Sydney busied himself with the data analysis late into the night, although he knew he was actually waiting for the phone call. He'd spoken to Jarod once, only briefly, since Kyle's miraculous reappearance and subsequent death two days ago. Sydney knew from long experience that it would take Jarod a day or two to decompress, and think about what his feelings were on the events of that fateful night. He'd call. When it came to family, he always did.

Sometimes Sydney wondered what would happen when the inevitable day came when Jarod found his living family, his sister and mother confirmed alive less than one year ago. Would Jarod finally let his sounding board go, and rely on his own instincts to resolve his conflicted feelings? He could shrink himself, Sydney had always noted with amusement. The Centre operated on the assumption that Jarod would sever his final links if he located his family. But there remained the second possibility, that meeting his family would simply open up a new set of both anxieties and curiosities for Jarod to work through. Sydney strongly suspected Jarod had an elaborate fantasy constructed around his family, one that would inevitably be shattered by reality once he was confronted with the actual people who had missed him for thirty years. Maybe, in short, Jarod would always have some emotionally salient event to work through, right ere on the phone with his old mentor.

Likely this line of thinking was his own vanity. The wishful thinking of a lonely and regretful man. Sydney couldn't tell anymore.

Sometimes, too, Sydney felt himself to be trapped in the middle of a giant simulation, one in which he was forced to care about catching Jarod. He dutifully tagged along on retrieval missions, and passively allowed his phones and email to be tapped. He wrote reports to the Tower, in which he rattled off psychobabble detailing Jarod's inherent fragility and emotional neediness. All of those mouthed words were belied on a daily basis for anyone paying attention by Jarod's frank thriving out in the world. Once upon a time Sydney believed it all, but no more. Not after two years. It was they who needed him, and the other way around had always been nothing more than a self-serving fantasy.

The phone rang. Sydney didn't jump, but stared at it for a full two rings before languidly picking it up.

“Sydney, how would your life had been different if Jacob had died?” Jarod asked without preamble or introduction, as was tradition.

Exactly the same, except I would have spent Christmases with you, Sydney thought. But what he said was, “The grief would have been briefer, Jarod. In some ways, Jacob has been dying for twenty-five years. Why do you ask this now?.”

“I feel … nothing,” Jarod said. Sydney waited. There was always more. Honestly it surprised him, how long it took Jarod to verbally spin things out of his mind. It was tempting to imagine that thoughts in Jarod's head were aligned neatly like a row of ducks, but long experience taught Sydney it was more of a maelstrom, one that somehow constructed an idea that was greater than its messy constituents. “I should feel something, shouldn't I, Sydney? My brother died, for real this time, confirmed. I gave his heart to another boy. So why don't I feel sadness or grief?”

“You already processed your grief when you thought he'd died the first time around,” Sydney said. “It's not unexpected for the response to be less pronounced this time. You didn't add any new memories with your brother's unexpected survival, so this is merely an extension of his previous death.” On his terminal in front of him, Sydney's messaging service began to flash. IT had noticed Jarod's call and begun the trace, and probably woken up Broots to drag him in at midnight. All futile. Jarod might let them trace the call or he might not, but either way they weren't going to catch him by surprise.

“That's the rub, isn't it?” Jarod said bitterly, his anger showing through. Sydney considered that progress. Jarod always needed to let off whatever was bothering him, lest it emotionally fester. In the past the Centre had often taken Sydney's tolerance of Jarod's outbursts to be coddling, but Sydney knew it to be vital for Jarod's continued functioning. Too much internalization of the Pretender abilities was how you got an Angelo – all intuition, very little coherent output, a being overwhelmed by the sheer stimuli assaulting him. “I never had a chance to get to know him at all. You know he told me he was looking for me, but following you? If you hadn't been chasing me, perhaps we could have had some time together, to get to know one another. But the chase has stolen that from me too.”

Suddenly Sydney noticed the shift in Jarod's train of thought, and straightened up in his seat. Normally Jarod enjoying stringing them along, even when he complained about it; it was part of the game. Expressing regret for maintaining contact with the Centre marked a new and dangerous turning for Jarod. As Sydney had warned the Centre on many occasions, Jarod could choose to walk away at any time, and they would have no hope of finding him, were he to choice to really hide. Only his connections to the team hunting him down, Miss Parker included, kept him in contact.

He was still on the phone though. That wasn't nothing. It wasn't a breaking of their relationship, not yet.

“I wonder if the rest of my family is looking for me too, and can't find me,” Jarod continued. “They looked like they wanted to see me, you know, that day.” Still biting, bitter, not sorrowful. This was no grief.

“I'm sure they are,” Sydney acknowledged. “They've been looking for you a long time too.”

A soft platitude, but one that choose to face this moment, resisting the long habit of deflection. One of these days, the Centre was going to need to face its decisions with Jarod's family. He'd advocated for giving Jarod some of his history in the past, on the grounds for just such a scenario – one in which Jarod was tempted to cut himself off, hopeless that his contact with the Centre would lead to any productive information. Carrots and sticks, it wasn't adifficult concept. But besides the one picture that one time, the Centre was adamant that no scraps of information get through.

Jarod paused on the other end, evidently unsure what to do with this platitude, mild as it was. “You're being unusually honest today,” he countered. “Is the Centre trying a different tack after all? Radical honesty?”

“Not particularly,” Sydney said, smiling, although Jarod couldn't see it. More honesty. It was refreshing. “But you know the Centre and I are not the same, Jarod. Perhaps it is I who is tired of falsehoods.” Now he'd moved on to a dangerous line of conversation, given that he was probably actively being spied on and certainly being recorded.

“Do you have any additional information for me Sydney? About Kyle, my family, anything?”

“If I had anything, I'd have told you already, Jarod. You know that.”

“Do I?” Jarod wondered softly. “If the Centre held a gun to your head, would you choose me or choose yourself? I think we both know the answer here.”

Your survival is my survival, thought Sydney. The acknowledgment of the reversal of the order of things, even to himself, sent a cold wave through his heart. Who was dependent on whom, the mentor or the brilliant student?

In that moment, Sydney had a rush of insight: The Centre didn't refuse to give Jarod any information on the grounds that he'd run away and never come back. They choose to do so because they were afraid Jarod's anger would be sufficient bring the whole complex down. He'd could destroy them, once he had what he wanted. And Sydney's ongoing job was to tame that anger, again and again.

“The guns are always present, even when they're not,” Sydney told him.

“My brother couldn't take it,” Jarod said, soft as a bird. “They put the gun into his hand, and it was too much. Do you still think its too much for me as well?”

No, thought Sydney. No hesitation. How obvious could it be after two years? Out loud, he hedged. “I used to think you were more fragile than you turned out to be, Jarod.” Although you still need midnight hand-holding phone calls.

There was another long pause on the other end. Sydney wondered if Jarod still considered himself fragile, if he ever really contemplated it in light of his actions in the outside world. A terrible word, a terrible concept to lay on someone with the level of hidden strength as Jarod. But Sydney needed it, to keep the phone calls coming. A seed of doubt somewhere in that towering edifice, like the tiniest crack in a foundation, waiting for stress to spread.

“I was never really fragile at all,” Jarod said at last, and the phone clicked on the other end. He'd either reached some self-imposed time limit, or he'd simply had enough of honest talk therapy for one day.

“Good night and good dreams, Jarod,” Sydney said into the ether.Jarod apparently did contemplate it after all. Dangerous, and exhilarating. He laid down his receiver and clicked on the screen in front of him, readying the expected report.