A Dark Turn
I Was Made to Love You
Thanks for the reviews again, guys! I you all. BTW, Galicdreamer... Did you finish your ficage for the challenge? Am head over to find out right now...
And Suzi... Writing for the challenge is highly commendable; I think I can find it in myself to wait for NtS... Never rush genius, right?
Chapter Eight: Self-Inflicted Wounds
~ I come along but I don't know where you're taking me
I shouldn't go but you're reaching, dragging, shaking me. ~
Neurotic, insolent b****.
Sark watched her in the rearview mirror: the absolute stillness of her body and the way the black blindfold (one of his ties) carved her face into two, pale halves. Her mouth, a startling slash of red against paper-white skin, was relaxed, almost pouting, and every so often she would shift her head from side to side as if listening for auditory clues as to where they were going.
A rough patch, there. A left turn, here.
He could almost hear her mind at work.
She was in clean clothes—he’d allowed her to change from the luggage he’d rescued from her hotel room—but they didn’t suit her at all. The fresh, neat all black ensemble, a stretchy, sleeveless top with thin straps and a short, pleated skirt, was at odds with the tired lines of her face and the small, dried trickle of blood that ran down the corner of her mouth. She wore them like they were uncomfortable on her skin, like she couldn’t stand the feel of something new and clean.
This was after, of course, he’d gone through hell to get her damn suitcase back for her. When he’d given it to her this morning—sans all the weapons and intel she’d stored in the trick bottom—she’d just…stared at him. No expression, nothing. True, he hadn’t expected her to throw a gratitude parade for him right then and there, considering their history, but he thought he’d deserved at least a ‘thank you’ for his efforts—some acknowledgement, however small.
Instead, she’d turned away and said, “I need to change,” in a voice that implied: don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Oh, really? Nothing I haven’t seen before, darling.
She’d been acting curiously all morning, though, even before the suitcase incident. It’d started when he’d walked in the living room and found her waiting for him, an expression on her face he couldn’t interpret: her eyes had been all over him and her movements slow, sluggish.
Where are you taking me?
He hadn’t answered her, but it’d unnerved him—her dull, searching eyes, the way she’d awkwardly been trying to get the clothes out of her suitcase.
Pity, then, and maybe something else. Something, a little like…
Here—wait.
The skirt and the revealing top, a gothic take on a catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, had been the only things in there, aside from an old, ratty bathrobe, a short blonde wig, and a haphazard selection of cosmetics. He’d gotten the clothes out for her, unfolding them and laying them in front of her, like a supplicant at a temple leaving out a sacrifice.
The hard line of her mouth had wavered, for a second, unnoticeable if he hadn’t have been right in front of her. He could almost feel it, her despisement of being dependent upon someone like him.
She unzipped the vest, very slowly, and half-turned away from him, shrugging out of one side of it. That left the bad shoulder. He hesitated, reaching out and then pulling back, but, after several abortive tries, he slid his hand around to her shoulder, fingers sliding over the bandage and under the fabric.
Her skin was cold, ice-cold. He’d realized he’d left her last night without a blanket.
God…ouch. She’d hissed under her breath as the vest came off and her free hand came up to her chest, guarding breasts as if he’d never seen them before.
He’d helped her with her top, and asked her if she wanted a jacket to go with it; the answer a firm ‘get the hell out.’
After that, she stopped talking.
She’d said nothing to him, even when he’d helped her put on a pair of Antov’s old work boots because the only shoes she had were the ones she on: soaked in blood. She’d said nothing when he’d bound her hands together (a make-shift leather restraint that was really his Italian leather jacket, torn to shreds). She’d said nothing when he’d blindfolded her and led her out to the car, a silent Antov in the background, face disappointed and hands ever-shaking.
He’d expected her to be full of accusations and demands, especially after last night. He’d expected her to be a crying, broken wreck. But she’d stared at him with eyes that were as blank and dark as drowning pools, as if she knew something. Knew him.
“How is your shoulder?” The car rattled along the dirt road, but the silence was very nearly defeaning; he asked more for form than actual concern.
She didn’t answer.
He hadn’t expected her to, but he wondered if she had any idea where they were going. That they were, in fact, headed to one of Irina’s safe houses, this one in a sleepy, little village named Molotov about an hour’s drive from Lazarevo.
Molotov. The place brought back memories, most of the painful and horrible variety, but he’d remembered Irina’s words, when he’d called her.
“Bring me Sydney,” she’d said, unusual accent flat as she spoke of her daughter, her child. “Hold her in Molotov until I get there.”
A pause, deliberate. “A day at the most, Julian. Maybe two.”
She’d used the name she’d always used, when it was just the two of them, the name that Lazarey’s chosen *h**e—another fond nickname for his birth mother—had christened him. Julian. The male to her feminine, Julilla, a woman he remembered as blonde, sharp-eyed, beautiful, cold, glittering like the rainbow edges of a knife exposed to firelight.
Now, good boys don’t cry, do they, Julian? Good boys shut up and bite their gorram tongues when they have nightmares. Or the monsters come—do you want the monsters to come and get you...? That’s what they feast on, you know: little, weak boys like you…
And how Irina knew he *detested* the use of that first name…
“I think about you, you know.” From the backseat she spoke, at last, slicing her way into his thoughts. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, some old fantasy sneaking up into reality. “About all the things that you’ve done to me. To others.”
He nearly smiled. No fanasty, no illsuion. Just nicely rounded out allegations designed to make the rest of the drive a living hell. For him, at least.
“I’m flattered.”
Her head turned in the direction of his voice. “You shouldn’t be.”
