their fingers under the table.

But the part of her she can’t turn off is already counting down.

* * *

“We? Are in so much trouble.” Francie was dicing onions like it was the only thing that was keeping her on the earthly plane. Sydney had been sitting on the couch flipping through files, but set them down at her friend’s words.

“Trouble like the carrots are burning?” She asked, swinging her feet over to stand up. “Or Trouble like I need to make sure Sark isn’t pulling into the driveway?”

“The second one,” Francie said darkly, and Sydney was half tempted to do just that, but knew that it wouldn’t make a difference and would only look highly suspicious if he, for some unknown reason, was heading up the driveway, and saw her peeking from between the slats in their Venetian blinds. She trusted her ears to tell her if a tight situation arose.

“What’s going on?” Sydney asked.

“You know how we thought you had forty-seven days starting on the day you woke up from the coma?”

Sydney nodded, pulling down the calendar off the wall that her other self and Sark had picked up free from the California Humane Society at some function. It had frolicking puppies all over the cover, and seemed to favor Labradors above other breeds. She had a feeling it had to do with their ability to pose, over their cuteness. “Which would leave me with…” she hadn’t even counted a single day when Francie interrupted.

“More translations came back. One of the words is different in a Latin translation – dormito. It means ‘to be dreaming,’ and it… It’s not from the day you woke up from the coma.”

Sydney felt her skin crawl as the hair on the back of her arms stood on end. “What do you mean, it’s not the day I woke up from the coma? What day is it, then?”

“It’s the day of the fourth death, Syd.” Francie began chopping again, and the tear inducing fumes began to make both of their eyes well. Sydney tried to scrub at her tears with the inside of her elbow, to keep from rubbing her eyes proper, but it wasn’t working very well either way. “Which means you spent those three weeks here, and we’ve lost them.”

“How much time do I have left, Francie?” Sydney’s voice booked no room for argument, and Francie took a deep, oniony sigh before she spoke.

“Five days.”

Sydney sat down right where she was, and she was lucky enough that there was a stool in her way. Her elbows plunked down on the kitchen island counter. “But that’s too soon. We still have no idea what I’m going to do, and we’re only taking Sloane’s word that this is the fourth death, and there’s too much…there’s too much to go on, here. If I only had another week, maybe or…” She drifted off into thought, nibbling on her bottom lip.

“Sydney, if it were up to me, you could have all the time in the world,” Francie said quietly. “This is just the truth I’m giving you – nothing more. You know that.”

There was a lengthy silence.

“I know that,” Sydney said finally. “I know. But it’s not fair, that’s all.”

“I know,” Francie agreed, just as reverently. “There’s just not enough time, ever.”

“Just when I think I’ve found somewhere I could…people I can…” She shook her head, her palms cradling her chin. “Life isn’t fair, is it.”

The sound of scraping as the onion puree went into a stock pot. “You’re just figuring that out now? Girl, you’re more deluded than I thought.”

They worked in silence for a few moments more, and Sydney was suddenly struck by the futility of their actions. Her silence stilled Francie’s knife, and they both looked at one another.

“Why are we doing this?” Sydney asked, agitated.

“Doing what?”

“This.” She gestured broadly to the spread in front of them, the elaborate disarray of experimental recipes that Sydney had been working on all day, in an attempt to revise the restaurant’s menu. “I’m not…” She ran a hand through her hair, tearing it off of her face. “She’s not going to come back, is she. When I leave.”

“Probably not,” Francie agreed quietly.

“Then why do this?” Her voice was growing higher, more pleading. “Why can’t I just…stop?”

Francie was scowling lightly at the cutting board underneath her hands. “What do you want me to tell you, Syd? That we do it because we’re fighting the good fight? That we’ll do what we have to until they tell us we can stop? You know it’s not the truth.” She leaned on one elbow as they regarded one another across the island. “You know you would keep doing it, even if they told you that you were done.”

The moment stretched before Sydney changed the subject. “I think I’ve figured out what the seven artifacts have to do with the equation.”

Francie let the subject change, and schooled her face into passivity at the open dismissal of dealing with the issues at hand. This would be relevant, too, and Sydney knew that was why she allowed it. In another five days, none of it would matter, anyhow. No one would be questioning Francie’s methods of mentally preparing the Changeling who had turned herself in to the CIA. “What did you find?”

Sydney found herself suddenly absorbed in a small spill of salt on the countertop, and focused on dragging her index finger around in the grains. The delicate designs she created stared back up at them both. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the DNA. I mean, if the four deaths are bound to happen to the same person, then why would Rambaldi pick me instead of…the other me.”

Francie nodded. “That makes sense, too. But I just assumed it was because you would be…better suited for whatever it is that the choice is.”

Sydney made a noise of dismissal. “There’s no guarantee in that at all. Chances are, it will be just the opposite. Rambaldi is never reliable when you most need him to be.”

“Okay,” Francie said, brushing the idea away. “So the seven artifacts, how do they factor in?”

“The first artifact I ever had to handle was something called The Circumference…only it was a lot smaller than what Rambaldi intended in his designs.” She grimaced briefly, recalling the full-sized version of the battery that lead to her meeting her mother for the first time in decades. “I took it on my first mission as an Agent working actively against SD-6. It was the first time I did something, knowingly, for the good of my country. But it also put a mysterious artifact into the hands of one of the most diabolical men of my time.”

“Arvin Sloane,” Francie supplied.

“Arvin Sloane,” Sydney echoed, scratching out the design she had made in the salt and starting on a new one. “But what if it wasn’t predestined that I was the one that would first handle a Rambaldi device? I could have spent another five years with SD-6 and never laid hands on one of them.”

“So what you’re saying is…” Francie had some lines gathering between her eyes as she concentrated. “Is that it wasn’t predestined, and the Prophesy was waiting to decide?” Her eyes darted back and forth, but she wasn’t actually looking at anything, and finally decided on squinting in confusion. “Wait, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Sydney said. “The only reason that it was me, instead of her, is because I happened to turn my back on the organization that gave me all the abilities I had to even come into contact with the artifacts in the first place. Don’t you find that a little strange?”

“I find that very strange,” Francie said. “But you still had a better chance of coming into contact with all seven of the artifacts before the Sydney I knew would have.”

Sydney frowned. “Maybe. That’s a good point, too. But there’s still got to be something…it’s a start, at least.”

“It’s a start,” Francie conceded. “Now.” She looked around at the food and cookbook strewn kitchen. “What are we going to do about cleaning up this waste of time?”

* * *

The map took up the entire fourth wall of the room. It was a negative print, and lit from behind, the x-ray of some important building glowing its broken bones and cracked ribs down on her. The reflection of the image on the shiny black pool of table top shivered and shifted each time she changed the slide. She had been staring at the same series of images for twenty minutes before she realized she couldn’t remember a thing she’d seen.

It’s too late to be awake, she told herself. Sark had called her cell phone several times, which she had steadily ignored, and the calls had stopped sometime around midnight. She considered spending the night on the couch in the break room, but knew deep down that it would be worth it to go home – to her own bed, and the comfort to sleep as long as she wanted.

Easing her cramped legs out from under the table, she stood and stretched, listening to her own body pop and creak and groan.

She had long abandoned the formalities of comfort during research, but it seemed her body was out of practice when it came to sitting around. I don’t know why, it seems like sitting around is all I’ve been doing. She shut down the projector and made her way groggily out into the corridor that would bring her to the main room, and the garage beyond.

Dixon had spent the evening outlining the final element in the Prophesy, the one that they hadn’t been able to figure out until that morning – the seven artifacts. Sydney had taken the opportunity to bring up her conversation with Francie from a few nights previous, about how it was possible that Rambaldi had prophesied less than they originally predicted, and had been relying on the two incarnations of Sydney to try to find the artifacts first.

But the problem wasn’t that she knew she met the qualifications – the problem was that she couldn’t figure out why.

“What’s to stop anyone who takes my DNA, basically makes themselves me, from doing whatever they want? They’ll never have to worry about making or keeping bargains or promises or anything of that nature. It’s like they can…can joy ride around in my body and not fill it up with gas when they’re on their way back.”

“Well,” Dixon had said, considering for a moment. “I may be a little nuts about this, but…you might have to consider fate.”

She scoffed. “Fate made Rambaldi write out these books. I don’t have the time to get into a philosophical conversation here, but how could Rambaldi have predicted what was going to be fate, hundreds of thousands of years ago? If I was the one who was going to be in them?”

“Maybe it was fate for him to know,” Dixon had said. She was warily silent, not wanting to insult him further by fighting over a point that would doubtless be moot in a few days anyway.

“It was just an idea,” he had said soothingly. “But to answer your question, the thing that will keep people from popping into the trunk of your car, so to speak, are the artifacts.”

She shook her head, not sure she was following him. “What do you mean? It couldn’t be too hard to get your hands on his artifacts, there were enough of them waiting around to kill you or poison you or be allergic to you without having to seek one out actively.”

“No matter what the DNA stands for,” he said simply, “You’re the only person who has handled all seven of those artifacts, in that particular order, that seems to be the right kind of…thing. Even if someone managed to take on your appearance, there would still be the matter of the seven artifacts that you must take care of.”

“And some of them were even destroyed.”

“Exactly. So, like it or not, you’re stuck with this one.”

And she was. She was liking it less and less, too, the novelty of seeing people play ironic or different roles replaced weeks ago by the reality that someone was going to have to die, and soon.

The offices seemed strangely haunted this early in the morning, with half the lights turned off and deep shadows obscuring hallways that branched out of the round. Things seemed muffled and peaceful, and her footsteps were quiet for once against the sharp, shining linoleum of the floor. The computer terminals were mostly empty, save a few dedicated researchers and programmers working on various assignments.

She could see the light on under the door of Marshall’s office, and smiled to herself. She stared at it so long, in fact, that she was startled when the door opened.

I need to go home and sleep, she thought, pressing her palm to her forehead and willing her heart back to its normal pace. She opened her eyes wider and blinked once or twice to clear her fuzzy vision.

“Sydney?”

She looked up.

“Sark?”

Her query was sharper and more incredulous than his, but his eyes were bigger and his six-year-old expression of betrayal and confusion spoke far more than his words could have.

They stared at one another for a humiliating length of time before Marshall stepped up to the door. “Let’s talk,” he said.

* * *

Sark was watching her again.

She could feel his eyes, the stare of cold calculation, and she knew he must be remembering all the things that didn’t make sense – all the things that he had written off to hospitalization or weariness or medication or not wanting to deal with problems. All the times he had allowed himself these explanations when, instead, it was the worst kind of betrayal a person could experience. The betrayal of self. She knew exactly what he was thinking – ‘how could I not have known?’ She had asked herself that question every night since she woke up in Hong Kong, expecting her best friend’s blood to still stain her palms.

