A Dark Turn
I Was Made to Love You
Title: Chimera
Author: Dita
Rating: R (violence, sex, mentions of suicide attempts)
Ship: Sydney/Sark
Timeline: Post-Telling in the distant, murky AU future. S3? Nope, never happened in this fic.
Genre: Look, ma, no angst. This is as close to fluffy as Sarkney ever gets. Not really angst; I’d call it more…reality. Life, realistic, but not angsty.
Summary: ‘…she can’t forget what the girl stood for, but she needs to forget Sydney Bristow…’
Notes: For your referencing pleasure… This story begins nine years after Syd's disappearance in The Telling. Also, Allison is mentioned in this part and, for the purposes of this fic, she is DEAD, killed by Sydney before Syd did her vanishing act courtesy of The Covenant. Just wanted to clarify.
The inspiration for this came, oddly enough, from The Bourne Identity, which I rewatched some months ago and got this crazy idea from. It’s also where the first quote comes from. Enjoy…
Part One: Strange Dreams
How could I forget you? You’re the only person I know.
Lyon, France
When Sydney Bristow was a little girl, she used to dream of cats. There were always dozens of them: tabbies and Siamese and short-haired and long-haired and the mangy. They were everywhere she looked, stuffed into the little room she called her own and pouring out down the stairs and overflowing into the garden where they prowled, anxiously looking and whining for their mistress.
She’d had innocent dreams, then, as a child. Cats and birthday parties and lacy dresses; she dreamed of her mother, the way she touched Sydney’s hair once and read bedtime stories doing all the voices from the princess to the hunchback. She dreamed of tastes like cookies fresh out of the oven, still hot, and in senses, like the yellow warmth of the firelight on her fingertips in winter.
But now, thirty years later when Sydney Bristow closes her eyes and dreams…she dreams of blood and screams and pain. She dreams of faces long gone out of time: Francie, Emily, Danny, Noah, Vaughn.
She dreams of skeletons that love her with their bony, skinless fingers and a darkness that cuts to the core so deeply she still feels it when she wakes.
Because wake she does. Breathless, exhausted, frightened.
Usually, he is there when she does. He never says anything about it, no platitudes or questions or demands. He puts his arm around her and they lie together in the dark, her head on his chest listening to him breathe—an affirmation of life, of each other.
This is the only way she can chase away the nightmares into a dreamless sleep—if he is there.
Sometimes, when he isn’t…
He is there tonight.
And tonight it is especially bad: it was a dream of The Night. She says it in her mind, capitalized, referring to The Night that ripped everything bare to the seams: her fight with Allison, them caught in a dance of death and lies from which there can be no victor. She hears the gunshots, but Allison won’t stay dead, she keeps coming and coming and coming… Her face—Francie’s face—distorted and screaming…
Those are the worst dreams, the ones that have a sliver of her old life in them. She feels that if she reaches out, she can grab it back, pull herself in and change things. She can change herself back to the way she used to be, back to the days she used to know and the people she used to trust.
But she’s slowly realizing that she doesn’t know that girl in her dream, the one with her face, any more than she knows the strangers that pass her by on the street.
She can feel the girl’s pain and taste the girl’s blood on her lips, and it makes her feel old. She can see the girl’s tears, smudged and lonely on a face that is only beginning to learn the shapes of betrayal.
She’s crying now, awake. She can feel the tears on her cheek and the sigh trapped in her mouth; she can feel herself already reaching for him and her heart burning like a funeral pyre in her chest, hot enough tonight to consume her and to make her wish she could throw herself on the flames of old grief.
She can’t forget what the girl stood for, but she needs to forget Sydney Bristow.
“I can’t…” Her tongue feels heavy like lead in her mouth.
“No. Shhhh… Quiet, now.”
He catches her, again. She feels a hand on her shoulder, trailing down to pull her closer to him. She lets him, making herself small against him, willing herself to feel safe now that she’s out of the dream and in reality.
He kisses the top of her head, the hairline. Lingering, sweet, and he brushes at her back, rubbing it in small, soothing circles like one might comfort a scared child.
She clings to him and they lie like that for a long time in the dark, no longer Sark and Sydney or even their aliases (the very respectable and very private Marc and Marie Davidson), but something more than that where they can just…be.
She finally falls asleep, entwined with him.