He watched her lip curl up in a smirk—like the clean clothes, it looked terribly out of place on her. It scared him, a little, watching one of his mannerisms play out across her face as if it belonged there, always.
“Do you ever think about it, Sark? All the nameless, faceless people you’ve killed? Bad guys and innocents alike? The lives you’ve taken without any regard other than to yourself?”
His answer was instant. “No.”
He saw her flinch, just a little, but it was the truth. He didn’t think about the people he’d killed: to him, it was unimportant, trivial. There were exceptions, sometimes, but they were as rare and few in between.
“I ask, you see, because you never seem to care. Do you?” She said it as if she needed him to say ‘no’, wanted him to. “Care?”
He almost wanted to say yes, because sometimes he did—a pretty, vibrant face flashed across his mind’s eye, sweet and simple framed by passionless eyes that didn’t belong there…Allison trapped in the body of a dead girl.
He didn’t say anything, but from the way her mouth curved down he knew she had interpreted the silence.
“I’d wondered.” Her voice was soft, silver. It reminded him of the bells of the Barcelona Cathedral on a Sunday Morning, clear and perfect. “Could you teach me how to do that? Not care?”
She sounded strange, like a shadow, a shade as if she wasn’t really even paying attention to her own words.
He looked back in the rearview mirror to see little rivulets of red trickling out from between her hands, down her wrists—her nails were digging into her palms hard enough to draw blood.
“I’d like that,” she continued on, “if you could.”
She wasn’t serious. He could tell from the way she said the words, carefully; she may not want to, but when it came down to it, she’d always care.
At least, he hoped so, if a creature like him could hope for anything. He simply couldn’t imagine a world where Sydney Bristow didn’t care, didn’t feel.
“It takes a certain mindset-”
“Which you don’t think I have.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
His fingers tightened reflexively on the steering wheel and he wondered just when their roles had become reversed, mixed ten ways to hell.
“You feel too much.”
Neither of them spoke again, for the rest of the drive.
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The house sat on a hilltop, huge and empty.
Sark rolled the car up the drive, past dozens of tall, tall pines that were huddled in tight clusters all over the property. They were beautiful, giving the carefully crafted illusion of a wild, unkept forest encroaching in the midst of civilization—and, indeed, most people would be enchanted by the picturesque, fairy-tale quality of it all.
But there was nothing of the fairy-tale about them: what they were was excellent aerial and ground cover from any prospective attacks. Not that an attack was likely. All of ten people in the world knew that this property even existed and of the ten, three of them were the guards he’d met a mile back on the outskirts of the land.
Eleven, now.
There were no other cars in the drive in front of the house; they were the only ones. He hadn’t really expected Irina to be here, yet. He knew she’d been in Paris for the past few weeks, working out the kinks to some new development pertaining to an ever elusive Rambaldi artifact. The Key, perhaps. Or The Passenger. One of them, at least, or both.
In his mind, they had all started to run together in smudged rivers, like the colors of an unfinished oil painting someone had doused with ice-cold water.
“Are we here?”
“Yes.”
He shut the car off and got out. The air was cool, even though this was spring, and it carried with it the faint hint of snow, which was never far off in this country.
He opened her door and she sat lying back against the seat, her head still facing straight ahead.
“Do you want to take your tie off me now? It’s actually scratching the hell out of my eyes.” Said with the faintest traces of contempt, their somewhat accord of earlier clearly broken.
“Not possible—it’s silk.”
He took off the restraints first, and then the blindfold. He didn’t know why he’d bothered with the restraints, at least—she was too weak to really need them. But, bitterly hard learned lesson aside, too much caution was better than not quite enough.
“Come on.” He helped her out of the car. He wasn’t a man that was used to helping others, but he found it was easier than he’d thought. He wound his arm around her waist, put one of her arms over his shoulder and kept her the injured side as straight as possible.
Her face was flushed—too pale—and her eyes were hazy, swirling irrationality. She looked as if she were about to fight him, for a moment, but he tightened his grip on her waist, nearly hard enough to bruise.
“Don’t fight me.” He whispered the words in her ear and felt her stiffen under him. “First of all, it wouldn’t do you any good: you’re injured, on my property, and completely alone—no intrepid fellow agents to keep you from harm.”
Slight interest, now. “Your property?”
“In a way. Do you want to crawl to the house yourself, like a dog or do you want some help with that?”
In the end, she held onto him tightly, and her hand was wrapped around his neck. For a second, her touching him reminded him of very different circumstances, days ago, with that ever expressive mouth moaning under his…
Which was a completely irresponsible line of thought, given the situation. But it didn’t stop him from remembering; it had been that way since the first time they’d met.
She was the sick, secret fantasy: even when he had her, he didn’t.
He helped her up the porch, into the house. Somewhere along the way, she’d leaned her head against his shoulder. He knew it was an involuntary thing, but it gave him one of those quick, cheap thrills.
There was something about having control over Sydney Bristow that was…intoxicating, for lack of a better word. Dominating her was like a small triumph; it really was beautiful. And should they ever become partners…
“What are you going to do with me?” She sounded almost young then, against him. Young and drained, as the effort was killing her. “Lock me up and throw away the key?”
She said it as if she was half-expecting it. Typical Bristow reaction.
“Hardly.”
He managed to get her to the guestroom and peel back the comforter and sheets on the bed, laying her in the middle.
She looked…fragile, then, a lost little girl trying her damnedest to be all tough and bad. The way her hair curled around her face only added to the impression and the bandage stood out against her otherwise unmarked skin like something obscene, sacrilegous.
It was a break-your-heart scene, Sark knew, looking down at her. He really was almost moved.
