Anon, Anon

It’s all about Sydney. Except for when it’s not. [Will/Vaughn]

Warning: If you can’t tell by the pairing up there, this is slash. Odd, non-specific, almost not-slash, but if you have a problem with that, there are plenty of stories floating around here which you may find more to your taste. Spoilers through the end of season two.

Thanks go out to Jenny-O, for being kind enough to beta. Jen, for giving me a smack or two when I needed it. Archival: My site (www.doyourthing.org/cherry), the ASA, and anyone who asks.

Anon, Anon

They find a cat -- orange and white, with ragged ears -- gingerly picking its way through the shattered remains of the glass door. It may be the sole companion of the old man who lives one block over, in the stately house with peeling shutters. Maybe it prowled the alleys in the dark and the wet, until it sensed an opening into the warmth. It may have wandered over from the house across the street, the one with the neatly trimmed lawn and straggling flowers. It may belong to the girl down the street, who sits in an empty house while her parents are away at work, tying bonnets tight over its head until only the pink nose peers out, and attempting to feed it tea out of empty china.

Cats and crime scenes do not mix. They will toss it out when things are settled, later. After they have rushed down the hall, broken glass sticking to the sole of their uniformly black shoes. After they find the shattered coffee table in a broken room, blood stains on the pillar in the kitchen. After a rookie almost trips over a woman with three bullets in her; and after this same rookie, rushing to the washroom to be sick, finds a reporter bobbing in a bath tub. Blood on his face and the steady drip, drip, drip, as it flows from a knife wound to the white stained ceramic.

Closer inspection will reveal spent bullet cartridges and a knife in the sink. Bloodied mirror, a gun beneath each bed, IDs with the same faces but different names, and scuffs on the carpet from the dragging heels of a body hauled elsewhere.

There is a pool of melted ice cream by an overturned cardboard container, and it is here that they will finally find the cat, lapping discreetly at the sticky, opaque puddle. An officer -- not the same rookie, but a veteran who’s seen this scene too many times -- tosses it out into the alley without preamble, without thought as to its owners.

You will read all this in the reports written by the men who cordoned the apartment off with bright yellow tape, who chalk-lined the body and discovered, to their surprise, that they weren’t too late to staunch the blood filling the tub. You will have to read it because by the time you get there, leaving a trail of rubber halfway up the sidewalk, Jack will be blocking the door, trying to explain to you with words that you have to leave. When this doesn’t work, his fist will explain it quite clearly to the side of your head.

***

Fifteen stitches. Fifteen hurried, imprecise stitches. He will wear the scar. They needed to close the wound, to seal it quickly so that all his life didn’t slip out through the blemish.

You aren’t there when they piece him back together.

Sydney would have been.

When he finally wakes, it is four days later. Low rustle of fabric and paper shoes, the steady hum of machines. Surrounded by white-masked nurses with clinically styled hair tucked up beneath paper hats. Not a familiar face in the room, and no one with the clearance to speak to him. You slam an informant’s head off the hard-baked road in the slums of Mexico city while he tears his stitches attempting to catapult from bed to get the answers the silent nurses do not know, and the frowning doctor cannot tell him.

Thirty-three days after Sydney disappears, you sit on a park bench in Munich, watching for a flash of brown hair or the purpose in her stride that she can never quite disguise, no matter what her cover. Thirty-three days after Sydney disappears, he blinks sweat out of his eyes and remembers what the wind feels like on his face when he runs while he attempts to walk across the room without his legs buckling. He remembers watching Sydney relearning how to use a pen after her mother blew out her shoulder, and does not fall.

You break a nose here and there, slamming faces into the brick walls that always seem to come at the end of every lead you follow. He follows paper trails and streams of information on a company laptop before he is even allowed out of bed. When you finally check in through e-mail, you find a list of names, locations, weaknesses, and suggestions on how to exploit them.

You wonder if Dr. Barnett knows just how creative Will can be.

***

You’ve always known you’d have to go back. You pictured a triumphant return -- Sydney nestled deep in your arms, a high-five from Weiss as you reluctantly surrender her to Will’s tight embrace and Jack’s cool but grateful eyes. Instead, you are out of leads, out of time, and Kendall has finally stopped threatening to cut off your resources and actually gone and done it.

You cross paths with Jack once, in Bermuda, and watch from the shadows as he exits a building you had been casually sneaking up on. It explodes shortly thereafter. He does not turn his head in your direction, or nod as he passes, but you find a note pinned to your door in the morning. “She isn’t here,” is all it says. The knife is driven deep into the cheap wooden paneling, and the script on the faded yellow paper belongs to Irina Derevko.

