Shades of Blue

I don't own Spy-Barbie and co. or anything resembling the Matrix. Should anyone happen to be interested in archival permission (or if pigs should happen to fly), just drop me a line and I'll say yes. Props go out to LA, who asked for this.

Shades of Blue

She stares at the calendar perched on her desk. One of those standup, month-a-flip calendars, with Supergirl staring right back at her from the corner. Accusing. Will gave it to her for Christmas, grinning wickedly at her over top of his eggnog. She's not exactly in a line of work where writing things down is encouraged ("Note to self: Password for the meeting of international super spies on biological weapons is 'Snafu'") but she keeps it all the same. Usually, it makes her smile.

There are three days circled in red, one in navy blue, one in green. Navy is safe, navy is good. Navy, she spoke with Will. He seemed distant, distracted, but she saw him, touched his arm. Green, she realized she hadn't seen him, spoken to him. She couldn't get a hold of him. The three red are sandwiched between the navy and the green, and it is on any of these days that he could have disappeared.

Men in dark suits move efficiently and silently through the operations center. One sits stoically at a computer strewn desk (name plate reading 'Finkman'), fingers flying almost too quickly for the eye to follow as green and black flash across the screen. Marshall hovers uneasily, the more precious of his gadgets caught up to his chest. His stammered cautions and advice go unnoticed.

Warm hands drop to her shoulders, and Sydney starts. Vaughn smiles tiredly as she looks up at him, squeezes her shoulders once, reassuringly, as he leans against her desk. "We'll find him," he says, and all she can do is nod tiredly from where she slumps in her chair. "We'll find him."

"Is it just me, or is there something creepy about our house guests?" Weiss asks as he straggles in. His jacket is draped over his arm, and he drops it with disgust to Sydney's desk, covering the calendar.

She shakes her head as she loses sight of it, and starts to surface like a diver from the depths of apathy.

"What?" Weiss asks, misconstruing the shake of her head. "You guys don't see it? I mean, it's not like I don't appreciate the extra help in the Will-hunt, but I'd just like to know what they're doing here."

What they know: Will was hot on the trail of something he'd been hunting for a while. Something big, something huge. Something with an insanely convoluted path that refused to leave a trail of evidence. What they don't know: What exactly, or even vaguely, this 'something' was. He forgot to mention it to the CIA.

They don't know what Will was working on, what trouble he could be in, what it is that he's gotten himself into. They don't even know exactly how long he's been missing, but there are men with no first names tearing the operations center apart.

Sydney blames herself. If she'd paid more attention. If she'd been less distracted. If she'd been at home instead of in El Salvador. She knows, she knows that Will does that sometimes. He's done it before, disappeared. Sometimes he just needs a day to clear his head. She's not his mother and he's never wanted her to be, but she can't stop the gnawing voice inside her head.

"Something slightly *off?* I'll say," Vaughn jerks his head towards the emotionless dark blurs dispersed through the huge room. "There's something fanatical about all of them," he says with a frown. "Like there's nothing they'd rather be doing than what they are. Like there's no task more important in the entire world than the one they're performing."

There's a pause. "Well, yeah," Weiss finally says, arms crossed. "There is that whole 'way too efficient emotionless superiority' thing. What I was going to say was something about how they must all take an oath at Corey Hart's grave to wear their sunglasses at night, but yours is better."

"Is Corey Hart dead?" Vaughn asks with a frown.

"Does it matter?"

Kendall's voice cuts across the room. He's organizing even more loudly than usual, and everyone, surely everyone can hear the stress. Sydney rests her chin on her hands, and watches the Agents Jones, Brown, and Johnson survey the progress board from behind the mirrors that spit back their surroundings. Their expressions, she realizes suddenly, are as identical as their suits and ties. Even more suddenly, she realizes she's only been assuming they're looking at the progress boards. With their eyes hidden like that, they could be watching Jack as he stands to the side, his best poker face in place. They could be watching the new blonde intern as she bends over to pick up the papers she's dropped. They could be returning her gaze with equal weight.