“You’re still in pain?” Asked in a bored tone, perfunctory.
“No.” She shook her head. “But they’ll be looking for me.”
By ‘they’ he assumed she meant the C.I.A., maybe even her father or her ever precious Michael Vaughn.
“I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you.” He laughed when he saw the expression on her face: pure fear. He imagined her thinking of all the bad things he could possibly do to her, have done to her.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Sydney. It’d be pointless after Lazarevo.”
Her eyes told him that she was still expecting it, for him to just kill her, to torture her or try to break her.
“Why should I believe you?”
“Believe me or not. It makes no difference.” Short, cut words. He could see her take them in, try to piece them together and read between the lines. “But I won’t. Hurt you, I mean.”
For now.
They both understood the unspoken meaning. They were poison to one another; they existed in each other’s lives only to cause the other a new and different kind of agony.
“You should consider yourself lucky, though.” Sark’s eyes got stuck on the small patch of exposed skin where her tank top had ridden up. “It’s not as if you have an army out there, looking for you. After two years, do you think there’s anyone left now?”
Her eyes widened and she bit her bottom lip, surprisingly endearing in a child-like way. She looked for all the world like she was trying very hard to show absolutely no emotion. Sad, he supposed, was the word for it; she was trying to supress sadness.
“And, to be honest, when it comes to you, The C.I.A. has hardly been particularly competent,,” he finished and watched the erratic way her chest moved with her strained breathing.
Her hand moved, unconciously, to the very spot where he’d been so fixated on, brushing the hem of the shirt up an inch.
Damn.
“Competent enough to beat The Covenant at it’s own game.”
“That’s not the issue, though. Not really.” The extra inch revealed the outlines of an ugly-looking scar, hook-shaped and deep. The thought f*** it ran through his mind and he reached down, almost absently, to trace the length of it, an oddly posessive act like he had a right to it, to her.
“The fact is,” there were more scars, some old and puckered while others were newer and paper-thin, “you don’t have anyone, do you? Your friends are either dead or gone. Your ex-lover’s remarried. Your parents…”
He trailed off and she looked at him with eyes that were almost black, unreadable. He still had his hand on her, but she didn’t tell him to stop.
“You right.” She moved her uninjured shoulder up. “I don’t have anyone. But, you see, it wasn’t always like that. I had people, Sark. Friends, people I depended on once...”
She put her hand over his, stopping him. “Who do you have?”
He thought of Lauren, for a moment, and Irina, before dismissing the thought. They weren’t his; they didn’t heal or help or need him and the reverse was certainly true.
“You see?” She said, after a long, desert of a pause. “You’ll always be alone. And do you know something really sadistic, Sark? Really horrible? I hope it hurts. I hope it hurts like hell..”
Her mouth was in that oddly determined line he’d seen a dozen times, in pictures and life; her face was distant, victorious…and he couldn’t ever call to mind a time when he’d wanted her quite as badly as he did right this moment, even if it was only the bare-bones illusion of her.
He still wanted to hurt her, badly, but that was his distinctive charm: being able to separate the need from the neccessity. He could still find ways to make her bleed.
But not right now.
He leaned down, watched her start, a bit. The vague thought that Irina was going to murder him if she found out crossed his mind, but he ignored it. He’d burn that bridge when he came to it.
Or Irina would do it for him. Probably with both of them on it.
“Alone, maybe, but never lacking company.”
She tried to twist away, everything tensed up. “Same diff-”
He closed the space between them. And the kiss…wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t sweet or patient or pretty—it was all underlaid violence and the promise of pain in the way he bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, to make her cry out.
Careless. Like the sort of thing you did when you didn’t want it to matter at all, but it just maybe *might*.
Everything about it was wrong; they both knew it and he knew she could have put a stop to it the second it started, if that was what she wanted, to stop.
But she didn’t and it was only the slightest of hesitations, her actions.
A moment, a pause, and she kissed him back.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
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For Sydney, it was like a movie set in slow motion. Something happening to someone else, far away and long ago. It had nothing to do with the here and now, where she was letting Sark to do this to her…all over again.
There were parts of her that realized she shouldn’t, really couldn’t: that she didn’t know what he was planning or who they seemed to be waiting for or the fact that he was a criminal who’d taken every oppurtunity to ruin her life…
Another part, the part that loved the wickedness of it all just as much as the first time, wanted it so bad it hurt inside of her, a physical ache.
She didn’t even stop when his hand slipped (probably deliberately) to her shoulder, pressing down on the bandage. Little tremors of hurt wound their way up and down her body, aching like hell—she saw stars—but the contrast…
Too sweet, too perfect: pleasure and pain, one so entwined with the other she couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended.
Not all self-destructive impulses had to be bourne of fear and sorrow.
Some were of despair.
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Los Angeles: Downtown Docks
It was cold, though it was springtime in southern California.
The dark dome of the sky was lined with the even darker outlines of storm clouds, fat and full of midnight rain, covering the starlight so that everything was thrown into a black fog.
“Krushchev. He’s dead. Correct?”
Hands braced against the railing, Anna Espinosa watched the sly, quick movements of the man standing across from her, her face expressionless and weapons well-concealed.
“Yes.” Her voice was smug, absolutely arrogant. “He’s no longer a problem. No longer our problem. And what he knew,” slight emphasis on the last word and just dangerous enough to give pause, “shares his grave.”
The man in front of her, so cool and implaccable, didn’t bat a lash, didn’t take his eyes off hers. “And Sydney?”
Anna leaned forward slightly, her hands clasped in front of her and shoulders squared off like a fighter awaiting the first round.
