Abyssinian
Cadet
This is the prequel to some fics I wrote ages and ages ago, Black-Winged Angel and Acceptance
Disclaimer: Alias is not mine.
Title: Broken
Author: Abyssinian (aka Ayaren)
Rating: G (I suppose)
Timeline: AU S2 post-Indicator. This comes before my other fics Black-Winged Angel and Acceptance.
Summary: They lived under the same shadow.
A/N: a big hug and thankyou to my buddy Luce (gucci_94) for betaing this fic
< O >
Part One: Under A Shadow
It was not until he said something that she realised she was anything but ‘ok’.
She thought she had dealt with it. That the knowledge the spy world had chosen her when she had been too young to make that decision for herself was acceptable, if not yet entirely all right. She thought she might even be able to forgive her father one day, because even while she condemned his actions as the worst kind of betrayal she found herself understanding why. After all, what parent would not do anything to protect their child?
Even so she found herself relying on her ability to compartmentalise more than ever. A wry voice inside her head suggested that if she boxed up any more feelings she would need to start a filing system if she ever wanted to find them again. She ran through the list in her mind. Firstly if she wanted to stay alive she had to treat the man who killed her fiancé like a second dad. Then she had to hide her knowledge of SD-6’s true affiliation and her own double agent status. Lying to Dixon in particular left her guilt-ridden more than once. Of course she could not forget having to keep her job secret from Francie —thankfully life was a little easier now Will knew, not much but it helped. Then there was that whole mess with her mother. Oh, and then trying to maintain a professional distance from Agent Vaughn when he was one of the few people she felt she could actually trust.
And now add Daddy to the list, she muttered bitterly. She had to work with him every day and pretend to Sloane there was no rift between them at all.
Yep, she was going to go insane one of these days. That or change her name and move to the tropics.
And yet, another part of her whispered, she got herself into these situations, some of which could have been avoided. She liked it, the voice accused. She enjoyed the drama of it all, her own personal soap opera.
Maybe that was why she was standing in front of his door. Well, the door to the hotel room she had to great lengths to discover he was currently occupying. Because she knew, no matter what happened, she was just adding a further complication to her already convoluted life.
Of course, she would not have been Sydney Bristow if things were easy.
And she had to exorcise him from her mind, rid herself of his voice, his smirk, telling her the truths she had hidden from herself. She had to confront him and tell him he was wrong, and then maybe she would sleep in peace. Hopefully.
Taking a deep breath to calm her already nervous mind she stepped forward and raised a hand to knock. Before she could do his amused voice piped up to her left and she spun, hand instinctively going to the gun holstered in the small of her back.
He was leaning casually against the wall and smirking at her as he informed her he had been watching for the past five minutes. She just glared at him, partly in embarrassment, as he swept past her and unlocked the door with a flourish, gesturing for her to enter before him.
She took one last furtive glance down the corridor and then slipped inside, her body trembling with anticipation as she sunk awkwardly onto the room’s couch. Her eyes followed him as he moved into the bathroom, stripping off his black jacket and sweater as he went. It was obvious he had just returned from a job. Idly she wondered who his target had been and then decided she was better off not knowing.
She knew what he was and she was not here to condemn him. She did wonder at his trust in her though as he willingly left her alone while he showered. Perhaps he had known she would come, and that tonight she meant him no harm.
It was just like him to know her so well. Some part of her thought he understood her more than anyone, more than her father or Vaughn, or even herself, but she ruthlessly suppressed that notion. He did not know her, not at all.
And yet, out of everyone she had come to him.
He emerged moments later clad in the same trousers but shirtless as he towelled his hair dry, pushing the blonde curls back from his eyes. She watched him cross to the wardrobe in unabashed appreciation, her gaze focussed on the muscles of his back. He was not a broad man, but within his slender frame was a body hardened by years of training.
Pulling on a shirt he apologised for his lack of manners, citing her unexpected arrival as an excuse. She shrugged, tucking a loose lock of hair behind her ear, not missing the flash that passed through his eyes at the movement. She had seen that before in her father. Somehow the action reminded both men of the other woman they had in common. Jack’s wife. Sark’s teacher. Her mother.
She accepted the drink he offered her, forcing icy fingers to clench around the glass. It was testimony to the trust she was placing in him that she did not even consider the possibility it was drugged before she drank.
Watching him sprawl across a nearby chair with the careless grace of a cat she instinctively knew that tonight they had called a truce. She needed something from him and he was curious to know what it was. She set the glass down on the coffee table and leaned forward with a sigh.
It was now or it was never.
