[fic]: to watch glistening, far-off streets with you (jason/marie) - 1/2

[alice_1005]

Title: to watch glistening, far-off streets with you

Fandom: bourne; jason/marie

Summary: A series of Decembers.

i. 2001

After their confessional roadside stop, Marie resumes driving Jason to Paris. The first words out of her mouth surprise him. Unrelated to what he’d spent the past hour divulging: a story it took time to make her believe. One Marie accepted only from the physical evidence Jason gave her of its truth. Under the cool blue fluorescence of the seasonal string lights lining the walls of the rest stop café, Marie thumbed through the forged passports Jason slid across the table to her. Tracing her fingers over the fabricated lives therein. Marie listened to him. Let Jason recount what he couldn’t answer about himself, that abyssal void of ignorance, nothing to guide him but inexplicable instincts. Hearing the scattered and violent details of Jason’s short life, Marie’s mouth twisted with growing unease—but her eyes went wide, soft. Jason clung to it: that shred of sympathy. Let it keep his voice steady, open, as honest with her as he knew how to be.

Now—returned to the road, it seems like Marie wants to forget about it. Like she has to forget it, if she’s going to keep driving him. Jason’s relieved she still is, even armed with information he hadn’t set out to give her. Cautious that it would frighten her. Maybe even make her back out of what she’d agreed to do for him.

Instead she glances over at him from the wheel and asks, “Do you know what date it is?”

“December 18th.”

Marie’s mouth parts with mild surprise. The car’s still heating up; Jason can see her breath as it expels from the open oval of her lips. She smiles a little. Dim in the dark, cramped space. “Okay, that wasn’t actually what I thought.”

She looks over at him fully then. Grinning, sheepish. Jason’s face must be blank; the smile drops off hers and she looks back ahead. Quiet for a trailing moment before saying to herself, “I’ve been waiting in line a long time.”

The wide road stretches onwards, a neon-lit grey strip cutting through the black night. Jason thought it might make the headache worse, telling Marie the truth—but it didn’t. He lets himself slump against cold glass and closes his eyes.

The sound of Marie’s voice drifts over. “I guess you don’t know what you’re doing for Christmas.”

“Not really.”

“Well, me neither, if it helps.”

Opening his eyes to her again, she’s still talking like Jason isn’t really there. Keeping herself awake. “I’m not very close with my family.”

Jason stares, waiting for her to elaborate. To offer more information on herself, on everything that encompasses the life she leads. All day, Marie’s been revealing who she is to him in an endless stream of words. Anecdotes, remarks and observations: all of it embedded within the soothing flow of the new voice Jason had become so accustomed to listening to. Marie chided herself for how much she’d spoken. But Jason told her unhesitatingly—he didn’t want her to stop.

Jason knows he barely spoke in return. Although when he finally did open up to her, he told Marie everything he knew at all.

He watches her face cloud a little with self-doubt underneath the lights lining the road. They wash out her hair, leaving it more orange than red. Sometimes their angle makes her cheekbones look sharp, glowing. Illuminating only half her face, shadows gathering around the cupid’s bow of her lips. Marie worries them as she reflects quietly, “Sometimes I lean on people too much.”

Before Jason can say anything, Marie turns to him. She breaks the sincerity of her own admission with a colourless smile. The openness with which they’d met each other in the café feels increasingly distant. As though after listening to Jason tell her everything he could, the stark contrast in the scope of their respective memories has made Marie think she’s said too much about herself.

Still she plays at nonchalance. “Hey, whatever I do, at least I’ll have money to spend, right?”

Jason doesn’t respond, long enough that Marie looks away. Readjusts her grip on the wheel with stiff fingers. She can’t seem to look blank, neutral, for long; she’s biting her lip again.

“Right,” he says slowly.

Marie nods. Something ripples tightly in her face, but no more words come out. Leaning back against the window, eyes slipping shut, Jason tries to convince himself it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t talk that much again.

—

For four mornings Jason wakes up to her. In the passenger seat of her car, the first time. In a shared bed, the next.

It’s new, having something to remember. So talkative during the drive, Marie claimed nervousness—but last night she hardly said anything at all. Though she must have been afraid. That once they’d arrived in Paris, Jason had needed to save her life. That the apartment Marie drove him to ended up littered with bodies by the time Jason half-carried her out of it. That he was bringing her deeper into something she couldn’t get away from anymore.

Yet if the days’ events scared her—Jason didn’t. Having retreated into the safe harbour of the hotel, that night Marie pushed into Jason’s space like it belonged to her. Brushing her nose against his face, pressing her lips against his lips, staring at him unwaveringly from under a wet curtain of newly-dark hair. Wordless because she knew they didn’t need them.

Devoid of her voice, Jason listened to her sounds instead. Marie’s gasps into his mouth as he kissed back. Her breath hitching when he tentatively pushed the thin white strap of her bra down her shoulders. The throaty noise she made while Jason knelt on the bathroom floor and started mouthing over her bare stomach. All night, neither of them really spoke. Abiding in a shared silence, broken only by what they brought out in each other.

They still knew almost nothing about him: who Jason was or who he’d been. But that blankness left a space for building something new.

This late in the year, Jason wakes before the sun rises. Even underneath a chequered duvet, a knitted blanket gathered near their feet—the real warmth in the bed comes from the shape of Marie’s body curled along his. Unconsciously kept that way in sleep. To ward off cold; danger.

Jason looks at her for a long time. Not lifting his head from his pillow as if to limit what he can see. Vision constrained to a close focus on Marie’s face, tilted into her hand, angled towards him from her own pillow. Breathing slow and deep; Jason watches the rise and fall beneath the shirt he told Marie to put on before she slept. The more he tells her things the more she listens. Sunlight bleeds into the room slowly, trickling through the heavy cream curtains. Marie’s back to it, it hardly lights her face. Her hair isn’t a colour that can glow anymore.

