I just cannot thank you guys enough. So huge, tremendous, very, very BIG thanks to: Suzi, Amy Lynn, Rach, Jassy, Usa moon, Joyie, ninja-kitty, riamber, freelancer360, Sara Spy, and AHSbandchick_lovinjulian. Your comments, as always make my day. :blush2:
Notes: Let's see... I have so many incarnations of this chapter it's kinda ridiculous. But, I think I've made a tenative peace with this one. Sorry for taking so long and extra sorries that this chapter features the
beast Lauren. But next chapter makes up for it, promise. Really. :lol: Feedback, as always, is very much appreciated.
Chapter Five: The Necessary Evil
<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>
DELIRIUM: What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?
MORPHEUS: There isn't one.</span>
There were always nightmares.
Ever since the day she came back from Hong Kong: bloody, bruised, scared.
And they were always the same.
Sometimes, of course, they varied slightly. Some nights they were sly, subtle, starting out good, meadows in the springtime, and ending abruptly, in a spray of bullets and blood and horror. Sometimes they were bad from the moment Sydney closed eyes: she was back in her old apartment and sitting across from Francie- no, not true, it was never Francie in those dreams, but Alison with her cold eyes and even colder touch and toothy, crocodile grin.
She always said things that Francie would never say, scary, twisted half-rhymes that burrowed into her soul and tore away at flesh and spirit. Sometimes, when it wasn’t Francie, it was Vaughn, and that was somehow worse, especially in the dreams when he would look at her as they’d never been apart, as if there was no marriage or obstacles or anything at all between them. In those dreams, he would smile at her, endearingly, and talk. Just talk. And she would talk back. They would have normal conversations: sometimes about art, sometimes about hockey, occasionally about the effect of candlelight on eye color and how it brought out a million different shades of colors in otherwise ordinary eyes.
Those were the bad ones. Blood, she could handle, like last night’s dream; teeth-pulling torture and betrayal, on any given day and twice on Sundays. But she hadn’t yet learned how to handle the moments where he looked at her just like
that…and then she woke up.
Syd, I’m sorry…
She didn’t dream on the four o’clock a.m. airplane flight back to the Los Angeles. She didn’t sleep at all, not even in the warm, darkness of the plane cabin with middle-aged businessman and sleepy toddlers snoring in tandem scattered all around her, tucked uncomfortably in paper-thin blankets.
Sydney Bristow kept her eyes open.
And her heart closed.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
It was the middle of particularly sunny and humid afternoon, and Lauren Reed was furious.
She didn’t often get that way; didn’t often lower herself to what she considered the “base” feelings: anger or happiness or sadness.
She was always calm, considered herself (indeed supposed she
was considered) an operative of extreme thoroughness, of calculation and cavalier, cold-hearted manipulation. She knew she could be cunning when the time called for it and vicious when it really mattered, but when she gotten the call from Katya this morning, a severe dressing down on the lack of protocol for the way she had handled Lydia’s murder and the subsequent aftermath, she had found, with some amount of dismay, that she had very nearly reached her limit.
Indiscretion, Lauren. Lydia was a priority. Now the CIA’s involved. It mustn’t go any further. Do you understand?
She considered herself patient. Even as she felt Michael’s hand move over her back, presumably in a show of husbandly affection, and she braced herself not to recoil in horror, she maintained her Mary Sunshine smile and beautiful façade of the perfect, slightly repressed CIA wife. She considered herself a good actress; she didn’t wince when he kissed her temple and then virtuously moved down to her closed mouth. There was the affectation of love in her eyes as she turned to meet him and wifely, devoted caring in her returning touch on his shoulder.
When she told him she loved him, loved him more than anything, she watched him accept the lie in his eyes, watched him romanticize it and patch it on his sleeve like a badge to the world.
Yes, she loves me. She needs me and she loves me. She really, really does. I have to love her back. A good husband would love her back.
It made her want to slash her wrists, his white-knight routine. It made her want to scream: get the hell over yourself already; if anybody ever really needed you as a support system, then they were already royally f***ed anyway.
And inside, the anger burned so brightly and so hot, it felt like she was trapped inside the heart of a star.
