Title: Graffiti
Author: darkstar
Email: clone347@aol.com
Archive: feel free, just let me know
Codes: S/V relationship, angst, character death.
Spoilers: nothing big enough to count.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If I owned them, I'd give Vaughn a hug. He needs one. But they aren't mine so there goes that idea...

Author's Notes: Response to Cover Me December Challenge and to a challenge sent to me by my partner in crime and SuperBeta, Airebella. If anyone would like to see the elements of either challenge, they are included after the story. Share the love.

Summary: Sydney and Vaughn attempt to reconstruct their lives after barely surviving SD-6's discovery of their identities.

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Graffiti (1/2)

by darkstar
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Someday I will have to tell you the story behind this picture:

A woman standing in the kitchen of a deserted apartment, standing by the window, standing by the air conditioner even though it is winter because she wants to feel the air press her skirt against her legs. She is watching a man in a gray overcoat enter a taxi cab, not one of those yellow cabs that pull up to the curb like a pointless smiles, but the more somber black-on-white variety. "I never loved you," she whispers, into the place on the glass where his reflection would have appeared, if he had been pinned to the right angle of light. "I never loved you," she whispers, into emptiness, into space. Behind her the wall is covered with random words: rocket, solomon, indigo, wrinkle, lip. Crevasse. Piano, rain, saffron, newspaper. Heart. And other such insanities. The meaning of these words is a secret she will leave in the kitchen, not entirely out of place amidst the unwashed plates, the cracked coffee mugs, the pile of children's crayons and finger paints. She reaches for the coat she bought just last week, a second-hand Army coat, heavy with its wool and wooden buttons, but leaves it draped over the windowsill, over the place where her reflection would appear, if she had anything left to reflect. Her only reflection, now, is the wall and the lost, beautiful graffiti. She leaves the room.

Someday, yes, I will have to tell you this story. We will sit at the hot-pink Formica counter of the restaurant where I wore out three pairs of tennis shoes as a waitress, and we will order the coffee (strong as ink) and as you ask me what happened to us all, my fingers will move in distraction across my napkin. The words they trace will appear to you as nonsense. After the last memory of the last word, I will tell you this:

The greatest tragedy of surviving is that we are forced to live in the aftermath of those who survived with us.

But how could I make you understand this?

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.rocket. For those three months, my name was Sadie.

I dyed my hair raven purple in a gas station bathroom, the cheap color staining my hands and the collar of the cotton dress bought at Wal-Mart two cities ago, and decided that we-- myself and the man who refused to speak-- needed a place to stay. One that did not involve permanent VACANCY signs and rented mattresses that smelled of booze and violence.

(And of something else that neither of us wanted to mention: half-lit, stale cigarettes, a lingering scent of burning that reminded us that of the night that the skin of his back and shoulders stank like bacon left too long in the microwave. It stank until I could taste, between my tongue and my teeth, the exact places where they had passed fire over his skin, again and again, asking him to give them his name. So he could give them my father's name. So he could give them my name.)

In those days, I still had that taste in my mouth to wake me up at night, to send me to my knees in front of the toilet trying to get the ash out of my stomach. All the while trying not to notice him, out of the corner of my eye, standing at the door watching me, without revulsion or pity, without sound. He had abandoned words-- intentionally, so no one else could drag them out of him-- and so he said nothing, but he stood at just the angle so that I could see the edges of the burn scars along his clavicle, along the slope of his shoulder. He made sure of this. In those days, I had yet to figure out whether to embrace him or slap him or put my hand across his lips and wring syllables from him, just to break his silence.

Sadie, fortunately, had no such dilemmas. The Wal-Mart dress and the purple hair worked well enough to land a job at the U-Turn Diner, where she was paid six dollars an hour to take orders from drunk truckers and the occasional wary but starving motorist who was hungry enough to ignore the door that was always falling off and the Pepto-Bismol pink counter that was always covered in a fine film of grease. Sadie, being nothing more than a trailer park gal from Memphis, didn't mind the fact that the boys liked to call her sweetheart and baby, who tried to stare up her (too-short) uniform when she walked back to the kitchen to fill their order. Sadie just laughed around her wad of grape gum and pocketed her tips. If she thought she could get more cash, she'd tell them about the jerk that left her in this dump, with a two-year old brat and no child support. She'd learned this went over well, but not as well as the inadvertent flash of skin when she bent over to tie her shoes. A twenty dollar tip was a twenty dollar tip. Sadie was perfectly at home in that world, from the Johnny Cash classics she hummed right down to the smiley face sticker on the tennis shoes that always seemed to be wearing out.

