Disclaimer: I don't own the Bourne series, I merely borrow the characters and promise to return them soon.
Only just discovered the Bourne series. Have read a few fics and felt that I needed to write something of my own, it's not perfect but I hope it does what it needs to.
It's like trying to see through water, everything is blurred and nothing makes sense. Everything flickers by in a disjointed lurch. The two halves of his life are so intertwined that if you cut one you cut the other. He is David Webb and Jason Bourne. He is a killer and he spares lives. He remembers and he is blank.
She was always there, only distantly but she was still there in the back of his mind. She'd sometimes appear in his dreams – a faint figure in the background but so vital to him. She, like everything returns to him fully shortly after escaping the mess of the CIA. Perhaps it was the quiet steady life he had begun leading in the Mediterranean. His mornings now occupied with long runs along the coast, his afternoons spent outside cafes as his memories slowly trickled through. Perhaps it was peace they had so desperately craved before was the reason he remembered her, and so the strange unnameable feelings he had felt around her could finally be placed – concern, and compassion, and need and dare he say it, love.
It was then guilt would rise in his throat and his head begin to throb, as he remembered Marie, remembered how he thought he loved her. But, he reasoned, he had loved her. She had saved him, helped him become who he was today, whoever that was. It certainly wasn't Jason Bourne, and he couldn't say it was David Webb. But whoever he was now, Marie had been a lifeline he'd needed and that constituted love.
Nicky was something else.
It had started simply enough. After every mission he went to her for consultations. She'd ask him questions. He'd reply. She'd take notes.
He was an empty shell of a man.
She was someone who understood.
It was an unspoken thing, more often than not she'd wake in the middle of the night and find him watching her half-hidden by the shadows. For a few moments they'd study each other neither one of them wanting to speak in case it broke the spell that seemed to draw them to each other. Then without knowing how it had happened he would be beside her so fast she was sure she was dreaming. At first it was desperate and lustful but over time it became something deeper than that – he needed her, she was the balm to his harrowed soul. Even the headaches seemed less intense when he was with her. They began to speak a little more and sometimes he'd even be there when she woke the next morning watching her as always. But it was a softer searching look than the standard cold empty one she was used to.
Neither of them mentioned commitments or love. Nor was it just casual sex. They both knew it was deeper than that but neither of them could bring themselves to admit it, because they knew in reality that it could not and would not work.
It was a complicated entanglement of their lives but they dealt with it because they couldn't do without each other.
He is jolted back to the present by a waiter bringing more coffee to his table in the shade of the afternoon sun, and it is then he knows what he has to do; what he should have always done.
It was a hot, muggy day and when she returned to her apartment later that night the air was suffocating. She threw open the windows in a futile attempt to move some of the stale air. She sighed and looked out over the city, if she was truthful her life had been stale for quite sometime, and it wasn't due to the low profile life she was now leading. Quite frankly she'd had enough heart-stopping moments to last her a lifetime. No, the problem was the empty feeling she felt whenever she thought of him.
They don't make mistakes, they don't do random.
Even though she'd uttered the words she didn't truly believe them. If they didn't make mistakes why had he failed to kill Wombosi? Why had he just left her? Did he not understand how much this was hurting her? No, of course he didn't, he couldn't remember could he?
She always felt safe when they were together, she trusted him, and she knew he would never hurt her. Then he came back and swore he'd kill her if she didn't tell him the truth. He screamed in her face and pointed a gun at her head rage in his eyes, full of emotion and anger that she wasn't used to and yes, she was scared. Scared because she didn't know this man anymore, before the amnesia the assets were pretty predictable in their behaviour but now he was showing his true abilities as an assassin, not the straight forward hunt and kill but the intricate head spinning chases in which he would always end up 3 steps ahead. She could no longer tell if he would kill her or not but the way he held the gun at her was not entirely convincing his hand drooped slightly but his eyes raged on. But most of all she was lost, for the past two years she had been clinging onto the hope he hadn't acknowledged her in Paris because he didn't want to compromise her position, and when he had wanted her to bring him in because he knew her, she was almost certain he remembered. But that was dashed when he manhandled her away from safety to interrogate her.
Maybe it was just a random fling for him to make everything seem better. Maybe she was just a cheap way to get laid. It hadn't felt random; it had felt vital and imperative. But what did she know, as much as he did now, it seemed.
She sighed again and headed straight to bed, too exhausted to do anything else. She fell asleep quickly and deeply. She awoke sometimes later her eyes groggily adjusting to the darkness. She immediately noted she hadn't woken in the night for some time, a long time in fact. Not since…. Her eyes darted to the corner of the room and there he stood like so many times before. She sat up onto one arm and studied his outline in the blackness. 'What are you doing here?' He stepped out of the shadows and considered her for a moment.
'To tell you something' He strode over to the bed and trailed his lips to her ear and whispered the words she'd only dreamt he'd say. She smiled before kissing him back with abandon.
Things were not solved but they could begin to piece together the life they had wanted and could now have.