AN I adore writing for this series. I get to indulge in all of my stylized fancies, which is always fun. This is also the sequel to if i believe in death, so things will make a mite more sense if you read that first.

The poem "Listen" is by ee cummings.

listen
beloved

He feels like a desert; worn and tired and so, so very dry. The sun and the wind and the bullets and the death had tumbled down onto him with vicious abandon, until he had changed into something giant and encompassing to survive it all, but looking at the woman in the hospital bed before him, he knows that there is no way he could survive this.

He is not angry. He's too wise to be angry at this point. It was all part of the game, as M would say, keep what you can, hide all that you may, tell only what is absolutely, undeniably necessary. He has never been good at that part, keeping every secret that he could. Somehow, lies blended into truths until one day there was no artifice in his words. That's why M runs things, he figures. He is just the attack dog, wound up and sent in a direction.

He is not angry, and yet he burns with something like hate and regret. He is not sure if it is at M, or at himself, or at the sickly vision in hospital gown green, but the feeling is there, tearing at his parched insides and making him think.

(he does not like what it might mean.)

i dreamed
it appeared that you thought to
escape me and became a great

It is hard for him not to think. He had been tugged from the field and set on a break, just when he needs to go out and do something. He cannot stand the waiting and the watching and the remembering. Of course, it is all covered up under the pretense of there not being a mission, but there is always a mission, this he has learned. But, again, M cannot have a compromised asset, so she closes it down and stuffs it away until she can think how to patch it up for when she needs it again.

Worry has never been something James would have placed next to her name, but now it is so damnably obvious.

He finds himself passing the time slowly, tediously, stumbling forward through sand and under sun until he arrives at the hospital, frustrated and exhausted and empty. He never meant to go, but once he looks up and sees its forbidding grey walls, he can't help but walk in. It is stupid and reckless and makes no sense (he killed that part of him that cared, he had, he had, he had), but he does it. Just once. He has to know.

Vesper.

(her name is arsenic on his tongue, coated in honey, coated in arsenic again. he is never sure if he hates or revels in it, and he has had a long time to wonder about it.)

She looks like death.

She is asleep, hair dark and surly around her face, which is pale and bruised and pathetic. The hand that isn't under the blanket is skeletal and mottled with injuries. He knew her condition, he had been the one to rescue her, after all, but it is very different, seeing her laid out while surrounded by clean and light instead of filth and murk. He despises the fact that, somehow, he still finds her pretty. Never in a bright, open, infectious way, but in a dark, pained, tempting way.

He stands outside of her room just long enough to make sure that, yes, she is real and she is alive, then he leaves. No one has noticed him, and he is certain he does not feel regret.

lily atilt on
insolent
waters but i was aware of

There is something dangerous in caring, this he knows. He knows it well enough to stay away from the hospital, to not mention her, to not ask about her, to not push M into sending him back into the field. He knows, and yet he cannot help it.

It is a heat in his stomach, one that curls up through his bones and seeps through his skin. Everything he does is touched. Eating, walking, sleeping, breathing, it all comes back to Vesper, the drowned girl that couldn't stay dead. Seeing her in his head, bright and alive and beautiful makes him sick, because she is barely any of those things anymore, and he hate sit. He should not be so effected.

(but oh, is he.)

Sometimes, he stands under the shower, as if he could wash the thoughts away. He looks down at his feet and sees nothing as the cold water coats his skin and offers to take it all down the drain, but he feels nothing but how parched he is.

In reality, James does not want to forget, does not want to stop worrying. He wants to know how she is, what she's been doing, where she has been, why she was locked in a cage like a dog, why he had been sent to fetch her.

In short, he wants answers he can never have.

He wants to break every rule he has because he cannot let. her. go.

fragrance and i came riding upon
a horse of porphyry into the
waters i rode down the red

He dreams of her death, the water between them as Vesper strapped herself to her own grave. He wakes up from the water, but he feels nothing but the heat. It is enough to chase him from the bed every time, sending him to find relief in any form, but nothing satisfies, not rain, not night air, not people, not whiskey nor wine nor gin.

(he knows that she would be his only release, but he is not an addict he can exist without her he does not need a dose of her to get through the day.)

