- floodgates -
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sark/Sydney
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. Imitation is the highest form of compliment.
Spoilers: Through 3x02
Feedback: Flowers need water and writers need feedback. Be kind, water a writer today. shadesofbrixton@yahoomail.com
Archive: Cover Me. Anyone else, please ask – I always say yes, but I like to know where it goes.
Author’s Notes: 1) Where the hell did this het come from?! 2) This is for Vaznetti. Because you betaed with an incredible amount of tact, considering the things you had to say – I tried my best to clear some things up. But some things just wouldn’t be clarified. So thank you for putting up with me.
He stretched his legs after she unshackled his ankles, and she winced when his knees popped. His government-issue Keds squeaked for purchase on the floor of the truck, and it was quite possibly one of the most undignified moments she had ever witnessed.
She laid her hand on the nape of his neck and squeezed, trying to reassure him. It was a detached comfort, though, because it was hard to imagine Sark dying. Sark would be there on her next mission, popping in at the most inopportune time, when the alarms had already been set off. His lips would tug up on one side as he pressed them together after his latest scathing quip, and then they would both be running for their lives, in opposite directions. As if no time had passed at all.
His hair was so short.
It brushed her index finger and she raised the digit slightly, letting it file crisply between that and her middle finger, and then rubbed upward. The hair was so soft, and she let her thumb sweep up the side of his head and then pulled the whole hand back down again to repeat the pattern before she realized what she was doing.
Her hand froze. He was watching her out of the side of one eye, amused and unsure and waiting.
“Sydney,” he said, his tone light but warning. “You could have picked a better time.”
He felt like a kitten she found when she was six. She had brought him home and her father had held her hand on the way to the vet to see if the kitten would live. Sydney’s nose had barely fit over the top of the examining table, and the kitten had bristled on the cold plastic, smelling animals and antiseptic from previous hours.
The cat had died before she could name it, its fur still silken, and her father had helped her bury it in the yard. For all she knew, it was still there.
She ran her hand up defiantly, her fingers carving trails in the mow. His eyelids drooped slightly and his head pressed back into her, his hands bracing on his knees and his back straight against the steel wall of the truck. She cupped the crown of his head, and he ducked it, gathering his wits.
“I don’t want to die.” He was staring straight ahead, rolling the words around in his mouth and finding the perfect balance of observation, honesty and assumption. He said it the same way some people would comment on a new car. It sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to say, she thought. She hadn’t wanted to either, two years ago.
Some things change.
* * *
Sydney remembered rainy days.
The only benefit of standing in the rain was that you knew, if you could just wait long enough, you would have a wonderful, warm home to get back to. You could shed all your clothes at the door, a long trail of damp material to the shower, and then spray yourself pink and clean and warm for as long as you wanted.
If you had a home.
Sydney didn’t. She had a house, granted - a nice one. The new house helped. Weiss, especially, helped. But when she got up that Sunday morning with the express intent of going jogging, she had to sit down on her still-smells-like-warehouse couch and put her face gently in her palms. Rain. Sydney had never been big on metaphors, but this was definitely one not to ignore.
Two years can change a lot of things, and she knew that, and she kept waiting for the other shoe to drop – for the one big thing like telephones or pizza or cell phones to not exist anymore. The first shoe was Vaughn, and now she was just hopping around, one leg in the air, about to lose her balance and topple into confusion and oblivion and angst.
So she grabbed her sweatshirt and an umbrella and headed out for a walk in the park, despite the foul weather beating down on the pavement.
Sydney pulled her curled fingers inside the sleeves of her shirt and felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up in the cold. Her cheek was pressed against the cold metal that held up the material, and she could feel the small fastener near the dip in her eye.
She had made an entire circuit of the park twice, and had noticed him following her during the second rotation. He had kept a respectful distance, for reasons she hadn’t figured out yet, but that was why she had stopped at the bridge. The metal of the railing radiated cold at her, and she didn’t dare do anything with her spare hand other than leave it hanging at her side.
That was where he approached her – standing by the side of a low bridge, water streaming in neat triangles behind the floating ducks, the sound of uncooked rice on construction paper as rain tap-tap-tapped on the umbrella fabric. He ducked under the umbrella and tilted his head awkwardly to tuck as much of himself in as possible, and shook away some water from his hands.
