sunshine_queen | damn the computer

As almost everything I've ever written has been lost, and since I just had a huge, horrific, frightening ordeal with my floppy where I saved my latest endeavor, I've decided to just put what i have left (not the latest, but almost everything) on to this journal.

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She had the maddening habit of being completely aloof, and she could lay on the couch reading, completely oblivious to his obvious disquiet until she chose to address his problems.

'This,' he says, 'It doesn't work.' He doesn't say 'anymore' because it might never have worked to begin with.

She deigns to look at him over her book- a biography, which is all she ever reads now. She has no interest in fantasy any more. She wants facts, life stories behind people she admires or thought beautiful once.

'It doesn't?' She asks, and she has the gall to look surprised and he loathes it, because she's taken on the air of a deposed princess or a belle in exile- condescending, haughty.

'No. We've changed. We're not who we were,' and he trips over this simple word- 'before.'

She doesn't ask the obvious question- before what?- and instead marks her page carefully, sitting up to cock her head, bewildered. 'We didn't change, dear. Oh no. People changed, our lives changed- but we're the same. We're us.'

He laughs bitterly. 'Frankenstein's creation, he can say that. But we're not science experiments; we're not monsters, either, not always.'

She snorts. 'You say that with such conviction.'

'Look at history, and you'll see.'

'We did nothing others wouldn't have done in our situation.' she says firmly, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She's barefoot, as she always is around the house, and her toenails are painted candy apple red, and he knows where she bought the nail polish and when she painted her nails and where, and it sickens him.

'We were insane.'

'We thought we were dreaming.'

'You said we were. I went along with it.'

'You didn't need to.'

'I had no choice.'

'This isn't my fault, don't blame me for everything.'

He grits his teeth, sharpening his response in his mind before slashing. 'Of course not, you're legally dead. You can't be held accountable for anything.'

~*~

He had entered the dream unwittingly six months ago, and he had spent two minutes outside the door trying to steady his breath before diving back underwater.

He had been treading water for two years now, and he was skilled at it. This might be a false alarm, so he was taking a deep breath in case he was submerged by an unexpected wave of emotion.

And then he opened the door to find himself in xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /Munchkin Land.

It was Munchkin Land in the sense that, like Dorothy, he walked from sepia into vivid color, into palpable life and vitality, and this was all because she was crouched in a corner.

She was hiding in the corner of the room when he arrived, pretending that she wasn't there, attempting to wake herself up from this trippy dream. It was funny, she didn't <i>remember</i> drinking, but something had brought this on, and while she had an impressive imagination, this was way out of her league. Dragons and princes and castles, yes; alleys and scars and stale safehouses, no.

She had once been good at math, but the numbers weren't helping her now. She was using them as a distraction- how long did it take a plane to get to China from California?- so that she would not wonder why she was in China and why there was a ugly scar just above the ridge of her hip.

Fifteen hours. It took a non-stop flight fifteen hours, and he had made it in sixteen.

He entered like a man asleep, trudging his way heavily through reality. She raised her head from her knees, not sure who she was expecting, but too tired to start out fighting. She's succumbed to the idea that she is in a CIA safehouse and that she is tired and that she aches, and she confused and too wound up to rest.

When she looked up, looking years younger than she was, and he peered into her face, she felt the need to release a gasp and launched herself into his arms, kissing his neck with fervor. He marveled that if this wasn't the real Sydney Bristow that she was a remarkable double, because this one even smelled like her, underneath the smell of cheap detergent and generic shampoo, and under the horrible animal scent of fear, it was her, as fresh and as sweet as he remembered.

He had felt very old when he had gently pried her off to examine her closely- the same latent freckles hardly visible to the naked eye, same dimples, same pattern of the iris. As he searched her face, she drank him in, because she had missed him in some way that she couldn't explain or identify. She took in the new creases and wrinkles that appeared there overnight, and she kindly attributed his haggard appearance to a long flight and worry. What she intended to do was make sure those wrinkles left his face soon and were replaced with smiles, because she appointed herself to that position.

She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing at all, not even when he told her gruffly that she had better sit down. He had extracted himself from her embrace and was now sitting apart from her, and she knew then that something had broken, maybe the world, it's either that or the sky has fallen, and she resisted the urge to run to the window and check on the sky, just as she resisted the urge to sit on his lap and pat him to assure herself of his reality, because she has missed him, she just didn't know why.