When Marie eventually wakes, Jason’s no longer in bed beside her. Though from the foot of it, he’s staring at her, still. She doesn’t seem bothered by it at all and he wonders how much he can get away with it.

Marie follows him through the city. On the métro, almost everyone around them is carrying something wrapped or boxed. Jason looks at the carriage's other occupants, notes something about each of their faces, what they make him think. He’s given up on trying to resist the impulse. Marie’s observant, too. She’s watching him. Jason can see her out of the corner of his eyes, making an assessment of her own that’s less averse than it should be. Her eyes fixed, her body again inclined toward him. Calm. Undaunted by what he’s put her through. Resolved, for now, to stay at Jason’s side—even with so little information for Marie to commit herself to.

Exiting at their stop, they stand close together on an escalator gradually rising to the surface. Biting winter air rushes down to greet them, flushing Marie’s cheeks, face otherwise starkly pale against her freshly-dyed dark hair. Something catches her eye. A partial image that slowly reveals itself as they climb into weak daylight: a line of trees along the street they come up to. Bare branches lit with entangling lights. Suffocating dim grey of the sky makes them seem brighter. Something about it makes Marie smile in a way that’s too private and small for Jason to guess at. He thinks about taking her hand, but uncertainty keeps him still, and the moment the escalator ends she’s already moving too far away.

—

Even before a threat forced its way in through the windows, Jason’s apartment felt so alien it bordered on hostile. Entering it together, he’d hoped to feel familiarity—or at the very least, recognition. But as they walked tentatively around a cavernous space of parquet floors and high ceilings, nothing in it called out to him but the sound of Marie’s voice. Echoing across from rooms that might as well have been empty—lacking as they were with any discernible signs of life.

Marie’s stepbrother’s is different. Cluttered, cosy. Lived-in. Warm, tiny bulbs strung high along the walls in long layers, bathing everything underneath them in gentle, blinking light. A welcoming kitchen toned in yellow and red, built from rich and textured wood. What Jason had taken Marie to in Paris had been all sleek metal, cold and stainless steel. A false home.

Now he stands intruding in a real home that isn't his.

It isn't Marie’s, either. Jason stays alert to her unease. Biting her nails, shutting every door or drawer she opens with a stilted carefulness she’d never shown him before. She’s eerily quiet. Made mute by more self-conscious hesitation than Jason could have imagined her capable of. The past few days, she’s been so driven. Dependable, determined: not backing away. Seeing Marie so transformed into someone so halting and still, Jason wonders if it stems from shame.

Once they needed to flee the hotel, it had been Marie’s suggestion that they hide out here—but these walls clearly hold history Jason can’t ask her about. Not anymore.

The past they could merely guess at the edges of within that roadside café had revealed itself in startling stages. Culminating in an undeniable discovery of just how violent Jason’s life before her had been. Now that they both know the brutal world he came to her from, Jason can’t ask Marie for anything. From this night onwards, he isn’t supposed to see her ever again.

In their final hours together Jason tries to give Marie as much space as he can. Dawdling outside by the swings, accompanying children who had barely reacted to her presence. Marie might not register as family to them at all—but she clearly means something to Eamon, still. He'd welcomed her in. Even unannounced, even caught on the threshold of having forced her way inside. Standing in the frigid backyard, separated from the shelter of the farmhouse interior, Jason observes them now through the bright glow of a square kitchen window. Marie not quite at ease, but brought closer to it: earlier embarrassment deterred by the routine mechanics of preparing dinner with her stepbrother. Window shut firm to preserve the warmth within; Jason's limited to watching the silent shape of her mouth responding to Eamon every so often. In the freezing, dimming dark, Jason stands glimpsing at facets of Marie that could never belong to him.

During dinner, Jason returned to her line of sight, Marie's quiet again. Her eyes trail around the living space. Tracing an uncertain path between the lights, the decorations, the presents piled under the tree. All the assorted indications of home and family and belonging. Jason wants to ask her if this is what she wants, someday. He doesn’t think so. When they stood on the banks of the Seine and Marie asked him hesitantly if he thought a family was waiting for him, the idea of it sounded foreign from her mouth.

But if she does want this—now they both know he could never give it to her.

They offer to do the dishes, a futile apology for having broken in earlier. Eamon leaves them to it. They don’t speak to each other at all, Jason thinks maybe they should, that they’re supposed to be pretending to be a couple—but it doesn’t matter to him what her stepbrother believes. He only cares about one thing.

Marie’s unbroken silence builds a distance between them Jason doesn't know how to bridge. In warm water glossy with soap, he moves his hand in repetitive circles, scrubbing a heavy pan and trying not to think.

She takes the items he hands to her, towelling them dry, putting them back where they belong. Marie knows this place, even if she telegraphs that awareness with an awkward stiffness. A reversal of Jason’s own approach—the whole world unknown to him, and he moves through it so innately he can’t explain it.

But he's still caught short, sometimes. Frozen. Now by Marie’s hand, suddenly on the small of his back. Lightly, no real pressure. The last time she put her palm there, Jason’s skin was bare, sweat-flushed; Marie was guiding him inside her, tipping back her throat to his mouth.

Marie’s touch is fleeting. Dropping away quickly, as if pained by the contact. Fumbling with the tap, Jason looks back at her. She’s staring staunchly at the kitchen floor. Mouth set in a tight, unhappy line. Feeling the weight of Jason’s gaze, she looks up. Eyes wide with fear, face heavy with what Jason thinks is regret. Like Marie doesn’t know what will happen next, but already blames herself for it.

Jason doesn't know, either. He has no certainty to offer. He wishes that he could tell Marie otherwise. That he could touch her.

