Thanks so much for the kind reviews! I hope that everyone likes this chapter as well.
Jason had never been the type of person to toss and turn throughout the night. He normally found himself sleeping stilly through the night, never quite fully asleep and always on the alert and ready to grab for the gun that he had under his pillow. But Jason's first night back in Paris, that night it wasn't going to happen.
Waking up, Jason found himself lying on the ground. His breathing was shallow and his hearing was muffled, but he could still tell that he was in a loud area. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed the remaining sand off, flinching just the smallest bit as the noises that the sand had been muffling hit him from every direction. Cars honked and tires screeched on streets that weren't far enough away from the beach that he had ended up on. Children screamed as they chased and were, in turn, chased by the surf and people talking everywhere. He looked down and found himself in a pair of tan shorts and a teal shirt that he hadn't seen in almost a year.
It didn't take long for everything to sink in. That was the day that Marie had died. He could remember it clearly. It was the only thing he remembered clearly.
Jason walked a couple of feet and turned to look in the direction that he knew Kirill would be. He turned immediately and took off through the streets, slamming into the small car just like he had all those months ago. He drove quickly through the streets, quicker than he remembered doing, thinking only of getting to Marie and being faster this time. It wasn't long before he found her and she was climbing into the car, bikini top almost blindingly pink and her constantly changing hair a bright blonde. She was beautiful and Jason took a minute to remind himself of it as she situated herself in the passengers seat.
Nightmares where soon to take hold of him as he tossed and turned over and over, the horrible memories from his past quickly forming in his head and not leaving out so much as the type of drink a tourist bought as Jason weaved through the streets.
If anyone where to walk into Jason's room at that minute, they would have been able to tell that he was falling into a dream full of nothing more then nightmares. Under his eyelids, his eyes moved rapidly and the noises that where coming from his mouth where little more than quiet whimpers.
It wasn't long until he found himself instructing Marie to drive, sliding onto the opposite chair against his will and ignoring the screaming in his head that it was a bad choice. The bridge was approaching fast and all Jason was worried about was dealing with his gun and babbling on about where they were to meet while Marie tried to point out different choices for him to make that might end the entire ordeal.
And then she was jerking forward, her entire body hitting the dashboard hard and sending the car careening. Jason jumped for the wheel, steering away from one edge and into another. Through another and into the waiting river. Jason counted the seconds it took the car to hit the murky waters, and he immediately began trying to get Marie out of the car. If he could just get her out faster this time… This time she might survive.
Before he knew it, Jason found himself underwater. His heart was beating faster and faster with every moment and the car was sinking just as quickly. Everything seemed so clear and so familiar. He got out of the car faster this time, swimming to the other side of the car and pulling her out quicker, breathing into her with more desperation than he had the first time.
But something was wrong this time. He wasn't able to pull Marie from the car, and sure, the first time he had had problems but this time it was like the bullet that had hit her had bolted her to the seat. He improvised and breathed into her with desperation from her place in the car, pulling back and watching her head fall forward onto her chest. He lifted it again, willing her to be alive, but the body under his hands had shifted again and this time, he was holding… Nicky.
The other girl that he had failed to protect.
--
With a jolt, Jason found himself waking up in his bed, cold sweat almost pouring off his body. He took a deep breath and glanced down at his hands that he was surprised to find shaking. It was the first time in what seemed like years that he'd had a dream at all, much less one of Marie. His breathing was erratic and he reached for the cell phone sitting on his bedside table, sliding it open with one hand and using the other to run through his short, somewhat damp hair. It was only three in the morning and there was, after a dream like that, no chance of him getting back to sleep anytime soon. Still, he closed his eyes and let himself fall back onto the bed, trying to control his breathing as he did so.
It hardly lasted though, and a second later he was shoving the sheets back and moving onto the floor, ignoring the chills that the cool tile sent up his body. It seemed that the further and further he distanced himself from Jason's life and everything that had happened, the faster those things seemed to chase him. It was funny, really. For the last couple years, Jason had wanted nothing more than a past. He wanted memories and he wanted to know exactly who it was that he had been before the experiments and amnesia. And then he had gotten one. He had made one and suddenly, he couldn't want to erase it more. It had been full of loss and new starts and confusion and then everything falling again and then the cycle would start again.
