Author's Note:

I started writing this a while ago, before I ever discovered fanfiction. The existence of this forum induced me to polish them up for sharing.

I didn't invent and don't own these characters or storylines. All was written for hobby purposes.

I didn't write these to fill in blanks credibly or because I thought I could improve upon the exceptional story creation skills of the filmmakers. In fact, I think that The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy are darned near perfect as they stand. They give just the right amount of information, with elegance, economy and freshness. This is an effort out of my own particular passion for, and interest in, Jason and Marie.

Thanks to Tigeress-10, Badr, llethe and Adlervan for their terrific stories and drabbles that provided me with much inspiration.

We start inside Identity, then leapfrog to the time period between Identity and Supremacy; I hope you'll understand why and how I chose my beginning point once we get into the first original chapter. More chapters on the way. Please review, if you can be constructive. Any suggestions for a better title? Maybe once the whole thing is complete…

Prologue

When Marie woke up and found him missing from the floor of the guest room, she panicked. Was he gone? He had said he would leave her where she wanted, but like this? She ran into the hallway, eyes darting. Her heart skipped a beat when she glimpsed him in the children's room.

"Jason, what are you doing in here?" she hissed. He did not look up, eyes trained on the beds.

"The kids… I couldn't sleep… I was worried…"

"Shhh, you'll wake them up..." She was reaching for his arm, trying to pull him out of the room. The look on his face stopped her in mid-sentence.

"I don't care who I am any more. I don't want to know." His eyes were dull with grief and regret as he gazed at the children. Her heart went out to him, the confusion and fear she had been feeling since their discovery of his vocation melting into compassion.

"We can talk out—," she whispered, as he went on, not hearing her.

"Everything I found out, I want to forget."

She leaned in closer, cupping his cheek with her palm, trying to hold his eyes with hers. "It's okay," she whispered in his ear.

He wheeled suddenly to face her, eyes intense, trying to whisper. "We have this money," he said, earnestly. "We can hide. Could we do that? Is there any way you would do that?" The impassive mask that had fallen down over his face as he read her perfectly in the taxicab in Paris lifted as his eyes met hers in frank hopefulness.

Marie was still murmuring quiet reassurances, eyes searching Jason's beseeching eyes as she stepped even closer to him and reached for his body. Their eyes met, but instead of Jason she saw Castel crashing through the glass into Jason's apartment, saw Jason breaking the other man's bones with efficient aplomb, saw with utter clarity of detail the bullet hole in Jason's landlady's forehead as they fled the building, felt again how Jason pushed her up against a shop's rolldown door just a night ago. Her eyes dropped, the fear slicing between the two of them again. She shook her head, "I don't know," she whispered, regretfully, reopening the gulf between them.

His eyes fell from her face. He looked back at the children one last time and allowed her to lead him out of their bedroom and back to the guest room. Trained to perceive all and reveal nothing, he could see her fear, smell it on her. What do you expect?, he asked himself bitterly. He was a killer, a monster. How could someone like Marie ever want anything to do with someone like him? Knowing what he now knew, how could he think he would ever be anything but alone, as alone as he had been when he floated, unconscious, in the Mediterranean?

Marie was pushing him gently to sit on the bed, her emotions in turmoil. Glancing at his face and failing to wrest his regard away from his inner thoughts, she kneeled on the floor and removed his shoes. She remembered how he made her put on clothes before going to sleep in their hotel in Paris; she would have been happier feeling his naked skin against hers all night long. "In case we need to leave in a hurry," he'd said. Gently, she pulled one sleeve of his sweater off his arm, and then the other. Lifting it over his head, she again sought his eyes. Jason looked away as long as he could, not wanting to see himself mirrored back in her visceral loathing of him. A hood of shame masked his eyes and face.

She was just starting to rise, planning to soothe him down into the bed in hopes that they might both sleep a bit before morning. At the sight of his shame-wracked face, her fear disappeared and her heart again broke open for this man she had fallen in love with three nights ago in Paris. He had taken her with him when it would have been smarter to leave her in the apartment. Brought her along when it would have been easier for him to run alone. He had made his deadly hands gentle for her. His tender urgency and drive for the truth had won her heart completely in the two days they had lived together in ignorance of his identity.

She imagined that he remembered no other woman. But still, she could not have fully understood the flood of sensations that her first, experimental kiss had unleashed in Jason, conditioned as he was to view other people's bodies as systems to thwart and overcome, and his own as a mechanism of death whose human impulses were only to be endured. Each moment that he had spent with Marie was a revelation of what it meant to be alive, and human. He did not know how he could let that go.

Marie sank back down on her knees, sliding her hands up his thighs to his waist. She pulled him close and whispered again, "It's okay; it's going to be okay. " She pressed her cheek against his now wet face and kissed his two eyes, drinking tears, then let him taste them on her tongue.

The two of them adrift now at the confluence of fear and shame, Marie slid her hands up his back, feeling the fresh scars there. She did not shrink from them, instead running her hands up under his shirt, his skin warm and jumpy over hard muscle as she pulled him closer. His hands reached reflexively toward the buttons of her pajama top, then paused as he broke their kiss, a question on his still-shaded face. She held his gaze and wordlessly pulled his t-shirt over his head, then shivered as he unbuttoned her top and reached inside. Hands quivering at the feel of her tender skin, his touch nonetheless elicited quiet sounds from deep in her throat. She let the top fall to the floor.

Marie's hands moved over Jason's flat stomach, reveling in the tautness of his body. Her head on his shoulder now as he nibbled where his hands had just been, she could still feel moisture on his skin where tears had fallen. Reaching, leaning, she wrested from him gasps and sighs, Jason gratefully receiving from her. Still, his hands were restless, unable to break contact with her silky skin. He gently pulled her up, rocking them back onto the bed. He pushed her pajama bottoms to the floor before kicking off his own pants and wrapping the quilt around them in the cold room.

Their mouths sought each other as they pressed chest to chest, belly to belly. He shifted her beneath him and gave a quiet near-sob as he sank into her softness. Marie crooned, "It's okay, my love" a hand on his head. He pressed his forehead into the side of her face, tiny, broken noises leaving him. Her acceptance of him, knowing what he was, confounded all his sensibilities.

"Jason, it's going to be okay," she insisted, voice petal-soft, thumb tracing his cheekbone as she coaxed him to look her in the eye. Deciding. Eye to eye, masks withdrawn, they began to move together. Her face was wet with tears; she didn't know any more whose they were.

She was asleep when the first light of dawn appeared; he was not. She stirred as he sat up on the edge of the bed to pull on his clothes. "Do I have time for a quick shower before we leave?" she asked. He stopped groping on the floor for his sweater, looked around at her unblinking face, searching hard. He realized that, despite everything she had seen since Zurich, she didn't know what she was getting into. He realized he did, though he didn't know how he could, and he decided he could be vigilant enough for both of them. He turned away, recalculating his plans to accommodate running a deaux.

He nodded his head, pulling on the sweater. He rested his hand on her hip for a second, then stood up. He knew that when she said a quick shower, she really meant a quick one. He also knew, somehow, that this was a rare trait in a woman. "I'll make coffee," he said, not dwelling on it.

"Try not to wake anyone," she whispered, but he was already silently gone.