You sit on the sagging bed, flipping the knife between your fingers and listening to the whine of the failing air conditioner. The street below shimmers in the heat, and you stare down, searching the throng outside and your reflection in the glass for a glimpse of anyone you know.

With the sky on fire against the coming seventy-second night, red and orange light straining through the window to stain your skin and dance off the blade of the knife, you book a flight back to LA.

***

With your window rolled down and your elbow resting in the empty space, you listen to the gentle hum of the crickets and palm leaves rustling in the wind. Across the grass, in the apartment, diffused by distance and drawn curtains, a single light is on. It is the only focal point you can draw on which distracts you from the ghost resting her head on your shoulder.

The release of the car door is deafening. Passenger side, front. There’s a gun in your hand before the thought has even registered.

You pretend your hand doesn’t shake.

There’s the rasp of blue jeans on seat fabric, and Will slides himself through Sydney’s ghost as if he doesn’t even see it. Drapes himself across the front seat. He spares a single, disinterested glance for the gun at his head, and spreads his arms across the back of the seat.

It is the first time you have seen him since he was released from physical therapy. There is almost nothing to him, you realize in shock. He seems *thin* somehow, despite the muscles corded along arms left bare by his ripped t-shirt. He drapes one hand out the window and tangles the other in his hair. His eyes have dark hollows beneath them.

“It was a closed casket funeral,” he finally says. “Francie’s. Her family wanted -- they didn’t know. They couldn’t know. I told them -- I told them one of the bullets took her in the head. She didn’t feel it.”

There is a loud retort, and you realize that it is because you dropped the gun you were no longer aware you were holding.

“It’s the not knowing,” he says.

You’ve never been any good at this. Sydney would know what to say. You work so hard to remember that you are not the only one that has lost her, but you forget to remember that she was not the only one lost.

“There’s coffee inside,” he says, climbing out of the car.

The kitchen light is the one you could see spilling out the living room window. When you go to hang your coat, you realize there is already one covering the rack. Black coat, a woman’s. The lines are familiar. You brush past it quickly when you realize it was the one Sydney was wearing when you dropped her off outside three months ago.

The cleanup crew boarded up the broken glass doors and removed the pieces of furniture, but not much else. There is an empty space where the coffee table used to be. The couch is covered in a nest of blankets and pillows removed from beds you only assume Will cannot sleep in. You want to say something about it to him, as he putters mechanically around the kitchen, but Sydney was always the one with all the words.

You head for the cupboard for a mug as he pulls the pot from the stove, but freeze when you see that of the pillars running through the middle of the room, one is still stained with his blood. In the harsh light it is brown and seems to glisten still, tainting the rest of the room. There are three plates set meticulously at the table. Three and a half months’ dust dulls the glint of the silverware.

You pull a go-cup from the cupboard instead, as you watch him carefully. It is not the circles beneath his eyes that are hollow, you realize with a sudden clarity as he fills your cup. It is his eyes themselves. Three and a half months have not passed for him, because he doesn’t know where else to be outside this moment.

You disengage the pot from his hands and press the go-cup into them instead. His fingers are lean and cold, as if they have been worn away at by glacier run-off. He looks at his reflection in the coffee without really seeing it. You pour the rest of the pot down the drain, and lead him to your car. His detached eyes burn into your back as you lock the apartment behind you.

You can’t bring yourself to turn off the light.

***

There are two beds in your apartment. Two separate living spaces, almost. The second bed doesn’t have springs that could slit your throat or lumps that crick your neck. A misplaced pillow here, a blanket left over the arm of a chair, a bed always too neatly made, and inside of two weeks you’re sure Will is sleeping on the couch.

You think of the things the psychiatrists pulled from his head, the dreams and the manhandling of his mind, the thing snuggled carefully against his chest (the woman he never had but thought he did), and you don’t wonder that Will can’t sleep in a bed.

***

Since Sydney disappeared, you don’t like your dreams. Something red coating green grass, shards of glass glinting in the moonlight. Flowers floating on a lake, above a swirling mass of brown hair. Ivy crawling over blue-white skin. A severed head (strangely familiar) with blank eyes and mouth open in surprise. You wouldn’t call them nightmares, because a nightmare is a clear sign that there is something psychologically wrong with you, that you lack an essential adaptation mechanism.

So when you wake up in twisted sheets, eyes dry and reminding yourself to breath, you tell yourself that two AM (as it is four in the afternoon somewhere you’ve recently been) brings bad dreams.

Whenever you wake up, after you force your hands to unclench from the sheets, there is coffee. The smell of it, wafting through your apartment, reminds the world to stop spinning.

