How Sweet the Sound

by Eatsscissors

What does a man like Kirill do with mercy? Mostly Kirill gen, dash of KirillXBourne.

TITLE: How Sweet the Sound

RATING: R

CHARACTER/PAIRING: Bourne/Kirill

DISCLAIMER: Not my sandbox.

SUMMARY/PROMPT: What does a man like Kirill do with mercy?

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

-Mahatma Gandhi

It takes nearly a week in hospital before Kirill feels like a man again. Who that man is, what shape does this being beneath his skin take, is something that he can only guess at, and it rankles him in the odd moments when pain medication cannot soothe him into oblivion again. His job does not pay him for uncertainty. Uncertainty ends with a bullet to the back of the head, a shallow grave and a footnote checked against history.

He writhes in uncertainty now, more and more with every angry second that he tries to hurl it away from himself. Anger is also something that Kirill is unaccustomed to; anger is something beyond his control, and anger in others is something that more often than not allows him to gain the upper hand against them. He has a job, and he does it. The emotions do not concern him. Neither does the irony of the fact that he cannot seem to bring those very emotions under his dominion now.

It takes nearly a week in hospital before Kirill feels like a man again, and only a few short hours after his release to realize that he has been given only a short reprieve. Every sound, every car door slamming and every child screaming over an imagined slight, frays his nerves, jerks his hand towards a gun that is not there, and brings his mind back to the same question. He goes back to another hand holding another gun, one that should have pulled the trigger (as Kirill would have, this much at least he does still grasp with a certainty, pulled it and collected his money and never looked back again) and yet didn't. By doing so, Bourne broke the math that made Kirill, and Kirill is still struggling to put it back together again.

He scowls and considers snarling at the mother of that particularly vocal child, but in the end doesn't. He isn't getting paid for this, and he is never cruel unless there is a fixed amount to be awarded at the end.

It takes less than a day in his sparse living space-it's impossible to call it an apartment, much less a home, when he could quietly disappear and there would be less trace of his life than in a hotel room-before the phone rings. Kirill hesitates before he picks up the receiver, and again afterwards. He is not a man who cultivates friends; he has instead people who believe that they may mean something to him. It all amounts to the same in the end. This one, at least, is proving useful.

It was not, as Kirill had feared, that Gretkov was turning on him; it was still almost as bad. The Soviet Union and its ultimate deviation from purpose is still a ghost that weighs heavily upon the recovering country. Public officials who are even rumored to have dallied with corruption are not tolerated. When they also carry guns, the reaction is...rather more strenuous. His friend-that-isn't is taking a risk in giving him advance warning before the arrest comes down at all.

Kirill flees.

In Madrid, where it is warm enough that he can almost shake the chill from his fingers and yet still so crowded that he cannot help glancing over his shoulder and picturing that hand again, that gun, this time doing what ought to have been done from the onset, Kirill considers. He should be dead. Of this he is well aware. Retirement never occurred to him, and running less so. He has known since he accepted his first roll of money for a job that was beyond the boundaries of the law, short hops that then became leaps, that it would end in bloodshed. He did not imagine that it would end with a bang that never arrived with its promised bullet, and with perpetual running afterwards. This is an arena that he did not plan for. He dislikes it intensely.

Behind Kirill and beyond the noise of yet another child whose parents cannot manage its vocalizations, a church begins to ring its bells. He scowls and rises to find another cafe quickly.

There is still an ache in Kirill's ribs and the last touch of a fading yellow smudge along his jaw when his thoughts turn from himself and the predicament that he cannot seem to rise from, and flow inexorably towards Bourne. Kirill knew nothing of the man outside of his face and a short dossier of known abilities and aliases before he was given his money and sent to perform his function. He had not known about the woman until the very second that he saw her in the car with Bourne. He wonders if that would have stopped him, had he had time to prepare for her presence instead of reacting for it in the handful of seconds that he was allotted.

He knows that it would not have.

Kirill does not conceive of love in regards to himself. His parents are blurry hazes that danced away when he tried to remember them as a child, until he stopped. Love makes people foolish and makes them fall into traps. Love makes people kill and yet not pause to cover up their tracks. Kirill has never known love to stay someone's hand before. It irritates him that he still cannot understand; these emotions that he cannot rein in have yet to cease and are if anything growing stronger. Without answers, Kirill fears that he will soon be the one so consumed that he forgets to cover his tracks. It may be that his time spent as a fugitive will be every bit as short as he originally supposed. Left between wallowing in this sour and foreign uncertainty until he finally makes that mistake that will end in another hand, this one with no qualms about jerking back on that trigger that it's wrapped around, and finding answers, Kirill supposes that there is only one choice left to him. Really, the only choice that there had been all along.