(I hated it. All of it, especially the sticky sweat in the creases of my arms and my elbows and across the bridge of my nose, the kind that was nothing like the sweat of dodging bullets-- clean, sharp salt-- but more like the feeling that I smelled batter-dipped and deep fried. I never got used to that. It left me with a perpetual urge to dislocate the jaw of the men who talked as if I were a cut-out from one of the dirty magazines in the bathroom. Or, even better, to sucker punch the women who would walk into the diner in their off-brand high heels and smudge their cigarettes with fuchsia lipstick and whisper-- just loud enough so I could hear as I poured their coffee-- that it was obvious from the cut of myuniform that I was the resident whore.)

After eight o'clock, Sadie disappeared somewhere between the bus stop and the steps to eroded apartment building. I would have to walk up the stairs alone and wonder what I would find when I opened the door. What new silences he would create: the silences left by shattered dishes, chairs broken against the bathroom sink, graffiti-- profanity, or random, nonsense words-- sprayed over the kitchen walls, in all capital letters. Amazing, how he could do all this without opening his mouth. I would like to say that every night, as I rounded the last staircase that would lead to our naked little apartment, our defiant last stand, I prayed he would be alive. But that is not true. There were just as many evenings when I knew that it would be easier on both of us if I opened the door and found him hanging from the fan.

He never asked me where I worked, although I am sure he knew because once he followed me and stood outside the window and watched, without revulsion, without pity, as I tried to wipe a beer stain from my skirt while balancing two trays of french fries. By the time I got outside to ask him why he had followed me (how much he had seen?) he was gone. I was angry with him, not for following me, but for leaving so nonchalantly. I still remembered a different version of him, the one that would have never let me humiliate myself before him in that manner. Who would have insisted I was worth more than six dollars an hour. I suppose by that time, both of us had decreased in value, although he must have felt he owed me something. That night, as soon as I walked into the door, before I could even pull the elastic from my ponytail, unlace my tennis shoes, he took my hand and showed me the latest word he had spray-painted onto the wall in my absence. (I always wondered where he got the paint. As far as I knew, he never left the apartment.) Glaring, block letters.

RoCKeT.

I blew my bangs out of my face with a sigh and flicked a piece of leftover french fry from my sleeve. "Don't play games with me, Vaughn. Or whoever you think you are today. My feet are about to explode...."

He shoved a piece of paper covered with ink and memories, into my hands. He looked beyond me, at some point over my shoulder, with the same clumsy avoidance of my face that I saw on the motorists when they tipped me extra and told me it was for my kid. His left forefinger traced circles around the cigarette-shaped scar in the hollow of his throat as he waited for me to read the answers to the questions I had never asked him. I already knew the answers, knew where they led and who had already died because of them. But I read it nonetheless. I made it a practice to take whatever pieces of him that he offered me, whenever he offered them. He liked to keep me on starvation rations.

RoCkeT. That's what it felt like, a rocket igniting just above my back and I tried to imagine that it soon would lift off, break gravity, leaving me earthbound and safe but no, it hovered. I smelled what I thought was melting rubber and at first I wondered who was burning tires but it was not tires after all. The only way out was through words. That was all they wanted. Words. Sometimes one-- the name of my employer-- sometimes two-- the location of the safe house-- sometimes three-- they asked me, you know, about you. The old man, Sloane, said that if I gave them someone else to blame, they would not blame you. And I gave them words, but not the words they wanted to hear. And so it began again. RoCkET.

