New Year's of Old
A/N: This is set in the canon of the Eric van Lustbader novels, though I'm not precisely sure when. It's just a little one-shot about Bourne on a certain New Year's Eve...
It was New Year's Eve, and Jason Bourne simply didn't know what to do with himself.
He recalled previous New Year's, spent in his Georgetown home with Marie and the kids. For him it had been a time of warmth and happiness and above all...peace. But Marie was dead now, the children shipped away to Canada; the peaceful existence of David Webb itself lay abandoned...and now Bourne was left to contemplate a solitary New Year's.
And what would the new year bring to him in any case? More deception and violence and death? More needless conspiracy and bloodshed? Faced with the bleak prospect of yet more darkness, to mirror the darkness of bygone years both remembered and unremembered, was the arrival of the new year even worth celebrating, for him?
Bourne lived for violence and the adrenaline-fuelled thrill of dangerous situations. It was what he was trained for, made for, after all, no matter how much he tried to deny it. But there was no immediate danger, either to him, or to anyone else this night. There were no objectives to be met and targets to be neutralised. It was just him. Him and the bleakness of his soul, surrounded by the rampant celebrations of those who led far happier lives than he.
Left to himself, in every possible sense, he pondered once more a question that had been nagging him at the back of his head for the better part of the past few hours now. Why Berlin? Why had he chosen to venture to this city whose division had once been the very symbol of the Cold War? What did the city mean to him? He had been here before, he remembered that much...but he didn't know what drew him here this particular day.
Instinct. Pure instinct had led him here. Not the instincts he had carefully honed after years in the field, but the instincts that served as a tenuous link to his forgotten past. And instinct led him to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. But why? What had happened here on New Year's Eve? As usual, he was faced with the maddening realisation that the answers were in his very own mind, albeit in a part that was sealed off from him, perhaps forever, a fact which never ceased to be a source of angst for him.
The tombstones did not evoke any memories, as he had hoped they would. The cemetery itself was practically empty; after all, today was a day of celebration, not mourning. And yet he walked on, relentless in his search for something he did not have the vaguest inkling of.
And then he saw her. Wrapped in a fur coat, red hair streaming down her shoulders. For a moment, he froze in place and his heart stopped beating. No, it couldn't be...could it possibly be...Marie? But then, something inside him, instinct no doubt, assured him that he wasn't seeing ghosts, at least, not the ghost of his dead wife.
But, this woman, he didn't know her, and yet he somehow felt he should.
He moved closer, stealthily so as not to alarm the woman. And yet, even as he moved, he hesitated. What if this woman had nothing to do with him, or anything that was connected to him? What if she was just another mourner and he was intruding on her grief? But instinct told him to soldier on; cautioned him that not seeing this true would deny him something. Something important. Something he needed.
At once, barely was he two feet away from her that the woman whirled around suddenly and stared at him. A moment later, a look of shock and recognition dawned on her and she gasped, "You".
Jason stared at the woman, the very young woman barely out of her teens, with her pale but striking face and hazel eyes much like his own. Recognition dawned on him too-he remembered her and he didn't remember her. It was like standing at the edge of darkness and believing one had seen the light.
"After all these years..." the woman mumbled almost to herself.
Jason couldn't contain his curiosity any longer. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"I don't suppose you would remember me...it all happened...a long time ago...but you were standing there...right where you are now...in this graveyard..." she said slowly, haltingly.
"What are you talking about?" Jason asked.
The woman sighed. "It was years ago...I was a little girl and these men...they came for me and my mother...they were my father's enemies. They killed my mother..." her eyes brimmed with tears with recollection of this fact "and they threatened to kill me. They were going to kill me, and then..."
"And then what?" Jason asked, still oblivious to what the woman was trying to tell him.
"You came...you saved me and killed all of them...and later, after my mother's funeral, you were here at the graveyard, standing just behind me. You were standing there and I didn't realise it until I turned around. And then, you put your hands on my shoulder, and said-and said..."
But Bourne remembered now what he said. He remembered the scene, vaguely...he had a glimpse, a fragment of memory...
"I'm sorry about your mother", he said to the girl. The girl who was so much like Alyssa, so much like the daughter he himself had and had once lost to violence; much like this girl had lost her mother and nearly herself.
