Title: Sleep

Summary: Vaughn reflects on Sydney and some of their problems while watching her sleep. Post S3

Ship: Syd/Vaughn. Kinda made clear by the summary but whatever.

A/N: Okay, so first off, I want to say that I am a girl and damn proud of it, and I have absolutely no idea what goes on in the mind of a man. None. Sad, I know. So, writing this from a man's POV was a little difficult, so, like, try to go easy on me. And second, I want to add that I didn't see a vast majority of the first half of the third season, I'm going off of what people have told me. So if some things don't match, I am sorry. Use your imagination.

Disclaimer: I own everthing. That's right, I own it all. Syd and I are doing our nails and having girly talks. Weiss is on my couch, drinking a beer and yelling at the football game on TV. Marshall is sitting on the chair, asking questions about football every thirty seconds. Jack is playing security man and threatening to shoot those annoying boys that like me but I don't like them back. Francie is in the kitchen, making me a gourmet dinner. Will is preparing to write all of my essays and things of that nature for when school starts. And Vaughn, Drew Fuller, and Orlando Bloom are in the pool fighting over me. ::sigh:: That would be the life.

When: After season three.

Rating: PG-13 cause of me language. I have a real problem with that.

She was so beautiful when she slept. So peaceful, so relaxed. When she slept, none of the evils that seemed to plague her life constantly could reach her. She was off in her dream world, which I hope includes me, away from the harsh realities of life.

God knows, she's had enough problems in life, enough to wreak havoc upon at least seven different people's lives. And yet, somehow she hasn't given up. She's still strong throughout it all and I think that's what I love about her the most.

When she was six, her mother died. Well, everyone thought that she had died. In truth, her mother had faked her death, leaving behind a daughter and a husband, not a man that I'm particularly fond of and vice versa. Almost thirty years later, Irina Derevko came back into her life and caused more trouble than she was worth. The moment my love was starting to get close to her long lost mother, the Goddamn bitch left. Just as she had done thirty years earlier. Needless to say, the daughter she left behind was hurt, angry, betrayed, vengeful, and so many things that clouded the lights in her eyes. And I could do nothing about it.

She wouldn't let me. She thought that because of my personal grudge against Derevko that I wouldn't understand what she was going through and wouldn't want to listen. She couldn't have been more wrong. While she may have been right about me not knowing what she was feeling exactly, I would have listened. I would have listened for hours on end to her ranting about how much she hated the woman that killed my father. She would have apologized for her mother's actions, though she really had no part in it and started to tell herself that I didn't deserve her because of her mother's sins. I always thought of it the other way around.

I never deserved her. I never deserved anyone so beautiful and strong and caring and sweet and kind. She was a goddess walking around the rest of us mortals, needing nothing more than worship and unabridged attention. I was more than willing to give it to her. I wanted nothing more than to worship her very being every minute of every hour of every day til the day that I died.

Then came that fateful day when she disappeared from my life. I got a call in the middle of the night, saying that there had been a fire at her apartment and I needed to get over there immediately. I did. What I found still haunts me to this day. She was dead. Gone. Forever. It was like a bad dream that I couldn't wake from.

For months after, I was inconsolable. I drank. I didn't sleep. I rarely ate and only then out of necessity. I didn't work. I didn't shower unless Eric practically shoved me in there because he said I stank, which I probably did. I actually started talking to her one day. Just out of the blue, I started having a conversation with her. I would ask her things, like if I should get a new car or go get my hair trimmed, it badly needed it. For a long time, she never talked back. I'd ask a question and silence would follow, giving me the horrible reminder that she was in fact gone. Then one day she answered. I heard her voice. She talked back when I asked her a question. I can't remember what the question was, all I can remember was that she answered.

That, I think it was finally snapped me. I snapped out of that world of liquor and depression and saw myself for what I was. I was a thirty-five-year-old drunk, who couldn't let his girlfriend rest in her grave, though she never actually had a grave. Her ashes had been spread across the sea by my hand. I realized that I was crazy. She couldn't have talked back. It was impossible. She was gone. Forever. I knew that she would be ashamed of my state. She would refuse to acknowledge that I was the same man she knew just a year before. I had changed that quickly.

I realized that I needed to get out. I needed to leave my apartment. I needed to get a job, my job with the CIA was long gone. I needed to start showering and shaving again. I needed to eat right again. I needed to get my hair cut. So I did. I cleaned up as best I could and left my apartment. My first stop was the hairdresser. I got my hair cut back to its original short, spikiness and was instantly reminded of her. She loved my hair like that. I could at least dedicate my haircut to her memory. Really pathetic and depressing, I know but I didn't have much else to offer. I was a wreck.

Then I met her. Lauren Reed. She seemed to understand me. She seemed to help me with my grief and despair over Sydney's passing. She seemed to want to help me and I let her. I knew that it was way too soon to even think about dating someone else, let alone marriage but somehow, less than three months after we met, Lauren and I were married. I couldn't help but think the entire day that it should have been her that I was marrying, not Lauren.

Lauren and I settled into married life fair enough. She worked with the NSC, while I got a job teaching a college class. Not exactly my dream job, that would have been hockey but it was close enough. I didn't go to hockey rinks anymore. They reminded me too much of her and the afternoons I spent with her trying to teach her how to play hockey because, truthfully, she sucked at it. And my second choice would have been with the CIA, like my father but after what happened to her, I didn't have the heart to sit there all day and pretend that I was alright. Outside, I may have looked like I had moved on. Inside, I was dying, slowly and painfully.

Then I got that call, in the middle of night, just like the call that had almost destroyed me. Director Dixon was calling me, telling me that the CIA wanted me to go to Hong Kong. When I asked why, he replied that she was there. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to yell. I wanted to say "no thanks" and hang up that phone. I wanted to shout with joy that she was alive. But I didn't do any of those things. I simply said that I would go there immediately.

Lauren wasn't happy to say the least. She was upset and kept saying that if she really was back, that I would leave her and go back to her. I tried to reassure my wife that I wasn't going to leave her, and that I loved her, but she wouldn't listen. So I had no choice but to leave on bad terms.

I wasn't sure what to expect to find in that safe house. At first, I thought it had just been a prank phone call, a rouse meant in good humor but wasn't. But then, when I opened that door and saw her sitting there on that bed, looking so confused and hurt, I forgot all the thoughts of it being a prank.

Her first action was to jump off that bed and run to me. She wrapped her arms around me, obviously needing my reassurance but I couldn't give it to her. The ring on my finger reminded me that I couldn't hold her in my arms and whisper how much I loved her. Not anymore.

I had no doubt that the woman in front of me was her. Only she could have held me like that. Only she could have looked at me with those wide brown eyes full of innocence and confusion. Only she could have bit her lip in a failing effort not to cry.

I told her the basics, that she had been missing for two years and that we all thought she was dead. I told her that I was no longer with the agency, that I was a teacher. I told her that I was married. She didn't say anything for awhile before asking when she had to be back in the States. I was confused by the question. I wasn't expecting that question at all.

She attacked me then. She said that I couldn't be the man I said I was. She thought I worked for Sloane. She kicked my ass because she was that good. I think she could always kick my ass, just now, she's better at it. She ran out of the room for some reason I don't know. I can't be sure if it was because of the guard had entered the room or if she was finally starting to accept that she had been missing for two years. I followed her out to the street, a tranquilizer gun in my hand. I never had any intention of using it. And I didn't need to. She fainted before I was forced to and I caught her before she fell to the pavement. It felt weird and good and tragic and fantastic to have her in my arms again.

Things did not go over well between us after she got back to L.A. We fought, we cried, we glared at each other, we didn't speak. There was air of hate and betrayal around her that I couldn't get through. She hated me. She made that part perfectly clear.

For almost a year, it was hard to just get up in the morning knowing that she wouldn't be beside me. She wasn't there but Lauren was. I couldn't just leave Lauren. I wanted, no needed, to make my marriage last. I always thought of marriage as sacred, something that wasn't to be taken lightly and if that mean not having her in my life, then that was the way things had to be. It killed me. It tortured me. I had trouble sleeping at night. But I did it nonetheless.

Slowly, she opened up, little by little to the point where she didn't hate my guts and didn't want to kick my ass every time she saw me. We talked, sort of. We spoke without hate in our voices. True, that she still had the tone of disgust and dislike when she talked to me, but at least she wasn't breathing pure hatred anymore.

Then came North Korea. That mission would haunt my dreams and my waking conscious for weeks after. We thought we were going to die. It seemed to be a certainty that we were going to die. We said things. Things we could never take back. Things we never would want to take back. We kissed. I had forgotten what it felt like to have her lips over mine, the sweet taste of her. I missed that taste. I missed her. I wanted her. We survived that mission, just barely and went home with the guilt of our stolen kiss weighing down on our conscious.

Lauren was jealous. That much was true. Or at least, she put on the façade of being jealous. I don't know if you're allowed to be jealous of a woman your husband that you didn't love, loved before you. She didn't love me. She was using me, using me for information. It was a charade. She never wanted to marry me. She had been ordered to marry me by the very people that had stolen the woman I love out of my life in the first place. Her secret was brought to light by the man that I thought hated me. Jack.

Lauren realized that her operation had been compromised and fled. It was probably a good thing too because if she hadn't I would've have killed her on the spot. I hated her that much for what she had done to me and my love. She had used my grief against me. I never thought of pain being my weakest link. But I suppose in that time after I thought that she had died, it was.

The sharp stung of betrayal and the need for revenge started to consume me. Lauren needed to pay for what she did. No one hurt the woman I cared about the most in the world like that. Jack understood my feelings about Lauren's due judgment and tried to help. He gave me a key to a storage facility. In it, he said, I would find untraceable weapons, and other memorabilia needed to dispose of Lauren.