And, mercifully, she doesn’t dream at all.
*~*~*
*~*~*
She goes to the market on Mondays.
Sark works during the week, at a bank. She thinks he does, anyway, that’s what he tells her. Sometimes, she finds it ironic and at other moments she doesn’t quite know what to think of it; that if she weren’t with him, he’d likely have cleared the entire bank of any and all cash and gold in an hour flat.
But he wouldn’t, not with her.
A fact she knows, even if she doesn’t quite believe he’s a banker: he would never put her in danger.
She smiles at the thought, the once impervious, invincible Mr. Sark doing exactly what she tells him. It’s almost devastating, how much has changed since she threw an ice pick into his kneecap in Siberia and he tried to drown her in the return.
Devastating, indeed. She remembers that the most, of all the ways they’ve hurt each other. He still has the scar and she still has nightmares about being trapped under three inches of ice.
Outside, it’s snowing when she steps out the front door, a soft, winter flurry that chills to the bone despite its gentleness. She pulls her coat around her face, but doesn’t go back inside. It’s rare that she ever ventures out this early but the need for distance today is particularly strong, pulling at her like the moon to the restless tides.
The streets are cold, quiet. She walks, feels her hair become damp and then wet, little tendrils clinging to the sides of her face. The thought occurs to her that she’s going catch her death in the cold. (That’s the phrase one of her nannies used, when she was young. “Mark my words, girl, you’re going to catch your death in that frost,” accompanied by a feverish cross. But that was then and this is entirely something different now).
But it’s her secret: she’s always felt a kinship with the snow. She knows she’s still alive when she can feel it on her skin, like individual tears shed long ago and in secret.
She walks and walks until up ahead she sees a huddled group of figures, moving towards her. Shapeless, black masses blurring together under a battalion of umbrellas.
The old panic comes first, ebbing at the corners of her mind, the old anxiousness leftover from another life and another person. Her breathing is quick, achingly fast, and she lowers her head, just the slightest bit, letting her long, long hair (dyed red now, a pretty autumn auburn) slide over her face.
"Charles-Henri l'a vu hier. Apparemment elle va plutôt bien, le cancer est en rémission."
"C'est merveilleux. Elle est une fille si gentille, ce serait tellement triste si..."
Sweet, chatty French voices cluck right over her, a foreign wash of ordinary conversation made by ordinary people.
The long, liquid pull of relief doesn’t come until they’re nearly half a block away, almost out of sight.
She wonders, as she pulls open the door of the supermarket, if the fear will ever go away, lulled into complacency by years of security, or if it will always remain, like a deep, ugly scar on otherwise perfect skin.
*~*~*
*~*~*
He’s there when she gets back. She walks into the kitchen and he’s sitting at the table drinking tea (so *bleeding* British) and reading the newspaper, in French.
She’s envious of that; even after nearly eight years in France, her French leaves something to be desired. She can still get by, of course, can pass as French born if she’s not scrutinized closely or for very long. But Sark… He breathes it, thinks it, plays it up. He’s never quite lost that Sark accent, although it has diminished somewhat over the years—more natural and almost Irish-like at turns, lengthening vowels and pronouncing her name until it’s almost ‘Side-nee’.
She doesn’t mind.
“Darling,” he looks up from the paper, taking in the wet, bedraggled hair and jacket with snow all over it. He very nearly smiles then (a smile, something not as a rare as it used to be on him) and his eyes do that whole ‘I’ve-decided-to-be-quite-amused-by-your-behavior’ thing he does so well.
“You have to stop walking in the snow. People will talk, they’ll wonder who is this bloody crazy girl who walks in the gorram-”
That’s as far as he gets before she crosses the room and cuts him off with her mouth on his, taking the words out of his mouth before they’re even spoken. It’s a little like being him, for a moment, and she loves that more than anything.
She forgets about the bags of groceries in her hands, drops them to the floor like dead weight; she forgets about the howling wind outside and the absence of everything that was once familiar to her life.
She kisses away SD-6, the C.I.A., The Covenant, Julia Thorne, old loves long burned to ash, friends no longer there, countless lies, and all the cutting deceits. She kisses Sark—Marc Davidson, Julian Lazarey—in the home they’ve built together over the better part of a decade, in the kitchen they’ve made love in countless times since they first spotted it: a charming, little brownstone tucked away from a sidewalk shaded by elms and bordered by a dozen others just like it.