He said things that were so insane that they must be true, because he had a limited imagination and what he said was so fantastic that it could only be reality or some incredibly realistic dream. It was after he'd finished that she saw the glinting symbol of her mortality on his finger, and something inside her snapped, and she swallowed harshly before clamping her hands around her knees and asking him, carefully and concisely in fewer than five words, to explain this new accessory.

It wasn't until he was half-way through his stumbling explanation that she started to cry softly, thinking about how he would have it all, the white picket fence and the tire swings and the minivans and the lazy Sunday mornings and china sets. He stopped talking to watch her wallow in her sorrow, and sadistic imaginings before he stretched across the chasm of the past to grip her arm, painfully, with the untainted hand, the right hand, the hand that hadn't betrayed her.

Her breath shuddered to a stop, and he could feel her pulse through his hand, as though he was taking her in by osmosis, and just before he started to remind her to breath, she whispered insistently that she couldn't remember, not anything, not being gone, but she had missed him, she knew that, because she could feel it. She didn't look at him while she said this, choosing instead to look at his hand on her arm, his hold on her arm palpable and real in what was obviously a dream world. Slowly, he released her, and he sat back in his chair, a chill noticeably shaking both his frame and his composure. Sydney, he said, his voice rusty as though he had hardly spoken while she was gone, while he was living underwater, not a day has gone by where I haven't missed you.

And this she doubted, because one does not get a ring on their finger by missing someone, but he clarifies. It was [i]her[/i] fault that he'd married, he'd missed her, he couldn't live without her, he'd needed someone to replace her, but she didn't, no one could. She accepted the guilt and then asked him steadily what, exactly, he planned on doing.

He was quiet for too long.

This is a dream, she announced, this isn't real. In your dream I've been dead for two years, and in my dream I'm waking up after being gone for two years, but when we wake up, everything will be fine. We can do as we please.

He said her name, weighing both syllables heavily because he had missed saying it, and because what she was saying was insane. He was beginning to shake his head and protest when she caught his eye and said simply that she had missed him and that she would fight for him.

And he didn't have it in him to deny her.

Or himself.

~*~

It had rained the night before, a brutal rain that had abused the land, and now the air smells poisonous with the sickly sweet smell of rotting gardenias. The scent verged on violent when they flourished; as they lay dying on the ground, it was nauseating. It permeated their apartment, leaking in through the windows, creeping insidiously with breezes, wafting powerfully in the gentle circulation of the fans.

The storm had left a heavy cloud of humidity and a power outage. She was not singing as she went about the house trying to keep cool, and when she lay down in bed beside him, she made sure to keep space between them, dropping the ice into his palm.

'If I never smell a gardenia for the rest of my life, I will be happy,' she says as she chokes on her breath. From the glass she brought in he takes an ice cube and slides it into her mouth, letting his fingers linger on her lips.

They had argued earlier, as they did often now, but after a dinner of clanking silverware and heavy silence, the storm had roared forth, the thunder and lightning so severe that he broke the silence to warn her to stay away from the windows. He had gone to locate a flashlight while she started on the dishes when the power had gone out, plunging them into a deep darkness that was made worse by the torrential rain outside. She turned to call for him, and she knocked into a glass, sending it crashing to the floor where it shattered. Panicked and barefoot, she had called for him to save her. She had used his name for the first time in weeks.

Armed with a flashlight he had rescued her from her fate, carrying her to the living room and depositing her on the couch without a word. And then he had turned and walked away, leaving her sitting on the sofa in the dark, unusually frightened by the dark and of the thunder.

She had curled up in a corner, her face, illuminated by the frequent flashes of lightning, a study of terror. Bearing an armful of candles and a book of matches he had come forth, and she frightened him. Quickly, quietly, not to startle, he'd forgotten the argument and what had once been anger, dropping the candles to be swallowed by the dark. He felt her clawing at the air to reach him, the lone flashlight illuminating the dust mites and monsters under the couch, and she grasped his hands roughly.