She was getting better at not thinking about things like that.

Instead, she tried to deal with what needed to be done in the here and now. Namely, how she could get Sark to stop looking at her like that.

As much as it irked her to admit it, she had grown used to him supporting her, believing in her. She convinced herself nearly all the way that it had nothing to do with the fact that her father wasn’t around. Or that she had an approval-seeking streak when it came to the men in her life.

Because it wasn’t that. It was just that she was out to prove something – in this case, that she could play Sydney Bristow and get away with it. And she had done that. But now she was wishing that she hadn’t, because the look Sark had on his face made it worth taking back.

“How long have you worked for the CIA?” she asked quietly, Marshall still on the phone. Filling Sark in with the details of the Prophesy and the realities of the past few weeks had been interrupted by its shrill ringing. There was some kind of confusion at the security gate.

“I got fired from my job a year and a half ago. Cutbacks,” he said, shaking his head. This was clearly not a history he ever thought he would have to relate to her. “A man hired me to do some research into cafeteria food testing. The results that I found lead to bigger projects – eventually they told me that I was working for the CIA.”

Sydney nodded. “And then they put you on the Rambaldi project.”

“I’m good at what I do.”

The conversation was automatic for him, as if he was having it with a new employee or a transfer Agent. Not his lover of over two years. Not the woman who had been deceiving him for the past month. Sydney felt another stab of sorrow. It’s not enough to just ruin your own life, is it. You have to ruin his, too. She ran a hand over her face, knowing that she needed to sleep off her feeling of exposure and vulnerability. Things would no doubt look better in the morning.

“Could you please explain this to me again?” Sark sounded frustrated, as if there was something malfunctioning in his brain because he had just run through the events in his head and they still weren’t making sense.

“You read the Prophesy.” It would have been impossible for him not to. In fact, he had probably been the one in charge of the multiple translations that Dixon had been gleaning together for her recently. Sydney played with the hem of her sweater and kept shifting her gaze from her knees to Marshall, who was on hold. He lifted an eyebrow at her and pursed his lips. She suspected that he was staying on the phone to keep out of the conversation, and wasn’t sure whether to thank him or hate him for it.

“I helped Dixon decipher it,” Sark confirmed with an odd tilt of his head. “Four deaths and seven artifacts and a choice before…a day…I think?”

“That’s about it,” she said. “I’ve handled the seven artifacts. I’ve died twice in my world and twice in this world. And we’ve got little time to figure out what the choice might be. I think you’re pretty much caught up to speed.” She knew it was rude, but she felt ready to drop from exhaustion and there wasn’t much else registering on her emotional scale besides frustration and weariness.

“I see,” Sark said, still in shock.

“I’m sorry,” Sydney said automatically. “The Sydney you knew is no longer here.” She couldn’t say ‘dead’. It sounded wrong to describe herself as no longer living when she was clearly alive, wondering what it was in her shoe that was digging into her middle toe so harshly, listening to Marshall huff into the phone, watching Sark twist on the knife she had provided him with.

“But…” he said, and bit his lip.

“I’m sorry,” Sydney said again, this time not as an apology but as a dismissal of additional questioning.

Luckily, Marshall slammed down the phone and stood up, making haste toward the door. “Come with me – both of you. Hurry!”

Sydney was already on her feet, Sark a few dazed steps behind her. She had time enough for a quiet corner in her brain to register the fact that she had never heard Marshall raise his voice before in anything other than hyperactivity. And then she was faced with a sight that was becoming all too familiar.

Francie Calfo, bleeding from chest wounds. Multiple lacerations. Her brain took over in medical jargon, filing away the wounds on the… She forced her brain to say it – on the corpse, Sydney.

“What happened?” she heard her own voice.

“We found her near the sub-elevator entrance,” said a gun-toting nameless face she knew from security detail. It struck her as odd that she knew the man’s doughnut preference and how he took his coffee, and the fact that he always dropped his shoulder in combat practice, but she didn’t know his name.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Marshall said, stooping next to the on-call doctor that had arrived before them. “Why would they bring her back here?”

“They wouldn’t,” Sydney said. “It would completely defeat the purpose of doubling her, if we knew that the surgery had taken place.” She looked up at the Nameless Man. “Oh, God. Has anyone told Will?”

“Tippin? He’s on his way.” Another Agent, this time.

“What are we going to tell Weiss?” Sark was quiet and behind her, their hands nearly brushing. She pulled her palm flat against her thigh and well out of range of any inadvertent physical contact.

“We’ll think of something,” she said helplessly. She felt a little light in the head, and spread her stance slightly to help her balance. It was an automatic thought – something she would have done in the field after being punched in the jaw to prevent seeing stars or birdies circling her head a la a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Marshall was straightening, his mouth a tight line of pale flesh before he spoke to the other Agents who had brought her in. “Start spinning this. We need a story for the paper, or something to tell her survivors. Check the cameras, see how she got here. I want to know ten minutes ago if anyone saw her come in.” He turned to another Agent. “Tell security detail to start monitoring every electronic imaging surveillance we have for her face. We need to know where the other…” he paused to swallow, his eyes flickering down to the body and then back up again. “As fast as you can. If they’ve left the country, we can’t lose track of them. Send someone to her house, toss the place. Pull the taps and the cameras, consolidate and filter everything we’ve got.”

He paused to consider for another moment. “Send Tippin to see me when he gets here.” He looked back at them all, and then barked, “Go!” The Agents scattered in various directions after another heartbeat. Marshall waited to make sure that they had gone and stalked back into his office.

Sark put his hand on Sydney’s shoulder, and pulled her back from the cooling corpse. The doctor had called for a gurney, apparently – one appeared to take the body down to the lab for examination.

As fast as it had started, it was over.

Sydney felt her knees going before the rest of her body, and it was the impact of the cold linoleum after that. The shock traveled up her thighs and down her calves and into her toes, made her hip bones ache from the abuse. Sark’s hand fell away behind her, and he was stooping next to her, one hand around her arm and the other turning her face toward him, his eyes concerned.

“I’m not…” she said, and her tongue got caught because the only word she could think was Francie.

“I don’t care who you are,” Sark said stonily. “Your friend is dead, and you’ve been decent enough to put up with the charade of living with me. Let’s get you out of here.”

She knew he wasn’t dealing. She knew he’d lose his mind with grief later. But somehow she got her feet back underneath her, and they headed for the exit that would take them through security and out to the parking garage.

They had almost made it out of the building in a gauze of silence and innocence when she heard, the sound traveling down the corridor from a distance away to haunt her, Will’s anguished cry.

* * *

They were sitting in the kitchen in the dark, and it could have been like any other night except that there was a gun sitting between them on the dusky surface of the kitchen table. The sun was setting on the horizon of the sea, and casting watery, diffused oranges and reds onto the tile floor.

“Explain this to me again,” he said, his voice shot and desperate for different words to come out of her mouth.

“I don’t know how else to say it.” She made her voice deliberately calm, infusing as much patience and caring as she knew how to put into it.

He barked a laugh. “You honestly expect me to believe that you’re from…another time? Or what is it?”

She placed a hand over his, gently, and she could feel the muscles in his arm tense, as if he was going to shake her off. But he didn’t. His eyes were roving the surface of the table, trying to comprehend. Her words didn’t seem to be processing. In the same quiet, calm tone of voice, she said, “Sark, I need you to believe me. Either way, when I wake up the day after tomorrow, I’m going to be gone. Tomorrow night is the forty-seventh night. My time is up.”

“And what will happen to you?” He asked, his icey blue eyes suddenly boring through hers. “How do you know you’ll end up back there?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But that’s where I belong – the four deaths have been weighed and I’m the only one who has handled the seven artifacts. I’ve made my choice, Sark.”

“To go back to him. To Vaughn.”

They regarded one another. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think so. At first, I wasn’t sure – but now I am.”

“You’re leaving me. Again.” His voice cracked on the last word and he pulled their entwined hands to his chest, gripping the five digits tightly against his shirt. She let him, thinking it would make her next words easier.

“Your Sydney is dead, Sark,” she said to him. “She died in that car crash a month and a half ago. She wasn’t supposed to wake up in the hospital three weeks later – I wasn’t supposed to come here. It’s not right, and I don’t know what will happen to my timeline if I let it be.”

“For God and Country,” he said scathingly.

She didn’t answer that. Instead, she tried not to think about the feel of his wrist under her fingertips, or the way the scornful expression made him look more familiar than he had in weeks. She looked down at her own body, clad in out-of-place black. She had never been able to sit in her own home in disguise. It had always been too dangerous, before.

Now, there was nothing to be afraid of.

“Have you considered the fact that, while your other incarnation is dead and you are here, killing this Vaughn may transfer over into your world?”

She looked at the gun between them. “I’ve thought of that.”

“And you’re willing to risk the man you love?”

She looked up at him, and the worried look had erased itself into confident, cocksure arrogance. She blinked in the darkness, debating what to tell him. What he needed to hear from her. There were too many variables of the truth – too many outcomes that could default the entire situation.

“He’s not – ” she started, but could see from the look on his face that he wouldn’t believe her anyway, and stopped. “Why don’t you believe me?” she asked in exasperation, wresting her hand from his grip. “Why can’t you believe that the woman you’re in love with is not me, and that the man I fought for two years straight is not you, and that Vaughn here is different from Vaughn there?”

“Because the woman I’m in love with is you,” he hissed.

Oh, I so don’t need this. She rubbed her eyes until spots of green and black exploded beneath her lids. Taking a deep breath, she looked at him again. “Sark, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying,” he said, sounding very much like Will’s five-year-old nephew. Only without the pouting and the defiant arms crossed across his chest.

“No, Sark, you don’t,” she said, sighing, and searched her mind for a different tactic. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

He pursed his lips briefly. “No, Sydney. I don’t.” He echoed her with a grimace. “I only just started on research, they wouldn’t field train me in a million – ”

She leaned forward until they were almost on top of each other. “If I asked you to fire this gun, would you do it?”

“What?” He pulled back, looking from her to the gun and back again.

“Would you?” she asked.

“You’ll…” he frowned between his eyes. “You’ll have to show me how.”

Grabbing the gun in one hand and his wrist in the other, she pulled them both out the back door, her mind on fire with the idea that this just might work. She thrust the gun into his hand, felt the press of sand beneath her feet, and pointed toward a palm that edged her property from the beach. “Aim for that. About five feet down, where there’s a vee in the bark. You see it?”