From there, the letters disintegrated into scribble, into nothing but frantic lines on paper. I could always mark the exact moments that the memories he tried to ignore caught up with him, when he didn't just see a snapshot but lived through the entire thing in Technicolor. In such events, all I could do was embrace him, to cling to him like he was water running through my hands, onto the floor. In reality, he was something far more concrete, like the iron grating on the fire staircase outside our window: a way of exist in case of fire. He did not move, not even when my hands crossed the rigid landscape of his scars. I had to remind myself, in such events, that there was nothing left for me to heal, that they had ruined him beyond any capacity for pain or healing. They let me have custody of his scars. In return I gave them my father.

His eyes followed my hands with slow, deliberate movements as I folded the piece of paper and tucked it in the pocket of my apron. I wanted to ask him what he was looking at: a confession, a weapon, an excuse. But when he took my hand, palm up, and kissed, without revulsion, without pity, the spot on my fingertip that had last touched the ink, I realized that I was already these things. The real puzzle was who was meant to hear the confession, carry the weapon, accept the excuses.

To find this out, I needed something more than paper words from him.

I pulled my hand from his, absent-mindedly (remembering the strategic advantage of being the first to walk away), and went to wash the diner out of my hair. In the background, I could hear him digging through the refrigerator for two microwave dinners. It amazed me that he could not remember his own name for longer than twenty-four hours unless I wrote it down for him-- if left to himself, he came up with the most ridiculous aliases. Elvis? Picasso? Special Agent Fox Mulder? -- but he always knew, without any help from me, to pick the carrots out of the vegetables because they gave me hives. Without fail, they would be sitting in a neat pile on the side of my plate, almost as a proof that he could become sane again any time he wished.

Our evening disintegrated into its usual routines. I talked constantly during dinner, relating the gossip from work, the reduced price of milk at the Save-Rite store, the sign I had seen posted in the window advertising a need for a janitor. This was meant as a hint, which he studiously ignored, pretending to be absorbed in the curl of macaroni around his fork. I talked without stopping, a tactical maneuver based on the reasoning that eventually he would have to tell me to shut up, or that if I spoke of only common things, it would prove that the world could be a normal place, a safe place. One he could re-enter at any time. This methods, again, proved useless.

After I watched him clean his plate of food (at the beginning, he refused to eat anything, writing on his napkins that it tasted of smoke), I cleared the dishes-- two plastic plates, dark blue, two cups, pastel orange, and various pieces of plastic silverware-- into the sink and turned the radio to fill the space of sound over the running water. By then, I had learned to find refuge from life in the smallest, most unexpected places: the chorus of a favorite song, the smell of lemon-scented dish liquid, the art, which took me a month to learn, of blowing bubbles in my hand. It was something Sadie would do; her habits were slowly becoming my habits, and eventually, I suspected, I would lose myself into her entirely. I was only myself between the hours of eight o'clock in the evening to six o'clock in the morning, when I left for work; the other fourteen hours belonged to her. So help me, I was even beginning to like the taste of the grape gum.

After dinner and the dish-washing, when the clock stretched somewhere between nine and ten, I turned off the radio and dragged my foam mattress out from the closet. The thought of sleeping was never appealing, since it meant that I would inevitably have to wake up and go back to the diner, but the alternative was worse. If I was awake, then I would be able to see, on the far wall of the kitchen (just visible from the living room) the square of streetlight that bled through the window, casting his shadow and know exactly what he was doing. Every night, every morning (as far I as I knew) it was the same. He sat by the window in the one chair he hadn't broken so that he could count footsteps on the streets which he feared. I counted it a triumph if I could persuade him to take the garbage to the dumpster behind the building. I wondered, at times, where he was when they took him: was it an alley, down on the pavement with the tomcat urine and the rotten Chinese food, or was it something more pre-meditated-- an ambush while he was cooking dinner, or watching television, or sleeping? Perhaps it was in somewhere that was even more common, like a gas station or a convenience store.

(They took me from my car, unconscious, after running me into a lightpost on the corner of 5th and Newton Street; I was distracted by the five miles that still remained between me and warning him of our exposure, and consequently failed to see the black Ford truck tailing me until it slammed into my left rear door at seventy-five miles per hour. A mild concussion, some bruises. I never even got the chance to tell my father where I was going. My father only went to the safehouse on the assumption that I would be there waiting for him. When he found out I was not, I am sure that he left to mount some doomed heroic rescue. Which failed, although they tell me he got close, within a mile, even.)