And she stood staring after him as he turned and walked away. Away from the graveyard, away from Berlin, away from the brief violent interlude that had shattered her life...to another mission, another objective...other lives to save and to take...
And now that he remembered that much, other details came to him. The girl's presence brought other details to mind. He remembered now that she had been the daughter of the US Ambassador to Germany and a prominent German-born American actress. She and her mother had been kidnapped by left-wing anti-American radicals. Her father, a former military intelligence operative, had been an old friend of Alexander Conklin's, and so, Conklin had deployed Bourne on a mission to rescue mother and daughter. Unfortunately, the ambassador's wife was murdered by her captives even as Bourne scoured Germany for them. He did however succeed in locating the girl and in terminating all the terrorists with extreme prejudice. Even after the rescue, Jason did not feel the mission was truly successful, as he had been unable to rescue the mother, a fact which plagued his conscience. It was why he had come to the funeral unobserved, why he had comforted the girl mere hours before his extraction from Berlin. This was on the night of New Year's Eve.
"I...I remember now...Emma", Bourne said softly. "That is your name, isn't it?" he asked.
"Yes", she replied.
The two remained silent for a few moments, and then Emma asked in a tone of curiosity, "I never really got to know who you were. Nobody really told me that, after it was all over".
Bourne sighed. "My name is Jason Bourne", he said. "I...used to work for a friend of your father's. When you and your mother were kidnapped, I was sent to rescue you'll. But I wasn't in time to save your mother". He paused and added in a tone of genuine regret, "I really regretted not being able to save her...that's why I came to meet you that night...to tell you how sorry I was, for not being able to bring her back alive".
"It's okay", Emma replied. "You saved my life, at least. I've always been grateful for that. When I saw you kill those men in front of me, I was terrified. But as I grew older...I felt thankful for that, knowing that my mother's murderers had been punished before my very eyes. It gave me a sense that...justice had been served".
Bourne recalled questioning the wisdom of killing before the innocent eyes of a young girl at the time. "No one at your age should have had to have witnessed that", he said grimly.
"No one at any age should have had to witness that", Emma said. "But that's the way the world is. Then and now. And that's why we need people...people like you. People who take lives...to save them".
Taking lives...saving lives...taking lives to save lives...killing...saving...killing...saving...
Words and thoughts juxtaposed in Bourne's consciousness. There was chaos in his mind, a mind shattered and rebuilt repeatedly over years and years of violence, tragedy, and recovery. Death...and life anew. That indeed was a constant in his life. And with this realisation, out of the chaos, came order.
True, he had killed more people than he could remember, with or without amnesia. But insofar as his victims were killers themselves, he had saved as many people, if not more, in the process. He had been trained to be the perfect killing machine, but hadn't he essentially been trained to save the lives of innocents ultimately? Innocents like this girl, Emma. Innocents who would have a chance at survival which his first family had never had.
For the first time in a long while, he realised his true sense of purpose. The inner darkness of his soul, which had propelled him to become Jason Bourne, had always strived to bring light into the world through dark deeds. It was indeed a paradox, but then if there was one thing he had learnt in all his years, it was that the world was itself replete with paradox.
"You're right", he told Emma. "I wish it weren't this way...I wish it weren't true...but it is. It's why I do...what I do."
"You know", Emma said slowly, "I come here every year, on this day, at this time...hoping...I don't know...hoping that you'll come someday...hoping that I could thank you...and now, you've come..."
"Yes, I came. Because my instincts told me there was something for me to learn here...from you. Something about who I am...and why I became what I am. Something that will give me the strength to keep going...so thank you".
And, as he had so long ago, he placed his hands on her shoulders, and then withdrew them, turned around, and walked away. Away from the graveyard, away a young woman's remembrance of a violent interlude that had shattered her life...this time, there was no new mission, no new objective...not yet anyway...but when it came, as he knew it invariably would, he would know not only what he had to do, but why he did it. He would know that there was after all some method in the madness, some reason in the insanity...the violence, the killing, the death...he now knew that sometimes, it did eventually result in something good. With this relatively optimistic thought in mind, he felt prepared to confront whatever the new year brought him.