With that indecipherable blue gaze focussed on her she just let go and told him everything she had not been able to tell anyone else. Even to her it seemed strange, almost other-worldly that this man, her nemesis, was the only one she felt would understand. He was everything she strove to destroy, but none of that mattered right now. After all it had been his words, a taunt spoke merely to provoke her for his own amusement during their last confrontation, which had brought her to his door.
At the time she had been disgusted that he would dare to liken their respective situations and bitten back with a fairly standard reply consisting of a mix of insults, physical blows and the determined insistence that they were nothing alike. They had nothing in common, she said, he was bad and she was good and that was all he needed to know.
But later when she knew she should just forget those words she found she could not. Words she had brushed off with ease on the previous occasions when he used them against her echoed over and over in her mind. They were designed merely to throw her off, to get her angry so that she was not thinking as clearly as she should have been. It was just another one of his weapons and usually she had been able to ignore it.
Only this time what he said was true and she was no longer capable of denying it. She was tired of trusting no one to watch her back, she said with an air of defeat, and so was he.
He arched an eyebrow at that but made no move to deny it. She was more perceptive than he had given her credit for. A faint frown creased his forehead as he asked her what he was supposed to do about it. They were enemies after all, she had no business bringing her problems to him.
Which brought him to ask the very question she had known he would and hoped to avoid answering: Why was she here now? Why not go to her beloved boy scout?
Because as her enemy he was the one person she expected to betray her, and he was the one person who had not done so. Because she did not care about him and therefore she could not hurt him. And, more importantly, he could not hurt her.
She recounted her list as he contemplated her words with the air of a man tasting wine. Project Christmas. Laura Bristow. The Alliance. Even Alice, Vaughn’s perfect little girlfriend found her way onto Sydney Bristow’s list. Her father had taken away her choices. Her mother had lied from the beginning. The Alliance were just the bad guys and Vaughn, the one person she had thought she could trust, had returned to his oblivious blonde once again. And then there were her friends, Will had been brought into something he never should have known because of her, his life destroyed for love of her.
She was sick of having to lie to the people she cared about, of expecting everyone around her to betray her some day. She was tired of placing her trust in someone only to discover her mistake in the most painful of ways. Arvin Sloane. Noah Hicks. Jack Bristow. Irina Derevko. Even Michael Vaughn and Will Tippin had betrayed her, the former blind to the love she felt and the latter ignoring her pleas to leave Danny’s death alone.
Her shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. It was too much for one person to handle alone, she told him. Surely he understood the destructive nature of their work. Surely he could sympathise with her. After all, was that not the reason why he was so cold, so unapproachable? To keep others away.
They were poison, she said, he knew it too.
He did not answer her.
Those oft-despised blue eyes offered nothing when she chanced another glance at them. Her host merely raised his glass to his lips and drank. She could see the lingering suspicion in the faintest of frowns creasing his forehead. He was well aware of her skills as an actress and it was clear he was not entirely convinced by her display.
Whatever courage had possessed her to seek him out fled in the face of his scepticism. The mask that had hidden her for longer than she cared to remember gave way as he maintained his silence. The control she had prided herself for vanished as she let the first flush of tears come. Her body shuddered with the release of over a year of the most strenuous suppression and she drew her knees up to chest, rocking slightly as she wept for the Sydney Bristow who had been lost so long ago.
He watched without speaking, the only sounds in the room the hum of the electricity and her wracking sobs. She felt his gaze on her and some part of her inwardly thanked him. He would offer her no comfort, real or otherwise. That was what made him different.
Yet, to her surprise, she felt his body settle onto the couch next to hers and another drink was thrust into her hands. He was careful to leave space between them as he leaned his elbows on his thighs and stared out the windows.
Tears continued to mark a trail down her cheeks but she raised her head to look at him.
Perhaps, he said with a faint sigh, poison could counteract poison.
She reached out and clasped his hand in hers. His head turned towards her and she saw the haunted weariness in his face, the same weariness that could be seen in her own. She felt a kinship with him then, and knew by the sudden widening of his eyes that he did too.
They lived under the same shadow, and maybe together they could come into the light.
END PART ONE.
< O >
A/N2: Phew, ok well there it is folks. The long awaited prequel hath been half finished, and I have to say it was quite an effort. The damn thing really doesn’t want to be written but I was determined not to disappoint. Though really, I’m not satisfied with it and it’ll probably disappoint anyway … oh well.
Oh, and Part Two might be a while (say another couple of months since I’m really busy right now, by rights I should have been writing an essay instead of finishing part one, but oh well).