“I was thinking that maybe, we could get away this weekend.” Michael brushed strands of her hair off her face, tucking them, what she supposed he considered sweetly, behind her ear. “Just a little trip. To Vera Cruz, maybe. To San Francisco.”
He didn’t mention the obvious choice-Santa Barbara-and they both knew it.
“You need to get your mind off your father. You’ve been working… We’ve been working too hard.” He smiled, a touch resigned with just a hint of that boyish charm that never failed to make her want to vomit all over his Italian loafers. “It could be you, me, a beach somewhere...”
Me, performing make-shift open heart surgery on you with a dull butter knife…
“Maybe, Michael.” She thought it a credit, not only to herself, but to women everywhere that she didn’t actually do the deed. But it was a damn near thing.
And now will you leave me alone?
“Think about it,” he said, gently in what she assumed was the Michael Vaughn version of tepid concern. “We’ll talk about it later.”
The hell we will.
“Of course.” She made herself reach up and tug at his lapels. The brief touch of their lips was exactly that-brief and devoid of almost anything that could remotely be called ‘feelings’. She wondered, vaguely, as she watched him walk away how long he’d be able to lie to himself about his feelings for her and just when he’d start to hate himself…and her.
Blind, foolish man.
It didn’t surprise her how little she cared.
She turned back to her desk and stared at the blank computer screen. She had to focus. Her anger at Katya and the Covenant was irrational; it would only serve to distract her from what was really important. She had to use them, after all, to get what she needed. They were the necessary evil; she couldn’t let them know anything- anything at all.
She threw a furtive glance over her shoulder. Given that, there were a limited number of people she could trust. Not Katya, of course, and not Sark. While it was true that money could buy anything from their lovely, little Sark, this time he was far more useful as a pawn than ever as a partner. She’d expertly play-acted that afternoon in D.C. when she’d called him, demanding Sydney be kept in the dark. He’d said Sydney hadn’t known anything and he had it under control; honestly, it hadn’t mattered if it wasn’t the truth.
No, she thought, a secret smile poised on her mouth.
It hadn’t mattered at all.
Speaking of that very devil, she spied the reflection of a familiar figure in her the computer screen: the tall, slim, perpetually pretty form of Sydney Bristow crossing the rotunda.
A little late in the day, isn’t it, Sydney darling? She thought, but was more interested in the way she could see Vaughn, across the room, looking at Sydney (as if she were the only thing alive, as if he wanted to rip all of her clothes off then and there); she watched the way Sydney’s shoulders stiffened and her averted eyes pretended not to notice.
What a delicate and intricate game we all play. Even in death…
She thought suddenly of Lydia on the pavement with her wide-open, surprised eyes and, then, of Sydney.
…there is no ending.
Sydney, or rather, Sydney’s reflection sat down at her desk, opposite Lauren’s, her back straight and proud as per usual. But the pinched, narrow look on the girl’s face couldn’t be due entirely to Vaughn’s mental eye groping. Perhaps…
Lauren traced the edges of her cell phone. She’d taken a big risk last night, certainly. She’d been lucky to have salvaged the phone recordings from Lydia’s apartment. Apparently, the girl was much more the enigma than previously believed. She’d had K-Directorate, Covenant, and CIA tapes meticulously filed away.
True loyalties, if any? Unknown.
But Lydia had done her part and now… Now it was Sydney’s turn on the rack. And did she had plans for their darling Sydney, but what she really wanted to do as it pertained to Ms. Everyone-Loves-Me-And-I-Can-Do-No-Wrong involved lots of bullets, blood and/or a shard of
very sharp glass. She wanted death on her hands and, most of all, she wanted it to be Sydney’s death; she wanted to make her suffer in ways she was sure the repressed little wonder spy could only begin to imagine.
But everything in good time, she reminded herself. The devil was in the details, after all.
And there was still last night to consider. It’d been simple, true, and risky. Now, the CIA would become privy to the existence of yet another Rambladi machination: the Key.
Katya and The Covenant certainly wouldn’t like this new turn of events: they who guarded everything so selfishly and secretly. They believed, she knew, that the interference of the CIA would be far too costly to be worth the risk.