“I see it,” he confirmed, “but you’re mad. There’s no way I’m going to be able to hit that.” He tried to give her the gun back. She crossed her arms defiantly across her chest. “Sydney, what if I hit someone? This isn’t a game. This isn’t funny.” She glared at him, tapped her foot, and waited. He sighed, shook his head, and lifted the gun, squinting down the sight of the pistol. He steadied the weapon with both hands, spread his legs to shoulder width, and fired.

The sharp report from the gun set Weiss’ dog to barking, and she spared a thought to wonder if he might be home. But it was early enough in the evening that he was probably still out. Sark still held the gun straight out away from him, and was looking at his extended hands with a bit of wonder.

“Come on,” she commanded, and turned down the beach toward the palm. After a moment, she heard him start after her.

They reached the palm at the same time, and stooped just a little to see the bullet that had drilled its way into the trunk, just at the valley of the vee.

“I did that,” Sark said in a bit of wonder, roaming one hand over the surface of the trunk as if touching it would make it true.

“You did that,” Sydney told him, taking the gun from his hand. “Now maybe you understand why I have to do this.”

“I don’t…” he started, and turned to look at her, the moonlight strange over the ocean. The clouds were lit from below and stained with a diffusion of pink that reminded her of the blood and toothpaste mixture that she had spat out the night before. “I shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“No,” she said to him, “you shouldn’t have been able to do that. That’s why I have to…do this. I have to go after Vaughn. The longer I stay here, the more things are…reorienting themselves to my reality. Francie’s dead, my father has showed up again, and you…” she left the thought open for both of them.

“So you’re going to go and kill a man who has the potential to evolve into an innocent if you stay.”

She clenched her jaw. “I’ll do what I have to.”

He nodded, considering. She handed the gun back to him, and he gave her a curious look. “I’m going after the world’s foremost criminal this morning,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “I’m not going to leave you without a gun.”

He didn’t say anything, but didn’t try to give it back to her. They headed back toward the house, both of them slipping on sand in practical shoes and trying not to think.

“Of course,” he said, “this makes your whole point about my not being in love with you completely moot.” He cracked a thin smile at her.

“Shut up,” she growled at him.

“Just because I’m on my way to becoming a psychopathic killer doesn’t mean I can’t still have feelings for you,” he murmured into the lengthening shadows.

She rounded on him, her shoes scraping sand against the wood of the deck attached to their house. “He’s not in love with me. You won’t be, if I stay.”

He didn’t say anything, but his smile did not decrease, and his eyes twinkled knowingly. How appropriate that he has the last word, she snarled to herself. “I’m leaving at first light,” she snapped out, and stalked off into their bedroom, slamming the door shut.

* * *

She felt the betrayal keenly.

It would have been easier if she could have looked back, seen it then, been able to tell herself that she didn’t see it until it was too late to do anything. She could have deluded herself into thinking that she had never wanted it to happen, or that she was powerless to stop it. She could tell them that she did everything she could, but sometimes fate takes these things out of our hands. She could have told them, and they would have believed her. In time, she would have believed herself.

But the truth was, she did not do enough. She had not tried her hardest. She had not killed him or questioned him or secured him when she was so sure he was not involved.

Because he was involved, whether she liked it or not. He was a part of the puzzle – a part she couldn’t ignore.

“What am I supposed to do?” she had asked his sleeping form one night. But even then, she had already decided.

And that was why she had let him in, when he came tapping at the door at two in the morning, carrying tea and overloaded sandwiches and the book, because there was still one chapter left. They had eaten in silence until neither of them could stand it anymore, the waiting, and she opened the book to the right page and read along with him, over his shoulder, until the last sentence was done.

The plates cleared away, the silence had lapsed from awkward to comfortable, and she wondered what he was thinking.

“You’re leaving anyway,” he said, his voice startling her. He said it gravely, and she knew it was the first time he believed it.

“I am,” she affirmed. “Because I have to.”

“No one has to do anything,” he said, sitting on her – their – bed, with one leg tucked up and the other dangling toward the ground. It was something that she would have said, back in her first year. She knew better now.

She sighed and stared once more into the closet. She had never had to prepare for a trip before without packing, and some small, treacherous part of her brain took the time to wonder what she was supposed to do without the security of a rolling, carry-on Samsonite. “Sark,” she said, very carefully looking at an assortment of sensible black heels instead of him, “I have to go because I can’t stop this here. But I might have a chance to, in…my world.”

“I know. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He sounded like a train wreck.

“It’s not the right thing,” she said, finally looking at him. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“Try,” Sark said. His tone surprised her, and the fact that she could be surprised by anything surprised her even more. He sounded bitter and hurt, and she wondered briefly if maybe she had been underestimating this Sark’s ability to mask.

She sat down on the bed and took his hand, and she expected him to drop his eyes, as he always had before. Instead, he gripped her hand tighter and tilted his chin up at her, every part the little boy she knew he had just behind those devastating eyes.

“If I hadn’t been meant to stop Vaughn,” she said to him, “they would have put me with him, not you.”

“You think they would make things that easy?” He mocked her with no great animosity, no questioning of who ‘they’ were – only that they existed, and meant trouble.

“No,” she said firmly. “I think they would have made it that hard.”

He looked at her. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“You will. Later.”

She reached forward with her free hand and brushed sure digits across his jaw, the day’s sparse beard catching the lines of her fingerprints as she moved up his cheek. She watched his face, saw his eyes go half lidded, as he lost himself briefly in the simple touch. She let her hand continue, marveling at the soft skin as it traveled under her palm, and the hair that brushed her fingers until his face was resting in her hand, and she had never considered a skull delicate until she drew her hand back and the face came with it, not willing to give up the rarity of contact.

“This will surely make things more complicated,” he said.

“I like complicated things,” she whispered.

But all was as planned, and when she brushed her lips against his, it felt right, the velvety soft play of plush skin beneath her mouth and the surprised gasp that went straight from his body into hers. And then the warmth, the heat that spread between them for seconds before he came alive under her palm, the shift of bones in his face alerting her to his open mouth before his tongue had a chance to.

And then he pulled away.

“Don’t do this,” he said, and his voice shook. “Don’t start something – ”

“Let me say goodbye,” she said, pulling him close again, him still not trying to shy from the hand that had slipped to his neck. “Some part of me cared for you. Some part of me still does. Before we go back to…different lives.” She needed to believe in this, and needed this to believe in anything.

“A night to remember,” he said bitterly. “Only one night.”

“I have to know I’m making the right choice,” she whispered severely, her lips finding the line of his jaw that her fingers had traced earlier.

“If we do this, I…” he faltered, and one hand shot out to grasp her arm, neither pulling her close nor pushing her away, but holding her steady for dear life. “I might not be able to let you go, Sydney.”

“I’m leaving at dawn,” she reminded him, looming the rest of her body toward him, afraid if she paused at all the moment would be lost and she’d have to consider what it was that she was doing. Their shoulders pressed together on one side before he yielded to her presence, and they moved together, shifting in the half-light provided by street lamps and passing cars.

“I can’t lose you again,” he said brokenly.

“You’ll have to either way,” she whispered.

And she thought perhaps, maybe, he was beginning to understand, because he stopped talking and started paying attention. He understood – one first time, one last time, a hello and a goodbye – as poetic as the cycles of the day and night or the change in seasons or the wash of tide outside their dining room window. This was how things had to be, she knew he was figuring it out, and they could not deny each other the selfishness that she was offering.

It would hurt him more than anything before had. But he still wanted it.

She shivered at the thought – to be wanted in the face of common sense, the face of hurt and knowing the inevitable and having no power to stop it.

That was the sound of a train wreck.

Music to her ears.

They shed clothes steadily, both of them marking each inch of skin indelibly in memory, but for different reasons. All the black fabric made the carpet and the bed swim with shadows.

He hovered half over her, in some pose that was probably familiar but not to her, not in the muscle memory she was relying on to teach her the layout of his body, the same way she memorized blueprints before a mission. There was touch everywhere, and the impossible parts of her brain shut themselves off one by one, reverting all auxiliary senses to the man in front of her. He seemed to move in fluid grace, and she tried but lost track of where he was.

His lips skimmed the scar and he stopped, hands planted on either side of her hips in the bedding, and pulled back. Stared at it. “What’s it from? For…for you?” He asked her, and she wrapped her hands in his hair, trying to catch her breath. One of his hands lifted again, and fit perfectly on the sharp curve of her pelvic bone, where her hip met her torso.

“I don’t know,” she said, and pulled, their lips meeting again, and her trying to ease his desperation and panic at forgetting the things that mattered. “A surgery. There are things I don’t remember.” She bit her lip, considering, before she continued: “Francie told me…”

He silenced her with a look.

Her fingers glided down his left leg and found the knot of scar tissue there. “How…?” she asked.

“A skiing accident four years ago,” he spoke into her neck. “I fell and impaled myself on my own pole.” She felt his eyelashes as he winced into her shoulder and he asked back, “How did you know it was there?”

She smiled and rubbed small circles on his shoulder blades. “I saw it happen. An ice pick. That I threw,” she clarified.

“Christ,” he breathed, his tone not darkening an iota.

“You were going to shoot me,” she said.

“I doubt it,” he protested, and she was prone to argue the point when he seemed to remember that he had gotten rid of her bra.

“Oh,” was her dazed retort. “Okay.”

He set about a long and thorough quest to make her remember what it was she was going to say, but it was lost forever and she could feel her brain shutting down in sections, overloading into sensation and heat and the inky, empty, endless darkness that his eyes held in moonlight, when they weren’t squeezed shut.

She found she liked the taste of the corner of his eye, and that dip next to his mouth that only appeared when he fired a weapon, a strange half-moon crease of warning and dusk. Little details that they devotedly worshipped, and she was glad to be a quick learner because this would surely be the only time she would allow herself such indiscretions.

“We’re on a desert island,” he told her when he saw the shade in her eyes, rubbing sweat against skin and trying to focus for the moment. “Whatever you need to tell yourself – ”

“No,” she said sharply, arching up to his touch to emphasize the point, and the noise of his gasp let her know he heard her correctly. “No, I’m not going to…pretend.”

“You can…” he was close to whimpering, if she could apply the word to the man above her. “I won’t…I’ll understand.”

“No,” she said again, softly this time. “This is you.” She left marks on his back that would last longer than her, and she wondered if he would find them three days from now and regret their fading into oblivion. “Sark.”

He breathed her name in a moan and things went Technicolor and Surround Sound, her insides feeling like a Dali painting and they rolled, and shifted, and it was vicious and everything hurt in swells, the way he moved and the sound of the sheets as he grabbed them in his hands, Egyptian cotton rending but not tearing.