-

That night Jason stands a sleepless vigil over children he can’t claim any responsibility for. That his presence threatens. Watching them makes him aware of their belonging in a world he could never inhabit as they did. An unvarying space of love, safety. Peace.

And yet—Marie meets him there. In that moonlit bedroom, she touches Jason again. Just the press of her hand on his cheek is enough to burn. Steered towards her, Jason reaches for the only thing he can.

ii. 2002

They both ended up spending that Christmas alone. Marie barely mentions it—merely a minor detail within the whole picture of what Jason had put her through—but he knows she did. He left Marie with far more money than he had first promised to give her. He told her she couldn’t see any of the people she knew again. He pushed her away.

Until he came back.

It’s been six months since Jason found her again, an inverse image to six months’ separation. Making it a year since Marie first let him into her car.

Since she started something Jason couldn’t make himself let go of.

It seems to be on Marie’s mind recently: the unlikely path that led them both here. That one overflowing week that led eventually to this longer, more sedate stretch of shared time. In Genoa, in a little apartment overlooking the waterfront that they’ll leave in the new year, Marie lays on a leather sofa and talks to Jason about things that didn’t happen. Like she can reshape the past they share—if not what they don’t.

“If Eamon hadn’t come home, what do you think would’ve happened?”

Jason doesn’t look up from the kitchen table. This apartment is one of the nicer ones they’ve found so far: open-plan, parquet floors, cast iron radiators painted white. He knows Marie likes the kitchen; thinks it small and homey. Tiled in muddy shades of brown, bathed in sunlight from a high window. Its appliances are dated but that doesn't bother her. She knows they won't be there long.

He’s underlining words he doesn’t understand in a local newspaper. He keeps his pen trailing across the ink as he tells her, “I don’t know.”

“I guess we’d have had to cook,” Marie muses.

A pause before her voice resumes, carving out an idle train of thought. “You could have taken another bedroom. It’s a big house. You wouldn’t have needed to sleep on the floor.”

Jason glances over. “You going anywhere with this?”

He didn’t mean to sound short. Marie’s response is placating. “Just thinking.”

She’s staring off into space. There’s little else to look at. The apartment is almost empty; void of all but what was in it when they were handed the keys three weeks ago. Marie didn’t ask him about decorations, a tree. For months Jason’s tried to learn everything he can about her but there’s something in him now that stalls. Wary of what he might make her bring up that she can likely never have again.

Stirring guilt makes him set his pen down. He clears his throat. Marie’s not looking at him, fiddling with her hands in her lap, sunk deeply into textured cushions. She looks cold. Lying there alone, curling into herself. Jason wonders why she doesn’t have a blanket—before asking himself if he’s even seen any here.

The sight of her solitude brings him over. Apologising as he approaches, “I’m sorry, I just meant—”

Marie’s eyes snap up to his. She speaks with calm conviction. “You don’t like thinking about it. That if things worked out differently, maybe I wouldn’t be here at all.”

Jason pauses. Marie waits, assured of her own assessment. Eventually he admits, “No.”

He stands a long moment before sitting beside her. At first, Marie acts like neither of them had been speaking at all. Lifting her legs to drape them over Jason’s lap, stretching herself out fully over him where she’d been drawn in, before. Tentative, Jason places his hand on her thigh. Six months spent touching her wasn’t enough to feel always-assured he could.

In many ways Marie’s more sure of herself than he is. She reaches for Jason automatically, stretching to brush over the backs of his fingers where they sit against her skin. Quietly, she reminds him, “Well, I am.”

—

Christmas morning, Marie wakes Jason by slipping her hand under his shirt and complaining, “It’s too cold.”

It’s rare, her waking first. Opening his eyes to her clears what’s left of the lingering fog of sleep. She’s scanning Jason’s face cautiously, fingers tensing against his stomach. Three times so far this month, she’s woken to him sweat-soaked from violent visions.

Not today. Jason reaches across the pillow to touch her cheek.

The unspoken response flattens the line of Marie’s shoulders. Like she’d been waiting for permission, she moves along the mattress, burying her face in Jason’s neck. A heavy weight slumping into him, as if trying to sink her way inside.

Jason swallows, scratchy. “It’s fifty degrees.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Her words are faint against his throat.

Jason rubs his thumb along Marie’s hairline. Grown-out now, same length as when they’d first met, but more uniform in colour; no longer streaked with stark orange highlights. He’s seen her dye it a few times but so far it’s stayed the same dark red as when he found her again.

“Ten degrees,” he amends.

Marie makes an unhappy sound. “Next winter, I want to go somewhere it never gets cold at all.”

Casualness makes Jason’s chest constrict. Keeps him mute long enough that Marie pulls back a little to look at him.

“Alright,” he says quietly.

Marie understands. She kisses him. Lazily, slow with the early morning, like she’s still half-asleep. But she isn’t—her body hums with a building intensity, thumbs settling onto Jason’s hips. Tugging at thin fabric, moving her mouth away from his to kiss Jason’s neck instead, to murmur questioningly until he nods against her forehead.

The unhurried path of Marie’s mouth down Jason’s body ends with her lips wrapped around his cock. Not so routine for them—she had to coax Jason into being still like this. It could be difficult, lying back and letting go as fully as she wanted him to. Always easier to drive her own responses. But Marie told him she liked this, she got off on it and she does; Jason can see the awkward curve of her forearm, bent so she can cup herself, move her own hips against her hand. Marie’s eyes are shut but Jason keeps his open for as long as he can. Strokes unkempt strands of Marie’s hair where it falls over her face, the high line of her cheeks hollowing around him.

