Author's Notes: No, I'm not going over to the enemy. I am still a staunch, Sydney/Vaughn shipper. Rabid, even. But as much as I was prepared to hate Noah, and as much as I still hope for his death, I have to give him credit. He made me like him enough to give him a voice, or at least to make him a victim for the ever ravenous Angst Muse. It was the debrief interrogation scene that did it. He was so casually defiant of the SD-6 goonies. It gave me the idea for this fic. I'm sorry. I promise I'll do penance for it....write a nice romantic S/V fic or something along those lines. Feel free to throw rotten fruit

Summary: The people come in shades of blue. They take everything from you.

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Shades of Blue (1/1)

by darkstar
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You're at your flat now. Un-alone. A dangerous word, crumpled and unexpected like discarded clothing, flung across the back of a chair. A black chiffon dress in a heap next to the bookshelf. You've forgotten the titles of most of the volumes; it's been so long, and after she left you made it a point not to open most of them. She was the reason you'd bought most of them in the first place; left to yourself you'd be satisfied with the occasional Clancy thriller. She devoured books with a passion, a strong taste for novels of forbidden love. The best kind. Why?

You have a theory. You're all toddlers at heart, in love with fire not only because it glows so brightly but because Father has told you repeatedly to keep your hands away from the flame. Perhaps it's the longing that appeals to you most: the concept of a hand passing over a drawn curtain to part it down the middle if only for a moment. The glimpse of an eye. You remember the days when you lived for such glimpses. So most of your memories are fragments: pastel lipstick on the edge of a cracked coffee cup, a yellow post-it note with three words scratched in soft lead. (I Love You.) A black and white photograph of a brunette reading a novel (The Blind Assassin) on a park bench.

At one time you developed the habit of watching her from the distance of small yardsticks as she sat in a restaurant devouring her meal to get to a new novel, a new collection of poetry. How vouyeristic is love; the appeal of watching someone devouring or being devoured, then leaning forward to whisper /how does it taste, does it hurt, whatever are you reading?/

All gone now, the coffee cups and secret notes and photographs. Drowned, waterlogged, dissolved. Only the novels remain, hidden in plain sight on the bookshelf in your bedrom. They keep their secrets well, and if they fail, there's always the gun underneath the pillow. Or the gun under the lampstand. Or the one in the cabinet, or the one buried beside the potted plant in the kitchen...an abundance of hard metal and lead. You like to be prepared for company-- the inlaws, you like to call them. Her other family, the one that would kill you if they knew what you're going to ask her to do. They'd kill her as well, you harbor no illusions.

And they dared to ask you for her name. The usual smugness, the usual threats. At the time, you remember conflicting urges: the desire to laugh at their inanity and the desire to grab the old man by the throat. A foolishness, to think they could pry her out of you like a nut from a shell, that you would crack as easily. An anger, that they would use you both as weapons one against another. Heat-seeking missiles, trained to search out the heart.

/You're the last person I ever wanted to see. And the only person I ever wanted to see./

/A kick to the stomach./

So now it comes down to love, again, to the hand in the fire.

This time you're not going in blind. You'll warn her of the heat, not that she hasn't learned by herself. This much is visible in her eyes, a regret you'll have to address another time and place. Somewhere further away than this, somewhere safe. India, you're thinking, obscurity. You spent summers there back in college, you remember how easy it is to become lost in the vast oceans of faces and bodies. The language will come back easily enough once you've spent a few days remembering. You'll show her magic: the plane into New Delhi, the scent of saffron and spice in the streets, then the train ride to Jodhpur. A entire city of indigo blue. And you'll buy another flat, and you'll buy her new books, and you'll watch the glow return to her skin.

A lie. You can't give her back what she's lost, even if you survive, even if you can keep her alive long enough to get out of the country. Sloane and his henchman know every route of escape, every path out of their invisible deserts. They've set up razor wire, manned guard towers. They specialize in snipers. Again, the target is the heart, although not only the heart. Sometimes they hit the spine just to watch you go down paralyzed, choking on sand.

