Alias- Jack & Laura

17) Sad Memory

Jack opened the door to the hospital room as silently as possible; Laura looked up from her book with a jump when he stepped in. "Jack! You startled me."

"I was expecting you to be asleep," Jack replied as he shut the door behind him.

"I convinced the nurse to turn down my pain medication. I was tired of only being able to stay awake for fifteen minutes at a time. Is Sydney with the Sloanes?" As she spoke, she closed the book and put it on the table.

God, Jack thought. It was ten o'clock in the morning; he'd been hoping she would be asleep for at least six of the next seven hours. "Yes, she's probably stuffing herself on cookies right now," he said in answer to Laura's question. He walked around the bed and looked out the window; unfortunately, the view was the same as it had been the day before.

Although he wasn't looking at her, he could hear the smile in her voice. "Well, without grandparents around, someone's got to spoil her."

Jack nodded without turning. His father had died eight years ago, and he barely communicated with his mother. They sent her a Christmas card every year, but rarely heard back. She had never seen Sydney. And Laura had told him that her parents had died in a car accident a year before he met her. He turned around abruptly. "I'm guessing that your parents didn't die in a car accident."

"No," she answered calmly. She'd been wondering when he was going to start asking questions; she'd been afraid that he would try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together himself and come up with something warped and twisted. She hadn't wanted to volunteer, though; he needed to deal with this at his own pace, as hard as it was for her to watch.

"Are they alive, then?" He moved to the bedside chair and sat down.

"My mother died when I was nine. My father…" She broke eye contact. "We didn't get along. I don't know whether he's still alive."

Jack could clearly hear the bitterness in her voice when she spoke about her father. He stood and placed a hand on her shoulder; she turned her head back to him, surprised. "I guess now I understand why you never mentioned your parents," he said as he pulled his hand back.

Laura stared at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't read. Then she smiled slightly and changed the subject. "So how is Sydney doing? She seemed all right last night."

Jack nodded. "She's doing all right. Although apparently my bedtime story-reading skills are not up to her high standards." He paused for a moment. He'd listened closely to Sydney's chatter last night and this morning, and had been surprised at how omnipresent Laura was in everything Sydney talked about. Sydney was obviously very close to her mother; he had known that before, of course, but now that knowledge took on a whole new meaning. "Laura…I…" He wanted to apologize for saying she didn't deserve to be a mother, knew it had been a horribly cruel thing to say, but…what if she had killed their baby? "Laura, when you had the miscarriage, did you…" He couldn't bring himself to say the words.

Laura's eyes filled with tears and with the same raw pain that had been there four years ago. Her shoulders started to shake as tears spilled down her cheeks. She kept looking at him, though. Hesitantly, he reached out his hand, and she grasped it tightly in her own. He wanted to know what had happened, but he could hardly stand to see her in such pain. "You don't have to talk about it," he said softly.

She swallowed hard and managed to slow the tears to a mere trickle. "No, Jack. You deserve to know what happened." She broke eye contact briefly, but then looked at him again. She tugged at his hand slightly, and he pulled his chair as close to the bed as he could get it. She spoke too softly for anyone who might happen to open the door to overhear. "There were never supposed to be any children. When I got pregnant with Sydney, I was so afraid that they would make me have an abortion. I didn't tell my handler until I started showing. He was furious." She paused and looked away, and he gave her hand a gentle squeeze. She turned back. "I managed to convince the KGB to let me keep the baby, mostly because the medical people would have been suspicious if I'd had a miscarriage that late. But they weren't happy with me. My handler made it clear that if I got pregnant again and didn't tell him right away, there would be dire consequences. Not just to me, but to Sydney."

"So when you got pregnant again, you told him," Jack said.

She nodded. "I didn't have a meeting with him from the time I found out until I was two and a half months pregnant. I was hoping that maybe they'd think that one more baby wouldn't make a difference. I told him that you wanted two children, that if I had this baby I could stop hiding the birth control pills. He got in touch with Moscow, and a week later he gave me some pills to take that would cause a miscarriage." Jack stared at her, horrified, and her eyes filled with tears again. "I couldn't take them, Jack. Three times, I sat in the bathroom for over an hour just staring at them, but I couldn't do it." Jack let out a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "But they were watching me. When a week went by and nothing happened…"

"God. They slipped you something," Jack said. "At the restaurant?" She nodded. They were both quiet for a moment, remembering. Jack had been ecstatic about the pregnancy ever since he'd found out; Laura had been quiet and moody, but he hadn't been worried. She'd been that way the first half of her pregnancy with Sydney, but had suddenly shifted to glowing and happy at about five months; he'd chalked it up to hormones. He'd taken her out to dinner that Friday night and tried to cheer her up, but she'd picked at her food and barely talked to him. Now he understood why. They'd gone to bed in silence that night, but he'd been awakened four hours later to the sound of her screams and blood all over the sheets.

The door opened suddenly, making them both jump. "How are you doing, Mrs. Bristow?" the nurse asked as she entered. "Sure you don't want me to bump your medicine back up?"

"No, I'm fine," Laura said, pulling her hand from Jack's and trying to wipe the tears off her cheeks.

The nurse looked at her for a moment. "You don't look fine," she said. She turned a disapproving look toward Jack. "You don't upset my patient, now. She needs her rest." She checked Laura's vitals. "Your heart rate's a little high, honey. I think I'd better turn your medicine back up." Laura frowned but didn't say anything. The nurse adjusted the IV and left without another word.

Laura turned to Jack. "We've got about sixty seconds before I can't keep my eyes open," she said.

Jack took her hand again and squeezed it. "It's all right. Get some sleep," he said. "I'll still be here when you wake up." She smiled at him, and he surprised himself by smiling back. He kept his hold on her hand and watched as she fell asleep.