She wanted to suspend the moment in time, freeze it or case it in glass or dip it in bronze so that she could carry it with her next to her cell phone and her wallet, and pull it out whenever she needed to. And she knew from the way that he was watching her, the way that his eyes were a nearly physical command on he skin, that he was doing the same thing to her.

They were both trying for something impossible, and she could feel the disillusionment lurking in the corner of her mind. She shoved it away harshly and concentrated on his skin, because who knew that he had so much of it, and why had she waited so long to admit that to herself?

But nothing that good could last. Just like she had always thought.

* * *

You’ve come so close.

He was watching her, and she could feel the bite of the cold cement come through the thin fabric of the grey slacks she was wearing. She wasn’t even bound, as if his steely gaze was enough to pin her in place. He held no weapon, but she had no doubt that there were at least four on his body that he could have planted through her skull pan before she so much as twitched.

But it’s still too far.

And now she was willing to admit defeat to, of all people, Jack Bristow.

She could feel him staring down at her, and it was becoming uncomfortable, the bare spot at the back of her neck where her pulled back hair left her vulnerable; feeling large and exposed and most certainly the place where he would strike if he chose to. She knew she was becoming paranoid and panicky, but she couldn’t seem to calm herself when he was just standing back there, silent and waiting.

It didn’t help that Vaughn was standing there, with his arm wrapped around Her – Her in Francie’s face, now. Worst of all, she felt like they all knew – like they could see what it was she’d been doing not a few hours ago, like an ingrained mark on her skin of betrayal – even though it wasn’t.

“If you can’t trust your father, Sydney, who can you trust?” His voice was concertina wire wrapped in velvet and it traversed her side, rotated one hundred and eighty degrees to come in front of her.

She forced her face upward, and it startled her how hard his eyes were when they met hers. Despite his words – his familiar words, and the things he called her, daughter, Sydney, darling, this man inside…

This was not her father.

It was the smallest of comforts that The Powers That Be would not make her see him inside. A warped, twisted figurine of his soul did not lay dormant behind that skin. Not like the others. Not like Sloane, or Sark, or Will, whose fates along this path lay so close to the road they navigated in her world, even when represented in a mirror image.

If her father – the one she knew – was willing to go to the ninth gate of hell and back to ensure her happiness, this incarnate was surely the opposite. The assurance allowed her to keep her gaze locked on his, and he stared down at her menacingly, daring her to look away.

She wouldn’t.

Satisfied that she would have used any weapons on her person at that point, Jack took a step back and nodded to Vaughn and Lauren-cum-Francie. “Get her up in that chair. Reed, find another able body to take her face. We’d might as well get her DNA before we kill her.” He didn’t even look at Sydney while he spoke of the termination of her life – as if it were a routine matter, inconsequential in the highly evolved scheme of his plans.

Lauren and Vaughn hefted her, one on each of her arms, and she put up a mild struggle, because it was expected. She tried to conserve her energy, but it wouldn’t do for them to think that she was holding back. She needed them to suspect nothing, to believe in her failure completely.

When they strapped down her head, she lost herself and reared against their hands, fighting mostly at her mouth, lips pulled back over her teeth like a horse escaping the bit. But then Vaughn slammed her once in the stomach while Lauren secured her head with a wide leather strap to the chair, and Sydney could do nothing but pant in quiet rage.

Lauren went off to find her second in command, and Vaughn crossed his arms, the sleeves of his well tailored suit pulling taught as his wing bones stretched his back. He was smiling down at her, and she knew she should try and stop her eyes from darting back and forth between him and Jack – who she refused to call father in her mind – but she couldn’t help but continue.

“You can’t do this,” she began desperately, trying to play for time, even though she knew it wouldn’t help – no one else was coming. No one else was listening. It would be another hour, at least, before anyone thought to come looking for her. She was too early, too eager.

She had left before sunrise – left Sark’s sleeping form prone in the bed, knowing too well that it would be the last time she would ever see him in this world – possibly both, if she went and got herself killed more thoroughly than she anticipated. But it disturbed her how hard it was to leave. He had spoken the night before about not being able to let go, but it was Sydney who found herself crouching at the bedside, running her fingers over the seamless glass that was his skin.

No goodbyes, she had told him last night, and his wordless cries were answer enough.

They had slept as the dead until an unease in her stomach woke her, the sludge-colored dawn creeping an hour away on the horizon as she slipped into discarded clothes and fetched what weapons she could find.

The plane flew early at her request, just the pilot and Sydney, alone with her thoughts and Dixon’s gear. She took care to sew the tracking device into the white suit, its bugs and kinks finally worked out in a trial run. A sacrificial guard had been selected, an electric bone saw had been included in her light-weight kit, and she knew the instructions to keep blood spatter when she collected the handprint she needed off the pristine, snowy fabric. Dixon had spent an entire day trying to find a way to cauterize the wound that she would be creating, but the experimenting became impractical. Last she saw him, he was still upset at the failure.

The rest of the kit was easy – the suit would refrigerate her body for the necessary time to pass through the room. A custom designed scrambler, attached to the keypad, would insert a positive sign for a negative sign for the body temperature of the severed hand – the temperature would register off the charts, but by the time she killed Vaughn, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

Killing the guard had been surprisingly easy. Sawing off his hand was simple and quiet. The real snag was when she turned pulled up the hood of her suit, activated the coolant device, turned the corner, and literally ran into her father. The hand went flying and landed with a sickening squelch.

Vaughn and Lauren Reed had dragged her on her knees past all the security check points, right into the room where she had wanted to be in the first place. Lauren had spent a good amount of time thanking her for her friend’s skin.

She had spent what felt like a century being prepped for the surgery. She recognized it, this time, from her previous treatment in Vaughn’s captivity, with slight modifications. Strange eye-drops and being scrubbed down, inside and out. It was a bizarre and unwelcome feeling, the feeling of déjà vu that she was walking into.

Sydney felt sick to her stomach.

Strapped in the chair, she knew she was screwed. Alone. She never even activated Marshall’s toy, which meant he wouldn’t have received the confirmation signal. No one would know that she was ahead of schedule and in royal trouble.

“Gag her,” Jack ordered, all traces of amusement or tolerance gone from his voice. He was half turned, admiring the instrument panel that lined the chair’s side. With a deft flick of the wrist, he turned one dial all the way to its right, and a blue spark of electricity surged directly over Sydney’s head, arcing from one open circuit to another. She felt her eyes grow big as she watched the transfer of electricity at such a close range. Vaughn was stuffing a rag into her mouth and secured it with a strip of duct tape.

That’s going to hurt to take off…

“Mr. Vaughn has brought it to my attention, Sydney, that I may not have the daughter I thought I did.” His face was beyond her field of vision, with her head tilted so far back. She felt Vaughn strapping down her other arm tightly and she flexed her wrists upward, hoping for as many centimeters of play as he would allow her. He doesn’t know. There’s no way he could know. She forced his voice out of her head and concentrated on inching her shins away from the table.

“I don’t know how the CIA,” he took a breath and did not entirely manage to conceal his exasperation, “got to you in time, but every problem has a remedy.” He loomed into her field of vision, the free charge of electricity reflected in his pupils. “For a high enough price.”

His visage receded once more and she could hear the sound of rubber gloves slicking over skin, the dry powdery slide followed by the intimidating snap. Vaughn was stooping to buckle down her legs, and she had to repress the urge to kick him in the face. As satisfying as it might be, it won’t get you out of here any faster. So she bit her lip and rolled her eyes back in her head as far as they would go, trying to examine as much of the machine they had hooked her up to as possible.

“Get Reed,” Jack said shortly to Vaughn when he finished. “If she hasn’t found someone by now, we’ll just get you to do it.”

“Sir,” Vaughn said by way of acknowledging the threat and the dismissal, and took his leave. Sydney wondered if he would be willing to spend the rest of his life as a woman just to reach higher steps on this man’s ladder.

“Whatever the case may be, Sydney,” Jack said, “I find it hard to believe that the CIA thought they could successfully use my own daughter against me.” He paused to look at her, and began setting out a series of scalpels. “Which means that there’s either an extraction team waiting for me just outside that door,” he paused to look at the only entrance to the room. “Or they don’t know you’re here.”

Sydney knew the latter was infinitely more dangerous, because it would allow her body double to simply rejoin the group, no one the wiser. She stilled her body into unresponsiveness. She wouldn’t give him any answers. Certainly not through a casual line of questioning. Make him take the gag off, at least.

“I’m guessing it’s the latter,” he said with the kind of cold intuitiveness of observation she had grown used to from years of a father who sold airplane parts.

Jack turned away from the scalpels and began examining her from all sides. “It is a fascinating procedure, you know. It actually goes straight down to DNA coding.” He tapped her nose, twice, and she made sure not to move a single muscle in her face, save for her eyes that tracked him across the room. “That Rambaldi fellow was pure genius.” He chuckled at her. “Though, to hear it told, you’ve had your own troubles with him.”

Still no reaction; at least not outwardly. Because she still had to flinch at that, and wonder how much he knew and try to stifle the urge to ask him. Not that she would have been able to anyway. She thanked him for the gag, just this once. Assuming he knew everything was the safest course of action. But if that were the case, she had to wonder why he would still want to kill her. Even a genetic duplicate would not have handled all seven of the artifacts.

He didn’t have a chance to say anymore, though because Vaughn came back in through the door. “Sir,” he said by way of getting the other man’s attention. “Reed is gone.” Sydney wondered at how fluidly he said it, and thought that maybe any kind of hesitation would have been looked down upon as emotion. If he’s more afraid of what Jack will do at the discovery of emotion than at the loss of an Agent, I might be in more trouble than I thought.

“Activate the tracking device,” Jack said in a tone that would have been accompanied by a wave of his hand, if he had been a man prone to excess motion.

“We did,” Vaughn said, and added another, “Sir,” for good measure. “It’s not showing anything.”

“What?” Jack turned from her now, facing him full on for the first time. It gave her the opportunity to watch both of them, and she saw that Vaughn had his hands clasped behind his back and his chin up, reminding her of a naval Leftenant reporting what would be construed merely as an unfortunate chain of events by his Captain.

Vaughn cleared his throat. “It’s not showing anything.” His eyes darted towards her once, and then locked back on Jack, who was now scowling four-fold at his trusted right-hand man. Sydney furrowed her brow, wondering what that look was about.

Judging from the amount of darkness filtering in through the window, though, it was drawing close to the end of the day. The end of the forty-seventh day, and she still had only a vague idea of what the hell it was that she was supposed to be doing, and no way to activate the failsafe of killing herself, with her hands locked down at her sides and surrounded by enemies like this.

