Think About Cheating
Pairing: Syd/Weiss
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Everything up to the end of season three to be safe
Word Count: 1,241
Notes: For Clara, who challenged me to write to Gretchen Wilson’s “When I
Think About Cheating” – no great fan of Gretchen Wilson am I, but I did my
best!
There are times when I’ll find myself looking across the bullpen at Vaughn, and I’ll remember. What it felt like to have his arms around me, how it felt to make love to him. How I was so in love with him, and how coming back from the dead, finding him married to Lauren, nearly killed me.
I’ll remember the nights before we got together, how I dreamed about him, how I never thought that there could ever be anything between us, and I’ll remember the time that I first really thought that we had something worth fighting for, when he told me about a watch to set his heart by that stopped the day he met me.
I swear, if I wasn’t already in love with him, I fell right then and there.
By the time we had our first kiss – and what a kiss it was – I would have died for that man.
That kind of love, the feelings that we had for one another, that doesn’t disappear. Not even when you know that even though you love someone, even though you’d kill for them, would die for them, sometimes, it’s just not enough.
Sometimes, you can love someone more than anything, but it’s just not meant to be.
Which was always the main problem with Vaughn and me. We loved each other, were as happy as two people could be, and together we had some of the best times of my life.
But we also had some of the worst.
And it wasn’t all to do with our jobs, with
SD6 and the Covenant and
A lot of it was just us, and no matter how we felt about each other, we finally realised that the constant back and forth and up and down was too much for either one of us to handle. It was wearing us out, and eventually, we were going to end up hating each other. Better to call it a day, when we could still stand the sight of one another, quit while we’re ahead, all those wonderful clichés.
We knew all that, in our heads. But in our hearts? It wasn’t as easy.
And it sure as hell didn’t get any easier when I started dating his best friend.
Not that that was something that was planned, quite the opposite in fact. Eric was always friendly to me, and Vaughn told me how he used to tell him all the time that he should ask me out, that there was obviously something between us. When I came back, with Vaughn married and my dad in prison, he was the one who took it upon himself to help me find a place to live, who helped me move in, who cooked with me, got drunk with me, gave me a very valuable book after one off the cuff comment.
He became my best friend.
And even after we found out about Lauren, even after I got back together with Vaughn, that didn’t change.
Nor did it change when Vaughn and I broke up.
He still came over every so often to cook with me, get drunk with me, and, though he’d kill me if I ever admitted it to anyone, watch American Idol with me. He was the one who kept me sane during missions when it felt like things were spiralling out of control, during briefings when it felt like we were getting nowhere. He was the one that I spent my free time with; late night movies, early morning runs, Sunday afternoon walks in the park spent laughing at him as Alan dragged him all over, listening to him complain affectionately about the scrape the big dumb mutt was getting into.
I always thought that my meeting and falling for Vaughn was like jumping off Niagara Falls in a barrel – some madcap urge that’s exciting and exhilarating and makes you feel alive when you’re right in the middle of it, but when you hit the bottom, when the barrel is lying broken all around you, if the fall hasn’t killed you, the whirling waters of the plunge pool surely will.
Meeting and falling for Eric on the other hand, that was like being caught in the most ferocious and frightening riptide that you could ever imagine, and just when you think that all is lost, you get caught up in a current that deposits you gently back to shore.
By the time I kissed Vaughn for the first time, I would have died for him.
By the time I kissed Eric for the first time, I was far more interested in living for him.
Which still didn’t mean that it was easy. After all, we were working together, our lives were still insane, fraught with danger, and there was the matter of Vaughn to deal with. But we talked it over, and we both realised that this was something that was worth fighting for, something good.
We were right too.
Which still isn’t to say that it’s easy. Because Eric was there for the whole, as he calls it, “Saga of Sydney and Vaughn,” and he remembers what it was like between us, the heat, the electricity.
Because he’s used to being the friend, the sidekick, not the romantic lead, and sometimes he can’t fathom why I chose him over Vaughn.
Because sometimes I’ll still find myself looking at Vaughn across the bullpen, and I’ll remember what it felt like to be in love with him. I’ll catch a glimpse of those blue eyes and that smile, or I’ll hear him speaking French, and I’ll miss what we had.
Because sometimes, on a mission together, we’ll have to pretend to be lovers, and we’ll be acting out the role, and it would be so easy to get carried away, so easy to cross the line that blurs reality and fantasy, past and present. There have been times when I’ve almost slipped, times when I’ve seen him nearly lose his balance too.
But in times like that, I think of what I
have with Eric. Cooking pizza from scratch at three in the morning because
that’s when we’ve got home from a mission and our body clocks are totally
screwed up. Sitting on the couch together, me reading “
He puts up with a lot from me, I know that.
Between the job, my screwed-up family, and
But if Vaughn and I were ever to cross the line, that would be it for us. Eric could never forgive that, any more than I’d expect him to. So no matter how tempted I am, no matter how in the moment I am with Vaughn, I don’t ever go there.
It’s not easy. After what we were to one another, it could never be easy.
But when I look at Eric, I know it’s worth it.