They can pretend here that they are like the families and couples who live next to them, are slowly becoming normal and are two people of no great importance.
And, in some ways, they are.
“You’re home early.” She breaks the kiss, feels all the old sparks rise up and burn along the surface of her skin whenever his eyes focus on her just like that. As if she was it, the one and only, the single most worthwhile thing in the world.
“I’ll be home early every day, if that’s the kind of welcome I can expect.” He laughs, a little, running a hand through his hair. It’s the curls, now, not the way he had it when they first started out—shorn from C.I.A. captivity—but from the time when she first met him, golden and pretty-boy-ish.
She gathers up the bags and starts methodically putting away the groceries. Brown sugar on the spice rack, the ham for tonight’s dinner in the freezer, the boxes of pasta in the cabinet above the stove. It doesn’t even occur to her, until putting the jar of paprika in its place, through the hazy glow of pleasure, that is he is home…early, which he never is.
She stops, watches her hand start shake in front of her.
“What are you doing home this time of day? I thought you didn’t get off until five.”
She says it absently, even while the panic from earlier that morning comes back, clutching her heart in a vice grip. She waits for him to say the words, waits for the scythe to fall on their lives just as she’s been waiting for it almost every day since they disappeared together, him freshly rescued from the people she once worked for and her broken, on the run.
We’ve been made. They know where we are. We have to go.
“No.” She can hear him behind her, feels his hand on her shoulder stopping her from moving. “Nothing like that.”
“Then what?” She hears a tremble in her voice, one she can’t control. She fears that she’s going to lose it; the anxiety slams into her so fast and so hard, almost bringing her to knees. But he’s already there for her, reaching up and cupping her chin in his hand, turning her to face him.
“It’s December twenty-third. Christmas Eve’s Eve. Tomorrow’s a holiday.” His fingers are reassuring, light, stroking away the little shivers. “I went in for the morning and decided to take the afternoon off, get an early start.”
“A bank holiday?”
“You can call the bank, if you like.”
“No.” Her voice is a sigh, a low murmur and she all but falls into him—a release, a reassurance, a hope.
“Did you get a tree, this year?” She finds her voice, even if it is still rough around the edges.
He does smile this time, all the way. She knows what he’s thinking of: that first Christmas they spent together in hiding in Belgium, both miserable at being forced into each other’s company. Their tree then had been an aluminum beer can Sark had carved into the semblance of a pine tree with a knife.
“Merry f***ing Christmas, Agent Bristow,” he’d said, handing it over to her. His eyes had been icy in those days, his voice still perfectly clipped and precise and cold. “Consider it a gift, from me to you.”
Ever since then, it had been tradition for them to have a tree during the holidays; though, she’d kept the little, aluminum one framed in the kitchen, for all seasons. Stupid, sappy, sentimental, and slightly bizarre considering the circumstances, but she couldn’t help it.
“I was hoping you might help me with that, actually, the tree.” He leaned over and nipped her bottom lip, softly, and backed away to grab his coat off a chair. Elegantly. Everything he did: elegant, perfect.
“You see, love, they’ve set up this lot across the bank, selling trees. Since I know how particular you are…”
“Oh, Jesus.” She rolls her eyes, dramatically for effect.
“'Tis the season.” He tugs playfully on her hair, and he’s so close she can feel the heat from his body. Warm now and familiar, not detached or threatening like it used to be.
“So, it’s me that’s particular, is it? Do you realize that it took us almost three weeks last year to find a gorram tree because you didn’t think any of the thousand we looked at embodied ‘the true spirit of Christmas’?”
He shrugged, and it was a smirk on his face this time—classic, vintage Sark. “It’s a matter of having principles, is all.”
Her face is deadpan, serious. “It’s a matter of being obsessed, is what it is.”
“Oh, shut up, will you?” But he’s laughing as he says it. “Dry your hair, get your coat. No—the groceries can wait. Come on, but we’re using the car this time. There’s no way I’m walking through a snowstorm like you. I’ll get bloody pneumonia before I get two blocks.”
“God, I should be *so* lucky.”
There’s teasing in the their words, affection, and something else that’s harder to define but just as sweet and comfortable and not quite perfect...but almost.
He goes, walking out the door to start the car.
She follows, close behind as always.