All I know is that when I could convince Vaughn to walk with me down to the Save-Rite, just at the end of the street, he would clench my wrist so tightly it almost bruised, and he would not let go, even when I needed to reach for groceries. I was forced to use my left hand. The teenage girl who rang up our purchases used to tell me how we were so romantic, madly in love, but I knew differently. He was afraid I would leave him. Maybe I would have.

He would not sleep while I was in the house but sat by that window, his left hand clenching an empty bottle that once held the discount wine I had bought last month to celebrate the fact that we paid the rent on time. Since I had hidden the gun, he chose this as a weapon, to protect me, or to protect himself from me, or from the noises that came after midnight, noises that sounded like ambush. Sometimes he woke me, sweat on his forehead, to send me to check the hallways, the alley behind the building. Tonight was not one of those nights. Tonight, when he thought I was asleep, he leaned against the wall and watched me, as if he were studying the aerial photographs of a building that he could not yet identify as a either a refuge or an enemy fortress.

The bottle never left his hand, cradled too casually, like a spear waiting to be thrown.

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.spaces.between.words.

In those days I dreamed long dreams, always in black and white, heavy with static and background interference. I dreamed of the end of our other lives, the moments before and after they became lost to us. I dreamed in snapshots, watching from the outside, and then spent the dreams distracted with attempts to climb into the picture and change something, anything, but I was always fixed on the outside. Trapped, even in the dreams, which, more and more, came in fragments, unexpectedly, without warning.

For example, that night I dreamed of a phone book.

The woman regains consciousness in the front seat of a decrepit '88 Chevy, in the alley behind a girl joint downtown called the Lucky Lady, and she takes this as an omen that their life will be spared. She wipes the blood out of her eyes and sees for the first time what they have done to the man groaning in the back seat, and she winces when he confuses her with them as she tries to gauge his injuries, when he begs her to leave him alone. When he asks her, half-conscious, what they have done to Sydney.

(I don't know, she says, I don't know what we have done with her. I only heard them say what they were going to do to her father.)

She does not have time to cry. She has to drive, quickly, before whoever is watching decides to change their mind.

Beneath the dirty white glow of a gas station sign that advertises free beer with the purchase of a full tank of gas, the woman kicks opens her car door and grabs the yellow phone book from the pay phone, then perches half-on the edge of the driver's seat. She begins to tear apart the pages searching for a hospital clinic that will not ask questions. This is not for her, though some of the blood on her hands is hers. Behind her, sprawled across the back seat, the man-- whose skin has been burned into the consistency of used coffee grains-- moans into the gag she has stuffed into his mouth to keep him from screaming every time they hit a bump in the pavement. He is beginning to regain consciousness. Without thinking, she leans over in the back seat and taps-- almost gently-- a certain muscle, a certain soft spot in the skull.

Now he is limp again, oblivious. She cannot find a phone number. She cannot find a phone number. She takes a deep breath then gags when the smell of burnt flesh fills her mouth; the phone book falls to the ground as she leans out of the car door, hand covering her mouth so she does not throw up. "Oh my love," she whispers, "my love." She forces her hand to stop trembling, to turn the pages slowly until she reaches the hospital section. St. Jude's Charity Hospital. 845 Potter Street. Yes, she will take him there. She writes the number on the back of her hand in case she forgets the address; already her mind is failing her. Already there are moments when she must look in the rearview mirror until she finds the face of the man in the back seat, because she forgets who he is: the lover or the father. She forgets which one she has saved, which one she has betrayed. Sometimes, she even imagines that she has betrayed both, that there is nothing in the back seat but a mirage. A ghost. This is when she stops the car, pulls it over to the curb, opens the side door, and touches the man's face, very carefully, from mouth to cheekbones to forehead. Then she knows. Then she knows what she has done.

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.solomon.

The seventeenth morning of our second month in the graffiti apartment, I discovered how to make Vaughn talk.