It was not an option she had considered seriously until this point. If she was not going to be able to kill Vaughn – or if he was going to revert to his ‘natural state’ before the clock struck – she would have little hope of setting things right. It seemed her father was unaffected by such transformations of the passage of time, as were most of her coworkers. But things were shifting, and changing…though perhaps too slowly for her to impact them in anyway.

It did not mean she would not try.

“It’s not,” Jack said. “I see.” He turned to her with a grim smile. “It appears we have hit a bit of a snag. Lucky you.” The row of teeth he favored her with promised no real respite from her fate, only a temporary delay. The thought made Sydney strain anew against all of her bonds, the leather belts cutting into various patches of skin, leaving bizarre patterns pressed into her flesh.

Despite her renewed struggle, the leather would not give. The straps’ treatment smelled rough and raw and heady, like something pulled from the bottom of a cedar closet, and Jack approached her with that disgusting smile still splitting his face. “Tighter?” he asked her, and unhooked one of the belt-like tethers that held her left hand to the arm of the chair to draw down on the tautness of the material.

A noise slammed against the outside of the door, bouncing against walls that Sydney had never seen but had no doubt passed through herself. Jack started away and she wrenched her hand out of the binding, just as the door was slid open by Vaughn. Jack yelled “No!” as Sydney snatched a scalpel off of the tray that was so neatly arranged at her side, and held it in her teeth while she undid the other arm’s binding.

Lauren Reed – as Francie – stumbled into the room, bleeding from what appeared to be a massive head wound. The left half of her face had crumpled like the second story of a building with its support pillars knocked out. Both of her wrists were bleeding, though one looked as if it had been chewed on – the wound was messy and raw, and Sydney wondered if she had pulled the tracking device out herself, or if someone had done it for her.

Sydney fumbled with the large strap that secured her head, and used the scalpel to slice deftly through the bindings on her legs. She spared the extra moment to pull the tape from her lips, and screamed in a silent rictus of pain, but it was worth it to get the gag out of mouth. And Vaughn was bee-lining away from Sydney and toward his Lover in Sheep’s Clothing to support her, to press his hands to her head as if he could remove the damage done with his care alone. Jack’s eyes were glued to the scene for no longer than ten seconds, but it was enough for Sydney to lodge the scalpel, end over end, into his right shoulder.

Jack had his gun out at the same time Vaughn was saying “What’s happening out there, Lauren?” and Sydney was making a run for the door between the three of them, streaking straight out. She nearly made it, but for the body that suddenly blocked her way, and she could feel a sudden hotness tear through her stomach and pass out the other side, plugging neatly into the siding of the door. More shots were coming over her, as she halved herself in pain.

It all happened so fast.

Sark stood in front of her with the gun she had given him. She looked from the gun to him, to the slowly oozing wound in her stomach, before taking one step back.

The step was all it took to throw Vaughn into action, but Lauren was already on her knees when Sark put his final resting card in her left temple, and Sydney was still backing up until she realized, at the sound of a soft crunch, that she was standing on Jack’s hand.

She picked up her fallen father’s pistol as Vaughn drew his from a shoulder holster, and fired four shots into his chest.

The clatter of the gun she held was a bookend to Vaughn’s body collapsing to the concrete, and Sydney followed not long after, swaying back on her haunches and her hands suddenly remembering to press in as hard as they could, because there was too much at stake not to.

* * *

She looked up at him, and for a moment could only see the featureless gray landscape of the warehouse ceiling. And then her eyes focused with a snap, and those indigo eyes were shining with fright down at her. She could feel his arms pressed around her, sharp contrast to the cold of the concrete floor. One around her middle, the other cradling her back. He was partially upside down, which mean that her head lay somewhere on his shoulder. She didn’t think she could have lifted it on her own. He took one of her hands in his and together they pressed down on the widening stain on her midsection.

She could feel him trying to still his own shaking and failing, because of the warm spot that grew from the darkness in the stomach of her shirt, and the reality of it hit her all at once – that she was not watching this curled under a down quilt on a drizzly Sunday afternoon in the winter. This was real. This was happening. She could see it in his face.

“Sydney,” he breathed, and heard the clatter and an awkwardness in her back was gone, and she realized he had made himself drop the gun. His voice was tight and strained, and his hands still shook. “You’re going to be fine. Will and a team are on their way. You’re going to be just fine, keep breathing, keep…”

The mantra continued for a few more rotations before Sydney made herself blink.

“He shot me,” she said, and felt stupid immediately.

“I know love, I’m sorry. I would have stopped him, I tried – ”

“He’s my father,” Sydney said, because something did not compute in the equation.

Sark stared down at her, unapologetic. “I killed him.”

And it seemed right. It seemed right that he should do that; that he should be the one to kill the man who was willing to kill her, even if it was her father and it was the man she needed – wanted – dead in some other, far off world. It seemed right that he was impenitent, because this was Sark. Finally being himself.

Things were falling into place.

“If I’m not dead by the time Sloane gets here, you’ll have to kill him, too,” she said thickly. Words were coming harder, and she had to force herself to focus on what was right in front of her, to prevent her sight from wandering up into the top of her skull.

“Don’t say that,” Sark said. “You’re going to be fine.”

She coughed, something welling in her chest. It wouldn’t come out. How long since she’d been shot? How much longer did she have? “Sark, we’ve talked about this.” As if it were a matter of taking out the garbage, or who was going to cook dinner or wash the dishes. “I’m dying.” It sounded like as much of a realization to her as it should have been to him – even though she had been saying it in her head for the past seventy-two hours, trying to convince herself of the truth.

But suddenly it was a realization, because something did not fit right.

“This is the fourth death,” Sydney said, the intensity in her voice making Sark blink down at her, and she was equal parts amazed and proud that he had not shed a single tear. He shouldn’t be crying for me. I’m not the woman he’s mourning…it isn’t right.

“Then what was the choice?” His eyebrows were drawn in on his forehead, the harsh, medical lighting catching the shadows hiding in the dip next to his mouth.

She could see Vaughn’s fallen body at the angle he held her, and the gunshot where it had scattered free of its mark. He followed her gaze and shifted her, so that she was closer to lying down. Pressing harder on her wound, they both ignored the fresh gush of blood that seeped around his fingers. “I don’t understand,” he whispered, and sounded very small.

Sydney pressed her side into his chest, into the warmth she could feel radiating there, different from the hotness that was melting their joined hands above her abdomen. “I didn’t have to go after Vaughn. I chose to.” She paused to let that sink in before continuing, “If I had been the Sydney that you knew, I probably would have been dead by now. By last week, even, when he kidnapped me.”

“And I would be living happily with a complete and total stranger with your face,” Sark said darkly.

“I can’t just do nothing,” Sydney said, feeling a strange and desperate pull for his approval. What she got was the brush of his lips across her forehead, and his chin resting on her head, tucking her in as close to his body as he could manage.

“You did the right thing,” he said. “You always do the right thing.”

She felt a surge of pity for him, and ignored the strangeness of the situation as best she could. “I’m sorry that you have to go through this again.”

His lips were thin and white, and his clutch on her grew tighter, as tight as his voice. He spoke vehemently, and she told herself to listen, because it was surely important if he was taking that tone. Or things had gone too far, and this was already the wrong Sark… “Sydney, you listen to me. You are not going anywhere.” He was shaking her a little, his emphasis rattling her bones.

“Do you know anyone named Allison?” she asked distantly.

The confusion was evident on his face. “Syd, we don’t have time to…” He let out a frustrated sigh and she could feel his shoulders shifting. “From…work? My assistant?”

Sydney managed to lift her other arm, and she watched astounded as she brought it up to her stomach, where they was pressing on the wound, trying to play for as much time as she had. “You’ll get over me, you know.”

“Sydney – ”

“You will,” she cut him off with a slight shake of her head. “You will, and… You’d better. You’ll see things in a different light when I’m not around anymore. I hope…people like Allison are still here.” The ludicrous quality of her words made her giggle a little, and it was only after that she realized it was manic laughter.

“What am I going to tell Eric?” Sark said, just as irrational as she was at that point.

“If my body is coming with me, will you have anything to bury?” Sydney wondered too late, and wished she had asked Dixon to find out the corporeal aspects of the switch. She didn’t want Sark left with a forty-seven day old corpse.

Things went fuzzy, and her eyebrows lifted very, very slowly. “Hey…” she thought she heard herself say. Dying wasn’t exactly new to her, but she’d never felt the excruciatingly slow pace before.

“Sydney…” he said, clutching her still closer.

And that was the last thing she felt before it was only a fade to black.

* * *

It was another hospital bed. She could feel the itch of the well-washed gown, and the crispness of the sheets as they rubbed against her bare legs. But the room was strangely devoid of equipment – no drips, no monitors, no needles or tubes or embarrassing attachments. No window, either. The room was pitch black, and something in her equilibrium felt wrong until she figured out that she was flat on her back, which was different from most of her hospital waking experiences – she had usually been propped, to get the drips to work properly.

It was so dark that she didn’t even see the weapon – just realized there was a body in close proximity and figured that kicking would probably be the right thing to do.

It was.

She used the momentum of the kick to propel herself the rest of the way out of bed, and ended up straddling Francie – Allison? – at the waist, and only had time to register the dark rage in the other woman’s face before she saw the gun lash out, and felt the bones in her arm snap. She ignored the pain, used the injured arm’s elbow to smash into the face below her.

Allison moaned in pain and tried to raise her arms to her broken nose, now freely gushing blood, and Sydney took the opportunity to wrench the gun from her hand, turn it on its bearer, and fire twice into her forehead.

Sydneys eyes oriented slowly to the darkness - but her equilibrium was still elusive. Looking down at Allison, Sydney saw that she still wore that stunned expression in death. She realized with a start that something had happened to Allison’s eye, that it was mangled beyond repair. She hadn’t noticed during the fray. But in death, things were still, and could take her time to observe what damage she had and had not done.

How many times do I have to kill you? Her brain was panicky and not functioning properly. She glanced up at the walls around her, and realized she had no idea where she was. She could feel her legs tensing on the corpse below her, and wanted to get as far away from the body as possible, but couldn’t seem to move. Where am I?

The door of the room burst open, light flooding the interior, and Sydney heaved her arm around to level the gun at…

“Sark!” She could see her own surprise mirrored in his usually smooth expression, and felt her arms tighten up, needing to come off the defensive. Only Sark.

Followed by henchmen with guns.

And she knew right away that things here were very, very wrong – or very right, depending on her perspective. Clearly labeled in her mind, this was Evil Sark who stood before her. She pulled her finger taut on the trigger.

But she had hesitated.

And he had seen it.