*~*~*
*~*~*
TBC
Author: Dita
Rating: R (violence, sex, mentions of suicide attempts)
Ship: Sydney/Sark
Timeline: Post-Telling in the distant, murky AU future. S3? Nope, never happened in this fic.
Genre: Look, ma, no angst. This is as close to fluffy as Sarkney ever gets. Not really angst; I’d call it more…reality. Life, realistic, but not angsty.
Summary: ‘…she can’t forget what the girl stood for, but she needs to forget Sydney Bristow…’
Notes: For your referencing pleasure… This story begins nine years after Syd's disappearance in The Telling. Also, Allison is mentioned in this part and, for the purposes of this fic, she is DEAD, killed by Sydney before Syd did her vanishing act courtesy of The Covenant. Just wanted to clarify.
The inspiration for this came, oddly enough, from The Bourne Identity, which I rewatched some months ago and got this crazy idea from. It’s also where the first quote comes from. Enjoy…
Part One: Strange Dreams
How could I forget you? You’re the only person I know.
Lyon, France
When Sydney Bristow was a little girl, she used to dream of cats. There were always dozens of them: tabbies and Siamese and short-haired and long-haired and the mangy. They were everywhere she looked, stuffed into the little room she called her own and pouring out down the stairs and overflowing into the garden where they prowled, anxiously looking and whining for their mistress.
She’d had innocent dreams, then, as a child. Cats and birthday parties and lacy dresses; she dreamed of her mother, the way she touched Sydney’s hair once and read bedtime stories doing all the voices from the princess to the hunchback. She dreamed of tastes like cookies fresh out of the oven, still hot, and in senses, like the yellow warmth of the firelight on her fingertips in winter.
But now, thirty years later when Sydney Bristow closes her eyes and dreams…she dreams of blood and screams and pain. She dreams of faces long gone out of time: Francie, Emily, Danny, Noah, Vaughn.
She dreams of skeletons that love her with their bony, skinless fingers and a darkness that cuts to the core so deeply she still feels it when she wakes.
Because wake she does. Breathless, exhausted, frightened.
Usually, he is there when she does. He never says anything about it, no platitudes or questions or demands. He puts his arm around her and they lie together in the dark, her head on his chest listening to him breathe—an affirmation of life, of each other.
This is the only way she can chase away the nightmares into a dreamless sleep—if he is there.
Sometimes, when he isn’t…
He is there tonight.
And tonight it is especially bad: it was a dream of The Night. She says it in her mind, capitalized, referring to The Night that ripped everything bare to the seams: her fight with Allison, them caught in a dance of death and lies from which there can be no victor. She hears the gunshots, but Allison won’t stay dead, she keeps coming and coming and coming… Her face—Francie’s face—distorted and screaming…
Those are the worst dreams, the ones that have a sliver of her old life in them. She feels that if she reaches out, she can grab it back, pull herself in and change things. She can change herself back to the way she used to be, back to the days she used to know and the people she used to trust.
But she’s slowly realizing that she doesn’t know that girl in her dream, the one with her face, any more than she knows the strangers that pass her by on the street.
She can feel the girl’s pain and taste the girl’s blood on her lips, and it makes her feel old. She can see the girl’s tears, smudged and lonely on a face that is only beginning to learn the shapes of betrayal.
She’s crying now, awake. She can feel the tears on her cheek and the sigh trapped in her mouth; she can feel herself already reaching for him and her heart burning like a funeral pyre in her chest, hot enough tonight to consume her and to make her wish she could throw herself on the flames of old grief.
She can’t forget what the girl stood for, but she needs to forget Sydney Bristow.
“I can’t…” Her tongue feels heavy like lead in her mouth.
“No. Shhhh… Quiet, now.”
He catches her, again. She feels a hand on her shoulder, trailing down to pull her closer to him. She lets him, making herself small against him, willing herself to feel safe now that she’s out of the dream and in reality.
He kisses the top of her head, the hairline. Lingering, sweet, and he brushes at her back, rubbing it in small, soothing circles like one might comfort a scared child.
She clings to him and they lie like that for a long time in the dark, no longer Sark and Sydney or even their aliases (the very respectable and very private Marc and Marie Davidson), but something more than that where they can just…be.
She finally falls asleep, entwined with him.
And, mercifully, she doesn’t dream at all.