'They kept me in the dark,' she had whimpered, a child plagued, 'And I missed you, but there was nothing but the dark-' and he had comforted her the best he could, lighting candles so that she would not be afraid, taking her into his arms so that she would not be alone, and the rain had continued.

The demons had disappeared with the storm, and now they lay quietly on their lumpy mattress, sheets rumpled and shoved to the foot of the bed. She had slipped on cheap flip flops to go find them ice; they knew the paltry contents of their refrigerator would be gone by noon, and they had breakfasted on chocolate ice cream and popsicles, the gardenia warping the taste of both.

'Maybe we'll melt,' she says suddenly, and her tone sounds as though she finds this thought appealing. 'We'll melt and drip away into nothing.'

He knows they live in some sort of alternate reality, but he is not willing to admit it.

~*~

They die in every city.

The first casualty are their names, the second, their identities.

She is Susie, Megan, April, Natalie, Mandy, with every new name, she adopts their own habits and loses her own. Susie scratches her elbow when she's anxious, Megan wears sandals on Thursdays without fail, April believes that Tuesdays are cursed, Natalie must wear a bangle on her left wrist, Mandy rubs at her eyes when she's tired.

He is Joshua, Matthew, Jake, Alex, Patrick, and he keeps his habits and adapts to hers. She is a method actress, and he has trouble just staying in character. He knows that he is losing her one bit at a time but doesn't tell her that.

They walk in crowds with their hands clasped, more out of fear then affection, though they don't admit to it. They'll play the part of tourists, and she leads the lives she thinks her name should have, because her life is a short step after she lost a few years.

As April, she crosses paths with a gypsy, and decides that if she doesn't get her fortune told she will absolutely perish, and so she drags him (Jake) in to her tent. She is an older woman and a complete fake.

"Your mother- she was a housewife. You were her favorite, even though you had other siblings."

"Yes," April breathes, enraptured. He watches her lie, and wonders if she believes her own words.

"Your father was- he was a teacher, yes, a teacher of math. He was very loving and attentive."

April laughs gaily- high, false. "Daddy was [i]so[/i] wonderful," she gushes, twirling a lock of short blonde hair around her finger.

"You weren't very good in school-" Here he nearly chokes, "But you tried hard and were very involved in sports. You had many friends."

April trills in amazement, "I wasn't voted prom queen for nothing!" Then she pauses, her hand stilling as she leans forward to whisper conspiratorially: "Tell me about my..." April glances over to where he stands, then back at the so-called gypsy, who nods knowingly. She motions for April to lay her hand palm-up on the table, where she studies the lines at length.

"You are not married, but you will be, soon. You will be extraordinarily happy, and you will have two children. It is very important that you make sure you place your older daughter in acting. She will be renowned for her great beauty one day."

April soaks this in, nodding seriously. "And the other one?"

"She will have the heart and the patience of unknown depths."

The gypsy coerces April into having her future seen in a crystal ball (large, lavish wedding; insanely luxurious life) and then all but demands that she buys a small rag doll to 'bring her luck'. The doll, which is the size of her hand, is purchased after being stuffed with dried herbs that will be beneficial to her life, says the gypsy. He feels that he now knows first hand the origin of the term 'gypped'.

"Can you believe that?" he asks lightly as they step back into the sunlight.

She stops abruptly, her rag doll clutched in her hand. "Believe what?"

"What she just said."

"She spoke the truth."

He peers into her face, hoping to find in April a trace of the woman he'd loved. "Don't do this," he almost begs, because it frightens him when she loses herself.

She blinks. "Do what?" She grins, her smile as blinding as the sunlight, and swings his hand, urging him forward. "You worry too much."

She avoids his name.

It isn't until darkness falls that he ever discusses anything serious. She's the talker, and she keeps conversations rolling; he is just as happy with silence. In the quiet, he does not have to confront the possibility of losing her, and of losing himself.

~*~

"What are you afraid of?"

"The truth. You?"

"Reality."

"And?"

"Losing you."

"You lose me everywhere we go. You know that."

"Never. I've never lost you."

"You will, though."

"I will not."

"Someday, you'll wake up, and we'll both be gone."

"Then we'll be gone together."

"That's not how it works."

"We'll make it work. We always do. And if you disappear, I'll find you."

