A/N: Thank you all for the enthusiasm and encouragement and kind words; for the reviews and PMs sharing your thoughts and asking questions! I'm genuinely shocked because I never intended for my little brain dump to take on a life of its own. This was originally a one-shot with the Legacy characters, but then Nicky Parsons started talking and I couldn't get her out of my head. I'm supposed to be working on something else writing-wise, but I keep pulling on this crazy little thread and it keeps unraveling and I can't stop myself. I appreciate so much that you're pulling, too, and asking, "But what about - ?" It sends me in unexpected directions and that's fun and thrilling and challenging. I will *try* to keep updating as quickly as I can but real world and my other project are hunting me down and I'm not sure how much longer I can hide in my closet and work on this interlude. But for as long as I can, I will. Please be patient and forgive me if future updates are not as swift as you (or I) would like. Thanks again reading!

The voice on the other side is familiar: "Doc."

Marta gasps in relief, moving for the door. When she opens it, Aaron sweeps inside, gun in hand, pushing Marta behind him and checks the room to make sure it is safe; seeing only Nicky, he lowers his gun. Seeing only him, Nicky does the same. He turns around, hand curling around Marta's neck as he pulls her close. Marta's arms go around his waist, her face turns up to his.

Nicky looks down, refocusing her attention on gathering her loose ammo. The lamp casts their shadows on the wall, two entwined figures, a single dark entity.

Aaron kisses Marta, hands cradling her jawline. She is so relieved to see him, that he's none the worse for wear. He pulls away with a protesting sound when she squeezes him. She lets go, concerned.

"Sore," he murmurs apologetically, one hand dropping to rub his side. He moves back to the door, opens it and pulls a duffel bag inside.

"How did you get our bag?" Marta wonders.

"I went back into the room and grabbed it before I headed this way."

Marta looks furious. "Are you insane?"

He shrugs. She sighs, drops her forehead on his chest. His arms go around her again.

"No trouble?" Nicky asks.

He shakes his head. "Bourne?"

"No." She shrugs, tries to be nonchalant. Nicky refuses to acknowledge the twinge that comes with that denial. She dumps the loose bullets into the bag.

"You got .357 ammo in there?" Cross asks, stepping away from Marta after a fond kiss to her forehead.

Nicky opens the bag, digs in. She tosses him a magazine and slides a box of ammo to him.

"You got a plan in there, too?" he asks, ejecting his empty clip and replacing it with the full mag.

"There's no plan," Nicky determines. "We hole up here tonight, split tomorrow. I'm out of Vietnam, you guys go to wherever you're going."

Cross looks irritated but doesn't say anything.

"I wanna know something." Nicky gets up, tucking the Glock into the back of her pants. "You said you got into Landy's email. How'd you do that?"

"I paid a hacker out of Germany a chunk of cash to get into the system. You'd be surprised how vulnerable government networks are. A lot of their people don't seem to understand that you don't click on links or attachments. Phishing works every time. Once he got access, it was just search and hunt. Landy made a mistake and sent a message to that private email of yours from her government-issued Blackberry. I pulled on that thread and found you."

Nicky considers this, files it away for another time. "Why? Why were you looking for me?"

"Bourne," he replies. "Since he exposed Treadstone and Blackbriar, I needed to know what else he had."

"He gave Landy everything."

"That you know of. What if he still had something he hadn't turned over? Like Larx or something else?"

"What does it matter? There's no point in exposing Larx. They're a Hydra. We'll never cut off enough heads."

"Actually we only need to cut off one." Cross sits on the futon, opens the box of ammo, and reloads his empty clip. "Eric Byers."

"You're crazy," Nicky tells him flatly. She remembers the colonel who'd chewed up Conklin and spit him out. Remembers how he threatened to take Treadstone away.

"The National Research Assay Group oversaw at least four Beta programs: Treadstone, Blackbriar, Outcome and Larx. There are more. Bet on it. Byers is the Beta program kingpin. He is NRAG. Someone in NSA or USASOC or DoD wants one, they apply to him. The CIA tried to hold on with Treadstone and Blackbriar, but they got sloppy – when Landy exposed them, Byers had to protect later gen projects by sacrificing Outcome."

"How do you know this?" Nicky queries.

"Me," interjects Marta. "Some of it anyway."

Cross nods. "Marta gave me a starting point. My hacker found a small thread between Ezra Cramer, Admiral Turso and Dr. Hirsch. It had been in Landy's documents as part of discovery for her trial. Then it went missing when they reinvented Blackbriar as an operation to bring down Jason Bourne."