She turns her head so that they can't see her lips. "I don't trust them," is all she tells Vaughn and Weiss.

*

An abandoned factory in Detroit. Weiss stays outside, soaking up the sun on a splintered wooden bench. His gun is hidden between the folds of the paper he pretends to read as he watches the door.

The first level is a muddle: collapsing stacks of water-stained boxes and grimy walls. They sprint through it quickly, because the sole set of footprints in the dust leads right to the stairs. One pair of footprints. Going in, but not leaving. Vaughn found a source who pointed them in this general direction, and Weiss traded a donut with a homeless man for an eyewitness account of a man matching Will's description entering this building two weeks ago.

The second floor, they are not so lucky. From the landing, they see all traces of the dust are gone, replaced instead by a maze of filing cabinets. A quick glance inside confirms that they are indeed full of files. A labyrinth of information and misinformation, and Sydney can see Will spending two weeks sorting through it all.

Vaughn nods at her, a sharp inclination of his head over top of his drawn gun. "I'll search this level," he says, and she sprints up the stairs to the third story. There is something akin to panic brewing in her. They are not supposed to be here. Agent Jones is supposed to be in charge of the investigation into Will's disappearance now, but she does not trust him. She does not believe in his good intentions, and he is dogging her tracks when he is not that one bare step ahead of her small band of intrepid personal investigators.

At the top of the stairs, she pauses, takes a deep breath. This is the final floor, she reminds herself. Search it, and get out.

She doesn't realize how sure she was that Will would be there until she kicks the door open and bursts through, gun drawn, only to find it completely deserted.

The floor is a single room. Bare, clean-swept concrete floors, pillars tinged with rust extending to the tin roof overhead. The windows are high and miraculously unbroken, the late afternoon light crisscrossing the air in streaks. The noise as the door ricochets off the wall echoes loudly. There is an old fashioned phone hanging on the wall, an ornate rotary affair -- the door barely misses it.

She searches the room again, but it is still vacant. She curses as she stalks over to the only furnishings in the room, gun still drawn. Two worn red leather chairs face each other as a broken mirror reflects a hundred images of the room. She sees, in one of the larger pieces, something cerulean on the floor behind her.

Crouching, she holds it up to the light to examine it. The light filters through slightly. Gel capsule, bright and semi-opaque; no different than a hundred prescriptions assigned every day in the city of Detroit alone, but maybe Marshall can turn something up.

She freezes with her hand half way to her pocket, still crouching, when the cold barrel of a gun is pressed to the back of her neck.

"I think you know the drill here," a man says, almost pleasantly, and she inclines her head slightly. Her gun is still in her other hand, so she slowly leans forwards to place it on the ground. Slowly, slowly, closer to the concrete, and she snaps around, elbow hurtling towards a wrist that just isn't there any more. Her gun hits the ground as her arm goes numb, and the gun is now firmly pressed to her forehead. "Not too shabby," a dark-haired man says, smiling. "You're good."

She didn't even see him move.

"Where is he?" she asks, eyes fixed firmly on where his should be. All she can see is her own reflection in his sunglasses.

"Sydney Bristow, I take it." He inclines his head, and offers her his free hand. She takes it, and as he hauls her to her feet she switches her grip, goes for his gun.

Only to find herself five feet back with her ears ringing. She doesn't remember how she got there, but when she touches her mouth a single trickle of blood coats her fingers. The gun is still fixed firmly on her, and the man has lost his smile. "Leave it alone," he tells her as he sweeps his sunglasses off. His eyes are tired, so very tired.

"If you know who I am, then you know that I can't do that." She works her jaw. It is sore.

The gun disappears in one smooth motion into the recesses of his long black coat. She is not fooled, though. As inhumanly quick as he has proven himself to be, he will have it out again before he even properly needs it. "Whoever you are, just tell me where he is, and this will go much better for you," she demands.

"He's somewhere safe," the man says, but something in the set of his mouth lets her know that this is not the whole truth. "Neo."