She arched a brow and contemplated the equal risk they had taken in eliminating Lydia the way they had. Katya had specifically told her to handle it a la Mafia style: eternal sleep at the bottom of a polluted canal and a nice, fat pay off to the family.
It should have been that way, yes, but could she really help it if she had other plans?
And those other plans…
She made sure she smiled at Vaughn as she rose (disgusting, how she hated him), and sidled up to Sydney’s desk. The expression on the brunette’s face when she spied Lauren? Priceless. A mixture of horror and disgust, with a dash of ‘where’s-the-nearest-exit?’.
“Sydney.” She watched Sydney’s eyes widen and her mouth tug down in plaintive lines.
“Lauren.” But her face was harsh, unyielding. The frown made her seem even harder, if that was possible. For once, Lauren almost felt…pity for Sydney Bristow. Almost, but not quite.
“I…” Insert appropriate awkward pause, “heard you just got back from Washington. How, did it go?”
“Fine.” It was a sigh of a word, reflecting nothing. Disinterest, maybe. Nothing else.
“It’s just I heard you had a run in with Sark.”
Push, prod, she thought. Was everything a goddamned battlefield? “An altercation. Vaughn told me. I wanted to make sure you were okay, you weren’t injured or anything.”
“I’m fine, really.” There was a curious light to Sydney’s eyes, one that gave Lauren pause. She didn’t look injured, a small bruise maybe on her chin and a split lip already healing, but nothing horrible. And then, the small hint of a blush near the cheekbones, unnoticeable if one didn’t know what to look for.
But Lauren did. More and more curious.
“Did you find anything, at least?”
“No.”
Jesus.
“Sydney, I know things have been strained between us lately. The situation of Michael, you, and I… I said or implied some things I maybe shouldn’t have...” She gave her pained, guilt-ridden face her everything, her mouth mournful and eyes sob-story sad. “But the death… The death of my father put things in perspective for me. And if aything, I don’t want us to be at odds. I think… I think we should start over. Fresh, if you will.”
Sydney said nothing, just stared at Lauren with those big brown eyes that showed no emotion or inclination toward anything at all. “If you want.”
Lauren tried for a smile.
Like pulling gorram teeth. “Of course, I do. And actually, the reason I came over was that I heard you’re off to Russia to meet with Alexsandr Khrushchev.”
“Yes.” Off to see Alexsandr, was she? Interesting character, that boy; he was a senior field operative for the Covenant and the Covenant paid him well to be an occasional double agent who threw the CIA a false bone of contention every once and a great while.
“I wanted to tell you to be careful, Sydney. People like Alexsandr and Sark and Lydia… They aren’t like us. They steal and kill and use one another without even thinking. That’s all I wanted-”
“I have to go.” Sydney cut her off in mid-sentence and got up-Lauren had to admire the sheer grace at the way she moved- and headed off towards Jack’s desk over in the corner. She was sure they’d have some interesting pow wow about how Lauren was asking questions again… Not that she cared.
Sydney alone knew where the Key was. Lauren cared that Sydney led her to the Key. That was it.
With that in mind, she left Sydney’s desk and started towards the corridor, winding her way down to the floor level: the safer, radio free places. She punched in the international codes and numbers by heart on her cell and waited a long, two rings before it was picked up.
“Yes?” The voice on the other end: heavily Russian and carelessly impatient.
“Alexsandr? I need a favor.”
The devil was in the details, after all.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Lazarevo, Russia
Alexsandr Khrushchev’s apartment was located, quite charmingly, on the banks of the Kama River in one of the cookie-cutter, yet equally charming, apartment buildings that crowded the riverfront. It was number 347 and his apartment happened to occupy the entire second floor.
Apparently, being a Covenant agent afforded some perks that working for the CIA did not. She wondered, vaguely, as she applied to yet another easily led astray doorman, how good the health benefits were.
Probably excellent, she thought.
She got in the building with no trouble yet again-how in the world did these people manage to stay alive so long with such lax security?- and made for Alexsandr’s apartment.
She knew him, of course, or, rather, Jack had told her she had. She only remembered meeting him once, when she’d just gotten back from her two year sojourn in wonderland. He’d kissed her cheek and held her hand a little too long for comfort and he’d stared at her with dark eyes that had been completely unfathomable—as if she and he shared a little secret unknown to anyone else.