Marie wants to come like that afterwards: gradually, self-controlled. Grinding against Jason’s thigh; a warm, wet drag over bare skin. She does it herself, but she asks Jason to talk to her. To recite the sole permanence he can give her. Whispering into Marie’s ear, laying open-mouthed kisses against her neck to feel the ratcheting pulse beneath, the way the muscles lining her throat arch with her gasps.

She stays close. Still not getting out of bed. Keeping them caught in an in-between haziness—in a bedroom barely lit by a cloud-ridden morning, in a city not quite warm enough for her in winter but never cold enough for snow.

“Don’t go for a run today.”

Firm, unembarrassed. Marie isn’t ashamed of wanting this: her head on Jason’s chest, curled where she can listen to his heart.

“Did you get me anything?”

Jason cards his fingers through hair that’s stiff with sweat. “Did you want me to?”

Marie’s breathy laugh ghosts dampness over his skin. “No. I don’t care.”

For six months, she'd shown Jason what mattered to her and what didn’t. What she could give up easily—and what she needed from him in return.

“We should sleep.” Voice already thick with its approach, “It’s still early.” Tilting her face slightly to kiss the muscle beneath, murmuring very quietly, “It’ll help.”

Often it didn’t. Marie slept close, within reach, every night of Jason’s life since he’d found her again—but the soothing solidness of her body wasn’t always a barrier to what followed him into unconsciousness.

Neither of them can bend the world to their will as much as they might like. In an effort to keep the past from their door, Jason moves her through an endless array of cities. In all of them, Marie tries to anchor his only chance of any future.

Sometimes she does. Sometimes she makes it easy. For Jason to close his eyes, to wrap himself around her, to have nowhere to be but this bed. To exist within something untouchable by anything else, even dreams.

—

Marie’s lazy that day, as if in memory of having normally spent it so. Jason watches her move listlessly around the apartment and tries to remember things he doesn’t dare ask about again; what rituals littered the outline of her life before meeting him tore it apart. The evening draws in early, robbing them of what little indoor light they had, fixing Marie under the glare of bright kitchen bulbs. Suddenly animated, seemingly invigorated with an unknown purpose.

Jason leaves her to it. From the nearby confines of the bedroom, he lies still on the bed he made and listens out for everything he can hear. Marie rustling through cupboards that will never become familiar, unclicking the lids of little jars. The hiss of the old stove as she finally ignites it. Humid air wafts under the doorframe between them, carrying the strong scent of warming spices. It brings Jason back to her, now simmering a pot on the stove. Maybe too aggressively—her back rigid with uncharacteristic vigilance, Jason watches Marie fiddle with stiff black dials until the bubbling recedes.

He keeps his footsteps on the wooden floors heavy enough to creak. Without looking up, Marie says, “It's not really accurate.”

Over her shoulder, Jason peers at a hastily scribbled list on a torn piece of paper. “Nelken?”

“Cloves. We don't have any.” Marie’s stirring with a wooden spoon, drawing wide, rapid circles through dark liquid. Raking his eyes over the maroon fabric of her turtleneck sweater, Jason thinks of her in her stepbrother's kitchen, one year ago. During Jason’s first, and only, invite to a real family table. Somewhere he didn’t belong. Somewhere he can’t imagine ever visiting again.

The stone counter is still cluttered with open jars. Buried under a thick layer of mingling spices sits the smell of alcohol. Jason traces a fingertip around the long loops of Marie’s letters. “How much of this list do we have?”

Marie smiles wryly. “Not much.”

“What’s zimt?”

"Cinnamon. Kannst du Deutsch oder nicht?”

“More than you can read Italian.”

That makes Marie laugh, a small spark of open joy. Eyes seeking Jason, it’s easy to grin back at her. To lean into relief that she feels able to do something she’s obviously done before.

“You’re right. I don’t know what any of these are. I had to open all the bottles with brown powder and sniff them. But I’m pretty sure.”

Marie shuts off the flame. Taps the spoon along the inner lip of the pan, sound resounding against the metal before she drops it carelessly somewhere on the counter. Digging through the cupboards again, she retrieves two mugs to ladle the spiced wine into. “Here.”

Jason sips at it blankly. “It's good.”

Over her own mug, Marie’s nose scrunches up in distaste. “Okay, you don't have to say that.”

“I mean, it's interesting.”

“I did my best. We were missing a lot. And I used maybe too much of what we did have.”

She did. A thin brown powdery film sits on top of Jason’s tongue, unpleasantly ashy in his mouth. All that matters is that Marie’s still smiling.

Abruptly, it drops. She turns away, picking at holes in the sleeve of her sweater. Jason’s surprised she has any that are that worn, in the unencumbered life he makes her live. Restrained, almost secretive, Marie says quietly, “I always did this with my brother. He's much better at it.”

“You cooked well together.”

Her eyes snap over. “No, my real brother. Martin.”

Jason swallows. He waits for her to elaborate. Just the hint that she might builds a prickling unease along his skin. Marie’s spoken of Martin before, but rarely; Jason wasn’t sure if that reticence was for her benefit or his own.

Tonight, she lets herself. Gaze unmoving from sienna tiles, Marie fingers her sweater while revealing a little more of what she’s left behind. “We used to always try and spend Christmas together. We hardly saw each other otherwise. But it’s been a while. Before you, I mean, even.” She starts to fidget, gaze flitting between Jason, the walls, the terracotta floor. “Last time, we had a big fight. He walked out, but that was—a long time ago. Years.” Disbelief trails off through Marie’s voice. As though she’d been hoping all their months together marked an unreal suspension of time.

Hesitantly, Jason prods. “What about?”

He’s unsure if Marie wants to say anything more. Unwilling to push her beyond how far she’s already pushed herself—to dredge this up, a memory more wilfully abandoned than any of what amounts to Jason’s own.

But she seems intent on continuing. “Our grandmother. Martin’s gay, and she’s—I guess you could call her traditional. Close-minded, anyway. I shouldn’t have let her speak to him like she did that year. Of course, I don’t speak to her anymore, either.” Marie’s cheeks burn with a private shame, her hand scrubbing over her face. “I was selfish. I just wanted everything to be normal. For everyone to accept each other. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I still don’t. But I think he needed me, and I wasn’t—I wasn’t there.”

Remorse thickens Jason’s throat. He isn't sure if he should reach for her. He thinks he has nothing to say, still; one year on and all the relationships and people that have marked Marie’s life are as alien to him now as they were then. In many ways she's still what Jason told her she was all those months ago: the only person he knows. He could tell Marie that he can't imagine anyone more loyal, more steadfast than she's been—that Jason needs her so much it brings a sometimes crushing guilt. But he won't. Overly aware of the dark side of her commitment to him: that Marie being there for him meant she couldn't be there for anyone else.

Marie knows everything Jason could say to her. Often she’s equally reluctant to voice any of it. Shutting a door in her mind, she says decisively, “We should go out. It'll be quiet.”

For weeks she’s refused to buy gloves, a scarf, as though doing so might welcome the cold’s presence. She keeps her hands tight around her steaming mug instead.

Marie leads them to the water. In the biting dark night the beach is near-empty of anyone else. Moonlight makes the sand look grey, bleached out, waves rippling against it like pooling shadows, swallowing up any remaining light. The same sea Jason spent weeks staring at from a tiny porthole, sleeping in a hammock. The first time he woke up in a real bed was with her.

The wide-open water traps Marie’s gaze. “I always wanted to go somewhere the ocean was always warm. It’ll be freezing, now.” She glances at Jason. “I guess you know.”

She continues sketching out her own story. “When you gave me that money I was so sick of snow. Of winter, all of it. I just wanted to see the sun again. Greece was as far south as I could get.”

The tide is low, waves pulled further and further from their feet. They stand isolated. Listening to the yearning calls of birds, the soft roar of the waves. Jason pries Marie’s fingers from her cradled mug and wraps them tightly against his palm.

Marie inclines her head to him. “You’d have found me anywhere, right?”

“Yes.”

She smiles. She squeezes Jason’s hand. “You know, you can tell me things like that without me asking.”

—

The moment Jason slips his scarf onto the hook by the front door Marie’s pulling him forcefully to her arms, her open mouth. Wine stains her lips dark. Blotches of cinnamon residue line her tongue. Freezing fingers make their way under Jason’s sweater, his waistband, digging like there’s a heat in him Marie can claim for herself. Jason stills her. Catches Marie’s hands in his. Lifted between them, he kisses her cold knuckles. The icy alloy of her rings almost sticks to his lips. Her pupils are blown, breath heaving. Jason lets go to run a palm up under her own sweater, cupping her breast, thumbing a stiff nipple through the delicate fabric of her bra. Marie’s eyes shut as she breathes out, harshly; in the unwarmed indoor space Jason can see the shape of it between them. Six months. One year. Jason first touched her two weeks into his life.

All night, Marie stays as close to him as she can get. Enmeshing herself against all of his skin, fitting the long lines of their bodies together as tightly as she’s able. Clutched to her, hips barely lifting out of her, moving merely shallowly together as Marie holds his forehead against hers. As if staving off a shared loneliness.

iii. 2003

In India, Marie writes letters. Not often—opting to spend most of her time outside; relishing the intensity of the heat they have no reprieve from anymore. Over a year spent traversing the varied shores of the Mediterranean, the towns and cities that lay along its waterfronts, places she’d never been and Jason couldn’t recognise—until that wasn’t far enough anymore. Until they needed to go further. The whole world, within reach. Carried a continent away from anywhere they’d already been, now Marie spends months discovering a single stretch of coastline.

Outside, she explores. Indoors, she settles. In a beachside cottage Jason bought for her, Marie absorbs herself in building a private world for them. Devoting herself to it, lavishing it with more attention than she’s ever shown anywhere else they’ve shared. Marie breathes life into the only one Jason can offer her. She cooks a little, although she prefers the preparation to the practice. She collects: jarred spices with handwritten labels for the wooden rack she fastens to the kitchen wall, heavy tins of pulses to line their cupboards. Hoards handmade, ceramic mugs, each one unique—in their design, in the feel of them under her curled fingers, lifting a pool of hot humidity to her face, under her chin. She fills metal canisters with fragrant blends, storing paper tea bags in a painted, wooden box that she keeps on the kitchen counter. She decorates. Everywhere they went came pre-furnished—but Marie enhances it. Brings back objects they could never keep, dotting vases around every available surface, filling them with flowers both fresh and dry.

And sometimes—she writes. Legs draped on the L-shaped couch in the kitchen, feet kicked out in a rattan armchair, cross-legged on their canopied bed. Marie sits at the desk where Jason struggles to sort through a past he can’t remember, and she writes letters she can’t send to the people that mark her own.

Mostly, Marie writes to her brother. She doesn’t say as much. But he knows. Jason watches her: always, automatically, sometimes more than he means. Sees her bent over her own palely-coloured stationery, face calm and neutral but hand moving intently with the determination of seeking release. Often she writes too quickly. Short haphazard strokes of her pen, brushing the tips of her fingers over still-wet words, blemishing them with dark swirls of ink. Some nights she comes to bed like that and Jason kisses the black marks on her hands as if in apology. As though he stained her himself.

Usually, they pretend. She bears silent witness to this ritual, like so many others of his. But tonight, Marie tells him like it's unremarkable, “I wrote to Martin today.”

Mouth on her knuckles, Jason doesn’t look at her. Eyes fixed on what he’s holding to his lips. When he drops Marie's hand her fingers spread out possessively over the skin of his chest. Marie keeps talking, and Jason keeps staring straight ahead of him. “All these letters. I wouldn’t know where to send them, even if I could.” She pauses. Her body tenses. Quiet and deliberate, Marie asks him, drawing out the words, “Could you find out?”

Eighteen months. Every day guilt finds a new crevice in Jason to carve itself into. He thinks, most of the time, Marie’s happy. He can make her happy. But sometimes he glimpses it—that life abandoned, not by choice but because he forced her to do it. A lost world that everywhere he takes her to can never quite measure up to. Could never replace.

He wants to do what he can. Careful, considering, Jason turns his head to her. Unnaturally blank, waiting for him. He swallows. “Probably.”

Across the pillows, Marie’s eyes widen very slightly. She never looks at Jason like she is now: with expectation he can do what she asks. She hardly ever asks him for anything.

Tonight, she does. “Would you?”

Jason’s already decided. His nod opens floodgates of relief in Marie’s face. He thinks he'll do whatever he can to gain her gratitude—a sight that reinforces its own rarity.

“Thank you,” Marie whispers. Fits herself closer, moving her hand to cup Jason's jaw. Tilting it to her as she lifts herself to him. Soft pressure, breathing love against his closed mouth.

—

Travelling a few towns over for an internet café feels safest. It’s a long drive, and Jason makes it alone. Kissing Marie goodbye in the early evening, nervous excitement reverberates through her brief press of lips. As though caught up in a tide she’d been keeping at bay for years, threatening now to lift her off her feet.

He returns late enough that she’s already asleep. Summer in December; covers shoved around her legs in the ceaseless heat. Long stroke of her spine open to him, curled a little into Jason’s side of the bed. She wakes up alone more often than he'd like but she hardly ever falls asleep that way.

Jason stands above her in warm darkness, watching the steady expansion of her chest. Torn between relief that sleep still comes to Marie this deeply after all the violence he’s made her witness—and fear for what that might mean if someone happened upon them there.

His fingers are tightly gripping a folded sheet. He leaves it lying out on his own pillow, right next to her. He heads for the shower.

When Jason comes out of the ensuite, Marie’s awake. She's holding the printout in her hand, bathed in the diffused incandescence of the bedside table lamp. Sliding cautiously onto the bed, Jason skims over her bent thigh. Marie's body stays solid, unreactive. Her eyes won’t rise from the page he printed. Beneath a blurry and indistinct group photo, she’s tracing a finger slowly back and forth over the clearly demarcated typeface that lists her brother among the members of the Parisian Orchestra.

Marie’s voice wavers, sucking in shallow breaths around it. “Martin never liked it there. Neither of us did. We went as teenagers a few times, his French was always better than mine but—” She cuts herself off, eyes overspilling. Bending closer, cupping her jaw, Jason brushes at gleaming trails with his thumb.

She ignores him. Remorse weighing down her words, “I think he's there because of us. Because of me.”

Lifting her head, Marie says exactly what Jason’s been afraid she will.

“I need to talk to him.”

—

“Allo, comment puis-je vous aider ? ”

“Je cherche à joindre un membre de l'orchestre.”

Silence on the other end of the line. Or near to it, anyway; the long-distance connections available in these places are always poor. Some distant humming or staticky clicking is always interfering, an irrepressible background baseline. It muffles the clarity of any voice—or any other sounds. It would be impossible to audibly discern if the phone he’s calling is tapped.

Jason doesn’t think this one will be. He didn’t even call the main line for the orchestra; he called the press office. The woman who answered insists now that Jason’s mistaken, that he’s dialled the wrong number. He tells her it’s urgent. He says it’s a family emergency.

All the while he keeps a steady eye on the man in the back of the store. Monitoring his disinterest in what his customer was saying down the phone. Marie wanted to be the one to do this, and Jason wouldn’t let her. Told her she needed to let him figure it out. Make the first step. She relented simply because he was relenting even more. It went against everything Jason knew to do this; every instinct he hadn’t needed to remember the source of to embody. A risk he’d only take for one reason: that Marie deserved whatever tenuous link he could allow her. It wasn’t fair to her, living deprived of anyone’s love but his.

The new voice that eventually comes to the phone sounds more demanding than concerned. Jason’s unprepared for how much Marie’s brother reminds him of her. The same cadence, even in a language she can’t speak. His immediate, instinctive hostility, like when Marie first noticed Jason watching her in an alleyway, thousands of miles away.

Jason doesn’t answer any of Martin’s aggressive questions. He just asks, “Do you know who I am?”

Judging by the length of the ensuing silence, he does.

“What’s happened to her?”

Hushed dread transforms Martin’s voice. It sparks a sympathetic pang in Jason: hearing someone else who needs Marie to be safe. He tries to speak quickly, reassuringly, “She’s okay. She’s fine. She wants to talk to you. Don’t say her name where people can hear.” Asking Martin to take down an address, Jason waits to hear the click of a pen uncapping. He recites a location he'd first taken Marie—two years ago. A Parisian payphone where he waited for her call from the hotel he’d sent her into.

Marie never rang it, in the end. She hadn't followed Jason’s instructions. Instead, she’d shown him that she could find another way.

Jason shifts the receiver between his jaw and his shoulder, glancing up again. “There’s a payphone there. How quickly can you get there?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“She’ll call you then.” He hangs up.

—

Jason watches Marie dial the Parisian payphone from where he’s still sitting in the jeep. Parked right outside, so he can watch through a wide window, littered with colourful stuck-up signs advertising the rate for long-distance phone calls. A different store than where they’d just been—after he hung up, Jason drove them on again. As far as he could take them in the time they had. The whole drive he kept one hand on Marie’s leg, giving ineffectual instructions. Every time he glanced over she wouldn’t look back. Staring out the window, she kept biting her lip.