Disclaimer: Alias is not mine.
Title: Broken
Author: Abyssinian (aka Ayaren)
Rating: G (I suppose)
Timeline: AU S2 post-Indicator. This comes before my other fics Black-Winged Angel and Acceptance.
Summary: They lived under the same shadow.
A/N: a big hug and thankyou to my buddy Luce (gucci_94) for betaing this fic
< O >
Part One: Under A Shadow
It was not until he said something that she realised she was anything but ‘ok’.
She thought she had dealt with it. That the knowledge the spy world had chosen her when she had been too young to make that decision for herself was acceptable, if not yet entirely all right. She thought she might even be able to forgive her father one day, because even while she condemned his actions as the worst kind of betrayal she found herself understanding why. After all, what parent would not do anything to protect their child?
Even so she found herself relying on her ability to compartmentalise more than ever. A wry voice inside her head suggested that if she boxed up any more feelings she would need to start a filing system if she ever wanted to find them again. She ran through the list in her mind. Firstly if she wanted to stay alive she had to treat the man who killed her fiancé like a second dad. Then she had to hide her knowledge of SD-6’s true affiliation and her own double agent status. Lying to Dixon in particular left her guilt-ridden more than once. Of course she could not forget having to keep her job secret from Francie —thankfully life was a little easier now Will knew, not much but it helped. Then there was that whole mess with her mother. Oh, and then trying to maintain a professional distance from Agent Vaughn when he was one of the few people she felt she could actually trust.
And now add Daddy to the list, she muttered bitterly. She had to work with him every day and pretend to Sloane there was no rift between them at all.
Yep, she was going to go insane one of these days. That or change her name and move to the tropics.
And yet, another part of her whispered, she got herself into these situations, some of which could have been avoided. She liked it, the voice accused. She enjoyed the drama of it all, her own personal soap opera.
Maybe that was why she was standing in front of his door. Well, the door to the hotel room she had to great lengths to discover he was currently occupying. Because she knew, no matter what happened, she was just adding a further complication to her already convoluted life.
Of course, she would not have been Sydney Bristow if things were easy.
And she had to exorcise him from her mind, rid herself of his voice, his smirk, telling her the truths she had hidden from herself. She had to confront him and tell him he was wrong, and then maybe she would sleep in peace. Hopefully.
Taking a deep breath to calm her already nervous mind she stepped forward and raised a hand to knock. Before she could do his amused voice piped up to her left and she spun, hand instinctively going to the gun holstered in the small of her back.
He was leaning casually against the wall and smirking at her as he informed her he had been watching for the past five minutes. She just glared at him, partly in embarrassment, as he swept past her and unlocked the door with a flourish, gesturing for her to enter before him.
She took one last furtive glance down the corridor and then slipped inside, her body trembling with anticipation as she sunk awkwardly onto the room’s couch. Her eyes followed him as he moved into the bathroom, stripping off his black jacket and sweater as he went. It was obvious he had just returned from a job. Idly she wondered who his target had been and then decided she was better off not knowing.
She knew what he was and she was not here to condemn him. She did wonder at his trust in her though as he willingly left her alone while he showered. Perhaps he had known she would come, and that tonight she meant him no harm.
It was just like him to know her so well. Some part of her thought he understood her more than anyone, more than her father or Vaughn, or even herself, but she ruthlessly suppressed that notion. He did not know her, not at all.
And yet, out of everyone she had come to him.
He emerged moments later clad in the same trousers but shirtless as he towelled his hair dry, pushing the blonde curls back from his eyes. She watched him cross to the wardrobe in unabashed appreciation, her gaze focussed on the muscles of his back. He was not a broad man, but within his slender frame was a body hardened by years of training.
Pulling on a shirt he apologised for his lack of manners, citing her unexpected arrival as an excuse. She shrugged, tucking a loose lock of hair behind her ear, not missing the flash that passed through his eyes at the movement. She had seen that before in her father. Somehow the action reminded both men of the other woman they had in common. Jack’s wife. Sark’s teacher. Her mother.
She accepted the drink he offered her, forcing icy fingers to clench around the glass. It was testimony to the trust she was placing in him that she did not even consider the possibility it was drugged before she drank.
Watching him sprawl across a nearby chair with the careless grace of a cat she instinctively knew that tonight they had called a truce. She needed something from him and he was curious to know what it was. She set the glass down on the coffee table and leaned forward with a sigh.
It was now or it was never.
