He calls her Monday night, and again Tuesday. Doesn't trust himself to keep from distracting her if he goes over to her apartment. They still talk for more than an hour, both times, before he forces himself to tell her good night. Bloomington, her job and his, literature, favorite movies, global politics, cars, and snow.

She calls late Wednesday night. "I'm done. Come over. Please."

He does, and she takes his hand as soon as the door is open, pulls him into a long, lingering kiss.

"I can't believe you waited," she says.

"I can't believe I did either. But I wasn't going to be responsible for you flunking your exams." He smiles. "How did you do, by the way?"

"Pretty good, I think. It's a lot easier to focus on studying, now." She slips her arms around him and continues, voice lower. "Although not so much, this week. I kept thinking about you."

"I kept trying to convince myself not to show up on your doorstep."

"I wouldn't have minded if you did." She kisses him again, her hands slipping under his coat and then sweater, and things are moving too fast again, he thinks. There should be flowers, and more talking, and something closer to proper romance. Then again, considering how you got here, maybe there's no proper way to do this. This isn't ever going to be an average relationship. That's what makes it different from all the other ones.

He slips his hands under her own sweater and thinks he can make it clear just how much he cares about her this way, too.

———

Aunt Margaret replies to his email, says she and Uncle Jack are happy for him.

He thinks back, remembers nothing about an Uncle Jack from his packet, and hopes Sydney's version of Aunt Margaret sent her something similar.

———

She lets him slow things slightly over the next week. Smiles and blushes when he brings her flowers. Lets him take her out to dinner Thursday, to a movie Friday, to Kelly's on Saturday night.

She introduces him to her friends there, a stream of seven names he's sure he won't be able to put to their friendly faces anytime soon. But he overhears one — Claire, he thinks — pull Sydney aside and tell her, "You waited long enough girl, but you sure picked a good one."

His friends tell him she seems great, with a few raised eyebrows. He thinks they don't even know the half of it, and glances at Peter, who gives him a knowing grin.

They linger, moving back and forth between the two groups, drinking good beer and eating greasy pizza, until it is closing time. Then they walk back to his apartment together, her gloved hand in his.

———

They wake late on Sunday morning, spend the afternoon at another movie. Chinese food in little cardboard cartons from the place next to Baxter for dinner.

She looks across his little kitchen table when she's finished. "You've got roots." She points to the top of her own head, and he groans. "What?" she asks.

"I'm not very good at the whole hair dye thing." He laughs. "I made a huge mess of my bathroom the first time, and my hair didn't look much better. The second didn't take at all, and then the third pretty much fried everything."

She smiles. "Yeah, I noticed. Why don't you let me do it?"

"Really?" That might actually make it bearable, if not enjoyable.

"Sure. I've got more experience." She stands, tosses her cartons into the trash can, and starts toward his bathroom. He follows.

"Do you have any old towels?" she asks, as he walks in.

"I don't have any old anything," he reminds her. "One or the other of those two on the rack should be nice and ruined already. Dye's in the medicine cabinet."

"Okay." He searches for the ruined towel himself as she opens the box and studies the directions. "You should take off your clothes, just in case. I wouldn't want to ruin anything."

It seems like a reasonable request — particularly given his first three attempts at this — until he looks at her and there's a little glint of ulterior motive in her eyes. He strips down to his boxers anyway. Fine by me if this goes that way. More than fine.

By the time he's done, she's wearing latex gloves from the dye box on both hands. Holding a tube in one, rapidly turning tan. "You ready?"

"Yeah."

"The trick," she says, pouring half the contents of the tube on the top of his head, "is to get the dye in really fast, so it's even, and leave it in the exact time it says in the directions. And you should only use half of the bottle."

"I thought I did that." Although not the way she's doing it, he thinks. Not with her breasts pressed against his bare back and her breath on his neck. Not with her fingers working through his hair and making him tingle all the way to his toes.

"We'll see," she says, peeling off the gloves and placing them in the sink. "I'm done here. Now we've got to wait 20 minutes."

"What are we going to do for 20 — "

She places a soft, wet kiss on his shoulder, then another, and another, in a haphazard line.

Oh. "Catherine?"

