Everyone, thanks so much for your support!
Elle, GAHHH!!!! Make me cry *sniff* Thank you so much for that nomination. *hugs*
iL0v3vAuHgN, It's okay if you went to SD-1 and read all that I wrote
I'm flattered that you'd go. I dunno if I recognize your screen-name though.
To everyone, I'm really sorry I didn't post all my chapters here. But hey, at least you didn't have to wait 3 months for my last update like they did. lol. YES, I'm TERRIBLE.
But in the next few days, I'm going to post all that I have written (probably two per day) because I will be going away on a trip for 5 weeks. I leave monday and I won't be back until August.
Sorry, if you get overwhelmed by all the chapters.
Chapter 12
Vaughn is wide-eyed staring and waiting for her to reply.
“ Um..I..um…well…” Sydney is completely flustered. She never gets flustered. Why does he have this effect on her now? After the initial jumpy feeling fades out, Sydney clears her throat. Her mind is racing for an excuse, a reason to be here. But her mind is blank. Screw it! She thinks, you don’t have to make up an excuse. Why did he lie about where he was going?
“ Well, what are YOU doing here?” she remarks. Then immediately realizes how lame she sounded. Couldn’t she come up with anything better beside throw his own words back at him like a ten year old?
Vaughn’s eyebrows raise a little, amused at her childish come back. “ I asked you first…” he replies back with the same immature attitude. “ the question is…what are YOU doing here?” Now he feels like an annoying kid.
She doesn’t respond with an excuse or an explanation. He is getting a little impatient and decides to push her a little. “ or maybe the better question is…why were you, for a lack of a better word…spying…on me?” He slowly enunciates and accents the word “ spying.” He certainly got the upper-hand in their little game after that comment.
“ I was…following…you because I thought you were going to WORK. I thought it might have been an emergency…you left so abruptly…” she tries to take his advantage away from him. “ What else could it have been that made you dash out of there?” She crosses her arms in front of her chest. Now the ball was back in his court again.
He turns his head away from her hard stare. “ Something important came up. I didn’t say it was work…” He says quietly to the ground not wanting to look at her while he lied. “ for SD-6..” he adds on. There, now it wasn’t a complete lie.
“ Why did Alice say it was work then?” she continues with her interrogation. She won’t be satisfied until she gets to the bottom of this. “ She IS your girlfriend isn’t she?” Whoa! Where did that come from? Her brain does a double take. It just came out. It’s not good to just blurt things without thinking, she reprimands herself.
“ Sydney, you should know better than anyone that there are things you can’t even tell those closest to you…” he stops a moment. “ Even though you really want to tell them everything.” He looks up into her eyes; brown ones that were now sparkling from the moonlight. “ It would be so easy to tell the truth…” She is startled by what she sees in his eyes. “ Sometimes I just want to tell everything…” They seem to be searching for something. Something from her? At the same time, they are expressing an overwhelming feeling of sadness too. She is mesmerized. She swallows hard as he suddenly breaks away his penetrating gaze and says, “ But...then I know I can’t. It’d be too dangerous.”
He shakes his head to clear the air. What was he thinking? Was he going to tell her the real reason he left so quickly? She takes a deep breath to recover from whatever just happened. She isn’t even sure what it was, but she was glad to be moving on from it.
“ Yeah. I know you can’t tell Alice everything. But if it wasn’t work related…why did leave? Why did you lie?”
He is quiet again feeling like a little boy who had to explain to his mother why he lied about getting detention. Then his shame suddenly turns into surprise. When did it turn from him demanding why she was spying on him to her grilling him with all these questions? And without him noticing until now. She was good. He had to give her that.
“ I didn’t lie exactly. I told her it was important. I just didn’t feel like elaborating. It was something very personal…” his voice drifts away. Will she let it go at that? Probably not, he thinks.
“ The page was from my mother. She needed me to do something for her…” he stops, not wanting to continue with the lying. “ She was reminding me about…”
Sydney sees his hesitation and reluctance to continue and knows that she should just drop the issue. It is obvious that he wasn’t doing anything Sloane would consider “suspicious.” He wasn’t going off betraying SD-6. It isn’t her position to pry into his personal life like this.