Six o'clock in the morning on a day of rain and steam, and the gray sky was so wet that it smeared our (drafty) windows inside and out with a fine skin of fog. I coughed into the sleeve of my sweatshirt and commented that I would have to stop by the Save-Rite on my lunch break for some cold medicine and chicken soup, before we both came down with pneumonia. He shrugged, perched on his chair by the window, a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal sitting on the table behind him, untouched, wasting its heat. It had been a night of war dreams, and I barely had the energy to button my coat, much less argue with him over the nutritional value of grain foods. I would have left for work without paying him any more attention than an annoyed goodbye if I had not noticed what he was doing. He was balancing a newspaper on his knees, folded into a neat square, and he stared at it with careful intensity for a few moments, then transferred his gaze to the fogged windows. Then, his left forefinger would begin to slide across the glass, tracing a shape which became a letter, which became a word that he had stolen from the paper.

Solomon.

I watched him in the silence of the rain on the glass, I did not speak, but watched. This was not one of the hate words he left across our walls during and after his rages, not the kind of words like sHaRd or rOCkeT or FiRe that acted as preludes to broken furniture and smashed dishes, and then the sobs heard through the locked bathroom door. This was simply a word, utterly without meaning or purpose, other than the fact that he wanted to see it spread out on the window. After he finished writing it, he lingered for a moment, surveying his work. Pleased-- and I swear, he almost smiled, I saw the corner of his mouth turn up-- he erased the word and began to study the paper again. I watched, my coat half-buttoned, my breath frozen in my mouth (still tasting of instant strawberry oatmeal) and then he began another shape. Another letter. Another word.

Wrin-kle.

He grinned.

This was the first time in six months that I told myself he was on the verge of talking, almost on the verge of living again, and believed it with any certainty. He was healing, or at the very least, forgetting. I wished I could say the same of myself, but I would take my victories where I could find them. All morning, amid the rancid sweetness of doughy pancakes and month-old blueberry syrup (inevitably spilled on my blouse at least once), I schemed of words that I would push into his mouth, until his tongue was full and would suddenly explode into the sound of his voice-- harsh, rusty, like a worn-out string on a guitar. At this sound, we would be dissolved, magically, back into the people we were only a year ago. So I asked for too much, yes. But it was, at any rate, enough to inspire me to wrangle my way out of the afternoon shift, to send me to the Save-Rite during my lunch break not just for cold medicine and soup but on the hunt for ways to give him words. I found a box of crayons-- red, blue, orange, yellow, green, purple, black-- on sale for twenty-five cents, and told myself that it would wash off the walls easier than the spray paint. I found a set of finger paint jars, thick and gooey with promise, and told myself that I had tried everything else. This could be considered a drastic tactical improvisation. I smiled. It was going to be fun.

That day, I walked home. In the rain. Without my jacket. I dared pneumonia to do what it could; I had survived worse. But we were through with surviving, we were going to start living again, even if I had to force us.

I don't think he was surprised to find me home early as much as he was rather taken aback by my appearance (still in the pink striped skirt and t-shirt of the diner uniform, my jacket unbuttoned, a large blueberry syrup stain just visible near my collar.) My hair dripped down my neck, all of my makeup running off in various different colored streams, arms full of shopping bags. And I was laughing. That's what really caught him off guard; I could tell because he opened his mouth and almost asked me what had happened before he remembered that he did not talk.

I unpacked the groceries and put them away, shaking the water from my hair, enjoying the questions furrowing his eyebrows as he opened the box of crayons, counting the colors, as he sniffed suspiciously at the jars of finger paint. At last he grew restless and pushed a napkin across the counter to me, on which was scrawled two words.

What For?

"Impatient, aren't we, Mr. Vaughn? It is Vaughn today, isn't it?" I grin at him.

He nods, a quick scowl of irritation at my avoidance of his question shadowing his jaw. I picked the newspaper out of the trash (he must have gotten bored) and set it on the table, then, after much deliberation, selected a red crayon from the box. The wax was soft, fresh like ten cent lipstick, just perfect for graffiti. I scanned the page of black and white words, some soggy with discarded oatmeal, searching for one single word that screamed red. As it turned out, it was rather obvious. I walked over to the kitchen wall, and began to write, in huge, indolent letters that flowed into each other like ribbons. L. I. P.

"Lip." I repeated, turning to him and holding out the crayon. "Your turn."