"What?"

"My name is Neo."

Years of training, and she thought she managed her facial expressions fairly well. Apparently not well enough, however, because the man laughs. "I see you know who I am after all."

"Thomas Anderson. You know you're on the CIA's hit list, right? One of a select few individuals they'd give us a medal for putting a bullet in."

"If you could put a bullet in me, I'd give you the medal myself."

"What did you want with Will?"

"It's not so much what I wanted with him, as what he wanted with us."

There is no need to ask who 'us' is – it is at the top of every dossier on with his name. Morpheus and Trinity are almost as wanted as Neo himself. "What did he want with you, then?" she asks, mouth dry, because if Will is caught up with these three (as he seems to be) it is no wonder the operations center is full of men in black.

"The truth," he says simply, and she fights the urge to hit him. Or try again, at the least. Her track record in that respect has been less than impressive.

"The truth?" she squeezes out through a clenched jaw. "The *truth?*" A thousand lunatics with a hundred thousand weapons proclaim to know the truth; and as far as she's seen, they do a fair share of the evil in the world. All to spread their certain truths. Will is too curious and too wonderfully, damnably tenacious for that, to fall for some pat promise of the revelation of the world's mysteries.

The phone on the wall rings. Neo turns his head towards it, and she dives across the floor as the second peal fills the vast room. Her hand brushes cool metal in the silence, and she is vaulting back to her feet as the third tone fades into oblivion. "Don't move," she hisses, careful to stay well out of his reach.

He doesn't say 'easy now,' or attempt to convince her to put the gun down. He doesn't even make an aborted gesture towards his own weapon. He merely regards the gun leveled at him with more than a trace of amusement on his face. "Don't move," she repeats, unnecessarily because he doesn't move, just stands there, perfectly still and somehow still perfectly in charge.

From the side, a hand clamps down on the barrel of her gun. She throws an elbow. The hand retains its grip, but the body it belongs to slides out of the way.

"Hello, Sydney," Irina smiles.

"What kept you?" Neo asks as Sydney blinks.

"We had to get up to broadcast depth."

"You've been briefed?"

"What do you think I was doing while I waited? You may be the one, but I've been doing this a hell of a lot longer than you have."

Sydney watches the exchange, back and forth. They seem to have forgotten she's there. "Okay, still here," she says, wrenching her weapon from beneath her mother's hand. "Remember me? I'm the one with the gun, so will one of you kindly explain exactly *what* is going on here?"

"Will was looking for something, Sydney," Irina says simply.

Shifting her gun, Sydney motions them to stand together. "We kind of figured that part out already. What we didn't know, though, was that he'd managed to get himself caught up with two of the most dangerous factions on the planet."

"Two?" Neo asks with a raised eyebrow.

Sydney looks at her mother, then at Neo; sees the similarity in their postures and the aura of knowledge and control they both wear. "Don't tell me that you and he –"

Irina nods.

"This is about Rambaldi?" Sydney is really beginning to hate that man.

"In a way," Neo says.

"In a *way?*" she slowly repeats.

"Yes," Irina says. "In a way."

"I'm sorry," Sydney says, very evenly, hands tightening on the stock of her gun, "but that's not good enough."

"Will came to us, following a trail of truths," Neo tells her. "Rambaldi provided some of these. We provided the others."

"So – what? You lured him with a trail of truths and questions because you knew breadcrumbs wouldn't work?"

"We didn't ensnare him," Irina says. "We provide a road to the truth, for those who are strong enough to take it."

The faintest trace of a smile slips across Neo's face. "Or for those too stubborn to back down. Tippin made the choice. He made it at every fork in the road."

"I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I heard it from him," says Sydney, keeping the gun steady between the two.

"I'm afraid that's not possible right now."

"Why?"

"Because he's not ready. Not quite yet. Being set free, it requires a period of readjustment."

Cold. "You -- set him free?" She feels a snarl building somewhere deep inside. She knows her euphemisms.

"Soft, now," Irina assuages. "He's alive."

