Temptation

A/N: A little one-shot set during The Bourne Supremacy about what goes on through Jason's mind when he sees Pamela Landy's head through the sniper-scope of his rifle in Berlin.

She was there, literally caught in his cross-hairs. He could see the blond hair moving through his sniper-scope, its owner walking about issuing orders, orders no doubt related to capturing or killing him. And in that moment, she sickened him. Sickened him to the core. Just like Conklin did. She was just like him, playing with life and death, commanding an army of spies and killers from the shadows. He hated them all; the people he used to work for in a past remembered only in brief traumatic flashes.

How easy it would be to just pull the trigger and end his enemy's life. For the woman across the street was his enemy. She was the one who, in all likelihood, had issued orders which led to Marie's death in Goa. She was the one who framed him for murders in Berlin, committed in reality no doubt, by agents dispatched by her. In all probability she was the one who had assumed the mantle of Conklin, who had inherited the nefarious Treadstone project. If she were to die now, countless lives could be saved. Some innocent, some guilty, but lives nonetheless.

He really had to struggle with himself to resist the urge to pull the trigger and shoot the damn woman's in the head. It would be the simple solution to the problem; their solution. There was no chance he could miss; they had trained him well enough to avoid that. Poetic justice it would be indeed if he were to use their training against them.

Part of his mind wanted to do that. But he didn't. Because another part of his mind was remembering. Remembering the last words of a woman before she was shot in the head. Marie was right. He always had a choice. And he had to choose now. Vengeance lay in the pull of a trigger and so did Jason Bourne. Not the Jason Bourne who had been fished out of the Mediterranean Sea half-dead, but the Jason Bourne created by Treadstone, the cold-blooded killer, the assassin he hated almost as much as he hated the assassin's employers. It was his way. It was what they had taught him to be. Killing the woman across the street would make him once more the man he hated. It would make him what Marie hated. And besides, the woman had the answers. What he really wanted, more than vengeance, was answers. The search for answers was what gave his otherwise meaningless life purpose.

So he would spare the woman's life. And listen to what she had to say. He would resist the temptation to become a killer. To become the assassin they trained him to be. He would not pull the trigger.