"Hmm?" She slips her arms around him, locks her hands together over his chest, then returns to kissing his shoulder.

"As much as I don't want you to stop, if you keep it up, I think you're going to end up with dye all over your body."

She laughs, body shaking beside his. "I guess the whole point of this was not to make a mess. You see what all the normal people miss out on?"

"What do you mean?"

"You can't just ask anyone to dye your hair so the people from your old life who are trying to hunt you down and kill you might not recognize you."

"I always wondered about that. How I was supposed to explain why I dye my hair every couple weeks and wear colored contacts all the time to someone I was — intimate with."

"If you can even get that far. Or — did you?"

"Not — not in Bloomington."

"Me either." Her arms tighten around his chest as she rests her chin on his shoulder. "I went on a lot of bad first dates. A couple seconds and thirds. And it's not even that they were bad people," she says. "Not all of them, anyway. It's just that, you have a relationship here, and it's entirely based on lies. And I can't imagine getting seriously involved with someone who can't know anything about the first 30-some years of your life."

"I know what you mean."

"It's not like I didn't lie to the people I cared about back then. But at least some of my life was true. It wasn't all based on lies."

"Maybe when you've been here long enough, it won't be so bad," he says. "When you've got more background built up in this life."

"Maybe it doesn't matter, anymore," she murmurs, releasing her arms to check her watch. "It's almost time. It'll probably go better if you rinse in the shower."

"I think it would go even better if you got in and helped."

She smiles and starts on the buttons to her shirt.

———

The next week, on a Wednesday evening, she looks out his window at the snow covering the sidewalks and asks if the offer still stands to get her into his gym.

Of course, he tells her, and he drives her there, uses one of his six complimentary passes to get her in.

"Women's locker room is this way," he says. He takes her hand and they walk along the hallway beside the running track. There are rooms on the other side, most of them empty, for aerobics and yoga and countless other classes he's never had an urge to take. Several are filled with exercise equipment, however, and he catches her staring into one of these, eying two punching bags in the back.

"I'll spot you, if you want," he says.

"What?"

"On the bag. I'll spot you if you want to have a go at it."

She sighs. "No. This doesn't look like the type of place where a woman can just haul off and start attacking the bag without drawing attention. I'll run instead."

The same look on her face as the little Italian restaurant — I miss it — but he doesn't call her on it. "I guess you're right," he says.

She disappears into the locker room, returns in shorts and a tank bra, and runs umpteen miles while he tests his shoulder on one of the machines by the bags.

———

He waits two days. It takes him a moment to remember why the alarm is blaring at three a.m., a little longer to reach over to the nightstand and turn it off. She sleeps through all of this, and he turns toward her, shakes her shoulder. "Catherine, wake up," although he wants to call her Sydney. It's more appropriate for his plans now.

"Hmm?" she mumbles, eyes half-open.

"Come on. Get up and get dressed. We have to go somewhere."

She squints her eyes at his alarm clock. "Michael, it's the middle of the night. Where could we possibly have to go?"

"It's a surprise."

"It better be a good one."

———

There is one car in the parking lot at the gym, but the lights are still blazing. Vaughn pulls in one space away, puts the car in park, and ignores her skeptical glance.

"This is the surprise?"

"Come on."

The lone car belongs to the attendant at the desk just inside the front doors. "The pool and the hot tub are closed now, guys," he says, waving them through.

"This place is open 24 hours a day," Vaughn says.

"Yeah, I figured that one out already. I'm still working on what we're doing here in the middle of the night."

"Hopefully not getting you utterly pissed off at me." He takes her hand, leads her along the hallway again, and stops outside the equipment room. "Go change," he says, handing her the duffel bag in his free hand.

She glances into the equipment room, to the bags in the back, and either she catches on to the plan here, or she's known it all along, and enjoyed watching him squirm. Either way, she smiles, "You didn't," and walks quickly to the women's locker room.

She returns a few minutes later in a tank bra, long pants and tennis shoes. "You didn't have to do this, you know," she says, as he tapes her hands and slips the gloves on.

"You seemed like you needed it."