And before she had time to reassure herself that this was the right thing; that the reaction of killing him was as natural as putting two into Allison had been, he had ordered people into the room, divested her of the weapon, and hauled her to her feet. He was studying her face, his eyes slightly squinted as if he was trying to see inside her. She stared back, her stomach roiling as realization of the mistake she had made washed over her. He kept his distance, though, and it was a small comfort to her that he was still respectful – or afraid – enough to do so.

“Don’t worry,” he said with that familiar trace of mockery and glanced down at the dead body at his feet. “The Covenant would have killed her anyway, for disobeying direct orders.” His voice was straight and calm, and he looked back up at her. “Or I would have.”

It was all he had time to say before she felt the blood rushing from her head, her vision swimming rapidly, the only thing in her mind was the same word over and over again: Failed, failed, failed… She heard one of the men cry out as she went suddenly limp in their arms, and saw Sark take a step back, thinking that this was a trick to take him off his guard. She wished it was.

* * *

The bullet is poison, and it hurts like shit.

She knows this because of three things. The first is that the split second after it goes in – and does not come out the other side of her chest – it pops. A tiny little explosion that could be acid reflux if she hadn’t just been on the receiving end of a very large gun. The second is the yellow spider’s web of polluted veins that is crawling its way along her shoulder and breast when the doctors in Mexico City cut her shirt off around her clenching fists.

The third is that she has to spend half of her stashed savings to pay for the antidote. She doesn’t want to know what it means that the Covenant would pay for such poisons to have her suffer a week long death instead of being shot and done with.

She shouldn’t have been following Sark in the first place, she knows, especially not as Julia Thorne. Because now she can tell the difference – feel that surge of adrenaline that courses through her when she knows there are no Safe Words or drop-off points or codes to dial into telephones to tell the CIA where she is. She is shot, that’s where she is – she is lying dead in a hospital somewhere. She is gone. She is Julia Thorne. And she is following the woman who has made her life a living hell for the past two years.

It’s all Allison’s fault.

She does not even try to call it revenge for her deceased best friend. It would be too poetic that way, and she doesn’t think Allison deserves that, and why won’t the bitch just die already?

It is on her way back to a hotel room one night that she is shot, and it is on her way back to her hospital room one morning that Allison finds her again, and she manages to grab a used syringe out of a nurse’s disposable station kit and jam it into her enemy’s eye socket. She twists, and she can feel the tissue separating under her ministrations, hear the high pitched keening sounds that Allison emits in Francie’s voice when she shoves it in a little bit deeper.

And then she is running again, running with her doctor to an even smaller locale. She knows she should have left Mexico City, because it is his terrain and he will find her no matter how far or how fast she runs. But it will delay the antidote another twenty-four hours, and those are twenty-four more hours than she has to live. So she risks staying, knows that they will track her and she will fight this fight again, and again, and again, until she finally discovers the secret solution to making Allison disappear now and forever, in any body form, from this planet.

She is willing to devote the rest of her life to the eradication of one woman, and one woman alone.

She tries not to think about Sloane, and how well that didn’t work the first time.

* * *

When Sydney came to, she felt the faint sensation of swaying. She was lying down, on her back, and everything was dark.

Again.

She could feel herself lifted, and the shuffle of feet coming and going, and she did her best not to move a muscle. The longer she didn’t move, the longer she could pretend that nothing was restraining her. Ignorance was bliss.

But it couldn’t last long. The sound of a door closing, and more footsteps of shoes on buffed tile. And then the darkness was gone, and Sark was peering down at her curiously. “How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice curious and scientific.

“Tired of waking up,” she said monotonously. She felt drugged and tired, and was only vaguely aware of her own body. Some addled part of her brain knew that was bad, but was temporarily powerless to change the situation.

He ignored that, and shifted his gaze down to her abused arm. “Can you make a fist?”

It wasn’t until that question that Sydney realized there was an arm under her hand, and fingers curled around the bones of her lower arm. She tried to squeeze, the numbness making it detached and queer feeling.

“That’s good. How about now?”

She tried to squeeze again. “Where am I?” She thought she kept the panic from her voice quite well.

“I can’t tell you that.” She could feel him shifting the bones in her arm with a sickening lurch, but her entire torso felt numb. It was an awful sensation of powerlessness. “Though I do care for your life, Sydney, I don’t particularly wish for you to be able to trace your own location. I assure you, your health will be returned to you as quickly as possible. It is of my utmost concern.”

Sydney was quiet, and the arm left her. She felt him tap her neck, and a dull throb of pain replaced the nothingness in her arm. He was watching her face for a reaction, and she hadn’t realized that it might be a bad idea to give him one. “Good,” he said. “That should heal nicely.”

“Why are you trying to save my life?” she said, and knew she sounded exasperated and impatient but didn’t care, because it was too close to the truth. She took the risk of glancing down at the rest of her body and saw that she was not restrained. She watched him watch her, and then, with a sluggishness deliberate enough for him to stop her if he wanted to, tried to sit up.

He helped her, one hand at the small of her back stuffing in pillows to fill up the empty space. She repressed the urge to thank him.

“You can’t mean to say that you never tire of taking orders,” Sark said blithely, pulling a folded blanket off of a chair that had been stationed next to the bed and whipping it open, flapping loose any dust or debris that might have collected in its indeterminable dormant period.

“So you’re self employed, now?” she asked darkly.

“I’ve always been self employed,” he said with a smile and a flourish of the blanket, and tossed it over her lower body. She found her one good hand burrowing into it of its own free will. “I’ll send in a doctor to set your arm, and then we’re going to have a nice long chat about some Rambaldi prophesies.”

Sydney willed her body into passivity. “What Rambaldi prophesies?”

Sark made his way for the door, and rested his hand on the knob. “Did you ever know,” he began conversationally, “that you talk in your sleep?”

She felt her mouth go cottony. “What else did I say?”

His teeth gleamed in the strange lighting. “You warned me to be careful. Though you didn’t mention why – am I under a threat of some kind?”

She didn’t say anything, so he gave her a pleasant smile and pulled the door ajar, and stepped through it. “Something to think about,” he concluded before he pulled it shut behind him, sealing Sydney in with her thoughts and her pain.

* * *

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

She looked up to find him staring at her from the doorway.

“They doctors told me,” he clarified.

She looked back at the book she was reading, noted the page for later. “I can’t,” she said bitterly.

His lips quirked up and Sydney felt her stomach flop, and grit her teeth. “I hate to think I’m keeping you awake, Sydney,” he said smoothly.

“I’m touched that you care,” she monotoned. “But I won’t sleep.”

He considered her seriously for a moment. “Why not?”

And then her eyes met his, and she knew just how haunted she must look, because his gaze sharpened minutely. “Because I’m afraid I’ll wake up somewhere else.”

Frowning, he said, “And this wasn’t a concern…there?”

She nodded. “Of course it was.”

“How did you sleep?”

Sydney laughed, only slightly maniacally. “You read to me.”

He didn’t answer, but stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him. “Run through this with me again. I’m afraid I’m still a bit confused.”

She set her book aside and stood up, walking past him to the ornate oak banquet table that ran the length of the room. Spread across it were various Prophesy translations, which he had dropped off over the course of the past week. The shelves were well stocked with books, and the stone floor was kept warm by some means she hadn’t quite figured out yet. But there were bars in the windows, and as much as Sydney appreciated the gilt, it was still a cage.

It had come as no great surprise that Sark had discovered the same Prophesy that she had, in the Other World. There were even good chances that the CIA had copies, and Marshall was working on – or already had – deciphered their cryptic and multiple meanings.

“It’s all right here,” she said, wishing she could set all the pages on fire just to never have to look at them again. But she knew that if she bothered, there would be duplicates in front of her within the hour, until Sark was satisfied with her version of events.

“You killed her,” he said bluntly. “You at least owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing,” she said, but the fire in her voice was gone. What she wanted to say, what she was really feeling, was that he owed her so much more than she owed him. He owed it to her to at least be the same person, day in and day out, and not force her to stall on the really hard decisions.

There was a stone fireplace in her room. She could probably climb out the chimney, if she tried. She was fairly sure he knew this.

The silence grew, and Sydney sighed before picking one page out of the bunch. “Here. See?” He slipped over to the table gracefully, his expensive shoes soundless on the stone. She was still in bare feet, and abruptly felt both underdressed and overpowered. She turned her attention back to the page she had pulled forth. “If what you’ve told me is true,” she paused for emphasis on her disinclination to believe that, “then my time spent as Julia Thorne was really time spent in…that Other World.”

“Then why not vice versa?” Sark prompted immediately.

Sydney shrugged. “Maybe Rambaldi knew all along that it was going to be me, and not her. Maybe he was trying to acclimate me to the environment.”

Sark shook his head. “You would’ve remembered, then. It would have been pointless to do that without the memories.”

“I was beginning to remember…” she started, and creased her brow in frustration.

“That’s not any more helpful than not remembering anything at all. It’s got to be something else,” he pressed her.

She threw up her hands and turned her back on the table. “I don’t know, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? I don’t know.”

She could hear him let out a very small sigh. “Sydney, I know this is hard. But it’s important. Surely even you can realize that.”

“Why is it so important?” she asked petulantly, still staring at the far wall.

The debate Sark had with himself was nearly audible. Eventually, it resulted in the rustling of his jacket suit as it opened, and she turned to see him pulling a scroll from his pocket. “It’s not his only Prophesy,” Sark said solemnly. “But I believe that it might help solve the mystery of his second one.”

She took an involuntary step forward before she realized he wasn’t going to let her see it. Despite his unwillingness to share, however, she headed back towards the table and pulled out a chair. “Fine,” she said, pulling forward the parchment closest to her. “We’ll start with the four deaths.”

“But you see…” he stroke up behind her and scanned the parchment for a moment, and then tapped on a certain line. “Here? This part about the seven artifacts. That intrigues me more than the four deaths ever did.”

Sydney gave him a nasty smile. “Well, if it wasn’t for Allison, the fourth death wouldn’t have even occurred. So I suppose I should be thanking her.”

“No,” he said quietly. “You misunderstand.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me then,” she said, her lip curling.

He gave her a purposefully blank look, full of confidence and pomp, and pulled out the chair next to her. He sat back, tapping idly against the arm of his chair. When he seemed to have looked at her for long enough, he readjusted the cross of his legs and spoke. “You really ought to be a bit nicer to me, if we were married and all.”

“We weren’t married,” Sydney said automatically, and then shot him a glare. “Are you going to explain this or not? We can’t figure out the second page until we know the facts for the first one.”

“Always so impatient,” Sark mock scolded her, but his fingers stilled their tapping. “As far as I can figure, you’ve got the three deaths right. But the fourth, the one that Sloane gave you…I think you’re right. You can’t trust that.”