When she’d pressed for information on how they’d met or what mission had brought them together, just to be sure and cautious, all he would say was that they had met when Simon “had finished” with her.
It wasn’t an avenue of possibility she wanted to explore, so she let it drop.
She took the elevator up to the second floor. Her hair this time was long and straight and very, very black—it kept getting in her eyes every time she moved her head in the slightest. It kind of negated the whole ‘glamorous spy’ image but that was just another day in the life of Sydney Bristow. Bad wigs and cheap leather.
She knocked on the door, once.
No answer.
Again.
The door cracked slightly open this time, and the eyes that stared back at her from the small crack of the barely open doorway were dark and big and eerily familiar.
“Mr. Krushchev,” she said. “We need to talk.”
He said nothing for a minute, the eyes that looked and looked didn’t move and neither did the door. At last, after long seconds,
“Ah, so again we meet. To what do I owe this pleasure?” He opened the door and she was treated to Alexsandr in his entirety, dressed to kill in casual black and well-defined mouth easily smiling. Some might have found his heavily accented English charming; Sydney simply found it disturbing.
“It’s not a pleasure,” she said, and followed him into the apartment, making to have her gun at the ready inside her vest and never to have her back turned towards him. “I’m sure you’ve already been contacted.”
She waited a beat and let her eyes roam all over the spacious, art deco decorated apartment. “I need information.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that.” He closed the door and the heavy sound of it echoed in Sydney’s ears. “For instance, I know lots of things.”
He was good-looking, really good-looking if Sydney was going to be honest, but she wasn’t attracted to him, not even a little bit. There was something slightly repulsive about him, reptilian almost, like he wasn’t human, not like the rest of them. He watched with eyes that seemed to feel…but didn’t. Oh, there was the shadow of emotion in his words and expressions, but they were exactly that-shadows. He went through all the motions, but he was never affected. He never changed and never got attached and he was completely devoid of all passions.
To put it bluntly, he was scary. Very, f***ing scary.
“The Key.”
“Yes?” He stared, openly, at her cleavage in her low-cut top.
“I need information about it.” She tried, none-too-subtly to raise the fabric to a more conservative level, a furious blush spreading across her face in the process. “You assured the CIA you’d be cooperative.”
“Did I?” He was leaning against the door, looking all delectable and tall, dark, and gorgeous. She could think that, and still mentally recoil at the thought of him touching her. “I recall no such promise.”
“You’re our liaison. I think it only fair-”
“Fair?” He raised an eyebrow, arching it elegantly. “You talking to me about fair? That’s an interesting argument, Julia. Coming from you.”
“The Key, please,” she managed to get out. But her mind was already away and racing.
He’d called her Julia. Whether or not it was intentional, was completely irrelevant. This conversation was quickly taking a turn to a place she had always avoided in respect to the thought of him. In short, she just didn’t want to know.
“Otherwise, it’ll go badly for all of us.” She had her gun out, smoothly, and pointed at his chest. The old Sydney would have balked at killing an unarmed man. The new, improved version just didn’t give a f***.
“Well,” he said, voice just a hint above amused. “It’s nice to see some things never change.”
“I won’t ask you again.” Her hand stayed perfectly steady and her eyes never moved from his. “Mr. Khrushchev.”
“I am, as you Americans say, at your complete mercy.” His mouth was smiling but his eyes were black-hole blank. She almost wished he would give her an excuse to pump a few rounds into the smug, a**hole smile. “Tell me, what would you like to know?”
“What is the Key? Is it a Rambaldi artifact?”
“Yes.” He paused, waited one, long beat. “And no.”
“Then what the *hell* is it?” She watched him, watching her.
“The mansucript pages the Covenant has managed to steal aren’t entirely clear upon that. No one knows, for sure, at this point. The passage is pretty vague. Some think it is an artifact. And others think…”
Her eyes sharpened and her finger itched on the trigger. “Others think…?”
“Not,” he finished. His eyes drifted once again from her face to her chest. And then, the strangest, fleeting thought:
God, I’d forgotten annoyingly vague he could be.
