AN: Simply because I’ve seen this theory kicked around the boards but never seen any fanfic that actually tried to make it work. Not that I believe this is in any way remotely plausible... But I couldn’t resist the challenge. *g*
* * * *
Thicker Than Water
CIA agent Jack Bristow stood unobserved in the shadows of the corridor. The object of his scrutiny, scarcely appearing older than a boy on better days, seemed even younger than usual in his current position. The young man was seated on the floor, back against the wall in the only sliver of the cell that he’d judged correctly was out of the range of the camera mounted in the corner. He sat with his arms wrapped around his shins, forehead resting on his knees, utterly still. Jack would almost have guessed that he was asleep, except he doubted that the boy’s tension could have been maintained had he dozed off. The toes of bare feet were still curled tightly against the cold floor and the tendons stood out sharply on the backs of clenched hands.
Jack suspected that by morning the cool façade would be back in place, but for now in the assumed privacy of the dim half-light and blind camera, the lone occupant of the glass cell allowed himself to succumb to the pain and confusion of having his well-ordered world shaken to its core. There had been no theatrics, no violent outbursts, nothing but the sudden panicked comprehension that had flared briefly in his eyes and been almost immediately quelled. Even now, only the taut muscles and unnatural stillness belied the turmoil that Jack was certain roiled beneath the surface.
* * * *
- four weeks earlier -
“Agent Bristow! Uh… Jack! Sir!”
Jack sighed mentally but stopped to wait for Marshall to catch up with him. He really didn’t have time for one of the gawky genius’ convoluted conversations, but he was loath to dismiss the man out of hand as he realized how distraught he seemed.
“What is it?” Jack asked, not unkindly but with only a thin veneer of patience. “Can it wait?”
“Uh, no sir. It already has. I mean I did.” Marshall stammered. “I mean I’ve already put off telling you about this for a week. Well, five days, but technically I suppose that could be considered a workweek although it did cover a weekend. Uh, right… Could we do this in your office?” Apparently anticipating Jack’s question he quickly added, “Yeah, it’s sort of important.”
Reluctantly Jack led Marshall back to his office and motioned him into a chair. He sat down behind his desk and prepared himself for the inevitable hemming and hedging that would precede Marshall’s actual concern.
“I know I’m probably keeping you from something important,” Marshall began. “But this is kind of important too. Well, I think it’s more than kind of important and you ought to know. I’ve just been trying to figure out how to tell you without, well… And just so you know up-front, I haven’t gone to anybody else with this yet. I thought you should be the first... you needed to be the first to know...”
“Sydney?” he asked, leaning across the desk suddenly. “Is it about Sydney? Have you found something?”
“Um, no. Well... yeah, but no. Not exactly.” Marshall cleared his throat anxiously under Jack’s intense scowl and tried again. “You know the genetic database we got from Stuttgart... Well, that Derevko got from Stuttgart, but we got from Derevko...”
“Marshall.”
“Right. So I’ve been fiddling with it in my spare time, you know. Not that I have much spare time, but it was sort of a brain-cleanser between projects. Just pulling up random DNA profiles and running little search patterns on them. Anyway, I got this idea to see if I was in there. I am, by the way, and running a search on it I was able to pull up both my parents’ genetic profiles, two aunts, six cousins, three grandparents - which is kind of odd, and a great uncle that nobody talks about because... well, they just don’t. So my next idea was to see if anybody else I knew was in there. It turns out that Sydney is in the database, which is why it’s sort of about Sydney but not really because that isn’t the interesting thing about it.” He paused to take a breath.
“The system can sort by all kinds of categories,” he continued. “Not just genetic traits, but like I said, it can pull up parents, grandparents, children, siblings. I ran all of those on Sydney... and I uh... I came up with an extra match.”
“A what?”
“A uh... an extra match. A person that shouldn’t be there. Well, that I wasn’t expecting anyway. I ran it three times just to be sure. And then I ran it another eleven times just in case the first four were a glitch. No such luck. Then it occurred to me that maybe Derevko had had time to insert specific information into the database. Although I don’t know why she would have bothered unless she’d intended to drop it for Sydney to retrieve, which doesn’t really make any sense unless this was what we were supposed to find, but...”
“Marshall!”
“I’m getting there! I’m getting there. Anyway, it also occurred to me that we could verify the results using, as it were, the actual um… subjects involved. So I ran blood samples from both of you through our lab. Very efficient, by the way. Nice guys. And I was careful about not telling them who the samples were. Just A and B. And the results came back the same the first four times they ran it. It’s 97.2 percent positive. Now you’re A and B is... Maybe you should just look at it.” Marshall handed Jack the folder he’d been clutching. Jack opened it to see a page of four DNA strands. “It’s a family,” Marshall explained. “Father, mother, daughter, and um...”
Jack stared at the paper blankly.
“I generated this page myself. That would be you - the first one,” Marshall pointed toward the long bar of gray and white shadings. “And that next one is…”
“I can read the labels,” Jack interrupted. The next one said - Derevko, Irina. The one after - Bristow, Sydney. And the last one...
“That’s not possible,” he murmured involuntarily.
“I know. That’s what I thought too. So I had them run it again. That’s sort of one of the reasons that I haven’t told you about this until now. I wanted to make absolutely positively sure.” Marshall paused. “We ran it thirty-seven times. Primary source material. Always the same results.”
“You haven’t told anyone else?” he asked without looking up from the folder.
“No, sir.”
“Are there any other copies of this information?”
“Everything I have is in that file.”
There was a lengthy silence.
“Uh… sir?”
“Yes, Marshall. Thank you,” Jack said absently, still focused on the file. “I’ll handle this now.”
“Okay. You’ll... handle? Okay. Um, so I’ll be going now?”
Jack nodded, still inattentive, then looked up suddenly. “You’re sure about this?”
“Thirty-seven times. I’m positive.”
* * * * Jack sat alone in his office staring at the strands of mapped DNA. Even his untrained eye could see the similarities. The other pages of the file merely confirmed Marshall’s assessment. He could barely wrap his mind around the implications.
Laura… Irina had been pregnant when she’d feigned her death all those years ago.
Sydney was not an only child.
He had a son.
He stood abruptly and tucked the folder beneath his arm. Almost without conscious thought, almost against his will, he found himself heading deep into the sublevels of the building. There was only one guard on duty in the observation room and he was accustomed to Jack’s occasional visits here. He merely nodded his greeting as Jack focused on the monitor. The range of the camera covered most of the cell, but the inmate was making no attempt to avoid it anyway. He lay on the floor in the middle of the glass-walled cell, chin resting on the back of one hand as he turned the pages of a book with the other.
As Jack tweaked the focus of the camera, the prisoner looked up at the low hum and flashed an impish, fearless grin at the lens. After six months of confinement his dark blond hair had grown longer, tumbling into sharp blue eyes. He needs a haircut, Jack thought dispassionately. He searched for any hint or threat of paternal stirrings at the sight of Sark... and found none.
“Take him out,” he told the guard. “Strap him down and drug him up.”
“Sir?”
“Just do it. I need a few more answers.”
Jack sensed the man’s hesitation but eventually he began to move. They hadn’t done this in months. Not since it had become abundantly clear that Sark’s loyalties were tied to nothing and nobody. The young man’s virtually nonexistent morality allowed him to give up former colleagues and allies seemingly without a second thought. He had answered every question put to him without any prevarication that had been detected thus far. He had proven far more useful to the Agency than even Irina had been.
For all his prior cooperation, however, Jack knew that he could not trust the boy to answer these particular questions without constraint.
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