She looked up at him, and then back at the lake. He was soaked.
“I thought you would be out of the country by now.”
The ends of his mouth tugged down in the corner of her eye; as if he knew what she said was true, agreed with it, and was nonetheless powerless to be standing anywhere but exactly where he was.
“I wasn’t going to come up to you,” he said. His voice meshed well with the raindrops, quiet and murmuring against the water. Sydney was glad there was no lightning or thunder, because she didn’t think she could stand any more overt drama in her life. Instead, the skies gaped and the rain’s intensity increased audibly. She could feel the heat of his hand hover hesitantly over the small of her back as they both drew closer under the umbrella before it dropped back to its resting place.
“But you did,” Sydney said, not knowing what else she could.
She could hear him breathing. The way he ran his teeth together before he spoke. The synapses firing in his head.
“Two years is a long time, Sydney.” He let that rest for a moment, that sentence of ridiculous understatement. “I come back, and everything is different. People are gone. People I used to trust…” He turned his head, and she felt the muscles in her neck flinch under the effort of not meeting that gaze. “We’re not so different, you and I.”
She could see the water dripping off the sleeves of his cable knit sweater, bouncing up off the ground to grab at the calves of her pants. “I know.” She knew when she unbound him in the truck. When she allowed herself to touch him, she allowed herself to realize how he was the only one left, from before. The only one who might understand.
“It would be easier. If you left them, the way they left you.”
Sydney pressed her lips together.
“Haven’t you asked yourself? How did they not find you, Sydney?” She let her teeth set and tried to breath evenly. “Unless they didn’t want to.” His voice was down to a whisper now, dropping the things into her head that she hadn’t allowed herself to think.
Because what would that mean?
“They locked away the only people who would have come after you. They isolated you.” He paused, considering. “They buried you.”
“I would have done the same thing,” Sydney said, both of them only hearing the ‘would have’ and knowing exactly what she meant, even if she wasn’t ready to say it yet.
He smiled easily, and turned back to the dotted lake. “Unfortunately for me, you’ve never done the easy thing.” He stood half behind her now, his hands in his pockets, and she watched as a cold sluice of water just missed the back of his neck.
“Sark.” Her voice was shaking, but not with the violence that usually caused the tremors. It was something else, and it made him listen. “Those two years...” Her eyes darted back and forth across the banks of the lake. “You remember them.”
“It would be hard not to, yes.”
“You remember them,” she said again. And what he heard was, ‘it’s not fair.’
Involuntarily, he took a step back, and his skin arched immediately under the icy water. Sydney turned, confused, the lines around her mouth ready for a good cry. The rain washed over him, ran through his hair like her fingers had, cold as the touch of a woman two years dead. It beaded over his forehead and dripped down his nose, but by then everything else was wet, too, and it hardly stood out.
“Nothing in our life is ever fair, Sydney,” he said, his bedroom voice low, like far away thunder in Arizona. It smoothed her face, and she could feel her fingers uncurl inside her shirt. His eyes were vibrant in the grey around them, and she held out the umbrella.
There was a comic moment while they soaked through and the umbrella shielded nothing but pavement, Sydney willing him to take it and Sark wanting to offer it back and wondering how many ways she could injure him with it. In the end, his hand closed around the handle, just above hers, and their fingers brushed as he pulled it over his head.
“They won’t be able to give you back your life.”
Sydney wrapped her arms around herself and felt the give of the fabric under the wet pads of her fingers. “Neither will you.”
“I could give you a new one.”
She wondered how she would explain the missing umbrella to the people watching her house, but realized they were probably dead, if he was here talking to her. It occurred to her that he had probably had to kill people to get in here. She knew she was being watched – hadn’t really cared when she heard the click – click – click sound every time she made a phone call.
He had killed people just to stand next to her. It made her skin shrink two sizes too small, reminded her who she was talking to. They were different. They had nothing in common.
She needed that to be true.
He squinted down at her, considering, assessing her rapid shift in body language and perhaps sensing a new threat she posed.
“I’ll bring it back to you,” he said.
She almost laughed, and a rivulet of water dipped down her forehead and into her tear duct. “You don’t have to.”
He half turned. “I will.” He exhaled once, met her eyes with something Sydney couldn’t label, and then he walked away.
And she let him.