Author's Note: While reading some old West Wing fanfiction, I came across quite a few stories from an old multifandom fanfic challenge called the "five things" challenge. As far as I can understand, the challenge was to write five AU vignettes based on the idea of "Five things that never happened to" a character of your choice from a fandom of your choice. I was planning to try my hand at a couple of West Wing characters, as my first dabble into fanfic for the universe. I sat down at my keyboard, and instead, out came the idea for Five deaths Sydney Bristow never died. So instead of trying to force myself to write something else, I thought I'd give this a try, considering the many many scenarios Sydney has found herself in that would warrant her death. I still plan on writing those West Wing stories, they've just been put off for a little while.

I should probably warn you that this is complete angst. No happy endings here, as the title would and should lead you to believe. This story is exactly what the title advertises it to be; five AU deaths that could have been canon were she not the central character of the show. If character death and angst aren't your cup of tea, I wouldn't recommend reading. These five vignettes are not related in any way to each other, but take off where the show created a "happy ending" of sorts. It was intense to write, and I, a love of happy endings, wasn't sure I'd have this much angst in me. This is the first time I've tried my hand at something like this, so I'd really appreciate your feedback.

Rating: This is rated MATURE, not for language, or for sexual content, but for being rather disturbing, and violent. I've tried to make it as tasteful as possible, but again, if it's not your cup of tea, don't read it.

Credit: Lyrics from Fix You by Coldplay. The Lady of Shallot is by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

Spoilers: Up to the end of S4. The last vignette has spoilers for the season finale, then my own speculation for the next season considering JG's pregnancy.

Five deaths Sydney Bristow never died.

1. When the tears come streaming down your face.

She's colouring a picture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, sprawled out on the kitchen floor, and listening to her parents' voices float down the stairs. She's only six years old, but she's already figured out that they always go up to their room when they're having a fight. They have yet to realize that their voices carry through the thin walls and flimsy door, and that their young daughter can still hear the fight they're trying so desperately to protect her from. Sydney isn't worried. They fight often. Sometimes her dad has to spend the night on the lumpy couch in the basement, amidst forgotten dolls and forts made of blankets by Sydney and her friends. But the next morning, she usually finds her parents either talking pleasantly over coffee, or curled up in bed together, her mother's head resting on her father's chest. She doesn't bother to pay attention to the angry words anymore. Her parents love each other, and they love her, and therefore, everything will inevitably be okay come morning.

"You are not going back to work. I told you I needed to run errands tonight, Jack. You need to look after your daughter."

"I don't have a choice. I didn't realize that National Security could take a back seat to the fact that the Bristows are out of milk and cookies. What am I supposed to say? I'm sorry, Director Chapman, but my wife needs to run errands and I have to stay home. I won't be able to monitor the movement of the Russians this evening, you'll have to find someone else. Jesus, Laura. Take her with you, for God sake."

"Oh don't you take that tone with me, Jonathan. You assured me that you would be here to –"

"Well my plans changed. I can't exactly control when the Russians are going to choose to blow someone up, can I?"

"I'm not taking her with me."

"Why the hell not? You do every other time."

Sydney hears her parent's bedroom door open, and her mother's footsteps on the stairs.

"Go to hell, Jack Bristow."

"I'll see you there!" he shoots back. "Leave her here if you're so opposed to taking her. She's a big girl."

"She's six years old! It's after dark, and storming. Someone needs to put her to bed. I am most certainly not leaving her here by herself."

"Well then you figure something out, Laura. I'm going to do my job."

Jack flounces out the door, letting it slam satisfyingly behind him. Sydney doesn't so much as look up, and continues to colour, giving Dopey a lilac hat. Minutes pass. Long moments of complete silence, the only sound being the hard rain against the windows behind the table.

"Are we going out, Mommy?" Sydney finally asks, looking up. She studies her mother carefully, not noticing the tears filling her mother's eyes.