Nicky frowns. "You didn't say this earlier."

"You weren't willing to stick around to listen," Marta reminds her.

Aaron continues: "If we come forward with Larx, all we've got is another program that they can sweep under the carpet. Bourne exposing Treadstone was like robbing a bank for a hundred bucks. I'm talking about pulling off a billion dollar heist."

"What exactly is your plan?" Nicky asks.

Marta looks curious, too, as if she's hearing this for the first time. Nicky thinks she probably is.

Cross sets down the full clip. "If we can get to NRAG, get the Beta programs, we own them. No more running, no more going to ground."

"You're going to bring it all to light?" Jesus, Nicky thinks. That's all she needs, another crusade that gets more people killed.

"We've seen how well that works," Cross notes sardonically. He shakes his head. "No. We hold the information hostage. Something happens to any of us that isn't old age, a chunk shows up on Wikileaks."

Nicky considers the recently minted "journalism" repository which publishes news leaks and confidential information. They recently posted documents about equipment expenditures and holdings in Afghanistan, and corruption in Kenya, events which garnered global news headlines.

"It's a Mexican standoff but Byers will agree to it because he'll want to protect his pipeline. They back off, leave us alone," Cross states.

"For how long?" Nicky inquires. "There's a finite amount of time in which those files mean something. They can change it, update it, hide it, call it something else."

"Not if we tie them all together and show a concerted conspiracy. Not if we get names, hard evidence, and a trail that links the key players. You think the Navy, the Army, the CIA, DoD, companies like Sterisyn Morlanta want to explain before Senate hearings and courts and the American public how they spent funds and broke laws? Murder? Assassination? Possibly treason?"

"What about the program participants?" Nicky demands. "What if they do to them what they did to Outcome?"

Cross' blue eyes are cold. "I don't care."

Fair enough, thinks Nicky. Because she doesn't care any more either. "So your plan is that we break in their digital vaults and steal the data we need."

"No," he says with a dangerous half-smile. "We've already broken into their vaults. I've got an inside seat in their network right now."

"What?" Nicky is intrigued.

"I told you: government networks are surprisingly insecure. The tech might be airtight, but the humans run the system and they're the weakest link every time. My guy launched an advanced persistent threat against their network. He spear phished names I knew from NRAG and deployed some custom malware. We managed to pick up access credentials to their network and installed a remote admin software. We've been collecting information about the infrastructure and we've got some admin privileges."

"What are you paying 'your guy'?" Nicky asks. "How do you know he won't double cross you?"

"A wire transfer worth his while. And not killing him, respectively. Besides, I got him into a black ops network. You think he's not dying to explore? We get what we want, he gets to keep a bot in the network to look to his heart's content."

"If you've got that, why did you need Bourne?"

"Expediency. Either Bourne has what I need, or I have to go digging in this network. Problem is I don't know what I'm looking at or for." He scratches his chin, eyes her thoughtfully.

Nicky observes that superior brain engaged and assessing.

Then Cross nods, more definitively this time. "That could work," he murmurs softly. He looks at her intently. "I thought the play was Bourne and what he had. But it doesn't have to be."

"What are you talking about?"

"It could be you and what you know."

Nicky waits.

"You're the only one of us who was on the inside. You're the only one who had clearance. You know their methods, you know the protocols, the way they do things. If I had time, maybe I could dig around; but we need to exfiltrate data soon, before they catch us. Chances are they've got behavioral correlation engines that will scream the minute we move any data. So we don't want to get the wrong data. We've been sitting quietly in their network for the last three months because we don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

Nicky frowns. "I knew Treadstone and Blackbriar's SOPs. There's no way they'll match NRAG's procedures."

"I don't need them to match. You have enough of an understanding of their protocols to find what we need. You managed logistics for all of Paris base. You're telling me some conventions aren't standard?"

Nicky hesitates, wonders if possibly –

"It could work," Cross asserts. "Between my guy's skills and your knowledge, we've got algebra here. We tie the programs together, we've got Byers by the balls. We cut the monster at the head."

"And if we don't?" Nicky's been trained to think in contingencies. "What if everything's off network, behind a bunch of firewalls we don't know about?"

"Unlikely but if we don't, we do it the old fashioned way." He pauses. "We break into NRAG."

"Yeah, you had me until 'break into NRAG,'" Nicky declares flatly. "That's just…no."

"Which is a good thing I came up with a plan that doesn't involve me breaking into a black ops agency, wouldn't you say?" He sighs. "Still may be necessary if we don't find the programs or something that links Byers to Treadstone or Blackbriar."