"If I find out that you --"

"We didn't harm him," she says, inclining her head towards Neo. "We both went through what he's going through, once upon a time."

"I find it very hard to trust an incapacitating truth that you won't share," Sydney forces out between teeth that want to clench.

It is Neo who answers her, face impassive. "You haven't walked the road. It would make no sense to you."

"Try me," Sydney snaps. "You may find me to be quicker on the uptake than you thought."

"He's right," her mother says. "You wouldn't understand. Not now, and by trying you'd endanger us all. Can you trust me, Sydney?"

"What are you asking? For me to help cover up the disappearance of one of my best friends, when I don't even know if he's safe –"

"He's as safe as he can be."

"—to aid and abet two of the most wanted criminals around, when they won't even tell me about this 'truth' I'm concealing?"

Irina sighs, shakes her head. "You find your truth through people. Will finds the truth for people. For him, it's worth it."

"But for me, it wouldn't be?"

"Sydney, you're needed here. If you knew – if we told you and it didn't break you, then you'd still be needed but you wouldn't be able to be here to do anything about it."

"You might want to be careful before you label the criminals in this story," is all Neo says.

"Oh?" Sydney laughs, and the sound cuts like glass. "So you're not really criminals, now? What are you? Freedom fighters? I have international laws that say otherwise."

"And you have no idea how inconsequential those laws really are," he says. Starts to say something more, then stops, head cocked to one side, listening to something distant with a frown. Sydney realizes with a start that her mother's eyes have finally left her and are now fixed on one of the few people who surpass her on the CIA's hit list. "Agents," he says. His gun is out again, faster than Sydney's eyes can follow. Irina has a Colt in hand, her eyes dark and cloudy.

Sydney's comm unit crackles. It's Weiss's voice on the other end. "They're here," he says, "Jones, Brown, and Johnson just down the block. They appeared out of nowhere, guys, I swear it, and they're heading your way."

Her mother flitters to a window, peers down the street. "If your people don't leave right now, they're dead," Irina says. "Those men are more dangerous than you could ever know."

Something in her mother's voice scares her – the matter-of-fact tone, the blank statement of fact, scares her. "Get out of here," she hisses through the comm.

Weiss' voice returns. "Sure you don't want me to distract them with a yo-yo trick?"

"Just get out of here. I'm right behind you."

Vaughn breaks in. "I'm not leaving without you."

"I have another way out."

"I'm not --"

"GO!" she commands, closing the link to his further protests. Looks around the room, and doesn't see the exit she assured Vaughn she had.

Neo nods at her in approval.

"What?" she snarls.

"You would have been great."

"Look, we're trapped in a room with three men I've taken an irrational aversion to rapidly cornering us, so cut the cloak and dagger crap. Don't say things you're not willing to explain, and help me work on a way of getting us out of here."

"Sydney—" Irina starts.

"Look, just –" she pauses, watching Neo prowl the room.

"*Sydney,*" her mother says. Imperatively. "Sydney, you have to listen to me. These men, they don't work for the American government. They don't answer to any international power, any organization. There are no checks or balances on their behavior, and they are not hampered by empathy or concern for any man, woman or child. If they find Will, he will die."

"If they find Will, that'll be the least of our problems," Neo says as he continues to prowl the room, ending up, as always, by the broken mirror and red chairs. "They're looking for all of us." He experimentally throws a punch at the shattered glass. His hand rebounds back at him. "Not you, so much. But the rest of us. They're looking for the same answers that Will sacrificed everything for, and if they find them they will destroy us all."

"Sydney, there's no time." Irina says, catching her daughter's eyes and refusing to release them. "I will swear to you by anything you demand that Will is safe, and that the only way to keep him that way is to ensure that these Agents don't find him."

"That's what this is all about," Neo says, inclining his head towards the chairs, the mirrors. "We cleaned this all up after we got Will out, but they're running a reconstruction. We were a part of this, so we can't destroy it this time. They'll be able to track us from this."