~*~

She comes back in the dark, and he'll wake up to find her sitting beside him, gazing at his face wistfully, and he'll know right away that it's [i]her[/i] and not one of her many aliases. He'll reach for her and she'll fall into his arms wordlessly, and he'll stroke her hair and kiss her face and he knows then that he could never survive again without her, and if that means putting up with everyone else she brings with her, than so be it.

They make love on those nights, and she'll fall asleep nestled against him; but when he awakes the sheets will be smooth and she'll be awake and back to whom she was the day before, and it will be as if it never happened. This is her protection.

On one such morning he wakes up, hoping against hope that she'll still be there, but, as usual, she had fled.

She's Natalie now, Natalie after the actress, with brown hair and a flair for the dramatic, a bangle on her wrist, sipping tea as she glances at a newspaper written in a foreign language that she can barely decipher and that he has given up on.

He says her name low, and she pretends not to hear. Saying her alias burns his tongue and he spits it out quickly, nauseated when she whips her head around and beams. 'Angel! What do you want for breakfast?'

'I can't take it anymore.' he says, and his voice is quiet and hard, and a look of sheer terror flits over her features. He's not sure what he can't take, because he know that if he leaves he'll be back by the next afternoon (and hates himself for it) if he makes it out the door at all.

She feigns innocence. 'Can't take what, precious?'

He yells in controlled rage, forever mindful of the neighbors and of those who mean her harm: 'This, Sydney, this. I can't [i]this[/i] anymore, the running and the hiding and the hair dye and the contacts and your jobs to finance it all. I haven't been able to hear English from anyone but you in [i]five months[/i]. I'm homesick. I could bear it, Sydney, I'd be happy to be here if only you were the same, but you're not, and I can't do anything to draw you back. I've [i]lost[/i], Sydney- I lost you and I can't get you back, and I can't stand that you won't even be yourself for me any longer. I'm losing myself, and it scares me, because with both of us gone we'll never get home.'

He wants her to yell at him for being a traitor, for giving up, to do anything but stand there with her eyes filled with tears and her lips parted to catch her breath. He wants her to accuse him of something, [i]anything[/i] so that he can get angry and maybe escape this madness, driven by fury to leave.

She does not get angry, nor does she incite him. Instead she moves across the room to him, pushing into him like a child, her face against his neck as she imprisons him with her arms. 'I can't do this without you,' she sniffles, and she murmurs her absolute devotion to him and how she would die if he left her. 'I want to go home,' she whimpers, and he maneuvers them over to the couch so that he can comfort her properly. 'I'm not gone, Vaughn,' she asserts, 'I'm here, I've never left, and we'll go home, soon, I promise, but-'

Here she sits up straight, her arms still around his neck, her eyes glittering with tears, 'But not yet, please? I have to find out who did this to me, to [i]us[/i], and then everything will be alright, and we'll go home.'

He does not tell her that nothing will ever be alright, but she is smiling again. 'We can go to town this afternoon.' she plans, 'And I'll make a call, and we can leave here. Maybe Morocco or Algeria. It'll be nice.'

With every call she makes, they fall deeper, but he mumbles 'Alright,’ defeated. She moves away, ostensibly to make him something to eat, and he realizes that he has died again, in some small way or another.

~*~

Instructions she'll write out for him and then burn. Flight numbers, locations, numbers, logistics. They give her the bare bones of an operation: he plans it, she executes it. Memorizing, time of the essence: plan, commit to memory, light a match. Fear chills the air around them as they dye their hair over the kitchen sink, brown for him, auburn for her.

Cargo planes mostly, jets occasionally, sunglasses and hats used liberally. Once, back when it was a game, he'd commented that someone might mistake her for some movie star traveling incognito. They arrive in Milan, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Prague and don't stay long enough to get jet-lagged. They break in, they download, they steal objects- everything they used to do, only now they can't hide behind the flag. They have the latest gear and their plans and contingencies down pat, put his breath still catches in his throat when he hears the sickening thud of bodies against walls (floors, doors, metal, concrete, wood, marble) or the spray of gunfire and the nauseating silence that follows when he can't tell if he can inhale again or if life is over.

She comes out alive, she always does, and through the comm he can hear the strains of a waltz that the band is playing downstairs at some upscale party that they'd never merit an invitation to even if they weren't frauds.

