white sheets

Sleep never came easily to him.

Not alone, and not ever in the presence of another. Certainly not with someone else in his bed, every faint movement springing his senses to alert, ready for a threat. Even the warmth of another body, of touch that he'd craved, was foreign after so long, and offered no comfort. He'd slept alone for two years, sleep and dreams his only escape, yet now he wished for solitude again.

It didn't matter that he knew Allison. His body and his emotions insisted that this wasn't her.

She wasn't the same woman.

He laughed darkly in his mind, flat on his back and staring at the shadow-striped ceiling, stretched on the bed beside her. The sheets were so white they seemed to glow in the dimness of the room. She was a black stain against them when he turned his head, her back to him, a collection of sinuous lines, spine, hip, breast and arm, and harsh curves, ball of shoulder, alien cheekbone, knees, ribs, ankles. Jagged scars marred her smooth skin, raised and twisted under his fingers and lips when he had made love to her. He wondered if they were more sensitive than the rest of her skin, or just numb.

He was numb.

It would have frightened him, if he could have felt that much emotion.

She wasn't his Allison any longer.

Sark sighed and trailed a finger over one of her scars. She had never been his. But he'd known her ... and now he didn't. It wasn't her stranger's face that had changed so much as what it hid. Not that he was the same, either, but this woman wasn't the one he'd dreamed of, and woken without, for two empty years.

She would be dangerous, in any operations he ran, and in his life. She could distract him. She might draw him away from the careful path he meant to walk in this new world of shifting allegiances and strategic alliances; might unbalance him from the tightrope he was walking between serving the Covenant and deliberately sabotaging their operations. She could turn on him in an instant if he slipped even once.

He'd told Sloane it wouldn't be a problem. It wouldn't be. He wouldn't let it.

Sloane had told him Allison was his asset within the Covenant. Sark knew better than to believe this woman was loyal to anything beyond herself. There was something bitter and destructive in her, he could taste it on her skin; like an arsenic-eater, she lived on her poison.

He wished futilely that it had been Irina to retrieve him, Irina who returned to his life rather than Allison, even wished briefly that Allison had died–instead of changing into this stranger who seemed essentially untouchable. He couldn't reach her and he'd already mourned her. If she were gone, it wouldn't hurt again.

He traced the scars with his eyes, barely able to see them, wondering. He had promised her Bristow would pay for those scars just hours ago, but the words were already hollow as he spoke them.

He didn't mean them. A revenge trip would lead to mistakes he couldn't afford now.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she'd mocked him, thinking his stillness was surprise at her survival. It hadn't been. Sloane had warned him; he'd thought he was prepared, he'd known she wouldn't look like her old self. But it wasn't Allison's ghost who had disconcerted him.

It was Francine Calfo's ghost he had seen for an instant, startling him with a stab of regret.

It was that dead woman he thought of as he made love to her specter, offering reparation to her in his mind, not for her death, but for this twisted desecration of her flesh, Allison's tainted assumption of it and his own presumption. He was tender and restrained, when that had never been his way with Allison.

It bemused him after. He'd never met Francie Calfo.

Yet he wished for her in his bed rather than this doppelganger.

Better yet, he wished he were alone.