When he is awake, he can taste her sorrow on his lips, he can smell her charm in the air. He is dry as death, but he senses her water, can almost imagine it dripping down to his face. It disgusts him, the way he fancies her release, a grace she has no right to give, and he no right to desire.

James knows that what bothers him the most is that he failed to recognize that she was not dead. There had been a little candle inside of her, guttering and flickering and begging to be scooped up from the water, but he had missed it. Had he noticed the flicker of breath, the whisper of a heartbeat, he would have known she was alive and would not have been surprised with a violence that made him sick. He would have been stone when he was sent to fetch her, carrying out the job with none of the aching in his chest he was feeling now.

He can't help but wonder, now, if in his panic and his anger and his desperation, he had wanted to believe she was dead. He could detest her all he liked when she was nothing but a name and a memory. The living, however, were tricky and could always come back and change things. That was exactly what she had done, after all, transforming his content loathing and disgust into panicked worry and hot shock with nothing more than a few weeks' imprisonment. And he needs that self-righteous fury, needs the reason to believe that he hadn't failed, that she had just gotten what she deserved. He needs it like he needs air, or like he now needs water to put out the forest fire of regret in his chest.

horse shrieking from splintering
foam caught you clutched you upon my
mouth

It is three weeks after she was entered into the hospital that he finally finds a name for all of this.

Haunting.

She haunts him. Her breath ghosts his hands and her smile mocks his lips and her eyes scorch his skin. That must be why he is certain he will never forget the wretched look of resignation and fear on her face when he saw her again, as long as he lives.

It gets to the point where he cannot handle it, and he seeks out M. Months have passed, he has been a good boy, she owes him answers.

"Why."

It is not a question when it comes out of his mouth, but a statement. M doesn't even bother to look at him, but continues to stare out at the river, with her hands in her pockets and her coat buttoned high. She sighs out a swear, tilting her head a little. He still finds it miraculous that she, a tired, small, old woman, finds him completely underwhelming.

"Because," she says, like that is enough. She switches topics. "Where are the agents ordered to watch me? You haven't killed them, I hope. I certainly don't have time for a bloody rouge agent."

"They're still in place," he says turning to lean against the rail of the bridge. The river is pretty in a muted, melancholic sort of way. He does not let it show on his face that it reminds him of Vesper. "They won't even know I've been here, if you answer nicely. Why didn't you tell me?"

"That she had lived, that she was given a different identity, a different life?"

"That she was the one I was rescuing," he said, trying very hard not to grit his teeth.

"Yes, I didn't want to do that. But if you had known, it would have effected your performance."

"Why was I the one in the first place?"

"Because," she repeats, giving a pause that makes him think she won't tell him, "once you had found her, I knew that you would do anything to bring her back alive."

He does not comment on the fact that she had banked on his emotions, does not comment on the fact that he still had them, the same way M has not said a word about the whole situation since it had started. It feels like a secret between them, and his insides rage at the idea. He hates secrets.

"What are you going to do with her?"

"Whatever we can. We've had to think hard about where to put her, how to use her. She still knows things, damn her."

"And what are you planning on doing with me?"

M turns to look at him, expression flat.

"Nothing. You're on holiday."

He leaves her on the bridge, allowing her to resume her walk. Recklessness is burning inside of him, because it feels like a go ahead, permission to go do whatever he wants where Vesper is concerned.

listen
beloved

He finds her file. It is contemptuously neat, detailing her life after death, the way she had been found and tortured, and how he had come to save her. The words are mechanical and taut, asset, extracted, serious condition, and they make no sense. They are dead and unfeeling, swirling up in his head until it aches as he tries to understand why they can't express the way he feels.

It should be simple. It should be a quiet affair, a few paragraphs and very neat period at the end to wrap it all up, but it isn't and there won't be. He feels Vesper in his palms and his breath and his bones, calling for him to go find her, to go see her and lay down at her feet and ask why she had given everything up. He wants to feel her flaws now, as the fully formed and fully understood things that they are, rather than bemusing half-truths he had glimpsed in dim hotel rooms and murky hallways. He wants to see her, as he now knows her to be, and not the ambiguously black and white thing in his starkly shades of grey world. It should be so very simple.