Their reward for surviving the mission was a handsome envelope stuffed with untraceable bills and the ability to live comfortably for several weeks- or like royalty for several days. They opt for seedy hotels and cramped apartments to prolong times between jobs, because they both know that they take a gamble every time they agree to one, risk calling attention to themselves, the lost, the rogues.

They perform their duties, eyes to the ceiling, and then they fly away to some distant city, where they never speak of what has just occurred. They recreate themselves- Stacy and Romain, and they live now in Algeria. She makes up the story, which she informs him of with heavily-lidded eyes: she is a college student and he is her professor, and they've run away to live some quixotic adventure of mad romance. This will work because she looks appropriately young and he looks appropriately guilty. She had chosen Algiers because it was once French and she wants to offer him comfort where she can. He appreciates the effort.

They live in the slums of the city, the area considered unsafe for tourists. Everyday he risks the danger of going down to the port and gazing longingly at the ferry that goes to Marseilles before trudging back to their little apartment. She is happy there for some reason, enjoying, as always, the dry heat. They are safe there, because people are warned to stay away from this area of the world unless absolutely necessary. She enjoys the ancient ruins not to far from the city, the streets that zigzag and the architecture that mixes European styles with Arabic. She plans trips to the picturesque areas surrounding them, to the art museum, and he wonders if she's just trying to pretend they're on a vacation. In the mornings, copies of the major French newspaper rest on the table and he hates to admit that it is comforting to be confronted with familiarity. She even manages to find a theatre that shows French and English films that she surprises him with, excited as he imagined she would be on Christmas morning.

Their first film there is 'The Wizard of Oz', which she claims was her favorite movie as a child, and that she would wait all year for them to show it on television, but she always cried when Dorothy went back to living in sepia-tinted Kansas. She preferred the bright colors of Oz.

Neither of them had seen the movie in years, and they sat close to the screen in a practically empty theatre, their arms entwined on the armrest between them, hands clasped loosely. She let her head fall to his shoulder when Dorothy began singing 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' and it wasn't long before he realized that she was crying. He said nothing, knowing that there was nothing to be said, and that their both wishing for somewhere where there wasn't any trouble was a pipe dream and nothing more, and the movement of her face as she mouthed the lyrics was a sad testimony to the state of things.

It isn't until later, much later, when they're lying in bed and she's asleep with her lips parted and her ankle over his that he realizes that she is Dorothy, the little girl dreamer thrown into chaotic worlds by forces she had no control over, longing for the normalcy promised to all children.

One day she sees her father in a crowd and drops his hand for the first time to follow him, disappearing into dank alleyways, crying out for him silently. He follows her, his heart skipping beats when he loses sight of her. She stops abruptly at the crossroads of two alleys, slumping into a wall, hiding her face behind a hank of red hair.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she reaches up to curl her fingers around him without turning. 'I want to go home,' she whispers. 'I want to go home.'

They pass the American embassy on their way back to their apartment. They try their best not to stare at it greedily.

~*~

The women of the building love Stacy. They love her tenseless, flawed French and her hesitant, stumbling show of Arabic. They love the way she wears long sleeves to fit in with their culture and how she clutches the ends of those sleeves with child-like dependence. They love her cinnamon-colored hair that waves slightly and the dusking of freckles across her pale skin. They love her effervescence and the way she waves to them in the hallway and knows all their children’s' names, even if she can hardly converse with them. They love the way she tries. They love the way she comes to them for help. They love Stacy, full stop.

It's him they don't like. They think he is moody and snobbish, with his French papers and clipped words. His French is perfect and his Arabic is horrific. His hair is too dark for his features, they think, and they don't trust his green eyes that cloud over and shift and dart as though nervous, even when talking to the old women. He is always polite, but they don't like him. He has brought this sheltered, treasured darling to a world that they know is dangerous. They don't feel he takes care of her.

They wonder what they do all day, because one rarely goes out without the other attached to their hand. They have torrid ideas of what might be going on, but they cannot reconcile it with the sweet-faced girl they see and the lack of noise inevitable with the paper-thin walls.

