Work Text:
The Rose
by Freya
Two years.
Two years that had passed, of which she had not the slightest memory.
Who was Julia Thorn?
Where did she live?
What did she like?
Who were her friends?
Did she even have any?
Considering her choice of job, it was an unlikely thought.
So many questions and so few answers.
Wasn't life an unfair bitch?
And who was she?
Sydney Bristow, double agent, SD-6 killer and CIA undercover agent.
Or rather former.
Former double agent.
Former undercover killer.
Because SD-6 was no more.
Gone, as if it had never existed.
As if all the people she had met, killed or rescued, hadn't been more than fragments of her imagination.
Never born, never alive.
Never died.
So much seemed senseless now.
Even her own life.
She still knew herself, of course.
Her birth-date, her apartment, her body.
Knew that when she looked at her hands they belonged to her and they would move when she wanted them to.
But when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a stranger.
Her eyes bore a darkness that she couldn't remember and she shuddered as she skidded the edge of unbidden memories.
She didn't want them.
They weren't hers because she hadn't made them.
Not Sydney, but Julia had made them.
But who was Julia if not Sydney?
Another side of her.
Hidden deep down inside of her, under vehement denial and suppressed memoirs.
What Julia had done ... would Sydney be able to do the same?
Or were they just two sides of one coin, yet too different to ever meet?
Two parts of one mind, one, the weaker, suppressed by the stronger one.
One black, one white.
One a rose, one its thorns.
One married, one dumped.
And still hopelessly in love.
Sydney looked at her reflection in the mirror.
The darkness in her eyes, now even blacker in the bright neon light, stared right back at her.
With a look that spoke of a sly triumph.
Of a secret waiting in its depth to break free and reveal itself in all its revolting beauty.
Of a secret Sydney had become vaguely aware of and feared it even in this vague state of recognition.
Because she knew that the darkness had something to do with it.
The stranger in the mirror carried the secret, not Sydney.
Not she.
The shuddering turned into trembling and a frustrated cry escaped her dry throat, her fist smashing against the mirror, hard enough to mark the glass.
It was all her fault.
Not hers.
Never hers.
Because she had nothing to do with it.
She hadn't wanted this.
Hadn't wanted a secret.
Hadn't wanted these thoughts, these feelings.
It was all just because of her.
Because of Julia.
If those two years had never happened, Sydney wouldn't have the darkness to fear.
Her own darkness, with its sly triumph, because it knew more than she did.
With its revolting beauty, sleeping like a butterfly in its cocoon.
She wouldn't feel ... different.
Strange.
She would be Sydney Bristow, double agent, SD-6 killer and CIA undercover agent.
The world wouldn't have known Julia Thorn.
One a rose, the other its thorns.
Yes, Julia was her thorns.
But she also had other thorns to fight.
Not Julia's, not her own.
She had to fight the origin of the thorns -- the rose.
Thorns digging into her because of the simple fact that the rose existed.
Alive, breathing -- real.
Too real for her liking.
Too real, too close, too rosy.
And she knew that her secret was just as real, as close, as rosy.
The secret -- the rose itself.
A secret edging closer and closer to reality's consciousness with each passing second ... tick, tock.
A countdown she would never be able to stop and one day she would wake up, feeling ... different.
A different way of different than she was already feeling.
A different kind of freedom, happiness ... and love.
Love for the rose.
For the white one.
The married one.
The other one.
The other woman in his life.
The only woman in her life.
Lauren.
~Fin~
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