"Get your coat, sweetheart," the mother replies evenly. She doesn't know what else to say.

Sydney chatters aimlessly in the car, fiddling with a fraying piece of yarn on her blue mittens. Her mother turns up the radio, trying to block out the young girl's voice, and more so the sound of her heartbeat, loud and strong in her ears. She glances nervously at the rear and side view mirrors every few seconds, in anticipation of what is to come.

"Are you listening?" Sydney asks, cluing in to the fact that her mother isn't paying the slightest bit of attention to her words. She sees tears on her mother's cheeks. "It's okay, Mommy. I don't mind coming with you. Daddy loves you, and even though he yelled, he'll forgive you."

Except he never would.

"I'm so sorry, sweetheart." the mother sobs. Sydney's about to ask her why when a white van slams into the side of their car, flipping them, and sending them flying over the edge of the bridge. Before they hit the water, six-year-old Sydney Bristow knows it's over. There's a loud crash, a flood of cold wetness, then nothing but silence.

2. When you lose something that you can't replace

When her mother died, her father had died too. She had to stand and watch her father, from afar, as he drank himself into a dark oblivion. And when he passed out on the couch, she'd cover him with a blanket, as she knew her mother would have done if she had still been around. He'd disappeared for several months, and when he'd returned, the drinking had started. When he'd finally snapped out of it, he'd disappeared again. Figuratively this time, instead of being physically gone, which was almost worse. There'd been a string of nannies until he deemed her old enough to look after herself, then only the cook he'd hired to make sure she was properly fed. He usually didn't come home until long after she was supposed to be in bed, wasn't there to make sure she did her homework, or ate the vegetables Mrs. McGregor prepared to go along with dinner. He trusted her, or didn't care enough to think otherwise. Many of her friends complained at 13 and 14 and 15 that their parents didn't trust them enough. They considered her lucky. But for once, she wanted nothing more than to get a proper scolding from him, a lecture, something, anything, that showed he cared about her at all.

Sydney was in the marching band at school, which practised late twice a week. One Wednesday, she got up in the morning with a massive headache that was pulsing down into her neck. She squinted in the sunlight, and shrugged it off as a migraine, which she tended to suffer from in times of high stress. Her father had already left for work when she came downstairs, and so she headed off for school. She came home that night, after Mrs. McGregor had already left, feeling cold and nauseous. Passing it off as a bout of the flu that was going around the high school, she went upstairs to take a bath and go to bed, skipping dinner altogether. Sydney found a thermometer in her dad's bathroom drawer, and took her temperature, sitting on the closed toilet in her pyjamas and shivering. It read 102.6, and she was concerned, but feeling too lousy to care. She managed to drag herself to bed.

It was around two or three in the morning when she woke up again, and she knew immediately there was something seriously wrong. Her neck was burning, and she was so dizzy she had to crawl to the bathroom to vomit. She grabbed the thermometer again and took her temperature for a second time. 105.9. One-oh-five point nine! The words pounded in her foggy brain. That wasn't possible. It must be wrong.

"Daddy?" she croaked. The hall light she left on for him was still on, which meant he hadn't come home yet. Tears streamed down her burning cheeks, and she started to shiver compulsively. Her last conscious thought before hitting the bathroom floor was that her Daddy would come home and save her. He'd find her and take her to the hospital, and she'd be okay. She'd be fine. Her Daddy loved her, no matter how many times he'd forgotten her birthday, or stuffed money in a shoe box for a Christmas present. He loved her, and he wouldn't allow her to die on the tile bathroom floor. He'd come home. He'd come home. He'd come …

He didn't.

3. When you love someone but it goes to waste.

She's haunted by the memory of his body in their bathtub. It wasn't supposed to end this way. They were supposed to grow old together, have children, be in love. She'd imagined his death, and her own, as an old couple. In some of her reveries, he'd died first, of cancer, of a heart attack, in his sleep. And when she'd woken up, her body had simply lost the will to live. She'd lain back down next to the cold white body of her husband, and she'd fallen asleep forever. They were soul mates, and she couldn't live without him.