*~*~*
*~*~*
She goes to the market on Mondays.
Sark works during the week, at a bank. She thinks he does, anyway, that’s what he tells her. Sometimes, she finds it ironic and at other moments she doesn’t quite know what to think of it; that if she weren’t with him, he’d likely have cleared the entire bank of any and all cash and gold in an hour flat.
But he wouldn’t, not with her.
A fact she knows, even if she doesn’t quite believe he’s a banker: he would never put her in danger.
She smiles at the thought, the once impervious, invincible Mr. Sark doing exactly what she tells him. It’s almost devastating, how much has changed since she threw an ice pick into his kneecap in Siberia and he tried to drown her in the return.
Devastating, indeed. She remembers that the most, of all the ways they’ve hurt each other. He still has the scar and she still has nightmares about being trapped under three inches of ice.
Outside, it’s snowing when she steps out the front door, a soft, winter flurry that chills to the bone despite its gentleness. She pulls her coat around her face, but doesn’t go back inside. It’s rare that she ever ventures out this early but the need for distance today is particularly strong, pulling at her like the moon to the restless tides.
The streets are cold, quiet. She walks, feels her hair become damp and then wet, little tendrils clinging to the sides of her face. The thought occurs to her that she’s going catch her death in the cold. (That’s the phrase one of her nannies used, when she was young. “Mark my words, girl, you’re going to catch your death in that frost,” accompanied by a feverish cross. But that was then and this is entirely something different now).
But it’s her secret: she’s always felt a kinship with the snow. She knows she’s still alive when she can feel it on her skin, like individual tears shed long ago and in secret.
She walks and walks until up ahead she sees a huddled group of figures, moving towards her. Shapeless, black masses blurring together under a battalion of umbrellas.
The old panic comes first, ebbing at the corners of her mind, the old anxiousness leftover from another life and another person. Her breathing is quick, achingly fast, and she lowers her head, just the slightest bit, letting her long, long hair (dyed red now, a pretty autumn auburn) slide over her face.
"Charles-Henri l'a vu hier. Apparemment elle va plutôt bien, le cancer est en rémission."
"C'est merveilleux. Elle est une fille si gentille, ce serait tellement triste si..."
Sweet, chatty French voices cluck right over her, a foreign wash of ordinary conversation made by ordinary people.
The long, liquid pull of relief doesn’t come until they’re nearly half a block away, almost out of sight.
She wonders, as she pulls open the door of the supermarket, if the fear will ever go away, lulled into complacency by years of security, or if it will always remain, like a deep, ugly scar on otherwise perfect skin.
*~*~*
*~*~*
He’s there when she gets back. She walks into the kitchen and he’s sitting at the table drinking tea (so *bleeding* British) and reading the newspaper, in French.
She’s envious of that; even after nearly eight years in France, her French leaves something to be desired. She can still get by, of course, can pass as French born if she’s not scrutinized closely or for very long. But Sark… He breathes it, thinks it, plays it up. He’s never quite lost that Sark accent, although it has diminished somewhat over the years—more natural and almost Irish-like at turns, lengthening vowels and pronouncing her name until it’s almost ‘Side-nee’.
She doesn’t mind.
“Darling,” he looks up from the paper, taking in the wet, bedraggled hair and jacket with snow all over it. He very nearly smiles then (a smile, something not as a rare as it used to be on him) and his eyes do that whole ‘I’ve-decided-to-be-quite-amused-by-your-behavior’ thing he does so well.
“You have to stop walking in the snow. People will talk, they’ll wonder who is this bloody crazy girl who walks in the gorram-”
That’s as far as he gets before she crosses the room and cuts him off with her mouth on his, taking the words out of his mouth before they’re even spoken. It’s a little like being him, for a moment, and she loves that more than anything.
She forgets about the bags of groceries in her hands, drops them to the floor like dead weight; she forgets about the howling wind outside and the absence of everything that was once familiar to her life.
She kisses away SD-6, the C.I.A., The Covenant, Julia Thorne, old loves long burned to ash, friends no longer there, countless lies, and all the cutting deceits. She kisses Sark—Marc Davidson, Julian Lazarey—in the home they’ve built together over the better part of a decade, in the kitchen they’ve made love in countless times since they first spotted it: a charming, little brownstone tucked away from a sidewalk shaded by elms and bordered by a dozen others just like it.