“Alive,” she said, her voice faintly smug and low. “As per your…request.”
Anger, then, on his face, a mottled flush of red that spread across coarse cheekbones and a mouth that tightened to an almost non-existant line. His voice was soft, deceptively so, and carried a flavor of ‘just-you-wait-until-you’ve-outlived-your-usefulness’, when he spoke.
“This is not a game, Ms. Espinosa. My request for Sydney’s safety was non-negotiable, not something to take into your own hands. It was an order-a direct order. Now, do you understand when I say ‘direct order’ or is there some far-reaching, abstract part of that you need clarified for future reference?”
“I think I’m good.” Her smile turned to a laugh and the sound was jagged, like someone rubbing shards of broken glass together.
“She’ll live to die another way, and right now, that’s all you need concern yourself with.” Her heavy-lidded eyes flashed heat in the gold-flecked depths, like a fourteen karat inferno.
“But I made an excellent show of trying to kill her.” She nearly laughed again when she saw his face harden and his eyes go curiously blank, flat. The perfect reaction, she mused, for the perfect dig. “Oh, darling, don’t look so worried, now. I had to, you know. Just in case; for the realistic edge, if you know what I mean.”
Everything that was disgust and malice was all over him, in every quirk and twitch of his mouth and slight shake of his fingers. When he opened his mouth, the corner trembling slightly, she thought, just for a second, she was finally going to see his cool, careful mask crack, like the faint, webbed lines on ice before it all fell through.
“How badly?” But…no. The fingers stoppped shaking, the mouth stayed still. Calm, cool, perfect.
It was almost a disappointment.
“Nothing to worry your pretty little head over. She’ll be a wonder in a few days. Perfectly fine, I’m sure.” In truth, she didn’t know. Maybe the little b*tch was, in fact, dead despite the daring, little rescue attempt. And wouldn’t that just be oh-so perfect if she was?
“A little gun-shot wound here, but in a few days right, as you Americans are so fond of saying, as reign.” She stared at him, in the silence.
“I told you,” she made an absent, dismissive motion. “It would have been unrealistic.”
“Would it be too ‘unrealistic’, Ms. Espinosa, if I were to shoot you right now? In the head, right under the temple?” She didn’t fail to notice the clipped, biting tone he was using, saved, she knew, for occasions when threatening physical harm. “Maybe, if I were to take a knife…”
“But you can’t, you see.” She leaned over and placed a shadow of a kiss on his left temple, drawing it out so every movement she made was sensual, lingering. “You still need me.”
And, for good measure, before he could actually make good on his promise of a knife in her flesh, she hurried on, voice seductively pleasant. “And I have something that might interest you, if perhaps a person such as you could be tempted to an interest.”
“Yes?”
“I know that your *darling* Sydney is alive, because I watched her be rescued.” It was just Sydney’s damn good luck that Sark had come when he had, lest Anna have changed her mind and pulled the trigger for the killing shot.
“By?”
“Someone I recognized. Well.” She waited a beat, let the tension run high and long in the air. “As would you.”
“Anna…”
“Sark.”
They stared at each other, in the murky lights of the dock: her eyes rebellious and his determined, echoing old and resurrected frustrations.
“And you know,” she continued, enjoying the slight shadows of pain in his eyes, “what Sark means…”
“Irina.” Said without a second of hesitation, in a tone so flat and sharp it nearly made Anna flinch.
“Did you follow them, then? Sark and Sydney?”
“Just enough to make sure of their location. Anything else would have done little good, at that point.” She shrugged and stretched, laconically.
“Alexsandr is dead.” A quick surge of pleasure through her, as she spoke the words aloud. “The Covenant will never know. The CIA will never know. Which means, we are free to go ahead as planned. Finding out the nature of the Key, decoding it, and then The Passenger.”
“Indeed,” he said, curtly. His eyes moved quickly up and over her. “Alexansdr gave Sydney nothing and my daughter, I trust, is still alive, Ms. Espinosa?”
“I already told you, Jack. Most likely.” She made her face defiant, her eyes a prye of honey flames. “I’m sure Sark saved her from bleeding to death.”
She didn’t even see it coming. One quick flash of movement—Jack Bristow, she had to admit, still had it—and he was next to her, shoving her face into the wooden railing with a gun pressed achingly hard to her temple.
“You stupid b****.” Said so blisteringly cold, devoid of emotion. Anna knew she never wanted to hear another voice like that again, ever. “I gave you an order. An order, Ms. Espinosa, which you deliberately disregarded.”
Blood was slowly seeping from her nose. Broken, of course. “An accident, Jack.”
He grabbed her by her hair, picked her head up, and then smashed her down again. Quick, hard, and with a loud cracking of bone.
This time, she screamed.
“Don’t be careless with my orders again. Whatever you think, whatever little endgame you’re trying to push… Don’t.” He pulled her around to face him, gun still at her head.
“I do need you, it’s true. But we need Sydney more.”
He let her go and she watched him slip the gun back into the folds of his jacket. Her face ached like holy
hell and her nose felt like it had been cracked in ten different places. She almost wished that Simon
was with her, instead of doing recon for a freelance job in Berlin.
Almost. Because…f***.
“What you’re going to do, Ms. Espinosa,” he said, “is make sure you didn’t f*** us over entirely. Find Sydney and find out why Sark and his…employer could possibly have any interest in her.”
She saw him smile for the first time that day, lips pulling back in a feral show of teeth. “Now, I’m only going to ask you this once. Do you understand?”
And, for the first time in her life, Anna Espinosa knew what it was to fear.