“ Look Vaughn…you don’t have to explain anymore. I’m the one that should explain. I apologize for following you. I thought it was work. It’s just that…when you took a different turn instead of going into Credit Dauphine. I became curious and my instincts told me to follow…I”
“ You thought I was doing something that I shouldn’t be doing…”
“ No!” she says like a reflex. “ I mean…yes,” she hangs her head down. “ I mean…I don’t know what to think.” She closes her eyes in confusion and brings her hand up rub her forehead. “ You know it’s hard to trust people. Sloane said, it’s the nature of the job, and you always has to be alert…or else, others are going to take you down, you know?” she is trying desperately to explain herself, but is not sure everything is coming out the way she wanted.
“ I know. I think I saw it in the spy handbook somewhere,” he jokes to ease her nerves. He knows she doesn’t mean any harm. . “ Page twenty?” She relaxes a little and lets out a little nervous laugh.
“ Yeah, I think I have a bumper sticker with those same words too,” she smiles. “ But seriously Vaughn. Sloane told me to be cautious, not too overly trusting.”
“ That makes sense.”
“ No, but…I really do want to trust you. I don’t know what it is, but I feel that I am more than half way there already and we haven’t even been on a mission together yet.”
He smiles at that. It makes him glad that she feels that way. “ I know what you mean,” he says. “ I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“ It’s good. I don’t need more people who I can’t trust. Do you?” He shakes his head. “ But you probably don’t trust me now…after my behavior tonight.” She says a little embarrassed. “ You have personal things…I should mind my own business.”
They stand there in silence for a few seconds. She starts to get nervous that the pestering awkwardness is coming back. All of a sudden, Vaughn reaches down quickly and grabs her dangling hand. His hand is warm. He starts walking while leading her behind him. She is completely surprised. But deep down, she is getting a little exciting sensation. The type you get when someone has a surprise birthday gift just waiting for you to discover. She wonders where he is taking her.
They walk a few feet or so and stop in front of the gravestone that he had been talking to earlier. She looks down at the engraved words: William C. Vaughn. Loving Husband and Father. Hero for the Country.
Sydney Bristow had given him a chance to go without explaining anything a few minutes ago. But he couldn’t do it. She deserved something more. Besides, he wanted to show her.
“ My dad,” Vaughn says sadly. “ My mother calls sometimes wanting me to come visit him. Tonight was one of those days. I went to the gift shop to get him something first” he wasn’t completely lying to her. It was all true except for the time reference. His mother does call to remind him about going to the cemetery when she gets overwhelmed by memories or loneliness. It just wasn’t tonight.
He had never brought anyone to his dad’s grave site. He would have brought Kristine, but they weren’t even suppose to know each other. He didn’t even think about bringing Alice here. He doesn’t even talk about his dad with Alice. But for some reason he made a split second decision to bring HER here. She was right about what Sloane said. In his life, trust is a tricky thing. But needed to be able to work together. Deep down hidden inside, he might have known it was little more than just wanting to do it for work. He wanted to share this with her. Wanted her to trust him. Wanted to trust her.
“ So you got him a hockey stick and puck?” she is amused.
“ Yeah, he introduced me to that passion when I was only six.” Sydney tried to imagine him as a little kid. She saw the image in front of her eyes.
A cute little boy all padded up skating in a hockey rink with his dad skating in big circles hovering around him, teaching him the game. Then the image started to blur in her mind. The boy started to spin on the ice, faster and faster. And the father started stretching out his hands to guide him. Round and round they went. Then as she looked closer, the image was transforming quickly. It was no longer Vaughn as a little boy with his father. It was a little girl in a pink tutu. And her mother was teaching her how to dance. She could feel a tear welling up in her eyes as she watched on. She hadn’t thought about her mother for awhile now. She thought she would have moved on by now. She thought that she wouldn’t feel this sad every time she remembered how abruptly her mother had been taken away from her. She was so young.
“ I remember my mother teaching me ballet when I was only five,” Vaughn looked at her through the corner of his eye and saw the nostalgic look on her face. “ I used to watch her dance and thought she was an angel she so was so graceful.” He saw that she was staring into space and half smiling. He then turned to stare at the same open space that she was and tried to see him and his dad. They stayed standing and staring. Each down their own memory path to a time when they were innocent and happy. A time when their guardians were there to teach them and protect them.