Other daydreams had allowed her own death before his. She'd imagined her funeral, their children's cries, and his tired, drawn face. He'd placed roses at her grave, then had fallen back into the arms of one of their sons. Their children hadn't been surprised, they'd known he couldn't last without his partner, the love of his life. They were morbid fantasies, but had been oddly comforting when she'd experienced them. But it didn't matter now.

Her father had offered her plane tickets to Switzerland, which she'd politely turned down. She was in too much shock to follow his train of thought. Danny had been killed because she couldn't keep her mouth shut. Now she was going to be killed too, because the man she worked for, trusted with everything she treasured, was, quite simply, a psychopath, and her father was a pawn in his twisted game. Even that doesn't matter anymore.

She takes a swig of champagne from the bottle sitting in front of her. It's been in the refrigerator for weeks, waiting for an event worth celebrating. There's no cause for celebration now, but she drinks anyway, the liquid tasting bitter on her tongue. She hasn't eaten in days, and the alcohol takes it's effect almost immediately. After the police finished collecting evidence, they'd sent in a maintenance team to tidy up the mess the body had left. The bathtub had never been so pristine. But she had cleaned it again, every hour she was in the house she cleaned the tub once. She'd been selfish, Danny had been stupid, and now he was dead.

She finishes the champagne, and is surprised to find she's still standing. She can drink almost any man under the table, but an entire bottle of champagne on an empty stomach is another story all together. She makes her way to her bedroom – their bedroom - walking unsteadily and crashing into a wall. A painting crashes to the floor, and she's reminded of a gunshot, and knows her time is running out. The walls sway and the floor whirls, but she presses on, needing to find her closet.

She picks his favourite dress. It's red and strapless. The last time she wore it was to a wedding, but her memory isn't of the wedding itself, but of the aftermath. It's of the hotel room, and making love until dawn in the bed, in the shower, on the couch, and in the bed again, the red dress abandoned on the floor across the room. She puts it on, and tries not to look at her body in the mirror. Instead, she focuses on her face, attempting to fix the damage days of crying has done with mascara, and hiding the puffy red with a dark brown eye shadow. When she's done, she looks presentable, and she's ready.

The bouquet from the wedding is still in a vase on the dresser, and she picks up the brightly coloured array in a final act of desperation. She walks into the bathroom calmly, without any of the nerves expected for what she's about to do, or the shakiness that should come from such a massive intake of alcohol. There's a half-full bottle of extra strength Tylenol in the medicine cupboard, and she swallows the pills two at a time until they're gone. Then, she climbs into the sparkling white bathtub, places the bouquet of flowers on her chest, and, like the Lady of Shallot, floats off into the abyss to join the man she loves. Her last thoughts are of the Lady of Shallot, instead of of Danny, or her father, or the world she's leaving behind. She didn't much care for the poem in high school, or when they studied it again in one of her English lit. classes in college. But now she understands.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,
Turn'd to tower'd Camelot.
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shallot.

4. Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones.

For all intents and purposes, she killed Francie. She'd killed her once by being her friend. By existing, Sydney Anne Bristow had caused her best friend's death. Another casualty of her screwed up life. Then, she'd killed her again. The woman lying next to her may not be Francie, but no one will know the difference. When the find her body, the DNA will say she is Francie Calfo, and that she was shot four times in the chest by the gun Sydney is holding in her palm. Somewhere along the way, someone will figure out that Francie is not Francie, but by the time that happens, she may already have spent ten to fifteen years in prison. People don't believe her. They never have. Her father didn't believe her when she was a child. She'd told him Mommy was an angel in heaven watching over them both, and Jack Bristow had glared at his daughter sceptically, and had said heaven didn't exist. Then he'd slammed the door of his study, likely to drink himself into oblivion, again. Francie wouldn't have believed Sydney if she'd told her the truth about her job. She would have laughed, and told her to quit the bank. But if that was her reasoning behind lying, Sydney knew it was shallow, at best.