(and yet, and yet.)

i dreamed in my dream you had
desire to thwart me and became
a little bird and hid
in a tree of tall marble

When he sees her, James does not feel like a desert any more. He is not dry and burning and craving water, he is all ice. He has become a tundra, too bitter and frozen to give her an inch. But the look in her eyes says that she has never wanted one.

He found her in the hospital chapel, on her hands and knees and quietly begging for something he assumes she cannot have. It is a strange thought, Vesper in a church, because she had never cared for grace or deliverance before, but he supposes that a good washing in the Venetian waterways would clean the sin out of anyone's soul.

He is ice, he is frozen, he does not care if she turns and sees him. But he also does not call out right away. James instead watches her, wondering if this was real, if he was staring this woman's pathetic, if shockingly determined, life in the face. Vesper continues, oblivious to him in the doorway, and he considers slipping away, becoming a shadow, a ghost that would now haunt her, stalk her everywhere she went. But that might just make her go mad, and he imagines insanity to not suit her features at all.

In the end, she stumbles upon him of her own accord. While he is considering what to do, she turns.

Again, she looks like death. The color drains from her face, and her eyes widen as she sees him. And yet, somehow, Vesper is not surprised. She has been expecting this, and the vague, bitter relief in her eyes tells him that she is not the only ghost in this room. She has seen him everywhere, waiting for the real thing to step out of the air and saunter through her life once more.

He can tell she wants to say his name, but the words are caught, her lips refusing to open. He is somewhat thankful for this, as he can't shake the belief that water would tumble from her lips, not sound. He doesn't need to see her drown twice.

It feels like a dream. He never imagined to see her again, much less speak to her, but in that second it felt so right. The idea sours inside of him, and then it all feels so, so wrong.

They just watch each other. Her gaze is tired and nervous, clawing at his stomach and making him want to speak, to lash out at her, to get her to drop her eyes and stop demanding things of him, but that awful, vindictive part of him knows that his gaze is just as terrible, so he stays quiet and he just looks. Eventually Vesper finds her words, and they are just as quiet and measured as he remembers.

"I didn't—I didn't think you'd come here."

"Only you are allowed to pray?" He raises an eyebrow at this, another sword thrust through her stomach. He barely registers surprise at his shocking desire to make her writhe.

He is still so angry with her.

"We only get to break the rules once, and we've already done that. What's worth being buried?"

She looks delicate. She meets his eye, but it is not with the blunt arrogance from before. She is a bird, skittering in the square, trying to get what she wants, but also too afraid to make a real move. Death has faded her. This thing before him is not Vesper, it is a vague image of her, one that tries to force her mouth into a smile, one that smooths her skirt with her hands in an attempt to make herself more pleasing to look at. He had been wrong. The little candle guttering inside of her had been undeniably extinguished by the water in her lungs, leaving nothing but smoke and shadows.

But he is not staying there to pass judgment on her. She had confessed her sins to him as he had lifted her out of hell and into the hospital room, and he had known then that this was a pitiable, regretful creature, one that had been trying since her death to make up for her mistake. And he had hoped, a little, that maybe he had been wrong, but this just proves it all. What keeps James there now is the secret he can see on her lips, little water droplets clinging to her skin and begging to be tasted.

"That depends on what you have to give."

Vesper's smile is sharp and fragile as she walks by him. He doesn't stop her, doesn't even watch her slide past. His eyes are settled on the altar at the end of the chapel, because the Vesper he has come for still has not left the room. She is settled about his shoulders, as she has been since Venice, giving him a smile that is razor instead of glass, and lazily encourages him to do better than that.

from a great way i distinguished
singing and i came
riding upon a scarlet sunset
trampling the night easily

She slips through his fingers. She leaves the hospital, and is left to hide herself in the city. He thinks about tracking her, about following the song of numbers and names and ending up on her door, but he will not.

She is not Vesper, she is not the person that had slipped her fingers into his chest and pulled, teasing his heart into her palm. He would have trampled the world to rest scarlet and aching at her feet, but now...

She is a charred wick, used up, on the verge of crumbling. She is not Vesper.

(but oh, how he wishes her to be.)

from the shocked impossible
tower i caught
you strained you
broke you upon my blood

He continues his work. He has been given a chance, and it has passed, so he continues on. James is again the attack dog, wound up and sent in a direction. He makes sure that no complaints leave his lips.