His thoughts are disrupted when he hears a sniffle. She is crying softly. She tried to hold the tears in, but they rolled down her cheek anyway. She lifts her free hand to wipe the tears away. That’s when he notices that he still had her other hand in his grip. He squeezed her captured hand gently, and she smiles again.
“ I’m sorry…” she quickly apologizes. “ I just thought about my mother…she died when I was six. She missed my first ballet recital.”
“ Sydney, I…”
“ It’s okay. I’m really past it now. I have wonderful memories of what a loving mother she was and that should be enough. It’s just that sometimes I wonder what she would think of me now. She’s probably disappointed that I didn’t become a ballerina,” she lets her dimples show in a big smile. “ What would she say if she knew I was a spy for the CIA?” she chuckles to herself.
“ Well…I don’t plan to do this forever. So she shouldn’t worry. I think she would be happy to know that I am studying to be an English teacher, just like her. When she died, I read some of her writing and it inspired me to be an English teacher.” She didn’t know how good it would feel to share this. She turns her head to face him to find that he is looking at her intently.
“ What…” she asks quietly. “ Do I sound like a nut case?”
“ No…” he furrows his eyebrows. “ you sound…amazing…” Now it was his turn to wonder where his words came from. “ I mean, I wouldn’t be able to go to graduate school and do your day job as well.”
“ I’m sure you could…if you wanted to.”
“ I don’t know,” he shakes his head. “ But I guess I’m doing what I knew I would be doing since I was eight.”
Sydney Bristow couldn’t believe her ears. He knew he was going to be a spy when he was eight? She didn’t know if she wanted to do it when she was nineteen when that recruiting agent approached her.
“ How did you know at eight that you wanted to a CIA agent?”
“ How did you know at six that you wanted to be an English teacher?” She doesn’t understand at first.
“ Because my mother was…” then her gaze fall from his face to the inscription carved on the hard stone. She reads the year of death and understands. This hero of the country died and left a wife and eight year old son behind.
“ Vaughn…I had no idea that your father. That’s why you decided to join?”
He knew he shouldn’t say anymore because he might reveal too much, but the way she was looking at him. Her genuine expression made him feel that it was alright to tell her. He gave in to her questioning eyes.
“ Yeah. My dad died in the field. I wanted to continue what he was doing…that’s why I signed up. When I was eight, they didn’t tell us any details. When I joined, I asked about him and his assignment, but it was all top confidential files. His death has always been something of a mystery in my life. I have always wanted to know what happened. Who killed him. Why exactly. They tried to feed me lies and explanations, but I saw right through them… But my search hasn’t gotten me anywhere except for a life of more lies and secrets. Isn’t life ironic?”
She couldn’t even speak. Her whole life, her mother’s death had affected every aspect of her being. Her hopes, her fears, her motivation in school. Now, she is learning that HE has gone through the same. And even worse because his father was murdered. She held on to his hand tighter to show her support.
“ If you need…I can help you with your search,” He was grateful for her considerate offer. But she shouldn’t be dragged into this.
“ You don’t need to,”
“ I want to. I understand about losing someone that dear to you at a young age. If I didn’t know that my mother died in a car accident, I would want to find out more .”
“ Thanks,” he gave her a weak smile.
All of a sudden, they hear some gurgling noise. Sydney quickly removes her hand from his and covers her stomach in embarrassment. She gives him a sheepish look. “ You left before dinner…my stomach blames you,”
He gives her a laugh. “I apologize deeply to your stomach. I’m sorry that I missed out on your cooking. I’m sure it would have been delightful.”
“ Oh yes definitely. I’m quite the chef,” she flashes him her dimples again. “ But don’t worry. I have feeling you’ll be getting a taste of it in the future.”
“ I hope so.” They look at each other and a new feeling hangs over them. Friendship? Trust? They are no longer complete strangers. Far from it, if they really thought about it. Tonight, they shared a part of themselves with each other that they never told anyone else and came out more at peace. They could both relate to each other’s losses in the past. They were now connected beyond simply as co-workers.