Jason reached for his bags, open yet packed that were sitting on the dresser and he began searching through them with the dim lights from the passing cars and street lights that spilled in from the windows along one wall. He eventually pulled out a simple pair of jeans and a black t-shirt and a sweatshirt, pulling them on and stuffing his feet into the shoes tossed near the door as he walked pass them and out the door, down the hallway, down more stairs and out into the cold Parisian night. It wasn't long before he found himself staring into the waters of the Seine that, despite the bright lights from somewhere and everywhere behind him, still managed to be a surprising shade of black, considering how almost clear they had been earlier in the day whenever he had glanced out over it in between his turn to speak in the cryptic conversation that had left him feeling more confused than ever before.
The girl had seemed to have confidence in him that he'd get over his past. It was sort of funny, when you thought about it - the only person that had any confidence in him whatsoever was someone that didn't know anything about him. The conversation had ended with her showing him her painting as the bells in a church chimed and her head had dropped to her watch and then she'd been gone, running off through the streets of Paris with the canvas and easel clutched against her clumsily and yelling back over her shoulder, "Buona fortuna! La buona fortuna, signore!" He had stayed for a couple more minutes, wondering what exactly had just happened, before standing and returning to his hotel where he had checked in under yet another fake name and received a raised eyebrow when he had chosen to pay in cash. He didn't see the girl for a week after that.
Jason walked close to the buildings by instinct, allowing the shadows to fall across his face and stuffing his hands deep into his pockets. While managing to look unassuming, Jason was still entirely too quick to react to even the smallest sound to make him look like one of the tourists wandering back to their hotel after losing track of time in a 'local' bar. His hurried footsteps carried him to the place he had both wanted to and been willing himself not to go to a lot faster than he had ever planned, and once he was there, leaning up against the side of the building and wondering why. Though he might have had a plan once, maybe right after he'd gotten a burst of confidence from who he had dubbed as 'artist girl', he had thought that he could have just walked back into his apartment, past the superintendent who no doubt had seen his picture on the news and into his apartment without any problems. There were other ways, of course. He wasn't desperate enough for an excuse to pretend that there weren't. Those options would simply consist of him having to draw upon his old talents. And if he were found after having used one of them, it would only be that much worse.
Jason was just straightening back up, getting ready to leave and go back to his hotel, when he realized with a bit of confusion that his name was still on the listing. He was reported as dead. The superintendent had been an obviously intelligent woman who had remembered him as soon as she had seen him. There was no way she would have missed the reports that he had been reported as dead. A thousand different scenarios immediately wrenched themselves through Jason's head, the most prominent being the idea that his apartment was still under surveillance. The idea shouldn't have shocked Jason as much as it did. It made sense when it was thought about – his body hadn't been found and while sometimes it didn't mean much, for Jason Bourne it meant a lot. And even if they were convinced that he was dead, it didn't mean that there weren't unanswered questions about who exactly he was and how he had managed to win the game of keep away for so long.
Jason peeled away from the wall, thankful for the hood on his sweatshirt that he had pulled up somewhere between his hotel and his apartment. But the added protection against alerting the police if they had had cameras up on the outside of the building didn't do anything for the thoughts circling inside his head. He had almost been wishing that the apartment would be rented out to someone else. Everything would have been cleared away and it would have been like he had never existed. Instead, it was very possible that the room was now a base for a group of Parisian cops, all looking for something that could give them anything to add to the constantly swirling updates on the Blackbriar project and everything that he had been able to reveal.
Jason ducked into the first open place he saw – a corner bar that looked clean from the outside, but one that he wouldn't be able to find ever again. And despite it's outward impression, the insides of the bar were anything but standard. Things in the bar were concealed behind a thick curtain of smoke and a loud French song with a pulsing beat made the glasses sitting on the tables around him jump with each bass beat. There were two pool tables in an alcove towards the back and the bar in the front was positioned in front of a full wall of shelves and multicolored bottles, the lights set in the wall behind them creating colorful patterns on the opposite wall. Jason walked towards the bar and took a seat in the bar stool furthest to the left.
There was a dull clunking as the pool players broke and then an outbreak of loud French, followed by a soothing Italian phrase that had Jason grabbing the glass of water he'd ordered with a flash of his hand and he walked towards the back quickly to find the girl leaning over the pool table, que poised carefully in her hands and when she finally moved it forward with a quick flick of her wrist, two striped balls fell into their respective pockets and a pair of grumbling men distributed another couple of Euros to the pile situated on the polished wood boarder of the table. She straightened back up and turned to look at him, appearing not at all surprised to see him there and asked, "You been looking for me, tiger?"
Jason's voice was quiet; over aware of the other men in the room looking at him suspiciously when he says, "I need your help."