It only takes a few seconds. A few moments where he is distracted by a broken water pipe in the ceiling (it is coming fast will it fill the room am I going to drown Vesper drowned), and then suddenly it is all her, her as she lays on a portion of roof, and she is pale and she is soaked and she is refusing to breathe, and then he is almost knocked off his feet. The face he sees before him is not a man dabbling in chemical warfare, it is Vesper's and it is suddenly dirty and bruised and terrified and overjoyed and distraught to see him. She is in his brain, she is in his blood. He can only see her as he feels what might as well be a sledge hammer sinking into his ribs.

listen
beloved i dreamed

He wakes and he knows that he has failed. He recalls bits of blurry torture, of demands for information, of pain. Everything between that and him ending up in the hospital does not really matter. He has failed, and it is because he has a ghost soaking his brain.

M comes, and she is brisk and brutal and any well wishes are cloaked in sarcasm and complaint. Another government agent comes, nervous and terse at the thought of having to give a tempestuous operative the official speech about bureaucracy and remembering his place while strapped to a hospital bed. A few guards come, but they never enter the room, never look around.

None of it sinks in. It all blurs until he is caught somewhere between waking and sleep, his thoughts mixing with other people's words and he's drifting through a cloud of pain and apathy. About the only thing he really can focus on is the fact that he is a complete and utter fool.

She comes to see him. James does not know how or why, but Vesper slips in once she thinks he is asleep. He may very well be asleep, it may all be a terrible dream he craves, but he does not care. He watches her from his lashes as she slips into the room, small and still healing.

James sees that her skirt is viciously red and matches her lipstick, and that is so jarring that he nearly opens his eyes. These are not Vesper's clothes, this is not something understated and lovely, it is bold and aggressive and demanding attention.

He still does not acknowledge her, partly because he does not care, and partly because addressing it would require sitting up, and that's just not something he thinks he can do right now.

She sits down by his bed, and she looks completely out of place. She is nervous, smoothing her skirt and brushing her hair from her face, and strumming her fingers on her lap. It sounds like water dripping, and he finds it exceptionally annoying.

Vesper does not say anything for a moment, just looks around the room and finally settles on staring at someplace about his knees. He closes his eyes, because he does not want to look at her anymore.

"I...heard that you were admitted," she says, like it's any mystery who let her know. The only mystery here is why M wanted her presenting even more of a distraction. She had gone through the trouble of hiding Vesper in a different life, why shoot that to pieces just now?

"I'm not certain why I came, I just...I wanted to be sure. They said you almost died."

She takes a breath, then whispers, "It really is a miracle you are alive, James. Broken ribs, injuries to several intestines, the skin mostly gone on your hands and feet..."

She trails off, and that is when he wonders just when he had fallen in love with death's darling. He had always assumed that it was him death had trailed after like a lost dog, because he rained it down without any regret these days. When he thought about it, it had always hung about her wrists and her ankles and neck, a gruesome sort of jewelry. No matter where they had turned, it had slipped after, coming from his hand and falling at her feet. This time, he supposes it is only the fragments of some severely misplaced good will on her part that kept him alive. He finds it oddly fitting, in the perverse quiet of the hospital room.

"I...was it like this with me?" she whispers to him, and she just sits there, presumably staring at any part of him but his face. He knows she speaks because she thinks he is asleep, but he cannot bring himself to confront her.

Having her just sit there beside him is good enough, though. He does not care that she is full of contrition, or that he had only just thought of her as a washed out specter, this is Vesper and this is what he will take. James allows himself to lie there, to soak up a bit of her water because he is parched and he wants to melt.

i thought you would have deceived
me and became a star in the kingdom
of heaven

He is released. It is painful and embarrassing, but he is settles back into 'normal life'. It still hurts to move, he cannot walk for long periods of time, and he no longer knows how to properly think, but he is considered a normal person.

James continues about, trying to remember how to act when not dying and suffering and feeling his soul dry up and his heart freeze. He tries to remember how to act when he wasn't a shame, and she wasn't his torment.

Then, one day, he sees her. He is out in the market, and she is out in the market, and he catches sight of her leaning over a crate of apples. She has stayed, and he has stayed. There is not enough coincidence or irony in the world to make him think this is okay.