She is tentative at first. A right hook he can barely feel, hands on the bag and braced for much more. She's capable of more, he knows, or at least she was. Left, right, right, right, left, increasing only slightly in force.

"You hit like a librarian now."

A hard right in response to that, and he feels it, then a sudden flurry of fists, feet. He watches her work into a rhythm, hitting fast and hard, hair swinging loose, sweat trickling down her forehead. She's right, he thinks. They couldn't have done this with people around. It is impressive, what she used to be, what she could still be, if given the opportunity, but it would have drawn attention they can't afford.

She finishes with that shriek and a roundhouse kick that sends him staggering backwards. Her laughter comes deep, from her stomach, and she's breathing hard as she walks over to him. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Better than the bag, anyway."

"You still think I hit like a librarian?"

"Absolutely not."

"Good." She steps closer, pulls him into a sweaty hug. "Thank you. I did need that."

———

She wakes him at 3 a.m. a week later, and he obliges. Thinks it might become a tradition, for them, and he considers buying her a bag for Christmas. More convenient, that way, he thinks, but maybe half of the appeal is that slipping out of bed in the middle of the night and driving to the empty gym feels almost clandestine.

He needs the late night trips, he realizes, almost as much as her. They bring back fading memories: Sydney, in vinyl and leather, evening gowns and colored wigs, one of the best at what she did. Because sometimes, now, it feels natural to call her Catherine, or Cate. To ignore the past and walk with her to Kelly's and drink beer with all of the normal people.

Michael, as well, now comes natural off of her tongue, although he wonders what she would do if his new last name was something with one syllable. Something like what lingers there, low in her throat, and threatens to emerge every time he makes her come.

———

Their conversations shift to current jobs, current friends, current lives.

They're restoring a series of works at the library, she says, and he's got a face for each of the names she mentions. Larry's wife is pregnant, he tells her, and she says she'll have to remember to tell him congratulations the next time she sees him.

She's wavering between three possible paper topics, and she asks for his advice. He tells her Peter's latest joke: "You know, what the Agency really needs to invest in is a good way to eliminate all these damn pop up ads from porn sites."

She goes three days without mentioning Will or Francie. He goes a week without telling a drunken Weiss story. And that's okay, he tells himself, because they can't live in the past.

Then one night, "Vaughn" finally slips out, and he lies awake beside her after they've finished, wondering if he should say something.

Maybe he is both to her, he thinks. Michael and Vaughn. The past leads to the present, and you can't ever extricate one from the other.

He reminds himself that she wants what he wants. Not this life, and not the old one, but somewhere in between.

———

Christmas Eve comes with a heavy snow that piles up on the sidewalks and seeps over the sides of his shoes as he walks to her apartment. Someone, probably Sydney herself, has swept the walk up to her door, but by then his socks are a lost cause, and he's glad she cleared out a dresser drawer for him. He did the same for her at his apartment, the same day they swapped keys. And soon, he thinks, it may be time to start talking about consolidating. Maybe they'll just finally pick one apartment, or maybe they'll search for a new place, one with a fireplace and plenty of space for the clutter they'll create.

He won't use the key tonight. She suggested the candlelight dinner, said they hadn't done anything nice in awhile, and so he brought flowers and wore a suit, and he'll knock on the door, do things properly.

She answers in a low-cut black dress, a mass of candles flickering behind her. She's been crying.

"Hey," he says, stepping inside, free arm around her waist, instinctively. "What's wrong?"

She shakes her head, looks away. "It's nothing."

"It's doesn't look like nothing." He steers her across her living room, to the couch, and flips the flowers onto an end table. "Did something happen?"

"Yeah. Christmas," she sniffles. "I'm sorry. I was just in the kitchen preparing and I started thinking about things back home — what everyone would be doing now. Just give me a minute, and I'll be okay." She gives him a big false smile.

Okay is relative, considering you just cried your eyes out. "What would you be doing, if you were back in L.A.?"

"Michael, dinner is — "

"Dinner is not going to be a whole lot of fun if you look like you're going to burst into tears the whole time. Talk to me, Sydney."

The use of her real name surprises her, and she looks up sharply. Surprises him, too, because he hadn't planned it. But here, now, it feels right, and he asks again. "What would you be doing?"