He wants to like them, more than he wants them to like him, because she likes them. He cannot bring himself to, and it's more than just spite. He doesn't like them because they send her home limp and dry, sucking out her spirit through her act. She spoils her phrases before speaking, always a few steps ahead. She creates backstories needed and gets flustered when she feels Stacy would or when she feels that they would expect her to. He fears that she will turn bone-dry like they are, and when she comes home wearily and sifts back into his life he wonders if the desert conquers people little by little or all at once.

They both miss the common things that made them who they were: him, his hockey games and his aftershave and his ability to believe in happy endings; her, her long baths and her strawberry lip gloss and her unbridled enthusiasm for life. She has him wish on eyelashes with her and she avoids cracks in sidewalks studiously.

She is unusually animated when they go and visit the Roman ruins of Djemila. She is thrilled with the palpable history and the preserved slice of antiquity. 'Just think,' she says in awe, 'someone stood here, right here, over two thousand years ago, and they saw what I see now. Isn't that nice? That it hasn't changed? And maybe years from now someone else will stand right here and they'll look out and see the same thing.' She misses the stability of a history in her life, and she is vicariously happy for those who have it. She spends hours in the museum, fascinated by the world-renowned mosaics and the marble statues, but also captivated by the ordinary household items on display.

On their way back to Algiers they pass through Setif, where an oddly placed amusement park lays as though lost. It boasts a zoo that she insists on seeing and trudges sullenly throughout. He tries to engage her interest as they're leaving, fearful that she might've left something of herself to history back in Djemila, by asking her what her favorite animal was. She looks at him as though he were a simpleton. 'The giraffe with a crooked neck, of course.'

That he misses her while his fingers are wrapped around her wrist frightens him. He slides his arm around her waist, hoping to draw her closer to him, because he is afraid of the responsibility she piles onto him when she loses herself.

They go home, and the women smile sweetly at her and glare at him with barely concealed dislike. When she wafts up the stairs ahead of him, his breath catches in his throat because he is sure that he can see through her.

~*~

He can count the knobs of her spine through the taken she wears to bed when he wakes up one dark morning. She is sitting with her knees drawn to her chest, arms loosely embracing them. He stretches an arm towards her, his limbs heavy from sleep, and splays his fingers over her back.

"I dreamt last night." She says quietly, not to him, but just aloud. She does not wait for him to respond before continuing. "I dreamt that I was six again, and my mother had just died. My father wasn't home and I was very lonely... and I knew, somehow, that my mother was bad. I didn't know she was alive, but I knew she had done something horrible, and I was going around in a world where the sky had fallen... and it was the day before my birthday, and I was sitting on the steps in front of school waiting to be picked up, my nanny was late again- when my mother pulled up and rolled down the window, and it was so [i]normal[/i]- and she called for me.

"And I knew she was bad. I knew she was bad and she had left me and that I should be mad at her- but I was so [i]relieved[/i]- my mother, alive, and wanting to be with [i]me[/i]- that I didn't even hesitate before running over and getting into the car with her. And she offered me her cheek to kiss, and she kissed me and smelled the same, and she smoothed my hair and complained about the hole in my tights from playing rough during recess and it was so wonderfully normal that I even thought to myself, I don't care if Mommy's bad, she loves me.

"We drove for a long time, and I knew that my nanny would be worried, but I didn't care, and finally we got to this hotel, and she signed in under a different name and she took me to her room and she had bought me toys and new clothes and books... she was trying to buy me off... and all the while I was thinking how wrong it was, but then she'd turn and smile at me, or she'd hold my hand, or she'd kiss me... and I would make excuses for her in my head. Even when she was doing strange things, or being moody, I'd think, she'll come back, and she'll be Mommy again... and I kept waiting for it."

She is cool under his fingers, cool and smooth as he slides his hand under the tank to feel the silk of her flesh, warming her with his love and good intentions. He can feel her words through her as though this dream has come from deep inside her and he can absorb it. Her shoulders hitch as her breathing snags on her emotions and she turns to look at him, her eyes burning with tears.

"How could I go? Why would I love her so much to follow her even when I knew what I was getting into? Why would I make excuses for her, allowances for her, all because she had loved me once? I loved her so much that I was willing to do anything to please her, just to keep her with me... but why? Why wasn't I stronger than that? How could I be so weak?"

He comforts her wordlessly, stunned into silence as he strokes her hair and taps soothing rhythms onto her back.