~ Blood is a river, tying you to me. ~
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If you got this far... Well, I commend you. :lol:
And Suzi... Writing for the challenge is highly commendable; I think I can find it in myself to wait for NtS... Never rush genius, right?
Chapter Eight: Self-Inflicted Wounds
~ I come along but I don't know where you're taking me
I shouldn't go but you're reaching, dragging, shaking me. ~
Neurotic, insolent b****.
Sark watched her in the rearview mirror: the absolute stillness of her body and the way the black blindfold (one of his ties) carved her face into two, pale halves. Her mouth, a startling slash of red against paper-white skin, was relaxed, almost pouting, and every so often she would shift her head from side to side as if listening for auditory clues as to where they were going.
A rough patch, there. A left turn, here.
He could almost hear her mind at work.
She was in clean clothes—he’d allowed her to change from the luggage he’d rescued from her hotel room—but they didn’t suit her at all. The fresh, neat all black ensemble, a stretchy, sleeveless top with thin straps and a short, pleated skirt, was at odds with the tired lines of her face and the small, dried trickle of blood that ran down the corner of her mouth. She wore them like they were uncomfortable on her skin, like she couldn’t stand the feel of something new and clean.
This was after, of course, he’d gone through hell to get her damn suitcase back for her. When he’d given it to her this morning—sans all the weapons and intel she’d stored in the trick bottom—she’d just…stared at him. No expression, nothing. True, he hadn’t expected her to throw a gratitude parade for him right then and there, considering their history, but he thought he’d deserved at least a ‘thank you’ for his efforts—some acknowledgement, however small.
Instead, she’d turned away and said, “I need to change,” in a voice that implied: don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Oh, really? Nothing I haven’t seen before, darling.
She’d been acting curiously all morning, though, even before the suitcase incident. It’d started when he’d walked in the living room and found her waiting for him, an expression on her face he couldn’t interpret: her eyes had been all over him and her movements slow, sluggish.
Where are you taking me?
He hadn’t answered her, but it’d unnerved him—her dull, searching eyes, the way she’d awkwardly been trying to get the clothes out of her suitcase.
Pity, then, and maybe something else. Something, a little like…
Here—wait.
The skirt and the revealing top, a gothic take on a catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, had been the only things in there, aside from an old, ratty bathrobe, a short blonde wig, and a haphazard selection of cosmetics. He’d gotten the clothes out for her, unfolding them and laying them in front of her, like a supplicant at a temple leaving out a sacrifice.
The hard line of her mouth had wavered, for a second, unnoticeable if he hadn’t have been right in front of her. He could almost feel it, her despisement of being dependent upon someone like him.
She unzipped the vest, very slowly, and half-turned away from him, shrugging out of one side of it. That left the bad shoulder. He hesitated, reaching out and then pulling back, but, after several abortive tries, he slid his hand around to her shoulder, fingers sliding over the bandage and under the fabric.
Her skin was cold, ice-cold. He’d realized he’d left her last night without a blanket.
God…ouch. She’d hissed under her breath as the vest came off and her free hand came up to her chest, guarding breasts as if he’d never seen them before.
He’d helped her with her top, and asked her if she wanted a jacket to go with it; the answer a firm ‘get the hell out.’
After that, she stopped talking.
She’d said nothing to him, even when he’d helped her put on a pair of Antov’s old work boots because the only shoes she had were the ones she on: soaked in blood. She’d said nothing when he’d bound her hands together (a make-shift leather restraint that was really his Italian leather jacket, torn to shreds). She’d said nothing when he’d blindfolded her and led her out to the car, a silent Antov in the background, face disappointed and hands ever-shaking.
He’d expected her to be full of accusations and demands, especially after last night. He’d expected her to be a crying, broken wreck. But she’d stared at him with eyes that were as blank and dark as drowning pools, as if she knew something. Knew him.
“How is your shoulder?” The car rattled along the dirt road, but the silence was very nearly defeaning; he asked more for form than actual concern.
She didn’t answer.
He hadn’t expected her to, but he wondered if she had any idea where they were going. That they were, in fact, headed to one of Irina’s safe houses, this one in a sleepy, little village named Molotov about an hour’s drive from Lazarevo.
Molotov. The place brought back memories, most of the painful and horrible variety, but he’d remembered Irina’s words, when he’d called her.
“Bring me Sydney,” she’d said, unusual accent flat as she spoke of her daughter, her child. “Hold her in Molotov until I get there.”
A pause, deliberate. “A day at the most, Julian. Maybe two.”
She’d used the name she’d always used, when it was just the two of them, the name that Lazarey’s chosen *h**e—another fond nickname for his birth mother—had christened him. Julian. The male to her feminine, Julilla, a woman he remembered as blonde, sharp-eyed, beautiful, cold, glittering like the rainbow edges of a knife exposed to firelight.
Now, good boys don’t cry, do they, Julian? Good boys shut up and bite their gorram tongues when they have nightmares. Or the monsters come—do you want the monsters to come and get you...? That’s what they feast on, you know: little, weak boys like you…
And how Irina knew he *detested* the use of that first name…
“I think about you, you know.” From the backseat she spoke, at last, slicing her way into his thoughts. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it, some old fantasy sneaking up into reality. “About all the things that you’ve done to me. To others.”
He nearly smiled. No fanasty, no illsuion. Just nicely rounded out allegations designed to make the rest of the drive a living hell. For him, at least.
“I’m flattered.”
Her head turned in the direction of his voice. “You shouldn’t be.”
He watched her lip curl up in a smirk—like the clean clothes, it looked terribly out of place on her. It scared him, a little, watching one of his mannerisms play out across her face as if it belonged there, always.