"Excuse me. Breaking into a black ops facility is part of your plan?" Marta has been standing by the door, listening to them quietly until this moment. Marta knows there's an odd inflection to her voice that doesn't sound right. Aaron looks at her curiously as if he can't figure out the underlying tone.

Nicky doesn't seem to have the same problem; she is on her feet, clearing her throat. "Look, it's…late. This has been a long damned day. I'm not agreeing to anything. I'm going downstairs to get something to eat. I'll be back in two hours."

She reaches into the interior pocket of the duffel and grabs something before zipping up the bag and kicking it back in place next to the futon. Nicky drapes a messenger bag over her shoulder, throws a pitying look at Cross, and flings something onto the desk before she quickly leaves the room.

Aaron looks up at Marta, who knows she is glowering, livid. "Doc, that's just a back up plan. That's only if we can't find what we need on their network..."

"We agreed," she interrupts, her voice trembling with rage. "We agreed there was no more plan. And if part of your plan is to put yourself in physical danger? Then Nicky's right. There is clearly something wrong with your cognitive abilities."

"If Parsons agrees, it's all under the radar. We don't have to be anywhere but on a computer. It's the only way they'll leave us alone," he begins earnestly. "It's the only leverage we have. I didn't tell you about it before because I wanted to protect you –"

Marta can't take it anymore. She's still stung by Nicky's earlier assertion that she's deadweight. She knows this. She's not trained to be a warrior; she's a scientist, the natural career path for an odd little girl who loved test tubes and books, whose painful awkwardness and shyness had precluded easy friendships. She can run data, make informed analytical leaps, write in-depth and brilliant articles for peer reviewed journals. She can stand before corporate executives and colonels, generals and admirals and tell them what their super soldiers are capable of withstanding. She can show diagnostic results for how these enhancements can potentially the save lives of active assets, or be applied in rehabilitation for amputees.

But running, killing, and surviving? These were not things she ever imagined being part of her life. And she's done the best she can, but even so, it chafes, the way Aaron tries to wrap her in cotton and wool. She knows he can't help it; she knows part of the science that made Outcome agents so exceptional never took into consideration their very human instincts.

"Stop protecting me!" she screams at him. "Stop keeping things from me, stop making plans that don't have my input. We're together. That means we do things together. I'll give you leeway for deciding what's safest for us; but no more patting Marta on the head like I'm a doll before you sneak off and do what you think is best for us if we didn't make the decisions together."

"Doc – "

"Shut up!" Marta is working herself up into a frenzy. It's the end of a really long day during which her adrenaline has been coursing almost nonstop. She is exhausted and worn out. And ironically, that's feeding her fury. "I'm the one who warned you in Manila when those cops were coming, I'm the one who killed that Larx agent and I'm the one who got us on that boat and saved your life when you were bleeding out."

Cross nods. "Doc –"

"No," she snaps. "If Nicky agrees and we don't find what you want on a computer, we call it quits. You don't break into anything. We move to an island somewhere and we keep our heads down."

"Marta," he says seriously, "If we corner Byers -"

"If we corner a snake it will strike," she shouts. Because too many things can go wrong with that scenario and it could actually get him killed. And while she's whined (because she knows it's whining) about not being able to survive on her own, it's being without Aaron that bothers her more than being alone.

She'd always had difficulty being indifferent to Aaron; the other Outcome agents had been numbers and routines to her. But Aaron flirted with her, talked to her, tried to draw her out. She knew him as Five, but she knew him. It was Aaron she'd thought about when the police had queried her about what happened in the labs in the aftermath of Donald Foite's rampage.

With that she pounds her fist on his chest; the hard blow is enough to get a grunt of pain from him. He quickly grabs her wrist, spins her around until her back is pinned against his body, his other arm tightly draped across her chest, holding her in place.

"Doc! Listen to me!" he says firmly, but Marta is struggling, kicking back at his shins, trying to break free. "Jesus," he swears furiously. "Doc!"

He lets go of her, perhaps unwilling to trap her or hold her against her will. She turns around and slaps him hard across the face. She immediately regrets it, instantly feels remorseful. He doesn't react to the slap though, except to stare at her with something akin to…fascination.

"I'm sorry," he apologizes. There's an irrepressible gleam in his eyes, reminiscent of the flirtatious agent she'd seen every few months at Sterisyn Morlanta. And oh my God, if that's amusement, she's going to kill him.

Marta feels flushed, warm. She shakes her head, lips pursed together; she refrains from shouting at him again.