Goa is every bit as hot as Madrid when Kirill pauses to huddle there, but this does not stop the trickle of sweat that starts along his shoulder blades and then rolls slowly soft from being one of the coldest things that he has ever felt in his life. The colors are too bright now, and the people move too quickly. Kirill continues to see guns and worries that he will not stop seeing them until he is able to understand why Bourne's did not perform as it was designed.

He can be confused, he can be angry, and now he has learned that he can be afraid. How joyous.

They have repaired the bridge, Kirill discovers as he weaves his way through the sparse pedestrian and motor traffic to finally stand upon it. The railing has been painted over, so that if Kirill could not remember the exact point at which the car plunged through it, he doubts that he would have known that anything was amiss at all. The metal and wood does not creak as Kirill leans his hands upon and tries to shake it back and forth. He ignores the stares that he can feel upon the back of his neck. If he meant to commit suicide, he would certainly be careful enough to wait until after the sun had set.

These thoughts continue to plague him long after he leaves the bridge. They are not the sort that one wants to be holding within his head when he visits a cemetery; Kirill is maintaining an uneasy truce with his new inability to direct the course of his own mind and moods. He scowls at the gatekeeper who stares at him, for he has no gift or tribute for the dead in his hands, and strides quickly across earth that has been well-softened by seasonal rain over the previous few days. There are marks left in the grass behind him. Kirill notes bitterly that already his ability to disappear seems to be abandoning him. He will be as bad as the people that he has killed before long.

When no one came forward to claim the body of the woman, money was pooled for her burial by the locals, for she and the mysterious man that she kept company with were liked, so much as they could be when they always seemed to hold themselves slightly apart. A cross was found among her things, and so a Christian cemetery was chosen to hold her body. Kirill scarcely glances at the few scattered crosses as he strides among the monuments. If there is supposed to be a power to them now that he has been granted such a nearly-miraculous reprieve from his own certain death, then he does not feel it. The eyes of the angels when they do seem to follow him are more hounding than comfort. The skin on the back of his neck prickles, and he steps faster.

There is no adornment on the woman's grave. The grass is short and the foliage trimmed into obedience, but it does not look as if anyone has been here to pay homage to the body beneath the ground, or whatever else she might have been before Kirill made her that way. He stands before the grave with his arms folded over his chest until he senses that the attendant has grown bored and drifted away, and then he lowers himself into a crouch so that he can better view the marker. It bears a name that Kirill does not believe is real, and nothing else. Apparently she left only the cross behind, and no passport so that those who arranged her burial could at least give her a birth date. Though Kirill stares at the unadorned stone until his eyes burn, there is no moment of epiphany, there is nothing that makes the impossible become real. He should be dead, and yet he is not. He was offered mercy-a word that his mind trips over and that he has still not been able to force himself to say aloud-by a man who should have been every bit as much of a killer as himself, and the answers are here. Kirill knows that they are in a place within himself that he cannot name; every additional second in which they refuse to reveal themselves brings him that much closer to grinding his teeth down into dust.

The sky above him rumbles as he continues to wait, signaling that the rain will return soon. Kirill ignores both it and the attendant who creeps back every now and again, fascinated by the man who refuses to leave the woman's grave. He is not the one that she lived with prior to her death. Kirill will in all likelihood be leaving a torrent of gossip in his wake when he does exit the city. He hopes that Bourne catches wind of it, eventually. He hopes that Bourne seeks him out.

He hopes that Bourne is a killer through every atom of his soul, and that he is as thrown by his own capacity for mercy as Kirill himself is. The alternative is inconceivable. The best option, the only option, is that Bourne will hear that Kirill came to this sacred place, that he stood on this earth, and then will seek him out with the intention of correcting his mistake. Then they can settle their accounts. Otherwise…it does not bear thinking about.

Even as Kirill allows his mind to drift towards thoughts of what Bourne will do once he discovers that Kirill has profaned the holy in such a way, he discovers that the muscles in his back and down his legs have grown tense, and that his breath is coming faster in his throat and his heart beating slightly louder in his ears. He is waiting for Bourne. Even as he entertains notions of Bourne seeking him out, the hunter being hunted for a change of pace before he can finish his task and equilibrium returned, he imagines that Bourne will still arrive here, now, before Kirill can manage to leave the cemetery at all. Surely Kirill's feet in this place will set off some kind of internal alarm that will bring Bourne here with murder in his eyes.

