A/N: When I was watching Bourne Ultimatum (for like the billionth time- I love that movie) this idea just popped in my head. I saw scene at the end with that other assassin on the rooftop with Bourne, and then I thought, 'alright, what happens to him?' And my brain came up with this. I know this is a little confusing, but I like the anonymity of it all. But if it gets too confusing, please say something and I'll try my best to edit/explain better.
Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle. -Marcus Aurelius
A forbidding sense of déjá vu flooded his senses as he slowly turned around. He'd seen this before; two men stripped of their identities facing each other a bare twenty feet apart. One, the closer to the edge of the roof, was scraped and beaten, disillusioned and weary. The other was confused, his world tilting off its carefully planted axis as the gossamer threads holding his violent life together ominously creaked before slowly snapping one by one. That man held a weapon in shaking hands, reacting in the only way he could remember – with a gun and cold demanding words that didn't quite hide the quiver in his voice. Why didn't you kill me?
Except last time he had been the one with the question. Now he was at the other end, shoulders slumped as his side pounded, nerves roaring with pain. Yet somehow it all seemed insignificant to the guilt twisting his conscience, causing worse pain than any physical wound. He gazed at his successor, examining him across the dimly lit roof, trying to pass all that he had learned in a simple gaze – the same gaze he had received all those nights ago. Do you even know why you're supposed to kill me? But such a look could only be understood by those who had already learned, and it was wasted.
The man twitched, as if hit by an invisible fist, and cowered into the shadows. The only thing that seemed to give the man confidence was the gun, cool, decisive, in his hands. He laughed bitterly, as another imagined thread split apart. Oh, how far the mighty had fallen. Look at us. Look at what they make you give. He could feel others behind his words, almost as if their essences live on in that phrase. It seemed as if he was little more than a channel to the words, speaking across generations of assassins whose eyes had been pried open, forced to see the sordid truth. And with that final statement, he turned and threw himself off of the roof, feeling the wind rushing to his head, the sickening plummeting of his stomach. It ends here.