Jason said her name insistently enough that it broke through to her. Marie let him see the wideness of her eyes, the nervous line of her mouth. Jason felt her apprehension as surely as Marie had his own two years ago: sitting in that roadside café, listening to him confess all the things he had feared he might never find answers for.

That week had taught him some doors weren’t worth opening. Flexing his fingers over her thigh in a tight grip, keeping his voice level, Jason told her, “We don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” Marie said immediately.

“He knows you’re okay. He thinks—”

“No he doesn’t. He doesn’t know anything. He hasn’t heard from me in years.”

Marie was submerged in once-stifled guilt, sweeping her onto the course she’d made up her mind to follow. Always, she carried an assuredness in her own convictions that Jason had never been able to pry from her.

She bit her thumb, turned to the window again. They were getting closer. Jason could see the signage they needed down the stretch of the street.

As he parked, he dropped his hand from her leg. Head bowed, mouth dry, his eyes stuck to the floor of the jeep. He needed Marie to understand something he didn’t think she would accept. Very quietly, Jason promised her, “It isn’t your fault.”

It was his. On some level, they both knew it—but Marie had spent eighteen months forging a shared culpability, partially reprieving him of something she shouldn’t. Until it became a committed belief she couldn’t abandon. One Jason selfishly didn’t undermine—given how much she relied on it to stay by his side.

Unclicking her seatbelt, Marie didn’t reply. She shut the car door behind her too quickly for it to lock into place.

Now—Jason sees her lit by the height of the afternoon sun, streaming in through the shopfront glass. Exaggerating all the marks and blemishes of the dusty window, framing her in a faraway haze. A silent, fast-moving image. Marie’s twirling the cord of the phone around her finger so tightly it must hurt. Her mouth is moving very quickly, her eyes are red-rimmed but her cheeks are dry. Some aspect of her at this moment is so unknown to Jason that it renders her unrecognisable. In the whole world, she’s the only thing he’s sure of—but now she seems somehow unfamiliar; as if she’s someone he’s never seen before. Slipping back into a universe he couldn’t exist in. A life that being with him dispossessed her of forever.

Suddenly, wordlessly—Marie slams the phone down. She rubs at her face. Turning away, leaving Jason’s eyes fixed on her heaving shoulders, bare over the bright fabric of her halter top. Marie stays like that for interminable minutes. Breaths gradually lengthening, evening out the shifting of her spine. In one sharp motion, she turns back. Through the dust-ridden window, her eyes seek Jason out.

—

This time the jeep door thuds heavily behind her. Marie says only, “Just drive.”

Jason obeys. His throat is too tight to speak. For a long time, he doesn’t lift his eyes from the road. He’s moved them through so many places but he’s never felt like this before—so suffocated with the weight of what Marie’s walked away from. Anything Jason could voice to her meaningless against an immutable reality: he couldn’t change any of it. He couldn’t bring Marie back to what he’d taken her away from.

But maybe—she could get there herself. Jason's tongue darts out to wet his lips. Still scratchy, he tells her, “You could go back.”

It takes Marie uncountable moments, prolonged by the thudding of Jason’s heart in his ears, for her to look over at him. “What did you say?”

Jason tries to sound more solid. “You could—you could leave. Go back to him.”

“That's not what you told me.” Marie’s voice is odd, stretched-out, as though it were drifting to him underwater.

“That was two years ago. For all we know they've stopped looking. For you. You could—”

All at once, she uncoils. “Listen to yourself. You really believe that? You think that's what I want to hear? That this is all—eighteen months and it's just thanks for everything, you can go now? Like the drive. How much are you gonna pay me this time, huh?”

“I didn't—”

The pitch of Marie’s voice keeps spiralling, so startlingly angry it almost shimmers off of her. “And go back to him? I gave everything up. You think that's all this is about—me choosing, you or him?”

“That’s not—”

As abruptly as she’d erupted, Marie recedes. “Forget it. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She brings her knees up to her chest on the seat, fiddling with the dial on the bottom to recline it slightly, move it backwards. A fire dousing itself out in her, leaving her flat when she demands, “Just take me back.”

Jason swallows, fingers stiff on the wheel. Marie's the only one who ever calls it home.

—

Jason doesn’t want to leave her alone, but he spends the hours before sunset trying to give her space. Not easily; the cottage is small. “Humble,” Marie had announced when he first took her to it. Smiling, rolling the word around in her mouth, the taste of it new to her. Not because she was used to grandiose settings, but because this one was different. She insisted—after their year spent hiding along countless shores, never long enough to set down any roots—this time it had to be different.

And it was. Six months. They'd never stayed anywhere this long. Every day Jason woke up and thought about when they should leave. Held back by the want Marie wouldn't voice aloud; a permanence she wouldn’t ask him for because she knew she wouldn’t get it.

Today it feels like Jason’s loitering somewhere he’s already left behind. Somewhere he has no real claim to. Suddenly unfamiliar, as though a new light had flooded the space and washed everything in an unidentifiable hue. The walls are covered in art he hadn’t placed, curtains he hadn’t hung; surfaces littered with trinkets he’d never brought back himself. Marie spent months openly furnishing this place—but Jason had tried not to notice it too closely. Too aware of what it represents: an imitation of something she'll never really have as long as she stays with him.

Jason last felt like this two years ago, in a farmhouse somewhere outside Nevers. But back then, he’d been an intruder. Now he stands as though a stranger in his own—

The bedroom is dark, no lights. He finds Marie splayed out on the mattress, wrapped around a pillow she’d taken from his side of the bed. Her limbs seem to be everywhere, taking up a distorted amount of space. The breeze drifting through the open window flutters the canopy curtains: bright, pale silhouettes made ghostly by the glow of moonlight.