Odd, out of nowhere thought. What the hell had that been? Her hand tightened on the gun, in response. “Just tell me what the Covenant already knows.”
“You should remember. You knew once, before anyone.” He pushed himself up from the door, all smooth movements that reminded her of the slithering of a snake. “Don’t you remember, anything?”
It was the closest she’d ever come to seeing anything resembling emotion in his eyes. Hurt, maybe, some form of pain. She backed up then, her brain registering that this just might be trouble. Bad trouble.
“I don’t-”
The world exploded into gunfire.
She didn’t have time to think or even move as a barrage of bullets sliced through the glass pane windows and slammed into the toned, tanned body of Alexsandr Khrushchev.
Blood, then, everywhere.
His body sunk to the floor and her training kicked in and she fell with him; her heart pounded low and dull, like a dozen war drums, in her ribs. She crawled towards him, slightly elevated from the ground, trying to get to a bleeding Alexsandr, and a stray bullet burrowed itself into her upper chest, slashing flesh and sinew.
She thought she might have screamed. She knew she blacked out for a second, just one, before the world rushed back into her face: blinding colors, shapes, a caterwaul of screams (her own), blood, and then, that old voice, the one that had kept her alive through thick and thin, through being a double agent and getting trapped under ice an inch thick in Siberia.
Belly on the floor, girl, get the f*** down.
She kept the gun in her hand as she inched her way over, stomach sliding on the thick carpet. It was easy to turn off the pain, to ignore torn flesh and spilling blood; she’d been doing it for years. The shoulder (she didn’t think of it as hers but as a separate, removed entity) could be tended to later. If not, she’d be dead and then, it would hardly matter.
Another crack of a lone gun shot.
And there was silence.
“Khrushchev?” She bellied up to him and was relieved to see he was still breathing lightly. There was a huge, gaping hole just left and down of his chest and more in his stomach, in his legs. “Come on, talk to me, say something.”
He gasped, a little, as if struggling for air. His eyes were already turned up to the ceiling, glassy and flat.
“7-8-3-4-7. Gen-n-n-e-e-e…” She had to listen close to his mouth for words, because they were lower than a whisper, slight. “v-v-v-v-a-a.”
A thin trickle of blood ran down the side of his mouth and his chest was still, once and forever.
The gun fell out of her hand. She didn’t know whether to scream or whether to run and the world was growing soft around the edges, pretty and blurry.
Blood loss, a part of her brain was thinking, clinically and removed like a medical textbook.
Severe. Most likely a fatal wound.
She thought she sat up, slightly, but knew the gun shots resumed, a million loud, screaming cracks of sound after another.
She felt a sharp, sudden pain in her neck and then light-headed. Again, there were colors here, bright and beautiful and easy to fall into.
“Dear, god. I turn my back for ten, f***ing minutes…” A loud crashing sound, the door maybe, some more gunfire, then and a voice. British, she recognized. Clipped. Familiar? She wasn’t sure. It was only then that she realized she had fallen down on top of Alexsandr and was bleeding heavily from both shoulder and neck.
Had she gotten shot again? She hadn’t noticed.
“W-w…” She meant to ask ‘who’ but couldn’t quite get her mouth to form the words. Things were sticking in her head, her tongue seemed too heavy to fashion even the simplest of phrases.
“No, don’t move. Stay still.” Impossibly, impossibly blue eyes looked down at her, it seemed, from a great distance. Determined, not overly worried, just…determined. She felt that it was wrong somehow, that the blue eyes belonged to someone she shouldn’t really be in the company of and she tried to wriggle free, if only to…
“No, I meant what I said. Don’t move.”
Hands, all over her. Loud, loud, loud gun shots.
And a voice, talking to her about staying alive.
She felt herself being dragged, maybe, being still talked to, being still shot at.
“Sydney, now you have to focus, Really, no, don’t close your eyes, look at me… No, Sydney, stay with…”
It was too much effort. The roar and the slow sweetness of the all-consuming darkness moved up to meet her.
She didn’t fight it.
<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>
~ I have heard the language of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence. ~</span>
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The quotes are from:
Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman. Great stuff. If you haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend it.
And that’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed…