early season two.
Sydney asks, "Where do you live?" Her knees are tucked up to her chin, her arms holding them tight.
"What?" he asks.
"Where do you live?"
He leans against the chain link gate. "West L.A."
"Vaughn," she says. "Where exactly do you live?"
"855 North Beverly Glen Boulevard. Why? You going to order me a pizza?"
Her smile leaves as quickly as it arrived. "I just realized -- I don't know your address. I can't even send you a birthday card. I don't even know when your birthday is. Today could be your birthday and I wouldn't even know. And you, you know everything about me."
"855 North Beverly Glen."
"I got it the first time."
"It's not today. It's in February."
"Okay."
"Not everything," he says, and she tilts her head. "I don't know everything."
::
He answers the door in old sweats and a white undershirt. At least they're clean. Sydney is wearing a bright blue baseball cap that matches her bright blue polo shirt and a bright blue boxy car parked at the curb. All three are emblazoned with a red and white logo that says Joey's Pizza. He's never seen her in jeans before.
The dog surges towards the steaming box she's holding and Vaughn hauls him back by the collar.
"So it's $15.27," she says, blowing a stray piece of hair out of her eyes. "Plus tip."
Donovan sniffs her knee and wags his tail. Luckily Vaughn has never relied on him for any kind of security. Slowly, Sydney smiles.
"Let me find my wallet," he says, and takes a step backwards. She follows him in and Donovan noses the door shut. It's his only trick.
"It was your idea," she says, shrugging. Donovan jumps up nearly knocks the pizza box out of her hands. "I didn't know you had a dog."
"Donovan. Do you -- do you want something to drink? To go with the pizza. At least that smells like a real pizza." He sniffs again and stares at the box. "I love pepperoni."
"Me too. I guessed."
"You never guess, Syd. You intuit."
"Well, I intuited you would like something simple yet spicy." She's proud of herself, which is rare enough these days. Donovan rubs his ear on her leg and whines. Vaughn can sympathize. She looks ridiculously and utterly cute. "Can you intuit what I want to drink?"
He concentrates. "Beer."
She nods, sharp chin up and down just once. She's feeling playful. "You are correct, sir." She follows him to the kitchen and lays the cardboard box on the counter.
"Double or nothing if you can find the plates on the first try," he says. She watches his eyes as if he'd give it away. Finally she says, "Cabinet over the microwave."
"One over." She frowns. "One over to the left. Why'd you pick that one?"
"It's where I keep mine," she says.
::
They eat standing up. He's hungrier than he realized. He can't remember when he last ate.
"Me neither," she says around a bite of pizza. She's beautiful like this, relaxed, no life-or-death decisions wrinkling her forehead. Just dinner. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, but her lips are still greasy. He wants to kiss her so much his throat closes up and he nearly chokes.
She hits him sharply across the back and threatens to do the Heimlich on him. "You'd probably break a rib," he says.
"Probably," she agrees.
He likes this game they're playing, this first date flirting like it's truly up in the air how the evening will end. They're good at this game. They play it all the time.
He's given up plotting scenarios where things go differently, where some key variable is altered and the rest all yields to the push and pull of a careful pick. Though he has in the past considered a few options that start off remarkably like this. Minus the pizza delivery uniform.
He's been quiet too long, and Sydney takes a deep breath. "Thanks for the pizza," he says in a hurry, on top of her saying something he can't make out. Then they both stop. "What?" he asks finally.
"I just know we're probably not going to get to go out for a nice dinner." She smiles a little. "Not this century anyway."
He wants to make a joke, but she's not really kidding. Her eyes are wide and he remembers her shaking that morning, trembling visibly as she told him what had gone wrong in Bali. He's not sure she even realized it. "I know," he says.
She narrows her eyes. "Is pepperoni really your favorite or were you just happy to see me?"
He laughs but her eyes are still suspicious. More than anything in the world, more than wanting to kiss her every time she speaks, he wants her never to be suspicious again. "I wouldn't lie about something that important," he says.
She nods and leans one elbow on the counter. "Nice place, by the way."
"Thanks."
"Very Agency issue. Outside it's very good at blending in. Regulation-trim lawn. Rain gutters at perfect right angles. You'd never guess inside it would have so much..."
"Dust?"
She turns her head and smiles widely. "Personality."
He spreads his hand out on the cool tile and looks across at his living room, years of books and souvenirs and seventeenth century furniture culled from meditative Sundays staring at fine gradations of wood grain. "It's my haven," he says.
She moves up beside him, behind him, and tucks her chin over his shoulder. He is immobilized. "You have such a normal life," she says. He can't tell if it's a warning or a request to be invited in.
"Want the tour?" He speaks too quickly, almost trips on his tongue. He is barely keeping himself from a nervous babble.
She nods into his neck. He doesn't really move, but eventually he manages to lift his hand from the counter and reaches back, brushing the inside of her arm slowly, a gradual descent until his hand covers hers, pressing it into his thigh. She exhales in his ear, calm and even. Her mouth is open and her breath is warm.
He flips his hand over and threads their fingers together. "Well," he says. "This is the kitchen. Home to beer and dishes and all the other usual suspects."
"Did you know the normal lifespan of a stove is fifteen point seven years?"
He laughs, feels his body relax. "I did not."
"Fannie Mae report on household energy."
"You trust the feds to tell the truth?"
"It's just a dishwasher statistic," she says. "I like your kitchen. It's my favorite room so far."