(At this moment, I was convinced that I had finally lost my mind too, that being Sadie and being Sydney had finally caught up with me and turned me into a stark raving madwoman. But at that moment, I was also convinced that it would be entirely worth it if he just took the crayon from my hand. If he would just go a little bit more insane with me so that we could both find our way back out again.)

He looked at me as if I suggested that we dress in purple chicken suits and dance on the roof.

"It's a game." I told him. "We take turns. One of us picks a word and writes it on the wall. Any word, from anywhere, the only requirement is that it is the word that you most want to say the moment. We'll use these," I held up the crayons. "And these." I pointed to the finger paint. "There's only one rule. The first one to find a word that you like enough to say out loud wins."

He pushes the napkin to me again.

Prize?

"Well, you'll just have to win and then I'll come up with something tremendous and amazing and spectacular."

He shook his head, that slight half-grin peeking around the corner of his pretended scowl, as if confirming that we both would be committed on the spot, if the landlord found out. But that was the best part; we could be as insane as we liked, on these walls. No one could stop us, no one else would know. No one could tell us we didn't make sense. He took the crayon from me and, after a scrutiny of the entertainment section of the paper, approached the wall with tall, skinny letters. Pianoman.

I repeated the word allowed, letting the skip of the *o* and the drawl of the *n* melt into my tongue. They tasted of ripe grapes, the skin pregnant with sound, just waiting to split open in our mouths. Soon, yes. soon.

For the next week, the Game surfaced at the most unexpected times. I would be washing dishes and he would leap up from the table, snatch up a yellow crayon, and scribble MACARONI on the wall above the sink, insisting on blocking my reach of the sponge until I drove him back with the hose. He would be sitting, at night, in his chair-- fist clenched around the champagne bottle, all muscles taut-- and I would crawl out of my mattress, shivering at bare feet on the cement floor, and cross the room until I stood beside him. Unclenching his fist from his weapon one finger at a time, then unscrewing the cap of a dark green jar of finger paint. I would dip both our forefingers into the paint until they were covered, and then guide them over the wall in the same smooth brush-stroke letters.

Saffron.

Sometimes he would try to outdo me, and I would wake up to find entire sentences waiting for me on the bathroom mirror, painted with my own lipstick. /The heart is a sleeping beauty./ or /Love is.../ No conclusion to that one, merely a string of fat periods in the shape of fingerprints. Sometimes I would cut words out of the newspaper and leave them taped to his favorite cup, to the back of his chair. /Eat At Frank's Hotdog Joint: More Dog for your Dollar./

That one was a personal favorite of mine.

When I woke up early to see him standing at the walls, forming the syllables without sound across his lips, I was certain that we would break silence soon. Soon. But we were going top fast. I did not know this until I suggested we take the Game to the Save-Rite, since the bread and milk were running out, and we needed to pick up another box of crayons anyway. I enticed him with the promise of new, shiny, words found in magazines and paperback books, and at first, he did well. He did not clutch my wrist, but merely curled his fingers around my thumb and held on as if I were a balloon that would take off any moment if not weighted to the ground.

We watched our skin change colors as we passed beneath the neon signs of the t-shirt shop, the nail salon, the antique store (purple, blue, green) until we stood beneath the flashing red and white marquee of the Save-Rite, which tonight advertised a sale on hamburger. As we moved down the crowded aisles, I began to plot a way that we could afford to eat meat twice this week and still have enough money to pay the electric bill. If I talked Bill into giving me next week's paycheck early and then got Marcie to let me take her shift on Friday...it'd mean working a straight three shifts but that would be okay...we needed to celebrate. I could even splurge and buy two of the deluxe chocolate chip muffins from the bakery aisle....

It wasn't until I was standing in the meat aisle waiting for the butcher to measure the much-anticipated hamburger that I realized that there were no longer fingers wrapped around my thumb. I had lost him. That sudden, sharp panic hit me first with the thought that they had taken him again, somehow, snatched him right from my side and I had been too busy planning ways to cook cow parts to notice. I needed a gun. It was in the apartment, hidden. Fine. I would find something else. I remembered his champagne bottle and raced to the liquor aisle to secure a similar weapon; I was relatively sure that I could kill with it in close quarters...the wine would sting their eyes and the blow would stun them and then I could use the broken glass to slit their throats...I don't care, I would do it, I would if they tried to...

