Third Edition

Rating: PG

Pairing: Sydney/Weiss

Spoilers: I’ve seen up to Season 3 Episode 6 and am spoiler free past that, but this only contains spoilers through to Reunion.

Notes: For the LiveJournal Writer’s Choice “Books” challenge

 

When she was a child, Sydney had a favourite book, the way some children have a favourite toy. The book was a first edition of Alice in Wonderland and it was a present from her mother, her beautiful, smiling, adoring mother. Laura Bristow would put her to bed, and Sydney would snuggle in beside her, luxuriating in the smell of her perfume, and Laura would read words that Sydney couldn’t. Sydney would point at the pictures, and her mother would smile, and she’d feel like the best child in the world because her mother loved her.

 

When her mother died, Sydney would look at the pictures, would read what words she could, use her memory to fill in the rest.

 

When she was older, when she missed her mother, she would read the book from cover to cover in one sitting, remembering her mother, missing her.

 

The pages were old, and her tears probably weren’t good for them, but she read on anyway.

 

Just like she did when Danny died.

 

Just like she did when she found out that her mother wasn’t the woman she’d thought, that Laura Bristow was really Irina Derevko, that her parents’ happy marriage had been a sham.

 

That book got her through some of the worst times in her life, but it wasn’t there when she needed it most, when she woke up to find two years of her life missing, her father in jail, Vaughn married.

 

She never wanted more to read about Alice’s adventures, but that book was, like so much of her life, reduced to ashes, so she was reduced to lying on her bed, trying to sleep, reciting passages of the book from memory.

 

It wasn’t the same.

 

Then she found a copy on her desk one day, turned around to see Weiss apologising that it was only a third edition, but she didn’t care, because that wasn’t the point. The point was that it looked just like her old copy, even if it felt slightly different to the touch, that the words were the same, the pictures just like she remembered them.

 

She cried, and she smiled and she hugged him right in the middle of the bullpen, and she didn’t care what people thought. 

 

That night, she went home and read the book from cover to cover in one sitting, and she remembered her old life. But for the first time since she’d come back, she didn’t cry, and that night, she had the best night’s sleep she could remember.

 

The book made her feel better, and night after night in the months that followed, it would lull her to sleep, make her forget all her troubles.

 

As time went by though, she found herself turning less and less to the book, and more and more to the man who had gifted it to her.

 

The man who was once her boyfriend’s best friend, the man who became her friend too.

 

The man who slowly became more than just her friend, who became her best friend.

 

Who, eventually, became more than even that.

 

Now, she lies in bed with the book in her hands, but instead of snuggling against her mother, she snuggles against him. Instead of her being read to, they take it in turns to read sections to one another, and instead of paper catching any tears she might shed, his hand reaches up to wipe them away.

 

She reads a third edition book now, apt for the third edition of her life.

 

A third edition that has no secrets, no dark shadows hiding in the corners.

 

A third edition where she is truly, truly happy.

 

A third edition she wouldn’t change for the world.

 

 

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