"Wait till you see the rest of the living room."
They walk slowly, carefully, like they might lose each other if they go too fast. That's part of the game, too. No sudden movements. It's a little like being held hostage.
She runs her free hand along the back of the couch, over the curved arm of the oak chair, and traces the edge of a bookshelf with a nail. "No dust," she says.
"Just nice, normal personality."
She taps the glass of a framed photo. "Your mother."
"Yeah."
She's waiting for him to say more. She wants him, he thinks, to babble. Just a nice, normal, overeager dinner date before you're even sure there's going to be a goodnight kiss.
"My mother, on the steps of the house where I grew up. That's -- there, the second step, is where I fell and broke my arm when I was six. I thought maybe I could fly."
"You jumped from the second step?"
"I was an underachiever."
"I don't believe that," she says, and squeezes his hand. They're still holding hands. "Where is she now?"
"Maryland. She lives with my sister." Vaughn runs his thumb over another frame, leaving a smeared print. Christmas last year, stockings on a chimney like an ad in a Sears catalog. He can't imagine Sydney in a normal life like that.
"You took that," she says, and he looks more closely. He isn't in the photograph.
"Mom. Mary, her husband Rick, their oldest son Jeffrey." He points at each face. "Michael, Rick Jr., and his partner in all crimes real and imagined, Stuffy the Bear."
"Stuffy?" She shines cotton candy sweet. Happy.
"He *is* a stuffed animal."
"Ahh. I see."
"We Vaughns take these questions of origin very seriously. It was Ricky's first toy, and he was told it was a stuffed animal. That was that. No changing his mind. I don't think he wanted to consider the alternative."
"I can see that."
"This," he says, and pulls out the book at the far end. "Is maybe evidence we take it too seriously."
She opens the faded leather cover gingerly. "The family Bible." She sighs a little, draws with her fingertips over the stained and scrawled ink that spreads across three pages. Birthdates and locations, marriages and infant mortalities. Two continents, twelve generations. He's still not sure why his mother has given it to him for safekeeping.
Sydney stops just short of touching his father's name. She is stiff again, paralyzed. He closes the book. Her hand dances to an old iron skeleton key propped against the complete works of Shakespeare. She halts at the last moment before picking it up.
"It's okay," he says.
She turns it over and over, feeling out the grooves and notches. "What does it open?"
He waits until she lifts her face and looks at him before answering. "My aunt Bob gave it to my father when he became an agent."
"Aunt Bob?"
"Roberta. But no one dared call her that, she hated it so much." Sydney nods for him to go on. "She was a great lady. Took the civil service exam at twenty-one wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked back. Showed up for work in a skirt and they stuck her in the typing pool until she kicked every other woman's ass. Metaphorically, of course. She was the first assistant undersecretary at State not to be an old boring white guy."
"They called her Bob at State?"
"No," he says. "We called her Bob at home. I think they mostly called her babe." Syd laughs and he touches her other arm, too. "She helped my dad pay his way through college. Put down the deposit on his first apartment after he and my mom got married. And she gave him this, which she said had been their grandmother's, brought over from Ireland on the boat."
"So what does it open?"
Sometimes when he's waiting for Sydney, he rehearses what he's going to say. The speech he's going to give. How to tell her things she doesn't want to know so that she still feels safe. She always just says exactly what she's thinking.
He's never imagined telling her all this. They're standing face to face, holding hands the most serious admission ever to pass between them, if he doesn't count the times they've saved each other's lives.
"The, uh, the story goes that it was key to the cell in the village jail, and that the night before they left for America, she snuck out of her house, stole one of her father's horses, and rescued her fiancé."
He covers the key in her hand with his own. Her legs are touching his. He's not wearing shoes, and she seems taller when he's barefoot. She bites her bottom lip a little. "What had he done?"
"Been wrongfully accused. The victim of circumstance." He looks her in the eye. "Spied on England for a gang of insurgents. Depends on which part of the story you believe. Either way it ends with him getting shot by a young lord, and her leaving alone."
Her chin comes up. "Was there a moral in that story that I missed?"
"Bob said, 'It doesn't matter to anyone but your family what you were doing when you get caught. But to them it makes all the difference in the world.'"
"Wow," she says.
"Yeah, pretty intense, I know."
"I hope she waited until you were past jumping off the second step to lay that one on you."
"Barely." She smiles wide enough for dimples, lips still shiny, and he leans in.
She stops him with a soft hand to his chest, then untangles their fingers and steps back. "I've been here a while," she says. "The car --"
"Could be suspicious," he says.
"Yeah." She looks down at his feet. "You have nice toes," she says, and sounds wistful. She takes another step back and looks up slowly. "We should be careful."
He nods. "I know."
"It's only that --"
"Someone might think I have a pizza fetish."
She is grateful for the joke and laughs too easily. His hands feel cold, almost numb. "I should go."
"Maybe next time we'll get to the rest of the house." Only beside Sydney does his life look normal.
"Maybe," she says. He lets her go.
END.
CREDITS: ALIAS by J. Garner, M. Vartan, J.J. Abrams, etc. Summary by Mulder, remixed by P.M. Dawn, from "Songs in the Key of X." Beta/addiction by Jamie, Punk and Ivy. My three favorite definitions for NORMAL: (1) The usual or expected state. (2) Being at right angles. (3) Of Latin origin: Using a carpenter's rule, or made according to the square.