“Do you ever think about it, Sark? All the nameless, faceless people you’ve killed? Bad guys and innocents alike? The lives you’ve taken without any regard other than to yourself?”
His answer was instant. “No.”
He saw her flinch, just a little, but it was the truth. He didn’t think about the people he’d killed: to him, it was unimportant, trivial. There were exceptions, sometimes, but they were as rare and few in between.
“I ask, you see, because you never seem to care. Do you?” She said it as if she needed him to say ‘no’, wanted him to. “Care?”
He almost wanted to say yes, because sometimes he did—a pretty, vibrant face flashed across his mind’s eye, sweet and simple framed by passionless eyes that didn’t belong there…Allison trapped in the body of a dead girl.
He didn’t say anything, but from the way her mouth curved down he knew she had interpreted the silence.
“I’d wondered.” Her voice was soft, silver. It reminded him of the bells of the Barcelona Cathedral on a Sunday Morning, clear and perfect. “Could you teach me how to do that? Not care?”
She sounded strange, like a shadow, a shade as if she wasn’t really even paying attention to her own words.
He looked back in the rearview mirror to see little rivulets of red trickling out from between her hands, down her wrists—her nails were digging into her palms hard enough to draw blood.
“I’d like that,” she continued on, “if you could.”
She wasn’t serious. He could tell from the way she said the words, carefully; she may not want to, but when it came down to it, she’d always care.
At least, he hoped so, if a creature like him could hope for anything. He simply couldn’t imagine a world where Sydney Bristow didn’t care, didn’t feel.
“It takes a certain mindset-”
“Which you don’t think I have.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
His fingers tightened reflexively on the steering wheel and he wondered just when their roles had become reversed, mixed ten ways to hell.
“You feel too much.”
Neither of them spoke again, for the rest of the drive.
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The house sat on a hilltop, huge and empty.
Sark rolled the car up the drive, past dozens of tall, tall pines that were huddled in tight clusters all over the property. They were beautiful, giving the carefully crafted illusion of a wild, unkept forest encroaching in the midst of civilization—and, indeed, most people would be enchanted by the picturesque, fairy-tale quality of it all.
But there was nothing of the fairy-tale about them: what they were was excellent aerial and ground cover from any prospective attacks. Not that an attack was likely. All of ten people in the world knew that this property even existed and of the ten, three of them were the guards he’d met a mile back on the outskirts of the land.
Eleven, now.
There were no other cars in the drive in front of the house; they were the only ones. He hadn’t really expected Irina to be here, yet. He knew she’d been in Paris for the past few weeks, working out the kinks to some new development pertaining to an ever elusive Rambaldi artifact. The Key, perhaps. Or The Passenger. One of them, at least, or both.
In his mind, they had all started to run together in smudged rivers, like the colors of an unfinished oil painting someone had doused with ice-cold water.
“Are we here?”
“Yes.”
He shut the car off and got out. The air was cool, even though this was spring, and it carried with it the faint hint of snow, which was never far off in this country.
He opened her door and she sat lying back against the seat, her head still facing straight ahead.
“Do you want to take your tie off me now? It’s actually scratching the hell out of my eyes.” Said with the faintest traces of contempt, their somewhat accord of earlier clearly broken.
“Not possible—it’s silk.”
He took off the restraints first, and then the blindfold. He didn’t know why he’d bothered with the restraints, at least—she was too weak to really need them. But, bitterly hard learned lesson aside, too much caution was better than not quite enough.
“Come on.” He helped her out of the car. He wasn’t a man that was used to helping others, but he found it was easier than he’d thought. He wound his arm around her waist, put one of her arms over his shoulder and kept her the injured side as straight as possible.
Her face was flushed—too pale—and her eyes were hazy, swirling irrationality. She looked as if she were about to fight him, for a moment, but he tightened his grip on her waist, nearly hard enough to bruise.
“Don’t fight me.” He whispered the words in her ear and felt her stiffen under him. “First of all, it wouldn’t do you any good: you’re injured, on my property, and completely alone—no intrepid fellow agents to keep you from harm.”
Slight interest, now. “Your property?”
“In a way. Do you want to crawl to the house yourself, like a dog or do you want some help with that?”
In the end, she held onto him tightly, and her hand was wrapped around his neck. For a second, her touching him reminded him of very different circumstances, days ago, with that ever expressive mouth moaning under his…
Which was a completely irresponsible line of thought, given the situation. But it didn’t stop him from remembering; it had been that way since the first time they’d met.
She was the sick, secret fantasy: even when he had her, he didn’t.
He helped her up the porch, into the house. Somewhere along the way, she’d leaned her head against his shoulder. He knew it was an involuntary thing, but it gave him one of those quick, cheap thrills.
There was something about having control over Sydney Bristow that was…intoxicating, for lack of a better word. Dominating her was like a small triumph; it really was beautiful. And should they ever become partners…
“What are you going to do with me?” She sounded almost young then, against him. Young and drained, as the effort was killing her. “Lock me up and throw away the key?”
She said it as if she was half-expecting it. Typical Bristow reaction.
“Hardly.”
He managed to get her to the guestroom and peel back the comforter and sheets on the bed, laying her in the middle.
She looked…fragile, then, a lost little girl trying her damnedest to be all tough and bad. The way her hair curled around her face only added to the impression and the bandage stood out against her otherwise unmarked skin like something obscene, sacrilegous.
It was a break-your-heart scene, Sark knew, looking down at her. He really was almost moved.
“You’re still in pain?” Asked in a bored tone, perfunctory.