They can pretend here that they are like the families and couples who live next to them, are slowly becoming normal and are two people of no great importance.
And, in some ways, they are.
“You’re home early.” She breaks the kiss, feels all the old sparks rise up and burn along the surface of her skin whenever his eyes focus on her just like that. As if she was it, the one and only, the single most worthwhile thing in the world.
“I’ll be home early every day, if that’s the kind of welcome I can expect.” He laughs, a little, running a hand through his hair. It’s the curls, now, not the way he had it when they first started out—shorn from C.I.A. captivity—but from the time when she first met him, golden and pretty-boy-ish.
She gathers up the bags and starts methodically putting away the groceries. Brown sugar on the spice rack, the ham for tonight’s dinner in the freezer, the boxes of pasta in the cabinet above the stove. It doesn’t even occur to her, until putting the jar of paprika in its place, through the hazy glow of pleasure, that is he is home…early, which he never is.
She stops, watches her hand start shake in front of her.
“What are you doing home this time of day? I thought you didn’t get off until five.”
She says it absently, even while the panic from earlier that morning comes back, clutching her heart in a vice grip. She waits for him to say the words, waits for the scythe to fall on their lives just as she’s been waiting for it almost every day since they disappeared together, him freshly rescued from the people she once worked for and her broken, on the run.
We’ve been made. They know where we are. We have to go.
“No.” She can hear him behind her, feels his hand on her shoulder stopping her from moving. “Nothing like that.”
“Then what?” She hears a tremble in her voice, one she can’t control. She fears that she’s going to lose it; the anxiety slams into her so fast and so hard, almost bringing her to knees. But he’s already there for her, reaching up and cupping her chin in his hand, turning her to face him.
“It’s December twenty-third. Christmas Eve’s Eve. Tomorrow’s a holiday.” His fingers are reassuring, light, stroking away the little shivers. “I went in for the morning and decided to take the afternoon off, get an early start.”
“A bank holiday?”
“You can call the bank, if you like.”
“No.” Her voice is a sigh, a low murmur and she all but falls into him—a release, a reassurance, a hope.
“Did you get a tree, this year?” She finds her voice, even if it is still rough around the edges.
He does smile this time, all the way. She knows what he’s thinking of: that first Christmas they spent together in hiding in Belgium, both miserable at being forced into each other’s company. Their tree then had been an aluminum beer can Sark had carved into the semblance of a pine tree with a knife.
“Merry f***ing Christmas, Agent Bristow,” he’d said, handing it over to her. His eyes had been icy in those days, his voice still perfectly clipped and precise and cold. “Consider it a gift, from me to you.”
Ever since then, it had been tradition for them to have a tree during the holidays; though, she’d kept the little, aluminum one framed in the kitchen, for all seasons. Stupid, sappy, sentimental, and slightly bizarre considering the circumstances, but she couldn’t help it.
“I was hoping you might help me with that, actually, the tree.” He leaned over and nipped her bottom lip, softly, and backed away to grab his coat off a chair. Elegantly. Everything he did: elegant, perfect.
“You see, love, they’ve set up this lot across the bank, selling trees. Since I know how particular you are…”
“Oh, Jesus.” She rolls her eyes, dramatically for effect.
“'Tis the season.” He tugs playfully on her hair, and he’s so close she can feel the heat from his body. Warm now and familiar, not detached or threatening like it used to be.
“So, it’s me that’s particular, is it? Do you realize that it took us almost three weeks last year to find a gorram tree because you didn’t think any of the thousand we looked at embodied ‘the true spirit of Christmas’?”
He shrugged, and it was a smirk on his face this time—classic, vintage Sark. “It’s a matter of having principles, is all.”
Her face is deadpan, serious. “It’s a matter of being obsessed, is what it is.”
“Oh, shut up, will you?” But he’s laughing as he says it. “Dry your hair, get your coat. No—the groceries can wait. Come on, but we’re using the car this time. There’s no way I’m walking through a snowstorm like you. I’ll get bloody pneumonia before I get two blocks.”
“God, I should be *so* lucky.”
There’s teasing in the their words, affection, and something else that’s harder to define but just as sweet and comfortable and not quite perfect...but almost.
He goes, walking out the door to start the car.
She follows, close behind as always.
*~*~*
*~*~*
TBC