Sydney was nodding. “It didn’t seem right. It was spaced way too far apart from the others, and for the transition to work on the right circuit, I would have had to experienced the first death. Here, I mean. In this world.”

Sark leaned forward and poked at the parchment that lay between them again, his cuff links glinting in the cool, polished surface of the oak. “I don’t think that’s right, even. Perhaps it was, instead, that you had to die once in each reality?” He began to tic them off on his fingers. “You died in the fire in your apartment, two years ago.”

“And in a car accident in the Other World – that’s what brought me over there.”

“Allison shot you,” he told her, “and you fell quite a distance. We thought you were dead, but we couldn’t find the body, so…” he shrugged.

A chill ran up her spine. “That’s the third death, then. Only instead of actually dying, I became Julia Thorne.”

Sark nodded. “I think the fourth death coincided with the Choice, whatever it was. You said that you died there…”

“I did,” she confirmed. “Trust me.”

He gave her an odd smirk and she knew he wanted to joke about trust, but he brushed it away. “But Allison was also standing over your bed, gun to your face, at the exact moment of the passing of the forty-seventh day. That can’t just be coincidence.”

“Nothing is ever coincidence,” she said darkly.

“My feelings exactly,” Sark said merrily, unnecessarily cheerful now that they were making progress. “Which brings me to my point – if you had chosen to stay in that world, you would have been somehow miraculously saved, and your body here – Julia Thorne – would have been killed by Allison, against the orders of the Covenant. The fourth death was willing to wait for you to decide whatever it was that you wanted to do with yourself.”

“But it also ensures that the choice can never be reversed, because the parallel body is gone now,” she said. “That’s…creepy.”

“That’s concrete,” Sark corrected her, and then gave her a lopsided grin, and leaned forward. “Any regrets?”

She scowled at him. “More than I can count.”

“I wouldn’t want to leave me either.” He laughed at her clenched jaw and pushed the parchment toward her. “So, if that’s the case, then what could the second page possibly mean?”

Sydney had a hard time looking away from him, not quite able to shake that she shouldn’t drop her gaze around him ever. As if she wasn’t already his prisoner, and had even more to lose. As if her friends and family didn’t think she was dead – again. “I’m not a mind reader, Sark,” she said bluntly, and held out her hand. “You’re going to have to let me see it.”

That pulled the cockiness out of his face. But he didn’t reveal any of the hesitation she knew he must be feeling – or he would’ve shown her the second Prophesy right away. He handed the scroll over to her, and she made sure not to touch his hand as she accepted it.

Rolling it open, she looked down at the second page.

With a start, she realized that it was the Prophesy page she’d seen before – Page 47, that her father had given Sark in exchange for Will nearly three years ago. A beautifully sketched mirror image stared back at her.

“This is my mother,” she said thickly.

“You’ve seen it?” Sark sounded surprised, and worked quickly to mask the emotion.

“I was detained by the CIA for being the subject of this…work.” She picked her words carefully.

“They thought you were capable of bringing down the most powerful force in the world?” His eyebrows showed how much credit he put in the idea. “You’re a very powerful woman, Sydney. But you’re not that powerful.” He seemed to be considering this for the moment, so she kept her silence. “Come to think of it,” he added, “neither is your mother.” The puzzlement she heard in his voice was mirrored in her own mind.

“There’s a stipulation,” Sydney said, “that the person never have seen Mt. Subasio. My father and Vaughn, they…broke me out. And I got to see them. So it can’t be about me. I’m…” She caught herself as she realized she had been about to apologize, and he didn’t seem to notice that she had cut herself short.

“But Irina’s been to that range as well,” Sark said, his eyes shining brightly at her. “It could be a mistranslation.”

“Even if it was!” Sydney said, suddenly tired of the conversation and its tactics. She didn’t know how to read this man, didn’t understand why he reacted in the same ways as the man she’d grown to know over the past month and a half. He was too similar, and it bothered her. “What do you want with me? Why won’t you let me go home?”

He watched her with a measured ounce of pity. “I know you haven’t seen them in a long time – your friends and you family. And I understand how that can be hurting you, Sydney. But I’m afraid I can’t let you go.”

“You know my father won’t rest until he finds me.”

“Your father thinks you’re dead.” He said it shortly, and seemed to have to deal with the fact that he had said it. “We all thought you were.”

She didn’t say anything, and he looked up at her.

“If the stipulation is a mistranslation,” he said, pulling the parchment out of her hands and resting it gently back onto the table, smoothing the edges with care. “Then you will...” he glanced at the text, “ ‘Render the greatest power unto utter desolation.’ And I can’t tell you how beneficial it would be for me to have the United States Government out of the way.”

The cold silence sunk in, and the reality of her long-term imprisonment.

“You obviously didn’t think that I was the subject of this Prophesy originally,” she said heavily. “So why did you think it was linked to the other Prophesy?”

“Both of them are numbered as Rambaldi’s Forty-Seventh Prophesy. They lie side by side in every copy of his works.” He stared at the parchment on the table. “I was hoping it might lead to finding Irina.”

She didn’t say anything, and he looked up at her in anticipation of a response. They regarded one another in silence before she said, “I’d like to find her, too.”

He nodded jerkily, and stood up, smoothing the front of his jacket. “I’ll leave the page with you, then. See if two minds really are better than one.”

She let him go, but thought of something just as he reached the door. “Why do they all think I’m dead?” she asked.

He gave her some forehead wrinkles and she had to do another quick recalculation of his ability to express with his face. “Think about everything the people you know believe about you, Sydney,” he told her. “And then think about whether they’d doubt – for even a second – that you’d martyr yourself to stop some awful apocalypse from occurring.”

“But you doubted?” she asked acerbically.

“It’s my job to doubt your motives,” he told her with a pull on the side of his mouth that definitely was not a smile. “I rely on them.”

But she wouldn’t give up. “So I made the wrong decision, then? Didn’t play into the hands of the Prophesy with my Choice?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Are you so sure that you couldn’t have stopped me from devolving into a criminal, if you had stayed in that world?” She didn’t answer right away, so he plunged on. “Or maybe it’s just that you had already lost your best friend, and your lover, and your world was topsy-turvy and you didn’t want to be alone anymore?” She could feel the confidence washing out of her, and he nodded resolutely to himself as he pulled open the door. “Personally,” he concluded, “I think you took the easy way out.” He made a show of hesitating before continuing, “It certainly wouldn’t be a struggle for you to kill me in this reality, now would it?”

He bolted the door behind him as the chair she flung at him shattered into matchwood against the wall.

* * *

“It won’t be easy, you know.”

“Nothing ever is.”

He is staring at her from the opposite end of the bed, his toes pressing into his pillow, the book lying in its familiar place on his chest. Only it is closed, because they have finally finished, and Sydney thinks that she will never be able to read Black Beauty again because it will always remind her of him. She’s not sure if it’s good or bad that she doesn’t want to remember him. She’s also fairly sure that whatever her decision is, she’ll change it in another three months, or less.

“Not to sound egotistical,” he says to her, “but what if you can’t do it?”

“I’ll have to,” she replies. “He’s not you. You’re not him. Just like I’m not her.” It is an old argument, but they will keep having it until he’s satisfied that her returning is the right choice. “I stopped trusting Vaughn’s face,” she says to him. “I can stop trusting yours.”

“I hope you’re right,” he tells her, and they watch one another warily for signs of altered personality. The silence is companionable, and Sydney cannot help but wonder how long it has been that she has considered him an ally and not an enemy.

“I hope you don’t think this strange of me,” he says to her after a few moments, and shifts his hand from the book to the down comforter that rests beneath them, the lift of his fingertips emitting the dry, comforting noise she has grown used to associating with falling asleep to his voice. “But I’m glad that you let me…say goodbye. Even if you’re not the Sydney I spent two years with, it doesn’t seem right to just let you go running headlong into danger without a send-off.”

She gives him a small smile. “It didn’t seem right,” she agrees.

He sits up slightly. “Of course, it also doesn’t seem right that you know sixteen ways of killing a man with your bare hands,” he says, his mordant wit pulling up the corners of her mouth. “Though it does me good to know that you can take care of yourself.”

She does not reply, but favors him with a toothy grin, which she has used rarely enough over the past forty-six days that she knows he will appreciate its appearance. They watch one another companionably as the clock on the dresser counts off its seconds, and Sydney knows that this is just another person who has always had a time limit attached. But she can’t help but wonder what it would be like to stay here with him, to try her best to keep him from turning that corner into the Other Sark she knows nearly nothing about but feels like she has known forever.

She wonders if that’s what it feels like for him, watching her and feeling like he knows her but really knowing nothing at all. And she marvels at the fact that he might be satisfied with that; with the not knowing. It is more than she could accept for her life, and she knows that deep down that is the reason she is leaving. To satisfy her own curiosity – not to save the world from danger and destruction.

Nothing but her own curiosity could make her give up this peace.

* * *

Another week went by before he let her out of the bedroom. When she asked him why, he gave her a wry smile and asked her, “Why? Would you like to be put back in?”

His question hit closer to the mark than she would liked to have admitted. When she had been confined to the bedroom and its small bathroom antechamber, she had felt like a true prisoner. Now that she had full range of the castle – Irish, early 14th century, by the looks of the tapestries and stonework that made up the décor – she felt as if she should be trying harder to leave, or to at least contact her father and arrange an extraction.

The problem was two-fold: she had no idea where she was or how to contact anyone; and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to leave. Something nagged at her every night, beyond her chronic insomnia (which was waning, now that she had a steady supply of old classics to dose herself to sleep with). Something felt unfinished, incomplete.

With the resolution that she would find out exactly what was plaguing her, she pulled together all the translations off the large Oak table and spread them across the floor of the Great Hall, arranging them as best she could in order of accuracy. That night, when Sark came to check on her progress, she was still stooped over the flagstones, holding three pieces of paper in her hands and muttering to herself about incorrect Latin and dating.

When he asked if she needed anything, she snapped at him to bring her chalk, and he left her with a grin and four new pieces of parchment; alternate translations of the second page he had reluctantly shown her so many days before.

It only took her two nights and days without sleep to figure it out.

The morning of the third day, when Sark was returning from an evening abroad (doing God knows what – Sydney tried not to think about it as adamantly as possible), she called him into the Great Hall and warned him not to step any closer.

He listened to her, for once.

The entire room was covered in a spider’s web of parchment, translations, and prophesies. In the very middle, Sydney sat with her box of Elmer’s school chalk, and the original Prophesy that bore her image.

Sark looked down at his feet, to see two Taiwanese translations with a chalked in date on the stone next to them. A line was drawn to a Spanish translation decorated in Mayan symbols on the outer border. There was also a date next to those, and Rambaldi’s Eye drawn carefully below the date.