An hour passes; trained in patience, Kirill hardly moves to breathe. If the attendant returns once more, Kirill thinks that he will kill him. That same strange force that has been uprooting his universe saves someone else's life tonight, for the attendant is not seen again. The disgruntled rumblings of the clouds above him give way at last to rain that is disturbingly warm, and yet still makes Kirill jump when he feels the first drops falling upon his shoulders and head. And still Bourne does not come.

At long last, Kirill swears and reaches out to swipe a piece of grime from the top of the woman's tombstone-he will not analyze why the urge to make the gesture came to him-before he leaves to return to his hotel. In spite of walking in heavy rain the entire way, Kirill will still stand under the shower as soon as he gets there. Neither experience will make him feel cleansed.

After Goa, he craves the heat more than ever. Bourne was an American, Kirill remembers now, even though he has no reason to. The job is done; he was paid, even if Bourne does still live. It's finished.

Kirill finds himself in Mexico a scarce month later, mumbling curses to himself the entire way. Getting past American paranoia and into the nation proper is too difficult these days, more so now that the Landy woman (Kirill wonders at Bourne's relationship to her, imagines the two of them twined around one another, and is alternately pleased to discover that Bourne is not so loyal, so good, that he cannot leave the dead one behind before her corpse can cool, at the same time that such thoughts make him clench his hands into fists) has torn the bandage off of an entire gangrenous mess of corruption. Huddling to the direct south seems like a pale exchange, but it is the best that he can do.

He still cannot seem to get warm, and the showers taken beneath the recalcitrant head in his bathroom do nothing. Kirill stood in the rain for an hour the day before, pretending to watch a football match amongst a gaggle of young boys, well aware that he was attracting attention for his refusal to even hold up an umbrella and unable to care. He does not sleep any longer; he drinks more than is wise for a man in his position, when reflexes might well be the only thing that saves his life if the various sides that he has angered should choose to come for him, and he does not even attempt to care.

He does not understand.

It takes less than a week to decide that Mexico is a failure, and that it is time to move on, to…to somewhere. Somewhere so hot that the skin will peel straight from Kirill's flesh, if that's what it will take to drive this damnable sense of cold that has haunted Kirill for months away. He does not allow himself to ponder too closely the fact that he does not know what his next move will be in any detail, even the most paltry, and that this would have appalled him in the time before. If he thinks too closely about the time before, he will go mad. It might only be a short trip from here as it is. All that he knows is that he must leave.

Naturally, he will later think, it is when he is finally seeking to escape that he is finally found.

"You've gotten careless." The voice is cold. Kirill tenses from where he has been packing, but does not rise from his kneeling position over the bed. He does not know what kind of weapons might be pointed at him now, or how eagerly their commander might be willing to pull the trigger.

"Have I?" he asks slowly as he starts to turn his head. He makes no effort to hide his accent; it's not a tourist town, so one gringo traveling alone is going to attract attention regardless of what his nationality might be. And Kirill has little doubt that this intruder knows exactly who he is.

"Yes. I was much harder to find." Realization floods through Kirill like heat, and it is all that he can do not to leap to his feet, never mind that it will undoubtedly unleash a storm of bullets into him-Bourne is surely pointing a gun at him. Kirill does not take him for a fool, not now.

"I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your voice," Kirill says as he slowly straightens and turns. There is a gun, of course. Kirill has seen far too many of them over the course of his career to imagine that the barrel is growing any larger as he stares at it, but he is still discomfited by how unerringly Bourne is pointing it at him.

"We never did get the chance to speak, did we?" Bourne must have looked innocent once. He has the face for it. Kirill wonders if Bourne ever capitalized on that trait; it's not one that he himself has ever possessed.

"No." Kirill watches the gun rather than Bourne's face, though those eyes are every bit as unreadable as the weapon itself. It's too far away yet for him to do anything else.

The thumb moves backwards slowly, readying the weapon to fire. Kirill is too busy studying the fine hairs that dot the back of Bourne's hand and move down his wrist to realize for several seconds that the gun had been put on safety as Bourne entered the room. It was a foolish decision, one more that Kirill cannot fathom in a long string. He's sure that his shock shows on his face, for Bourne's eyes narrow.