With that indecipherable blue gaze focussed on her she just let go and told him everything she had not been able to tell anyone else. Even to her it seemed strange, almost other-worldly that this man, her nemesis, was the only one she felt would understand. He was everything she strove to destroy, but none of that mattered right now. After all it had been his words, a taunt spoke merely to provoke her for his own amusement during their last confrontation, which had brought her to his door.
At the time she had been disgusted that he would dare to liken their respective situations and bitten back with a fairly standard reply consisting of a mix of insults, physical blows and the determined insistence that they were nothing alike. They had nothing in common, she said, he was bad and she was good and that was all he needed to know.
But later when she knew she should just forget those words she found she could not. Words she had brushed off with ease on the previous occasions when he used them against her echoed over and over in her mind. They were designed merely to throw her off, to get her angry so that she was not thinking as clearly as she should have been. It was just another one of his weapons and usually she had been able to ignore it.
Only this time what he said was true and she was no longer capable of denying it. She was tired of trusting no one to watch her back, she said with an air of defeat, and so was he.
He arched an eyebrow at that but made no move to deny it. She was more perceptive than he had given her credit for. A faint frown creased his forehead as he asked her what he was supposed to do about it. They were enemies after all, she had no business bringing her problems to him.
Which brought him to ask the very question she had known he would and hoped to avoid answering: Why was she here now? Why not go to her beloved boy scout?
Because as her enemy he was the one person she expected to betray her, and he was the one person who had not done so. Because she did not care about him and therefore she could not hurt him. And, more importantly, he could not hurt her.
She recounted her list as he contemplated her words with the air of a man tasting wine. Project Christmas. Laura Bristow. The Alliance. Even Alice, Vaughn’s perfect little girlfriend found her way onto Sydney Bristow’s list. Her father had taken away her choices. Her mother had lied from the beginning. The Alliance were just the bad guys and Vaughn, the one person she had thought she could trust, had returned to his oblivious blonde once again. And then there were her friends, Will had been brought into something he never should have known because of her, his life destroyed for love of her.
She was sick of having to lie to the people she cared about, of expecting everyone around her to betray her some day. She was tired of placing her trust in someone only to discover her mistake in the most painful of ways. Arvin Sloane. Noah Hicks. Jack Bristow. Irina Derevko. Even Michael Vaughn and Will Tippin had betrayed her, the former blind to the love she felt and the latter ignoring her pleas to leave Danny’s death alone.
Her shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. It was too much for one person to handle alone, she told him. Surely he understood the destructive nature of their work. Surely he could sympathise with her. After all, was that not the reason why he was so cold, so unapproachable? To keep others away.
They were poison, she said, he knew it too.
He did not answer her.
Those oft-despised blue eyes offered nothing when she chanced another glance at them. Her host merely raised his glass to his lips and drank. She could see the lingering suspicion in the faintest of frowns creasing his forehead. He was well aware of her skills as an actress and it was clear he was not entirely convinced by her display.
Whatever courage had possessed her to seek him out fled in the face of his scepticism. The mask that had hidden her for longer than she cared to remember gave way as he maintained his silence. The control she had prided herself for vanished as she let the first flush of tears come. Her body shuddered with the release of over a year of the most strenuous suppression and she drew her knees up to chest, rocking slightly as she wept for the Sydney Bristow who had been lost so long ago.
He watched without speaking, the only sounds in the room the hum of the electricity and her wracking sobs. She felt his gaze on her and some part of her inwardly thanked him. He would offer her no comfort, real or otherwise. That was what made him different.
Yet, to her surprise, she felt his body settle onto the couch next to hers and another drink was thrust into her hands. He was careful to leave space between them as he leaned his elbows on his thighs and stared out the windows.
Tears continued to mark a trail down her cheeks but she raised her head to look at him.
Perhaps, he said with a faint sigh, poison could counteract poison.
She reached out and clasped his hand in hers. His head turned towards her and she saw the haunted weariness in his face, the same weariness that could be seen in her own. She felt a kinship with him then, and knew by the sudden widening of his eyes that he did too.
They lived under the same shadow, and maybe together they could come into the light.
END PART ONE.
< O >
A/N2: Phew, ok well there it is folks. The long awaited prequel hath been half finished, and I have to say it was quite an effort. The damn thing really doesn’t want to be written but I was determined not to disappoint. Though really, I’m not satisfied with it and it’ll probably disappoint anyway … oh well.
Oh, and Part Two might be a while (say another couple of months since I’m really busy right now, by rights I should have been writing an essay instead of finishing part one, but oh well).
you know how to excite me!!! back muscles are sooo hawt!!