“I figured out the second Prophesy,” she told him.

“Do tell,” he asked her casually, belying the nervous tension in his voice.

“It’s…complicated,” she said, frowning. Her thoughts swam rapidly against the current, and she tried to trace back her pattern of lies and half-truths to the original point of epiphany. “The people that Rambaldi writes about – the ones in this Prophesy. Me, or my mother.”

“I get it,” he cut her off.

She was rambling, and she knew it. Blinking, she tried to focus. “It’s true. Of course it is, it’s Rambaldi – but the ‘greatest power’ part is wrong. See, in that translation, it’s not ‘power’, it’s ‘desire’.” She pointed to another. “That one is ‘dream’.” And another. “And that one is ‘control’.” She looked up at him. “It’s not only that I get to take down the greatest power, Sark – it’s that I get to pick what that power is, too.”

His eyebrows shot up his head. “What?”

She nodded, more sure of herself than ever. “So, while you might want me to take down the government…it’s not going to happen. Because that’s not what I consider the world’s greatest power.”

Sark made a sound of disgruntled disappointment. “Then what do you consider the world’s greatest power?”

“SD-6,” she said simply. “It’s already fulfilled itself.”

Sark swore, pulled his hands out of his pockets, and then seemed to not know what to do with them. “I’ll have to have this validated,” he said.

“I’ve got to sleep,” she answered. “Get whoever you want to take a look at them. I don’t care. Just let me sleep.”

He seemed to pause, doubtless wondering whether he should keep her from the sleep she craved, in case her malleability came in handy later on. Instead, he nodded once, and she stood and gingerly picked her way through the chalk lines and scattered papers.

As she headed up the broad staircase before her, she couldn’t help but notice the look of disappointment on his face.

* * *

When she woke, it was mid-afternoon, and he was pacing the length of her bedroom, running his fingers along the smooth surface of the Oak table. He stopped when she sat up, and she did her best to clear her mind, to prepare herself for his questions that would undoubtedly come at her.

The other option was that her usefulness has expired, and he no longer saw the need to maintain her life. But – she hoped – he would have killed her before now if that was the case. She regarded him warily, waiting for him to advance.

Instead, he merely watched her.

Unnerved, she climbed out of bed and pulled on real clothes, conscious of his unwavering gaze and the unearthly silence that enveloped the room. Once she was dressed, she turned to him, and watched him swallow. His large, blue eyes met hers, and all he said was, “I’m only going to ask you once.”

Her mouth twitched and she wished she had put on shoes. “Ask me what?”

He took a deep breath. “If you want to stay.”

The look on her face was answer enough, apparently, because he laughed, and rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. “I know it sounds illogical. But…Sydney, you have to consider the fact that you don’t have anything left for you in…in your real world. I’m offering you an opportunity to not go through the trauma of reintroducing yourself to a world with lost time – again.”

She nodded. It made sense that he would think the offer would entice her – though he obviously had some ulterior motive for her staying at his side. “Only it isn’t lost, this time.”

He let his hand drop from the back of his neck and rested it on the table behind him. “The Prophesy you’ve deciphered is accurate.”

She felt a swell of pride, but forced herself to focus on what he was saying next.

“If you decide not to stay, I will…return you.”

“How…” she asked, and sorted through all the questions she wanted to ask when a new one came to her. “How long have I been gone?”

“Sixty days,” he told her. “We can have you home by dusk in L.A., if that’s what you want.”

“And you’re…just going to let me go.” She didn’t believe it. Not for one second.

But there was little to argue as he lead her out of the castle for the first time, onto a genuine Moorland. There was a small airplane waiting for them, revving into activity as she looked around in wonder.

“Not many barons dared build a castle on a moor,” Sark said, looking amused. “Apparently my…father…decided it would be a perfect hiding spot. The locals don’t come on the moor.” A dark-suited man slid open the door to the aircraft as they approached, and Sark held out a hand to help her up.

“Why?” she asked as she hefted herself into the airplane, and turned around to watch him pull himself in behind her. The doorman sealed them in. It was strange to leave her rooms behind, with their books and clothes that weren’t hers anyway.

“Elves,” Sark said, without any additional explanation.

“Of course,” Sydney said, and they shared a smirk.

The ride was long and silent, and they were somewhere over the ocean when Sydney said, “Why give me the choice?”

Sark turned his head and nothing else, from where he had been tracking their progress out the window. It disturbed her how still he could stay, when she could practically see the electricity running beneath his skin. “What do you mean?” he asked her, sounding slightly distant through her pressurized hearing. She swallowed in an attempt to clear it, and gave up after the only result was flinching in pain.

“Sark,” she said, and leveled a severe look at him. “I know you’re not really letting me go. So why give me the choice to stay?”

He tilted his head to observe her. “You’ve become awfully complacent over the past few days, Sydney. You do realize that, I hope.”

She bit the inside of her bottom lip. She realized. It bothered her. She should be taking every opportunity to wrest any weapons on his body from him, and give him a neat and tidy death through the left temple. But she hadn’t tried. Not even once.

That they both knew it made her greatly uneasy.

Sark went on. “There’s also the matter of your father. He is rather persistent. Spotted in Rome, last my contacts got back to me.”

“What’s he arranged my exchange for?” Sydney asked.

He smiled at her. “You haven’t even told me whether or not you want to leave.”

“I want to leave,” she said.

“Do you?”

They watched each other warily, before he went on. “He’s agreed to give me Irina’s coordinates in exchange for you, safe and sound, back with him.”

“He doesn’t know them,” she said, knowing she was putting nails in her own coffin.

He nodded. “I’d thought of that, Sydney.” He looked up at her, and their eyes met again. “But he’s either withheld them from you, or found them out to save you. Either way, it’s a momentous sacrifice he’s willing to make to get you back.”

She frowned. “Once you get them…”

Neither of them wanted to say it.

“I want to see her,” she said stubbornly.

“I know you do,” he said passively. “And I think…I think she wants to see you, too.”

Realization dawned across Sydney’s face as they passed through an embankment of clouds. “You don’t know if she’d welcome you? Aren’t you the…prodigal child?”

That earned her a laugh. “When you haven’t seen someone as fickle as your mother in two years, Sydney, all bets are off.”

“You seemed to know exactly what you were doing with me,” she said levelly. He didn’t reply to that, but looked at her again.

“Do you want to leave?” he echoed his first question. She stifled the urge to taunt him for going back on his word and asking her more than once.

They regarded one another for what felt like the hundredth time, and she wondered if she could map his face by memory now. The creases next to his eyes, and the bizarre curve of his mouth and the way his forehead scaled up into inquisition burned itself into her retinas. She could watch the anticipation in his gaze grow sharp as she opened her mouth and licked her lips.

“No.”

And it was the truth.

Not only did she not want to leave, she couldn’t leave. Not because she wasn’t sure if this man sitting across from her in the plush, tan leather seats was good or evil – not that the lines were ever drawn that clearly. He had saved her life as often as he had tried to take it, as it suited him. Not because she wanted to see her mother again – though she did, and thought that her father would understand her temporary betrayal to bid her mother a proper adieu. And certainly not out of any punishment to herself, for the forty-seven days of relative bliss she had spent in some alternate form.

It was the truth because it was in the Prophesy.

What she had told him that morning was partly true: she was, as far as she could tell, the figure in the sketch that Milo Rambaldi had created so many hundreds of years ago. She was the focus of the Prophesy whether she wanted to be, or not. It was also the truth that she could pick and choose what the world’s most powerful element was. And she certainly didn’t think that it was the United States Government.

But she had spent so long thinking down on SD-6, and convincing herself that it was destructible, that it had been years since she considered an organization run by Arvin Sloane to hold absolute power over the world.

The truth was – what she hadn’t told him – she was pretty sure it was one of two people. Her mother, or Sark. Not that she would ever tell him that, because it would almost certainly lead to her death and the biggest case of a swelled ego this side of Sloane’s most pompous moments. But it also meant that she couldn’t leave him. The sake of the world depended on it.

Martyring yourself again, Sydney. Sark would be so proud, if you could tell him.

And they day would come, eventually, when she would have to find it in herself to put that bullet through his head, or beg him down from some maniacal plan to exterminate all Belgians, or some equally bizarre mission. Or she would be forced to kill her own mother. Neither option was entirely enticing, but she couldn’t fly her own opinions in the face of the Prophesy.

Rambaldi had never been wrong. He wasn’t about to start now, for her sake. And if there was one thing she had learned in the Other World, it was that destiny was not to be taken lightly. She watched Sark lean back in his seat, and could see the gears in his head already turning to maneuver her back to safety after the false exchange had been made. It was comforting to know that she could rely on him for that, at least, and that he would not betray her today.

Tomorrow, undoubtedly, was another matter. And the day after that, and the day after that. But Sydney knew she had the luxury to earn his trust, and to see whether the Sark she had spent forty-seven days with was right that he was only the second side to a two-headed coin.

For the first day since she could remember, Sydney had nothing but time.

END





AUTHOR’S NOTES: First and foremost, to everyone who encouraged me to follow this – writing this fic in thirty days was no easy feat, but it had to be done – it was the only way I would ever tackle a 50,000 word, novel length fic, and not take a year to write it. By the time it was done, the ending would be contrived and desperate and not well thought out, and I’d have been Jossed by JJ and that’d suck. So thanks a million to Madame D, Gabby Silang, Am, Shaza, Corngirl Jo (especially for her vids, which I watched, oh, two million times), and Narky.

Secondly, to Rez, who is my Alias Fandom slut. I give her the worst shit in the world, and she gives me feedback better than sex. Um, no pressure or anything. Heh. Whoops. And to Sydney Real, who gave me the idea for the scar and listened when I needed to talk. Come back, SR, we need your fic again.

Most importantly, though, this fic couldn’t have happened without Caedn. It is entirely her fault. Our nightly recaps after Alias, planning the fic out together, gave me countless ideas. She gave me a trigger when there was none. She gave me an ending when there was none. She gave me an extra 10,000 words when there was no hope. This fic literally would not have happened without her. Every time I ran up against a wall, she set me right. Every time something didn’t make sense, she worked it out. She is a genius, and I am in her debt forever. Cae, I’m giving you my first born. But I’m keeping Weiss.

Lastly. To my roommate. Because every time someone gets their ass kicked, it’s exactly what I wanted to do to her.

Excerpt that Sark reads: Black Beauty – part 3, ch. 3

Original Rambaldi exceprt: "This woman here depicted will possess unseen marks, signs that she will be the one to bring forth my works. Bind them with fury, a burning anger, unless prevented, at vulgar costs, this woman will render the greatest power, unto utter desolation."