How do you tell her this? That you want the risk and fear the risk, that you want her and fear her. Truth within truth, you're good at that. You don't survive five years under deep cover unless you're very good.

An impulsive decision: you pull a book off the shelf. The Blind Assassin, her favorite, the book you remember from your last picture of her, the one you took with a stolen surveillance camera. At the time you remember it was unthinkable to ask her directly for a picture; now you're not sure why. You flip to the back page, blank, the color of old cream. A story of love, of truth within truth, of cloth flung at random over chairs.

So you talk in codes, she's good at that. A poem you read not long after you left her, on a random plane ride, and then read again and again for reasons that you understand completely know. A paraphrase of your life.

It takes a moment to find a pen, and then a moment longer to move into the kitchen to write. The rest of the house is indigo with the darkness before morning; she's still asleep. You won't ruin that, not yet.

Dear Sydney,

I can't tell you what needs to be said, not directly. Blame it on the inlaws. So here is what we're up against:

Perhaps if a face can be recorded-- but isn't that another story?

(Her face in the focal point of the camera lense, darkened with concentration, you remember zooming closer and closer until you swore you could see the page numbers reflected in her eyes.)

Isn't there another story consistent with sand? How it turns to mirror-glass when heated in your hand.

(The temperature of her hand the last time it rested across your wrist, thumb spread over the vein that kept the time of your pulse, and how you imagined, being much younger and more inclined to romance, that she was spun glass, that you could turn her palm over and find traces of reflected stars.)

The sound it makes makes another story.

(The unwritten lines, the lines-between-lines, the email she never read, the stories you never told her. A sound much similar to a sigh, to the brushing of a finger over your lips to keep the sound back, but failing.)

It's completely silent here so we hear nothing but high and low tones constantly as we take inventory.

(Go down the list, check off what you have left, what you've lost along the way. Innocence, gone. Faith, gone. Starlight in palms, gone. Gone, gone, gone. Broken down. Casualties of war. Love, gone. No, wait. Love: damaged, burnt to the core but not broken.)

The people come in shades of blue.

(Dark blue, the folder containing your reassignment orders. Bruise blue, the side of her cheek after the mission went bad, that time she went in the field without you for the first time and how you wanted to beat that idiot who let you get hurt. But she were a big girl, she said. Sea blue, the sweater she wore the last day you watched her read in that restaurant. Ice blue, her face in that freezing room when you couldn't get the door open and all you could think was oh, God, she's going to die for Them.)

They take everything from you.

(Go down the list, check off what you have left. What they've done.)

You add your own postscript:

It ends here, Sydney. They take from us, and they take from us, and then just when we've somehow found the guts to get back on our feet, they take some more. So I haven't got much left to lose, now, but there's one thing I'm not going to let them control. You. I never read this book, after you left. But I looked through it, once, and I remember a certain line between the two lovers.

/He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. Right, the usual choices./

We've gotten the throat cutting out of the way, now let's try the love.

And then, an address, a time.

475 West Redien Street.
Orpehus Shipping.
9:00

You close the book, walk into the bedroom where she is a shade of blue not so different from those people you hate. She will also take everything from you, but it is a reverse effect. The emptier she makes you, the fuller you become. You place the book by her head, turning your wrist just so until it (of course by accident) slides across her forehead. The consistency of starlight, you think.

You wonder if you'll ever find the nerve to tell it to her straight.

Maybe, if she decides to meet you, if she chooses freedom. Maybe, if she lives, if you live. A connection there; you have no intention of surviving if she doesn't. But all this is another story.

For now, you slide the gun from the lampstand into your shoulder holster and leave to arrange the details. Passports, identities, money, both US and foreign currencies. You blend into the indigo streets, already dreaming of Indian heat on her skin, but on a more pratical level, ready to shoot and kill anyone who gets in your way.