Before these thoughts had even fully passed my mind, I heard a dull crash from the other end of the store and began to sprint down the aisles, the liquor bottle slick and heavy in my hand. I ran into shopping carts and old woman carrying poodles; I tripped on a can of tomato soup and hit the tile *hard*. I limped to my feet, ordered my throbbing knees to shut up, and rounded the cereal aisle...to stop short in my tracks. He was standing in the magazine aisle, but the shelves were nearly empty because he was pushing their contents onto the floor in frantic sweeps. One of the cashiers had already tried to subdue him and was double over on the floor, clutching his gut, and two others were pinning his arms behind his back. Which, inevitably, only made him worse because it made him remember the last time men held his arms behind his back, and what had followed.

The sick feeling in my gut, somehow, thickened, curdled even more. He must have been distracted and stopped to look at the magazines...and I didn't notice, I left him alone, too absorbed in my own plans...The bottle that I was going to use to defend us slipped from my hands and broken on the floor, splattering my legs and socks with glass and liquor as I moved to pry the men away from him.

"No, stop, back off, Vaughn, it's okay--look, I said, let him *go*..." My hands closed around the collar of the man closest to me and I shoved him-- less than gently-- back into a display of Captain's Crunch. Vaughn slung the other man to the floor, but his suddenly free arm swung back around to catch me in the jaw. I rolled with the punch, taking him down with me so that by the time we stopped moving I was straddling his waist, holding each of his arms down by the wrists. Yelling, the entire time that it was me, me, Sydney, that he could stop, that we were going home. That no one was going to hurt him. It was me, Sydney. Me.

The worst part was the first time he looked up at me after I pinned him down. For a good five seconds I was a complete stranger to him, and his eyes held a rage like nothing I had seen, but underneath that, a helplessness. It was that helplessness that I could not accept. Then he realized where he was, what had happened, and refused to look me in the eye at all. This was a relief.

I helped him to his feet-- his hand clutching my right wrist again, more of a vise than ever-- and sent anyone who stared at us the kind of glare that promised to turn them to a bug and then squash them if they so much as said a word to him. We ignored the indignant cashiers and went straight to the manager; I invented a medical condition, a lack of pills, and got off only having to pay for our groceries and the whiskey bottle I dropped. As we walked back to the apartment, I could see him visibly fighting back the panic. We struggled up the stairs to the apartment, and as I tried to persuade him to let my hand free so I could unlock the door, I decided that I now hated Sloane even more than when I learned of the death of my father. My father died for a reason-- even if it was only a reason valid to me-- but they had done this to Vaughn without cause. Simply because they could.

Once inside, he dropped my wrist as if burned, and, without even taking off his coat, fled to his chair. He did not move for the rest of the evening, his knuckles white around the neck of the champagne bottle. I did not even try to bring him words, or to ask him for words, but unpacked the groceries (the bread was squashed, several eggs broken from where I'd dropped the shopping basket) and went to take a shower. It wasn't until I was on the bus the next morning, wedged between a mother with a crying two-year old and an old man trying to eat a sausage biscuit that I remembered I had forgotten the hamburger.

For three days, no words passed between us. But then, on the fourth day, I woke up on a Saturday morning that was so cold my breath turned white in the air, and stumbled into the bathroom (swearing that if the hot water was broken again I would choke the maintenance man on his own jelly doughnut) to find a word waiting for me on the mirror. Black and white letters, cut out from the headlines. His idea of a joke.

N E W S P A P E R.

I could already see Vaughn grinning over his oatmeal as I read it. In this manner, I knew I was forgiven.

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.spaces.between.words.

In those days I dreamed without faces, only sound, but distorted, like a conversation heard through a telephone wire as a storm approaches. I was not the one speaking, merely listening through a third-party line as the two voices argued back and forth over the price of a father's life. I was the guilty eavesdropper. The old man spoke with cruel soft words, though the tone as almost loving. The young woman spoke in the softer, crueler tones of one who knew that what she was doing changed, in one single action, everything she had believed about herself. But she didn't care.

"I must admit, Sydney, that I've seen you looking better."

