Consumed

Pairing: Nadia/Vaughn

Word Count: 443

Notes: Clara – All. Your. Fault. Also, this is all you’re getting. For the LiveJournal 15minuteficlets challenge #82

 

The Bristow family, Vaughn often thinks, have consumed his life.

 

First, Sydney, with her smile and her eyes and her way of making men – him in particular – fall in love with her. He knew, knew from the first that they shouldn’t get involved with one another, knew that even the friendship they forged as agent and handler was too much. But he let himself believe that they could make it work, that they could get through it together, and when he kissed her amidst the ruins of SD6, he thought it was the beginning of the rest of their life together.

 

He knows better now, because scant months later, he lost her.

 

He lost himself too.

 

Marrying Lauren, teaching high school French, he chose to believe that he was moving on with his life, that that was what Sydney would want for him. He told himself that he was doing the right thing.

 

Then Sydney came back.

 

Sydney came back and he discovered that his entire life was a lie, in more ways than one.

 

Because that was when he found out about Lauren.

 

He found out, thanks to Sydney, that the woman he loved was a Covenant spy.

 

And when he was reeling from the realisation, trying to figure out what to do about it, Jack Bristow stepped up to the plate, gave him a key and told him what to do.

 

He’d made it easy for Vaughn to cross the line from Boy Scout to killer, and much as Vaughn is grateful, there’s a large part of him that hates Jack for that.

 

Just like there’s a large part of him that, while he loves Sydney, hates what she’s done to his life.

 

There’s another, larger, part of him that hates how she refuses to see what he’s become.

 

He wonders, sometimes, if that’s why he’s drawn to Nadia like this. Because though she’s like Sydney, in looks, in temperament, there’s a darkness to her too, and she understands him in a way that Sydney never will.

 

And in the darkness of the night, when their bodies come together and he is consumed with lust for her – and he knows it’s lust, not love, never love – he’s glad for whatever the hell this is, however wrong it is, because it makes him feel something, and in those dark days after Lauren, that’s a gift he never thought he’d have again.

 

Vaughn’s not the man he was five years ago; consumed in Rambaldi fires and the wake of Hurricane Bristow, that Boy Scout is long since dead.

 

But when he’s with Nadia, he feels alive again.

 

It’s not much, but it’s something.

 

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