"You're hot when you're mad, Doc."

One minute they're facing each other. The next, she's in his arms and they're kissing furiously, tearing clothes off in a frenzy. It was always headed this way; though Marta hesitates for a moment, recalls something that had occurred to her in the aftermath of their earlier coitus interruptus. While Aaron is unbuttoning her pants, Marta looks over at the desk against the wall, at the packet Nicky tossed onto the keyboard earlier.

She's not sure if she should be embarrassed or grateful.

Nicky left a condom.

Nicky finishes her bowl of mì xá xíu, an egg noodle soup with thinly sliced BBQ pork and a savory pork-based broth and leaves cash on the table. She gets up, heads back to the flat entrance. Inside the stairwell, she glances at her watch. She told Cross two hours; still a good half hour before she should head back to the safe room. She sighs, sits down on the steps facing the door.

If he's managed to grovel sufficiently, Cross is getting laid. Nicky wonders if she crossed a line earlier, leaving the condom. For all she knows, Marta is on birth control of some sort and doesn't need protection. But despite the physical tactility between them, Nicky kept getting the sense that they weren't lovers, not sexually any way. It's moot: the tension and intimacy between Cross and Shearing – and the emotionally charged and adrenaline fuelled day – can culminate in only one result.

Actually, Nicky amends, they're either making the beast with two backs or Marta is sobbing her eyes out.

Nicky shakes her head, wondering how the hell Marta Shearing has survived this long, even with Cross to protect her.

She doesn't remember when she was ever that fragile. She's been a soldier since she was a little kid. Granted, a soldier with means, but even so, Nicolette was never allowed to show weakness. The only time in her life when she felt safe being vulnerable was her interlude with David Webb. Maybe that was why they'd been drawn to each other: because they'd recognized the hidden, helpless core in the other person; and instead of exposing it, they'd sheltered one another.

Then...

Jason is trembling. Nicky's shaking, too.

That wasn't just sex.

That was something profound.

Something terrifying and sacred.

Even if she could talk right now, there aren't words enough to articulate what she's feeling. Instead, she gently strokes the length of his naked back with one hand, the other still clasped around his neck. Their bodies are spent, satiated.

It takes a few minutes for rapid heartbeats and harsh breathing to recede to something normal. Jason starts to move away, but Nicky's arms wrap around him, holding him in place.

"I'm too heavy," he protests.

"It's not uncomfortable," she responds. She prefers the weight of his body on hers, the heat of his skin warming hers. He shifts a bit so his sprawl isn't burdensome.

"I don't know how I'm going to be able to say your name without giving myself away," she whispers, running her hands through his hair. "They'll know."

He kisses her collarbone, buries his face in the crook of her neck. "Then call me David when we're together," he murmurs. "Jason Bourne is what I do. But David Webb is who I am." He lifts his head, looks down at her, blue eyes penetrating. "My identity's not wrapped in a name."

"Will you stay tonight?" she asks. She can't believe he's here in her bed. It's been months in the making and even though she knew this was where they were headed, it's all she can do not to shriek with delighted laughter.

He lowers his head to kiss her gently on the lips. "After everything I did to get here? I'm not leaving early."

"Jason –"

"David," he corrects gently.

"David."

Nicky opens her eyes, coming out of the unexpected nap to awareness. She'd been dreaming…no, remembering…and?

She glances at her watch. Five minutes past the deadline she'd imposed for returning.

Something woke her. Something isn't right. Nicky sits still, listening.

She hears a distinctive scraping sound. Someone is picking the lock of the outer door. She reaches into her bag, pulls out the Glock and stands on the step, lifting the gun. Pressing the trigger's inner lever, she disengages the first of the gun's three safety mechanisms. What differentiates her weapon from the Sig Sauer P229s that Bourne and Cross favor is the passive safety feature which allows her to fire immediately without manipulating an external lever; and she needs fast if she's to survive. Nicky controls her breathing, maintains a steady inhale/exhale rhythm while she keeps her eyes focused on the door.

Even though part of her hopes it's him – that tightness in her chest, that fluttering in her stomach – Nicky's still surprised when the door opens to reveal Bourne. Jason sees the gun and steps back quickly; sees it's her, and straightens, slowly stepping inside the vestibule.

They stare at one other, Nicky with her gun steady, pointed directly at him. He holds his hands out, palms up in capitulation.

"Why are you here?" she demands in a low voice.

Even though her pistol is trained on him, he shows neither fear nor anger. It's an empty threat and they both know it.

"I don't know."