He thought she would have left, would have wandered off somewhere else. Vesper might have drifted off into the sun, for all he knew. And yet, she has lingered, just like she has done in his mind.

She looks up. She sees him. She spies his weakness and his shock and his doubt and his shame, and she says nothing. Vesper simply asks him a question with her eyes and he refuses to understand.

He does not know what to call it when he turns around and leaves before he can slip on the trail of water she leaves behind her, everywhere she goes. It is not death, it is not pain, it is not defeat, it is not running away, though it may be fear.

(he does not admit that he is a little pleased that, despite all of her words in the hospital, she has not deceived him and left.)

through day and space i saw you close
your eyes and i came riding
upon a thousand crimson years arched with agony

"You have probably realized, by now, that I cannot allow you to continue as you are."

James looks at M, his eyes icy and unimpressed. He knows as well as she that there is something more than the matter that he is a haunted shell. There is something lurking in the air, some secret that will slither to life.

"Your performance of late has been sub-par. And considering the serious physical damage you sustained... You know as well as I that it does not fit a double-oh agent, and it needs to be rectified."

"What is it, then? A permanent holiday under the ground, bury me in some forsaken institution in the middle of Siberia?"

Change my name and hide me as someone else, like you did with her?

He hates himself for even thinking about her, because once Vesper climbs in his head, she is impossible to wring out.

"Nothing so dramatic," M scoffs, looking out the window as if she can hardly believe she is having this conversation with a grown man. He ignores her. She has lost all rights to him caring at all about how she looks or acts.

"Your days in the field are strictly over, at least in the capacity you are accustomed to. If you are willing, however…we will be able to bring you on as a consultant."

"A consultant?" he asks. Scorn drips from his words. Fire and death rages in his bones, there was no way he could be a consultant.

"Yes. Otherwise, you will be set off with a pleasant retirement, and left to scrounge around for whatever chaos you feel isn't beneath you."

He scowls at her, but does not respond. This is all he has, and he knows it.

(in actuality, he knows he has maybe just a little bit more)

i reined them in tottering before
the throne and as
they shied at the automaton moon from

He thinks about her, morning, noon, and night. It is no longer haunting going on, it is pleading. Some part of his mind is begging for a rest, as all of his deserts and tundras in the world cannot defeat no rest.

He can't do it. James can't bring himself to give in, to lay down at her feet and divulge all that he's been hiding. He can't.

(he had never been a coward, but he had also never been quite so broken in this way.)

But he doesn't really have a choice.

He knows where she lives. He knows how long it takes to get there from his flat. He knows that there is nothing more he can lose, because his sanity is slipping without her and he doesn't care about much else. He knows that as nothing more than a consultant, he may go see whatever dangerous asset he'd like, as long as there was no national incident over it.

He knows that he cannot bear any longer without her. He doesn't care what it is, a brush from her fingers, the sight of her mouth, the feel of her eyes on his skin. He is too desperate to be self conscious, or picky.

Fear still rings in his blood, though.

Her door is dark and plain, and makes a pleasant, solid sound when he knocks. He hears her muted call, her footsteps, the moment's hesitation before the door opens. He hears the shock in her mouth when she sees who it is.

They stand there, James looking at Vesper, Vesper staring back, and he doesn't know how to say it.

Please I want you I can't do this I don't know what to feel I understand accept this here I am, begging at your feet.

This is not like the last time they met, ice and sand meeting with sighs and one sided acceptance. Death's darling and death's dog, pushed together out of a hopeless addiction and a wicked bit of fate. If James was fool enough, he might have even though they were just…people.

The droplets of water that cling to her fingers are still just as obvious to him. He wonders if she has noticed the brittle ice, flaking off his skin, and sand slipping out of his shoes.

(maybe, maybe, maybe)

James isn't sure if she says anything. It might have been a thought, or a whisper, or a prayer, but then she tilts her head, unhappy but unafraid.

Vesper turned her back on him, and walked away.

(it does not hurt, he tells himself, it does not it does not it does not)

But she also left the door open.

James watched her for a moment, then stepped over the threshold. It felt like Vesper was wringing a raincloud across his skin.

the transplendant hand of sombre god
i picked you
as an apple is picked by the little peasants for their girls