“No.” She shook her head. “But they’ll be looking for me.”
By ‘they’ he assumed she meant the C.I.A., maybe even her father or her ever precious Michael Vaughn.
“I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you.” He laughed when he saw the expression on her face: pure fear. He imagined her thinking of all the bad things he could possibly do to her, have done to her.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Sydney. It’d be pointless after Lazarevo.”
Her eyes told him that she was still expecting it, for him to just kill her, to torture her or try to break her.
“Why should I believe you?”
“Believe me or not. It makes no difference.” Short, cut words. He could see her take them in, try to piece them together and read between the lines. “But I won’t. Hurt you, I mean.”
For now.
They both understood the unspoken meaning. They were poison to one another; they existed in each other’s lives only to cause the other a new and different kind of agony.
“You should consider yourself lucky, though.” Sark’s eyes got stuck on the small patch of exposed skin where her tank top had ridden up. “It’s not as if you have an army out there, looking for you. After two years, do you think there’s anyone left now?”
Her eyes widened and she bit her bottom lip, surprisingly endearing in a child-like way. She looked for all the world like she was trying very hard to show absolutely no emotion. Sad, he supposed, was the word for it; she was trying to supress sadness.
“And, to be honest, when it comes to you, The C.I.A. has hardly been particularly competent,,” he finished and watched the erratic way her chest moved with her strained breathing.
Her hand moved, unconciously, to the very spot where he’d been so fixated on, brushing the hem of the shirt up an inch.
Damn.
“Competent enough to beat The Covenant at it’s own game.”
“That’s not the issue, though. Not really.” The extra inch revealed the outlines of an ugly-looking scar, hook-shaped and deep. The thought f*** it ran through his mind and he reached down, almost absently, to trace the length of it, an oddly posessive act like he had a right to it, to her.
“The fact is,” there were more scars, some old and puckered while others were newer and paper-thin, “you don’t have anyone, do you? Your friends are either dead or gone. Your ex-lover’s remarried. Your parents…”
He trailed off and she looked at him with eyes that were almost black, unreadable. He still had his hand on her, but she didn’t tell him to stop.
“You right.” She moved her uninjured shoulder up. “I don’t have anyone. But, you see, it wasn’t always like that. I had people, Sark. Friends, people I depended on once...”
She put her hand over his, stopping him. “Who do you have?”
He thought of Lauren, for a moment, and Irina, before dismissing the thought. They weren’t his; they didn’t heal or help or need him and the reverse was certainly true.
“You see?” She said, after a long, desert of a pause. “You’ll always be alone. And do you know something really sadistic, Sark? Really horrible? I hope it hurts. I hope it hurts like hell..”
Her mouth was in that oddly determined line he’d seen a dozen times, in pictures and life; her face was distant, victorious…and he couldn’t ever call to mind a time when he’d wanted her quite as badly as he did right this moment, even if it was only the bare-bones illusion of her.
He still wanted to hurt her, badly, but that was his distinctive charm: being able to separate the need from the neccessity. He could still find ways to make her bleed.
But not right now.
He leaned down, watched her start, a bit. The vague thought that Irina was going to murder him if she found out crossed his mind, but he ignored it. He’d burn that bridge when he came to it.
Or Irina would do it for him. Probably with both of them on it.
“Alone, maybe, but never lacking company.”
She tried to twist away, everything tensed up. “Same diff-”
He closed the space between them. And the kiss…wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t sweet or patient or pretty—it was all underlaid violence and the promise of pain in the way he bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, to make her cry out.
Careless. Like the sort of thing you did when you didn’t want it to matter at all, but it just maybe *might*.
Everything about it was wrong; they both knew it and he knew she could have put a stop to it the second it started, if that was what she wanted, to stop.
But she didn’t and it was only the slightest of hesitations, her actions.
A moment, a pause, and she kissed him back.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
For Sydney, it was like a movie set in slow motion. Something happening to someone else, far away and long ago. It had nothing to do with the here and now, where she was letting Sark to do this to her…all over again.
There were parts of her that realized she shouldn’t, really couldn’t: that she didn’t know what he was planning or who they seemed to be waiting for or the fact that he was a criminal who’d taken every oppurtunity to ruin her life…
Another part, the part that loved the wickedness of it all just as much as the first time, wanted it so bad it hurt inside of her, a physical ache.
She didn’t even stop when his hand slipped (probably deliberately) to her shoulder, pressing down on the bandage. Little tremors of hurt wound their way up and down her body, aching like hell—she saw stars—but the contrast…
Too sweet, too perfect: pleasure and pain, one so entwined with the other she couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended.
Not all self-destructive impulses had to be bourne of fear and sorrow.
Some were of despair.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
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Los Angeles: Downtown Docks
It was cold, though it was springtime in southern California.
The dark dome of the sky was lined with the even darker outlines of storm clouds, fat and full of midnight rain, covering the starlight so that everything was thrown into a black fog.
“Krushchev. He’s dead. Correct?”
Hands braced against the railing, Anna Espinosa watched the sly, quick movements of the man standing across from her, her face expressionless and weapons well-concealed.
“Yes.” Her voice was smug, absolutely arrogant. “He’s no longer a problem. No longer our problem. And what he knew,” slight emphasis on the last word and just dangerous enough to give pause, “shares his grave.”
The man in front of her, so cool and implaccable, didn’t bat a lash, didn’t take his eyes off hers. “And Sydney?”
Anna leaned forward slightly, her hands clasped in front of her and shoulders squared off like a fighter awaiting the first round.
“Alive,” she said, her voice faintly smug and low. “As per your…request.”