Sydney takes a deep breath, closes her eyes to break her mother's gaze. She holds that breath for a hundred years before finally letting it escape in one whooshing breath. She doesn't understand this, but her mother looked her in the eyes and swore. From the broken mirror, a hundred Sydneys look back at her. Every reflection is distorted slightly from the piece of the whole that holds it, and each is a person she could have been or could still be because of the choices she makes. "Did he find it?" she asks. The only thing each Sydney has in common is the desire to keep Will safe. "His truth, your truth, Rambaldi's truth. Did he find it?"

Irina nods.

"Yeah, he found it," Neo says, running his hands through his hair. "But with that one, knowing the truth only brings more questions."

She smiles. "That's my Will," she whispers, raising the gun. That's her Will. It is because of her that he was brought into this life, and if he has found his own way out, she owes him that chance. Each face in the mirror is impassive as she brings it to bear, and her mother nods.

She flips the gun in her grip, and brings the butt crashing into the mirror. The pieces spring together for a second, forming a whole, and she has a second of forever to see, through the reflection, that none of them are really there. Black everywhere, and the walls run green with streams of numbers. The glass shatters, shards exploding from the frame. Back turned, hands covering her face, she crouches, ignoring the blood slowly winding through the fingers on her gun hand.

Glass covers the floor, and her mother settles carefully beside her, and there they are, mother and daughter framed by red leather chairs and sparkling shards. Irina gently disengages her daughter's hands from her face, pulling her gun from her hand and turning her face upwards. There are smears of blood beneath her dark hair.

"There's no *time,*" Irina shakes her head. "There just isn't enough time."

"They're in the building," Neo calls from where he stands by the landing, gun in hand. If Sydney didn't know better, she'd almost say he was guarding the phone on the wall.

Sydney feels something cool pressed into the palm her mother pulled the gun from, feels her fingers wrapped tightly around it. She opens her hand to find a sapphire sparkling against the blood pooling there. The pill, she realizes with little surprise.

"You can't remember," her mother says softly. "As long as you remember, you're in danger. Will's in danger. We're all in danger. You can't tell what you don't know. They have no compassion and no stopping point, but they despise exercises in futility. They won't try to extract what you don't know."

"Hurry up!" Neo calls. "They're in the stairs."

"You're needed here," Irina reminds her softly.

Sydney nods.

"You're strong, but you will break. They won't try to extract what you don't know," she whispers, gentling brushing glass from her daughter's hair. "Please."

Please. Sydney closes her eyes. "Make sure Will never stops asking questions," she says. "Even if it does look like someone's about to strangle him."

"I will," Irina promises, looking away from her daughter, towards the door and the footsteps rapidly growing louder. She shifts Sydneys' gun in her hand, chambering a round as she rises. "I love you," Irina says just before the door flies open, and Jones (or is it Brown) spills into the room with a burst of gunfire.

Sydney closes her eyes. Drops the sapphire pill, slick with her own blood, onto her tongue and lets it slide down her throat.

It cuts.

She sleeps.

*

Sydney dreams.

She dreams Will sits at the foot of her bed and tells her everything will be fine. Trench coat open over faded jeans and sunglasses shoved on top of his head; he tells her not to worry about him. She can't help it, she tries to tell him.

He says: Know what you believe and believe what you know, and I promise not to worry about you, either.

It's really not fair that he should be worrying about her, so when he looks at her imploringly, she nods: I'll try.

She can't promise, but she'll try.

He'll try, too. Cobalt eyes bright, he laughs: You've always been trusting, haven't you, despite it all? Question it. Question all of it, for me?

For him, she will.

Somewhere, a phone rings. Waking, dreams of glass and blood fade, leaving her room empty and a faint impression at the foot of her bed.

The light filtering through her blinds is warm, patches of sky swimming tantalizingly through the slats. Glimpses caught of it are like ocean waves beating against her window. The blankets are heavy and comforting about her still form. They shift about her as she stretches, eyes on the summer horizon, and she realizes something.

Peace. She feels at peace.