"You can thank your boys for that, Sloane, they're a bit overzealous."

"Yes. They're young and patriotic and you are a terrorist out to destroy their country. I apologize if they got a bit carried away with subduing you."

"Save the patriot speech for someone who believes it."

"You condemn things of which you have no understanding. Did you enjoy your time in the Conversation Room?"

"A sadistic little man pulled my fingernails back with heated needles. Enjoyable but it would have been much more gratifying had you been the one getting the manicure."

"My associate was only giving you a warning of the more drastic measures to which we will have no choice but to resort if you continue to refuse my offer."

"Repeat it again for me. Torture's bad on my memory."

"I have no wish to kill you, Sydney. You have become so much to me...to Emily...and I have no desire to add to the grief of a husband the grief of a father who has lost his daughter."

"You are not my father. I have a father."

"Jack? You could call him a father, I suppose. I want to believe that he is the one responsible for all this, that he is the traitor, not you. I know that it is one of you. Your friend, the unfortunate Mr. Vaughn, has been rather regrettably stubborn on the matter. But if you told me something I could believe, then I could let both of you go. You would not be allowed to return to your old life, of course, but arrangements could be made, until the Alliance was appeased. But if you cling to this childish loyalty to your father, I am afraid I will have no choice but to dispose of all three of you."

"For someone as powerful as you're supposed to be, I'd have thought you could come up with something more original."

"Threats bore me, and to speak quite frankly, I don't have the time. There is a traitor in my house and I will find out who it is, no matter who I have to break. And I will break you, eventually. For everyone there is one thing which cannot be endured, which is beyond pain or resistance. For your friend, I think it is fire. For you, I think it will be something else, but rest assured, I will find it. That one thing which to you cannot be imagined, is merely unthinkable.

"I have a vivid imagination."

"Then imagine this. This room is soundproof, which means that no one can hear us. It also means that you have not been able to hear him in the next room; this is probably a good thing, as he has been making quite a bit of noise. I have allowed my associate to use a blowtorch.

(Silence, static with that choking that comes when a wrecking ball smashes into the base of your spine, without warning and suddenly you can't breathe, can't talk. You can't even hate because what you feel is so far beyond hate as to make hatred ridiculously trite.)

"Don't worry, dear, we are being careful. I believe that at this point, Mr. Vaughn-- given the proper medical care-- will still be able to live a normal life. We have avoided tampering with the necessary things like, oh, hands. Legs. Eyes. But my associate, I will admit, is getting impatient.

"When the CIA learns that you are torturing one of their operatives they will--"

"What? Ride in on white horses to save you both? You'll both be dead before they get through the paperwork. And it won't be as friendly as a bullet through the head."

"My father--"

"Has already hidden away in some rat hole of a safehouse, leaving his darling baby girl to die here. Stings, doesn't it? Feels like betrayal? So why not return his favor? Give us his location."

"Let Vaughn go. You don't need his information; you have mine."

"You have not exactly been forthcoming."

"Aren't up to a challenge?"

"I am due for my next chat with you friend. I will be back in ten minutes to see if you have re-considered my offer. In the mean time, if you will direct your attention to the monitor there. We wouldn't want you missing out on the fun, now would we?"

This is when I tried to hang up the phone, when I didn't want to hear anymore. If these were only dreams, I would be able to manipulate them, bend them somehow so that there would exist an alternate dimension of reality in which I was never forced to watch one human being (if you could call these men that) hold another human being down and methodically pass a small hand-held blowtorch up and down his back. This I could not imagine. This was unthinkable. There was only one way to make the television screen go black, and that was to give them a name. There was only one name I could give them, one magic word. And so I did, and the television was turned off, and I was allowed to request terms for my new life as something less than a human being.

From these dreams, I woke with my throat dried out, hoarse, from calling to my father, only there has been no sound. On those mornings, I was most tempted to sit Vaughn down in the kitchen and force him to hear what I did for him, hear every word of it, so that he would have no choice but to give me whatever I want. He would no choice but to give me words. What would I want him to say?

I. Forgive. You.

But I could not even bend thse into the reality of my dreams, no matter how hard I try. Like fire, like television monitors, it had become unthinkable.

continue ... part 2