Anger, then, on his face, a mottled flush of red that spread across coarse cheekbones and a mouth that tightened to an almost non-existant line. His voice was soft, deceptively so, and carried a flavor of ‘just-you-wait-until-you’ve-outlived-your-usefulness’, when he spoke.
“This is not a game, Ms. Espinosa. My request for Sydney’s safety was non-negotiable, not something to take into your own hands. It was an order-a direct order. Now, do you understand when I say ‘direct order’ or is there some far-reaching, abstract part of that you need clarified for future reference?”
“I think I’m good.” Her smile turned to a laugh and the sound was jagged, like someone rubbing shards of broken glass together.
“She’ll live to die another way, and right now, that’s all you need concern yourself with.” Her heavy-lidded eyes flashed heat in the gold-flecked depths, like a fourteen karat inferno.
“But I made an excellent show of trying to kill her.” She nearly laughed again when she saw his face harden and his eyes go curiously blank, flat. The perfect reaction, she mused, for the perfect dig. “Oh, darling, don’t look so worried, now. I had to, you know. Just in case; for the realistic edge, if you know what I mean.”
Everything that was disgust and malice was all over him, in every quirk and twitch of his mouth and slight shake of his fingers. When he opened his mouth, the corner trembling slightly, she thought, just for a second, she was finally going to see his cool, careful mask crack, like the faint, webbed lines on ice before it all fell through.
“How badly?” But…no. The fingers stoppped shaking, the mouth stayed still. Calm, cool, perfect.
It was almost a disappointment.
“Nothing to worry your pretty little head over. She’ll be a wonder in a few days. Perfectly fine, I’m sure.” In truth, she didn’t know. Maybe the little b*tch was, in fact, dead despite the daring, little rescue attempt. And wouldn’t that just be oh-so perfect if she was?
“A little gun-shot wound here, but in a few days right, as you Americans are so fond of saying, as reign.” She stared at him, in the silence.
“I told you,” she made an absent, dismissive motion. “It would have been unrealistic.”
“Would it be too ‘unrealistic’, Ms. Espinosa, if I were to shoot you right now? In the head, right under the temple?” She didn’t fail to notice the clipped, biting tone he was using, saved, she knew, for occasions when threatening physical harm. “Maybe, if I were to take a knife…”
“But you can’t, you see.” She leaned over and placed a shadow of a kiss on his left temple, drawing it out so every movement she made was sensual, lingering. “You still need me.”
And, for good measure, before he could actually make good on his promise of a knife in her flesh, she hurried on, voice seductively pleasant. “And I have something that might interest you, if perhaps a person such as you could be tempted to an interest.”
“Yes?”
“I know that your *darling* Sydney is alive, because I watched her be rescued.” It was just Sydney’s damn good luck that Sark had come when he had, lest Anna have changed her mind and pulled the trigger for the killing shot.
“By?”
“Someone I recognized. Well.” She waited a beat, let the tension run high and long in the air. “As would you.”
“Anna…”
“Sark.”
They stared at each other, in the murky lights of the dock: her eyes rebellious and his determined, echoing old and resurrected frustrations.
“And you know,” she continued, enjoying the slight shadows of pain in his eyes, “what Sark means…”
“Irina.” Said without a second of hesitation, in a tone so flat and sharp it nearly made Anna flinch.
“Did you follow them, then? Sark and Sydney?”
“Just enough to make sure of their location. Anything else would have done little good, at that point.” She shrugged and stretched, laconically.
“Alexsandr is dead.” A quick surge of pleasure through her, as she spoke the words aloud. “The Covenant will never know. The CIA will never know. Which means, we are free to go ahead as planned. Finding out the nature of the Key, decoding it, and then The Passenger.”
“Indeed,” he said, curtly. His eyes moved quickly up and over her. “Alexansdr gave Sydney nothing and my daughter, I trust, is still alive, Ms. Espinosa?”
“I already told you, Jack. Most likely.” She made her face defiant, her eyes a prye of honey flames. “I’m sure Sark saved her from bleeding to death.”
She didn’t even see it coming. One quick flash of movement—Jack Bristow, she had to admit, still had it—and he was next to her, shoving her face into the wooden railing with a gun pressed achingly hard to her temple.
“You stupid b****.” Said so blisteringly cold, devoid of emotion. Anna knew she never wanted to hear another voice like that again, ever. “I gave you an order. An order, Ms. Espinosa, which you deliberately disregarded.”
Blood was slowly seeping from her nose. Broken, of course. “An accident, Jack.”
He grabbed her by her hair, picked her head up, and then smashed her down again. Quick, hard, and with a loud cracking of bone.
This time, she screamed.
“Don’t be careless with my orders again. Whatever you think, whatever little endgame you’re trying to push… Don’t.” He pulled her around to face him, gun still at her head.
“I do need you, it’s true. But we need Sydney more.”
He let her go and she watched him slip the gun back into the folds of his jacket. Her face ached like holy
hell and her nose felt like it had been cracked in ten different places. She almost wished that Simon
was with her, instead of doing recon for a freelance job in Berlin.
Almost. Because…f***.
“What you’re going to do, Ms. Espinosa,” he said, “is make sure you didn’t f*** us over entirely. Find Sydney and find out why Sark and his…employer could possibly have any interest in her.”
She saw him smile for the first time that day, lips pulling back in a feral show of teeth. “Now, I’m only going to ask you this once. Do you understand?”
And, for the first time in her life, Anna Espinosa knew what it was to fear.
~ Blood is a river, tying you to me. ~
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If you got this far... Well, I commend you. :lol: