Title: Possession

Author: mojoco

Rating: R

Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, they belong to JJ Abrams and Bad Robot Productions.

Author's Note: Thanks to those who have reviewed "All She'd Taken" and "Any Way, Any Place." This kind of grew from those.

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Possess: 1. To have, as property; own. 2. To have as a faculty, quality, or the like. 3. To have a powerful influence on; control or dominate. (Webster's Dictionary)

Prologue

The name she'd been given at birth was Sydney Bristow, but no one called her that anymore. Not even her husband. Honestly, she didn't mind. A new name made it easier to forget who she'd been-- who, if she was honest with herself, she still was: a one-time double agent, forced into hiding, a new life, away from everyone and everything she'd once known. Except him. She'd have died before she let any circumstances take him away from her. She'd already had too many other things taken away.

"Marc, darling," she said, approaching him then. It wasn't the name his parents had given him, either, but not even a flicker of confusion flashed in his eyes. He'd never been confused or reluctant to be called something other than Michael Vaughn, even in the beginning. For as scared as the two of them had been to leave their old lives at first, it hadn't taken long for them to fully embrace their new identities. Things were just so much simpler, now that they were no longer Sydney Bristow, double agent, and Michael Vaughn, her handler. Lover. Whatever. So much better than she'd ever dreamed they could be. Sometimes she couldn't help but wonder if they'd died and gone to Heaven.

Of course, Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn had died the day his car had toppled into the water with both of them in it. Oh, their bodies had never been found, but for all practical purposes, the two of them were dead. What no one but the two of them knew was that they'd been reborn, as Mr. and Mrs. Marc and Katherine Chadwick.

She hadn't even married him under her real name.

Dead people didn't have weddings.

Her husband lowered his sunglasses to look at her then, the gaze in his green eyes reminding her for the hundredth time that he really was no longer Michael Vaughn. Michael Vaughn had never gazed at her with such open, naked admiration and desire. He had been just as appreciative of her beauty then, to be sure, but there had always been something a little reserved, a little unsure in his gaze, as if he was afraid she was going to be snatched from him at any moment. He didn't have to worry about that now. She was his, all his, only his. Just as it had been then, now he was the only person alive who knew everything about her. And loved her anyway.

"Katie," he said, the name rolling off of his tongue as easily as Syd once had. "How is it even possible that you get more and more beautiful every day?"

"I could ask you the same question," she said, leaning down to kiss him. Within a moment he had pulled her down to his lap. She might have been worried that the beach chair wouldn't support both of them, except they'd sat like that countless times before-- kissing, every now and then, but more often than not just gazing at each other. Anyone happening onto their private beach would have looked at them an thought that no two people had ever been so happy, or so in love.

They would have been right.

They just wouldn't have known the hell the two of them had gone to just to sit on that beach.