She wipes at her eyes and turns toward him. "Francie and I had this ratty old artificial tree — we got it for our dorm room junior year and we could never bring ourselves to replace it. And everyone was always busy — well, mostly me, you know... "

He nods. "Yeah."

"So we would wait until Christmas Eve to decorate it. A couple of years ago, she got this idea that we should do a traditional tree, string cranberries and popcorn and everything. So Will came over, and we popped like tons of popcorn on the stove, and drank all this eggnog, and we ended up eating all the popcorn. So we had a cranberry tree."

"A cranberry tree?"

"Yes, a cranberry tree. So now it's sort of become a tradition, except every year we pop more popcorn, you know, to see if we can actually save some for the tree."

"And do you?"

"No. Every year we'd still eat all the popcorn. That's why — that's why I was crying. I was in the kitchen, and I looked at the stove, and I thought, 'maybe there's enough popcorn now, with one less person around to eat it.'"

A little sob, and she wipes at her eyes again.

"I know what you mean," he says, pulling her closer. "It's hard to get into the Christmas spirit when everyone you would have been celebrating with thinks you're dead."

"Yeah," she whispers. "I just — I miss them."

"I know. So do I."

"It was worse last year," she says. "So much worse — without you. I think I spent most of winter break crying. And don't say you're sorry, Michael. I just want you to know — I'm glad I'm not alone this year. I'm glad I'm with you."

"Me too." So glad. So lucky.

"I think it's sort of harder, though, in some ways," she says.

"Why?"

"I feel torn, don't you? Last year, it was easy. I just wanted to go back, so badly, because everything in my life was back in Los Angeles. But now, I'm on my way to the job I've always wanted, and I've got new friends, and I've got you." She pulls back slightly and stares at him, eyes soft and wet. "If I could go back to my old life, the way it was, I don't think I would. And I guess I feel guilty about that."

"You shouldn't feel guilty about adjusting to your new life." Even if I do, sometimes.

"It's more than just adjusting, Michael."

"I know."

"Would you do it? Would you go back to things the way they were before, if you could?"

The decision is easier for him, he thinks. He's had the advantage of seeing it three different ways. Life with Sydney Bristow, when he couldn't have her. Life without Sydney Bristow, regretting the chance he passed up. And his life now, with Catherine Murray. "No, I wouldn't. It took me too long to realize that I would have sacrificed everything — my old friends, my family — for this. But I should have."

"Your family. Your mother, right?"

"Mother and older sister. But she lives on the east coast, and she's got a family of her own. So some years for Christmas it's just me and my mom," he says. "I think I feel worst about what happened to her, especially after what she's already been through. She had to bury me. Can you even imagine — "

He stops himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course she can imagine. She's lived it. She can imagine that and then some.

She pulls away slightly, no reaction at first, as she slips her hands from his back. He does the same, and then she surprises him, taking both of his hands in hers. No reaction at all. She let it slide. But you're both thinking the same thing. "Yeah," she says softly. "I think I can."

She runs her thumb over his knuckles. "Did you ever think about how we got here? About all the things that had to happen in order for us to be right here, right now?"

"Yes. I've thought about it."

"And?"

"I've pretty much resigned myself to never having it all," he says. "But I think maybe I ended up exactly where I'm supposed to be."

She leans in, brushes his lips with hers. "Me too," she says, so soft he can barely hear it.

He slips his arms back around her, pulls her into his lap, and holds her there, cheek pressed against his. Her breathing goes shallow, and for a little while, he thinks she is asleep, which is fine with him, because it means she is relaxed, no longer upset.

But she sighs and shifts, eventually. "I guess I should go and reheat dinner," and she stands, starts to walk away. Halfway across the living room, she turns around and pauses.

"Vaughn, I love you."

"I love you too, Sydney."

———

On a cold January night, he sits on the couch in his — their — living room and watches a Blackhawks game. She is there, sprawled across the couch, head in his lap, reading something for class. She'll recommend it to him, after she's done, if she thinks it's any good.

She waits for a commercial to look up at him. "You know what we have in common, Michael?"

"What?"

"We both like to do this."