At first, I never considered the thought of it. Cold blooded murder wasn't the kind of man I was. But as the days past, the thought of killing that heartless bitch became more and more appealing. My original thoughts of bringing Lauren to justice by means of the legal system faded to the thoughts of disposing of her completely. Making her suffer as she made my love suffer seemed to be the perfect and only choice.

My love caught wind of my plans and she tried to talk me out of it. She knew that it wasn't like me to do something like that. She didn't want me to turn into that kind of man. I tried to listen to her but that nagging voice in the back of my head told me that Lauren had to die.

I put my plan into motion. I followed Lauren and waited until the perfect opportunity. I spotted it and took it. I brought an unconscious Lauren to the warehouse that Jack told me about and proceeded to carry out my plan.

But her words echoed in my head. She said that killing Lauren would only haunt my conscious and that she would lose me all over again. The thought of losing her again nearly made my heart stop. That's why I couldn't go through with killing Lauren. I cared more about the first and only woman in my life than getting my revenge.

I don't remember much of what happened after that. Only that I had been stabbed by Katya Derevko, the sister of the woman who abandoned her daughter twice. The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the hospital, surrounded by machines and with Eric by my bed not her.

He told me that she had gone after Lauren, that she realized that that woman needed to pay. I knew that was a mistake. She would run into her aunt and think her aunt was on her side when she wasn't. I begged with Eric to let me out and he only agreed to help me when I told him who really stabbed me. He helped me get out the hospital and I got on the first plane I could to Palermo.

I made it just in time. Lauren was about to kill her when I arrived and instead I killed Lauren. It was self defense. That's what we told ourselves and Dixon and the entire CIA when they asked. Lauren was going to kill her but I killed Lauren before she had the chance. It was true, in a sense, and we weren't going to let that woman ruin anymore of our lives.

I wanted to marry her right away. I wanted to legally claim her as my own and never let her go. I knew that it was a stupid idea. She knew it, too. We couldn't get married. We needed to reconnect and try the dating thing again. The dating thing quickly turned into the seriously dating thing which quickly turned into the living together thing which finally, after six months, turned into the engaged thing. She didn't want a big wedding and neither did I. I could have cared less where or when we were married, just as long as we were.

So we set the date, called everybody we wanted to be there, which really wasn't a lot of people, made the necessary phone calls to caterers and florists and people of that nature and on October first, she and I were married. The ceremony and reception are a blur. I can honestly say that if it weren't for the wedding video and our rings, I would have thought the entire day a dream. She was now Sydney Anne Vaughn, just the way it should have been all along and I intend never to let anything change that.

Married life with her didn't entail settling. I didn't have to settle into being married to her. It was just right. Nothing could describe it better than right. Perfect maybe, but right seemed to do the job just fine.

I watch her face as she sleeps. I can see the worry-line free forehead, the slight smile as she dreams of something nice, the hair falling in front of her eyes though going unnoticed, and I realize that I love her more than anything. If she "dies" again, I will wait til the end of time just to be with her again. I will never give up on her, not again. I've learned my lesson, the hard way and it's one that I will never forget.

She stirs lightly in her sleep before falling back into her previous unmoving slumber. I reach out and brush the hair from her eyes. My hand continues down her face, along her neck, down her chest, to her belly where it stops. I can almost feel the tiny life growing inside of her. The life we created together. The life that I would protect fiercely from harm. It's hard to believe that in less than seven months, we're going to be parents. We'll have a little girl or little boy running around the house, bringing us joy and a little bit of frustration. I hope that our child has her eyes, her beautiful brown eyes, and her chin, and her strength, and her caring heart, and hopefully goes without inheriting her stubbornness. Though with me and her as parents, that child will probably be the most stubborn one the face of the Earth. And I'm okay with that. Just as long as he or she is healthy and happy.

Her eyes shoot open suddenly and she smiles warmly. She can tell what I'm thinking just by looking at me. I love that about her. "Your hand is cold," She whispers, laughing lightly.

I return the laughter and smile. "No, it's not."

"Yes, it is." She insists and my hand leaves her belly. Instead, it snakes around her back and pulls her closer to me. She laughs, "Now, it's not so bad."

"Good," I answer, placing a soft, feathery kiss on her forehead. She snuggles closer to my chest and sighs contently. "I love you."

"I love you, too." She whispers back.

"For ever and ever?"

"For ever and ever," She confirms, closing her eyes again. Soon, I hear her even breathing, telling me that she's sleeping again.

I smile and pull her even closer to me to the point where there's barely any space between us. "Sleep, my darling, just sleep." I whisper, closing my eyes as well, ever aware of her warm body pressed up against mine. Sleep claims me soon as well. It seems that only in our sleep that the evils of life don't touch us. Sleep is when we heal wounds on both the inside and out. Sleep is what keeps us sane. Sleep is healing. Sleep is perfect.
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