The first time you smell it, it is foreign and invasive, dark burnt in the midst of silence. There is a pot on your stove when you pad out of your room, blankets from the couch in a heap on the floor. Will’s laptop on the kitchen table, his suede jacket haphazard across the back of a chair, but the man himself not in this place.

Sydney was never here, you realize as you pour yourself a cup of coffee. You sit down in a hard-backed chair and try to figure out how that had happened. The coffee is strong, but you drink without anything to weaken it. She was never here, so maybe that was why she is here now.

Just before three, the apartment door cracks open. Donavon raises his head from his basket in the hall. Will, wet haired and wraithlike, pours himself a cup of coffee. Turning, he sees you in the shadows. Five months ago, he would have yelped in surprise. Now he didn’t seem to have the energy.

He sits beside you, shoes kicked off and feet pulled up onto his seat. He is wearing sweats and running shoes, and you can see the perspiration on his upper lip. His coffee is black as well.

Together you sit there, in the dark, sipping coffee and listening to her ghost.

***

Will’s scars heal better than yours. The knife wound in his side will always brand him, but it is not a red and angry welt, especially considering it was closed twice. It fades and blends, and he wears it well. You have wounds from as far back as Argentina that have not healed as fully.

You have often wondered if you could go back to the people who closed him up so expertly, hand them the pieces of his life, and ask them to put those back together as well.

***

Midnight coffee and two-thirty jogs. You sit with Donavon's head in your lap and a steaming mug in hand while he runs. You sort through lead obtained through private sources (Kendall slammed you behind a desk when you got back, of course. After eight months, they are officially not looking for her any more) while he pounds the pavement.

The Agency offered Will the Senior Analyst’s post when he got back to work. Sorry we almost had you tortured, but we realize now that you weren’t responsible, it was just because your girlfriend was murdered and replaced with a genetic clone who hypnotized and used you. Now that’s she’s as dead as the girl you never had and we’ve given up on your best friend, let’s just kiss and make up, okay?

He was offered it because they had burned bridges to mend. He doesn’t even dignify the offer with an answer, though he knows the job would have been his even had things gone down differently.

Someone, somewhere, feeling keenly the lack of both Bristows, takes the time to realize how well Will adapted to the situations he was thrown into without training. How naturally using a gun came to him, how he was able to avoid a garrote. Someone, somewhere, will arrange for self-defense crash courses for him, and when he takes to them quickly, they will make him an offer he could easily refuse, but doesn’t.

You start putting vitamins and nutrient supplements in with the coffee grounds. They still send you to Dr. Barnett, and Will spends even more time there than you do. Just so they are sure on the frame of mind of a new field agent who should probably not be learning three ways to kill a man with a spork.

Midnight coffee, two-thirty jogs, and training sessions that aren’t over until you’re both bleeding and bruised. You do not speak with Dr. Barnett about any of this. This is the easiest way.

These are the only things that aren’t about *her.* Except for when they are.

***

His life lies around him like a shattered mirror, and he cuts himself on the edges trying to piece it back together. You can’t help him, because he knows better than you where the pieces fit. All you can do is pull the slivers of glass from his hands and wipe the blood away.

He thinks losing her didn’t break you.

You miss her as much as he does. You watch for her on every street corner in every country, search for a glimpse of her in every photo of every crowded street that crosses your desk, but he is right. Losing her didn’t break you.

You were broken long before.

***

At month ten, Will goes missing in Saigon. A mission gone bad, an informant found dead, and two injured agents rescued because he stayed behind.

Kendall won’t let you join the rescue team. The rescue team is blown into small pieces the following week. There is no second rescue team.

There is no demand for ransom, no body with a matching scar fished from the Mekong River. You make the same amount of coffee as always, sit up at midnight and drink to his empty chair. His blankets are folded neatly across the end of your couch, and in the silence he used to fill, you find that Sydney is not the only ghost in your apartment.

The same day they find pieces of Agent Jordan, who led the rescue team, you find yourself pounding the pavement. The moon is new and the wind is cold, and Donavon, wuss that he is, refused to come with you. The cold is good, you discover over the next few nights, because it helps calm the fever. You haven’t done any amount of running in much too long, and your harsh breathing helps to fill the quiet spaces.

Up and down, through parks and under bridges. In the silence, you see him, so you realize that he is probably dead. Eight nights you run. The ninth, you stagger into your apartment, muscles aching and sweat trickling down your back, and trip over a pair of shoes by the door.