She was still gasping for air, but knew she had to do something. She would be locked away forever if she let the authorities find the impostor's wounded body, and the CIA-issue gun, which had ended her life, covered in the fingerprints of one Agent S. Bristow. She didn't much care how rational her thinking was at this point, she just knew she had to do something.

Will kept an extra jug of gasoline in the storage room for emergencies. Sydney fetched it, and spread it throughout the apartment, not realizing what she was doing. She was in agent mode. She'd done this many times before, when she'd had to cover up lives she'd ended, or traces of evidence she'd left behind. It didn't matter that this was her house, that it would be her things going up in spectacular flames, that her best friend's memory would be lost forever, it just needed to be done. And so it would be.

There was gasoline everywhere by the time she ran out, and she headed back to the kitchen to find the match that would ignite the flame. She'd light it, then make her way to Vaughn's house. She'd confess what had taken place, and between her boyfriend and her father, they'd figure something out. Worst-case scenario, she'd end up fleeing the country, and Vaughn would accompany her. He'd never let her go alone. A year ago, that would have seemed an impossible solution. Now, it seemed like a new beginning. She lit the match, threw it on the ground, and only watched the flames for a moment before turning to leave. The fire was spreading quickly, as she'd assured it would, and by the time the fire trucks arrived she'd be long gone.

Then she turned around.

She knew the face behind her. She knew the smug face, and the worldly youthfulness of his expression. She knew she was finished as the gun was fired, again, and again, and again.

They'd find remains. Remains of Sydney Bristow and Francie Calfo, murdered, as their apartment burned around them, bodies turning into nothing more than charred ash. But she wouldn't be blamed. Her boyfriend would stop searching and fall in love again, searching for what they had once. Her father would drink himself into oblivion, seeking the same thing he'd tried to find after losing his wife. But she wouldn't be blamed.

5. I will try to fix you.

The baby lets out a sharp cry, and for a moment, Jack Bristow thinks he sees his daughter's eyes flutter at the sound of her child's pain. But she doesn't move, and the steady beeping of the heart monitor doesn't change, so he's left with the knowledge that he imagined the movement. Parents aren't supposed to outlive their children. It's the unspoken, unwritten law. Nothing is worse than losing a child, he thinks, although as he holds his granddaughter closely, he begins to wonder if losing a parents isn't equally painful. Ellie will never know her mother, and in truth, she'll never know her father. Not if Jack has anything to say in the matter anyway.

"How is she?" Vaughn asks, wheeling himself into the room. He's paralyzed from the waist down. He feels he's suffered plenty. Jack begs to differ. He ignores the question, paying attention only to his granddaughter.

"My name isn't Michael Vaughn," he'd said. Five words that had forever altered all over their lives. It didn't matter who he actually was. Sydney was going to die; the only reason she'd been kept alive this long had been to allow the baby she was carrying to mature further. Five months of visiting a hospital, of holding the hand of his brain dead child. Ellie was the only good thing that had come of it. A beautiful blonde baby, who had her mother's deep brown eyes from the moment she was born.

"I couldn't protect your mother," Jack had told her the first time the nurse had laid her in his arms. "I tried, but I couldn't. Maybe I can protect you."

Vaughn was speaking softly to Sydney.

"I'll look after our baby girl, Syd. I'll make sure she's okay."

"Like hell you will," Jack replied gruffly. Ellie whimpered.

"Pardon?" Vaughn said, confused.

"This" he motioned towards Sydney's bed. "This is your fault. You hurt one of my girls more than I'd ever thought possible. She lost the will to live because the one man she thought she could depend on lied to her. Like hell I'm going to let you hurt another."

Before Vaughn could find the wherewithal to respond, Sydney's monitors began to beep and screech. There was a flat line.

Ellie began to howl.

5/5