"Why did you go to the grave?" Bourne asks him in a harsh voice which suggests that lying would not be wise. So word did get back to him; though this is, perversely, the exact situation that Kirill had been hoping to provoke on that day, he feels no satisfaction now. Just once, before he dies, Kirill wants something to make sense again. That he very well may die here without that wish being granted is a galling catch in the back of his throat; he forgets that he once wanted Bourne to take back his precious mercy that had no framework in their world.

"To see if you would be there," Kirill answers. It's the truth, though he does not expect to hear it from himself. Perhaps the surprise registers in his face, or perhaps Bourne's eyes narrow a tick out of suspicion alone. The gun does not lower itself, at any rate.

"You found me easily enough before," Bourne says. He takes a step closer, because he's preparing himself to take that final shot or because he sees something in Kirill saying that he's no longer a threat, even Kirill himself can neither know nor say. "Don't tell me that it would be that hard again."

'It would,' Kirill thinks, but he does not say. Bourne is closer than ever, so close that Kirill almost imagines that he can feel the heat from his body, so close that the muzzle of the gun will be making an indention against the front of Kirill's shirt at any moment. He should be afraid. He thinks instead of Bourne and Landy twined around one another again, making the breathless sounds of desire, and feels something else entirely.

"You should have fired," Kirill says.

Something in Bourne's eyes flickers, not quite confusion. He doesn't think that Kirill is referring to the gun that he's holding now, but he'll pretend that he does. Kirill knows this as surely as he knows that he could take the gun away from Bourne right now and probably refer nothing more serious than a bruise. He also knows that he won't do it, and he doesn't know why even now, and that alone is nearly enough to make him lunge forward and damn the consequences.

Bourne's eyes flicker again. He steps back, and Kirill can see his finger tighten on the trigger. Maybe not, he thinks. "It wouldn't have…she didn't like that side of me," he says instead.

The woman. The original one, not the one who is plastering herself across CNN now. Kirill can feel his brow furrowing. He doesn't understand, but he wants to. He's not used to things that he cannot dissect and quantify. "Why?" he asks.

Bourne nearly starts backwards before he can catch himself. Kirill does not think that this is how he imagined this meeting going at all. "Because," he says slowly, as if he cannot believe that he's having to explain something like this to Kirill and is waiting for the punchline. Kirill doesn't feel like telling him that he has a severe shortage of cars with which to engage in wild cross-city chases with him now, or the urge. "Because sometimes you can care about someone so much that to dishonor their memory like that hurts you. Hurts you more than you know how to deal with."

That's interesting, Kirill thinks. He's never cared about a person that much in his life, and cannot conceive of caring about someone that much even now. Certainly not Bourne; Bourne is the irritating annoyance that he wishes had never happened, so that his life would still make sense to him. He hardly realizes that he has started to lean closer.

Bourne's gun is pressed against Kirill's chest hard enough to leave a bruise later as Kirill's mouth finally touches Bourne's own, but Kirill is after everything else not in a position to notice. If there is supposed to be sanctity or certainty here, then he cannot find it. All of the questions remained unanswered, but the feel of Bourne's mouth on his and Bourne's hand eventually finding the back of his neck and holding him there is very nice all the same. Even when Bourne's fingers flex a few seconds later and he pulls Kirill away. Several blocks away, there are church bells ringing. They still make Kirill twitchy and irritable; only the knowledge that sudden movements around this man and this gun will not be wise keeps him still.

"What?" he asks, his voice low and breathless in ways that are not making Kirill reconsider the wisdom of his original actions.

"I wanted to understand," Kirill says. "Why you didn't kill me. That's why I went to her grave."

Bourne's eyes are dark, so dark, when they are also so close to Kirill's own. "She's the only one who knows why," he confesses. "I still don't. I don't even know who I am any more."

That's not an answer that should make Kirill feel any more relaxed and yet it does. He did not realize until that moment how much it was unsettling him to think that Bourne was in addition to being a nearly perfect physical weapon somehow omniscient. He starts to kiss Bourne again, only to be stopped by those fingers once again flexing against the back of his neck. The muzzle of the gun against his chest becomes more insistent. Kirill had nearly forgotten that it was there, and he still can't bring himself to believe that Bourne will actually pull his finger back on the trigger as Bourne steps away.

"Don't go there again," Bourne says as he turns to go. Even with his back turned towards Kirill, he manages to seem as if he's aware of every move that Kirill makes. "Or I will pull that trigger."

"I don't doubt it." Even though he does. There are many things that he supposes he must learn to live with now.

Kirill is in the hallway along with Bourne before he even realizes that he has started to follow, and neither one of them makes mention of it.

End