The Anniversary
A/N: One-shot from Bourne's POV...set a year after The Bourne Identity.
Marseilles, France
The crowded streets, the cafes, the salty smell of the sea air...he knew it and he didn't know it. It was, like everything else from past, a fragment from an unremembered dream...the tiniest sliver of memory that he could sense and even feel, but never truly grasp.
He had walked these streets before. He knew that much with conviction. In his minds' eye he imagined himself stealthily making his way along the dockyards, making his mental calculations, plotting and planning his infiltration into Nykwanna Wombosi's yacht.
It was all imagination of course. He could barely remember anything about that op...that last op which had made him what he was today...an amnesiac drifter who lacked purpose almost as much as he lacked identity. All he could recall were those final moments when, seeing his target surrounded by his offspring, he simply couldn't find it within himself to execute his mission.
And today, it was a year since that fateful night. A year since he'd been found by the crew of a fishing boat, with two bullets in his back and not a memory in his mind. Somehow, he found himself drawn to this place, this city, on this date. He'd felt an overwhelming desire to return to where it all began, as far as he could remember. Marie had agreed of course...she'd even expressed hopes that returning to Marseilles would jog his memories. Not that he cared to recover a single memory concerned with what had happened that night...
At last, he reached the dockyard, and stared out at the vast expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. He stood mesmerised at the sight of the sea that had spawned him, given him new life as it were while depriving him of his old one. Should he be thankful for that? Or should he rue the misfortune of not knowing who or what he was? It was a dilemma that confronted him almost every waking moment.
The smallest fragment of a memory, loose and disconnected from a lost whole, flickered across his sub-consciousness. He remembered staring out at this very same expanse in the evening, cellphone in hand. He remembered sending an encrypted text message, a very brief one-Infiltration tonight. Who had he sent the text to? Probably that blonde girl whom he'd seen with Conklin in Paris... 'Nicky' wasn't it?
In the past year, memories, fragments like these, had returned to him suddenly, sometimes even violently, both when he was awake and in his dreams. Virtually all of them were of moments like these-moments before, during, and immediately after an assignment. He didn't know which moments were worse-the moments before, the moments after, or the split-second in which he pulled the trigger...
But, oddly enough, there was something vaguely heartening about this particular memory...as though the knowledge, in retrospect, that he had been preparing for a kill, for the very last time, somehow made it all better.
Did it? Or was it just an illusion he'd conjured up to make himself feel less of a criminal revisiting the scene of a crime he had nearly committed?
As with so much about himself, he didn't know. He was an enigma, a paradox...and there was nothing he could do about it. All he could do was wait. Wait for the answers...or wait for a time when he truly and completely stopped caring about the answers.
He felt a presence by his side, and had to incline his head only slightly to see Marie standing to his left. She had evidently decided to follow him on his sojourn through the haunts of his past.
He gripped her hand, gave her a brief smile which she returned, and then turned his gaze back to the sea again. He had only been alive for a year...but at least, thanks to the woman beside him, it had been a good life so far. More than a worthy replacement for the one which had drowned away into those blue depths at which he still stared...