Wrong Again
Fandom: Alias
Rating: PG
Pairing: Syd/Vaughn, Syd/Weiss
Spoilers: Blink and you’ll miss it for Authorised Personnel Only
The first time that
Back then though, as his lips found hers in the smouldering ruins of SD6, she wasn’t thinking about the past, or the future, just about him, about how she’d found the man that she was going to spend the rest of her life with. And if she thought she’d found that once before, in Danny, well, Danny was gone, and Vaughn wasn’t, and they were going to be happy together, right?
Wrong.
She didn’t know how wrong until she woke up sprawled in an alleyway in Singapore, until she was sitting in a safe house with a headache she couldn’t stand and a scar she didn’t remember getting, until she heard her own shaking voice utter the words, “Vaughn, why are you wearing that ring?”
It had to be a dream, right? Two years couldn’t have gone by, Vaughn couldn’t have found someone to replace her in so short a space of time, right?
Wrong.
With little choice in the matter, she’d tried her best to go on with her life, found a new apartment, new friends, and she told herself, night after lonely night, that she’d get used to Vaughn being married, that she’d forget about him, that maybe, just maybe, she and Vaughn and Lauren would one day be friends.
Wrong again, maybe the most wrong she’s ever been, because Lauren wasn’t the woman she pretended to be, and her marriage to Vaughn was based on a lie.
When they found that out, when Lauren was dead, when Sydney and Vaughn had a new start, working for APO, when they started dating one another again, Sydney was sure that this was it. This was their third time, their charm, and they were going to be happy together, for the rest of their lives.
She was sure of it, convinced of it.
She was wrong.
Looking back on it now, she can see the reasons clearly. Vaughn’s scars – caused mostly by association with her, with her family – ran too deep to be forgotten so easily. Nor were the scars his alone, because she never quite got over her anger at being replaced by Lauren so quickly. And maybe, she can admit to herself now, things between them were just never meant to be, because it had always been just a little bit too fraught, there had always been just a few too many obstacles between them for them to have their happily ever after.
The problem was, she remembers thinking at the time, was that she couldn’t live with Vaughn, and she knew that.
She just wasn’t so sure that she knew how to live without him either.
She was sure, even when she was breaking things off with him, that they’d end up back together one day. That they were meant to be together, that he was the only man in the world for her.
She’d thought that, and she’d believed it with every fibre of her being.
She’d been wrong.
Because one day, she looked at the man standing beside her, the man who’d been nothing more than her friend since the first day he met her, the man who’d quietly made her smile, made her laugh, given her a piece of her childhood back and made her feel safe. She looked at this man, looked at him looking at her, and she’d realised that maybe, just maybe, the man she was meant to be with wasn’t the man she’d been angsting over for so long.
Maybe the man she was meant to be with was his best friend, and hers.
Just as quickly as the thought had arrived, she dismissed it, because they were just friends, she and Eric, and there was no way that he felt that way about her. Even if his eyes did linger over her body every once in a while, even if he did come around to her place more than he used to, he was just checking up on her, post break-up, just being her friend.
Right?
Wrong again.
She knew that the day that he kissed her for the first time, the day that she found herself kissing him back, and it didn’t feel wrong, or strange, or like they were betraying anyone. It felt like they should have been doing it for months, and ever since then, they’ve been making up for lost time.