Will leans against the counter by the stove, hands wrapped tightly around a steaming mug. There is a cut through his left eyebrow. His wrists are wrapped in gauze through which you can see only a faint speckling of blood, and there is a lot of skin missing from his right forearm. The clothes he is wearing are not his. “You make horrible coffee,” he says.

The dead returned and his ghost will no longer fill the apartment alongside Sydney’s. His face is carefully neutral as you walk purposefully closer. He doesn’t move when you pull the cup from his hands and set it in the sink behind him. Doesn’t flinch as you carefully examine him. The cut through his eyebrow has been well treated, but will still leave a scar.

You notice then that his hands are clenched tightly at the edge of the counter, his fingers turning white. His breath is even but too fast, and it is with no surprise that you realize it fills the silence.

He doesn’t taste like coffee, you realize in the time that follows. You didn’t realize that you expected him to, didn’t realize that you’d even thought of what he’d taste like, yet you’re left searching for a trace of Columbian dark roast. He’s hungry and lean, and his skin burns. He leaves his fingerprints all over you.

You discover every bruise, every cut, and every faded scar after every mission, and you can’t decide if this is everything that is about Sydney, or the only thing that isn’t.

Maybe it just is.

***

Sixteen days, and you were willing to believe Will dead. Three-hundred-twelve, and you still wait for a message from Sydney in the personals circled in papers you find on the curb, in each hang up on your machine.

You lie awake, eyes closed, and listen for morse code in the tapping of the woodpecker outside your window. Will, with breathing even, pretends he is capable of sleeping while in the presence of another person.

The closest you get to a message is ‘spinning and slowly you fall.’

You think you may have been listening to the beating of your heart, or the words Sydney mouths from where she perches on the windowsill.

***

Just before one year, you reach a realization.

Sydney is not coming back.

She is smart and strong, resourceful and clever, and if there was a way for her to get back then she would have found it. Three-hundred-fourty-nine days for her to find her way back home. If she hasn’t found it by now, she will not find it, does not want to find it, or is long beyond finding it.

Maybe she is somewhere, safe, outside this life. Maybe she has a small house with a white picket fence and two cats. Maybe she’s teaching school in a third world country, where the students call her ma’am and there is no need for a door to the one-room school in the omnipresent heat. Maybe she’s drinking wine in Morocco, with a gaggle of girlfriends to shake her back to reality when she stare for too long at the stars or the bustling crowds. Maybe there is an unmarked grave in the Australian outback.

You don’t know, you can’t know, and it’s killing you.

You hand Kendall your resignation, effective for day three-hundred-sixty-five. Weiss helps you clear your desk wordlessly. Your father, Alice, Sydney, Derevko, Sydney again -- he’s covered your back when you can’t think of anything but what’s not in front of you, and he’s offered you a swift kick in the ass more than once, when you’ve been stuck. He knows that you don’t know how to let go and move on. “We’ll miss you, man,” he says as he dumps the last of the boxes into your car. He doesn’t tell you he wishes you’d stay, because he’s never lied to you. He knows as well as you what is necessary.

A clean break.

***

Will doesn’t understand when you leave. He continues to run missions. A new target every time -- nothing to hold on to, nothing to dwell on. Just moving from one distraction to the next, only grateful civilians to remember he was there. He leaves small pieces of broken glass behind him.

In the same burst of recognition which led you to say to Kendall the things you’ve always wanted to say, you realized something else. Will, you remembered. Pouring coffee with empty eyes in an apartment he shared with three ghosts. He didn’t choose to stay.

It’s hard to make a clean break with him on your couch, in your bed, and in your head, but he has nowhere else to be.

Day three-hundred-seventy-five he falls asleep with his head on your pillow. It’s a restless, fitful sleep, and his arm is thrown over his head, but he slumbers. He dreams, forehead creased, but you can’t bring yourself to wake him. Sydney would -- she would wake him and know the right things to say, but you are not Sydney, and neither is he.

This may be all about her. It may be the only thing that isn’t. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but you aren’t her and neither is he, and it may be time to realize that even if this is about her, it is not her.

You let him sleep. In time, the lines etched on his face smooth out and he nestles deep into the blankets. The woodpecker tapping at the power pole outside your window is just a bird. Just a bird. No secret agent spy tool, no last minute perfect endings, just this.

And if he isn’t at peace --

(If there is no peace--)

--he isn’t bleeding.

(There is at least a tourniquet.)

There isn’t anywhere else for him to be. There isn’t any place farther you could run that wouldn’t kill you. There isn’t anywhere he could go where he would take the ghosts with him, or leave them behind completely. This is the only place that either of you can be.

So this just is.