Jason isn’t sure if she’s awake. Stepping inside fully, he stills at the sudden sound of her voice. “Did you eat?”

He didn’t even think about it. “No.”

“Me neither.” Words low, dragged out of her. Marie presses her forearm over her eyes.

With her face completely hidden, it’s easier to ask what she’s been waiting to hear. “What did he say?”

“What do you think he said?”

“He blamed you.”

She’s very quiet. “For a lot of things. Yes.”

Jason gives up on keeping himself away. Kneels on the mattress so he can crowd over her. Lifting Marie’s arm until she relents, letting it fall away from her eyes. This close, moonlit from the open window, there’s a vacancy to her. She might have been lying there for hours, alone. Halting, Jason cups her cheek. Staring down at her, heartbeat hammering in the silent room until—Marie turns into his touch. Reaches up to hold his wrist; unexpectedly strong pressure, keeping him there. Jason’s chest overflows on a harsh breath. Only able to move his fingers, he rubs his thumb across her mouth, strokes a forefinger near her eyelids.

Beneath the span of his hand, Marie seems diminished. Voice still faint as she recounts, “He says I'm gonna get myself killed.”

“That won't happen.”

Marie smiles sadly up at Jason from under his fingers. “You really don't know as much as you think you do.”

“I know you.” He traces over her closed lips.

Marie lets go of his wrist to hold the back of his neck. Bound and possessive, suddenly seeking the same reassurance. When Jason leans down to her she whispers against his mouth, “Maybe that’s all you do.”

Another truth Jason avoided earlier; the counterpoint to what she’d abandoned. Marie left everything for him. He couldn't have anything but her. Lowering his lips to hers, Jason kisses her desperately, overwhelmed by it: the need he'd undermined in a vain effort to convince Marie that she still had another path.

But she'd been right about that, too—both the audacity of his suggestion, and its futility. She can't go back. For both of them, there remains only this.

Spread out underneath him, Marie digs her nails too deeply into his naked back. Her half-moon marks border bullet scars she first touched two years ago. Scratching down Jason’s spine, urging him inside her, vividly alive and wanting where she'd been inert, hidden, before. Throat ragged with the sharpness of a shared need, Marie murmurs, you don't want me to leave and Jason kisses her hard enough to affirm what they both know.

—

Eighteen months spent watching Marie wake. Today she does so gradually, blinking under bright mid-morning light. She slept through the sunrise. Jason didn't—right away, Marie can tell he hardly slept at all. The moment her eyes are fully open, she's touching his cheek, asking him, “Something real?”

Jason shakes his head. She moves to lay a hand on his forehead, still clammy with cooled sweat from fitful visions.

“Me leaving, or me dying?” Marie sounds calmer than Jason’s heard her since he picked up that phone and dialled. This time, the pain he’s presenting to her is routine.

Jason waits a long moment to respond, studying how the day lights consolation in her face. Marie’s fingers start to stroke his temple. Eventually he admits, “Both.”

The corner of her mouth quirks grimly. “I guess it's the same thing.”

He shifts away. Back to her, Jason closes his eyes, trying not to revisit the images that had kept him awake. “Don't.”

“Sorry.” Softly sincere—but never discouraged. Always unafraid of pushing him like she knows no one else in the world can. Marie presses closer, chapped lips brushing over the marks she'd dug into his skin the night before. Making herself unavoidable, soft-skinned palm gliding over Jason’s bare stomach. She kisses his shoulder. Pulls back, pressing her forehead to the back of his neck, curling an arm around his waist. Relief at her lasting forgiveness makes her harder to resist. Jason gives in to the ebb of encroaching darkness, a warm breathing ballast at his back.

—

Jason opens his eyes to a post-it note on the pillow next to him. A habit Marie began here, during their first sustained stay. From the window over his head, midday sun shines hotly on dark sweat stains. He strips the sheets before he showers.

Once he’s dressed again, Marie’s already back. She’s in the kitchen. Smiling at him, something about it insubstantial: a veneer over what they’ve yet to discuss. She pushes a plate of hot buttery rolls toward him, filled with a strongly-spiced mix of fried vegetables. A dish she’d first tried at a stall during their lengthy journey here, somewhere on the other side of the vast borders of the country they’d chosen. That they’d lingered in long enough for Marie to form favourites.

She doesn’t let them linger now. Plates barely tossed in the sink, she stills Jason’s hand before he can turn on the kitchen tap. Standing close, face neutral, she says, “Come take a drive with me.”

Jason wipes his mouth against the back of his hand. Warily, “Not to another phone.”

“No.” Marie’s not looking at him anymore, slipping her feet into her sandals, already opening the front door. She’s hardly ever evasive; not like him. But sometimes—increasingly—Jason finds he’ll suppress his need to run if it lets him follow where Marie leads.

—

Marie drives them to the banks of a little bridge. Narrow, wooden, tucked-away compared to the much larger cement one they can see in the near distance. Further downstream, the river tapering off amongst marshy banks, they stand on a short path almost hidden by tall reeds. The water below their feet is still and muddy-green. Not remotely as appealing as the undeniable beauty of the brighter ocean—but Marie stares into it with a secretive half-smile, like its uninviting exterior makes it belong more fully to her.

She seems to feel this place does. She tells Jason it’s always quiet here, set beyond the shadow of a looming, immense structure that ferried countless pedestrians, traffic. This bridge is deserted. Someone working a stall first pointed her in its direction, telling her that tourists avoided it; it wasn’t picturesque, it creaked a little too much underfoot.

Abruptly, Marie clears her throat. Her fingers drum on the railing. Her face flattens and Jason knows she’s going to talk about it.

“I don't like where I'm from,” she starts. Jason keeps his eyes fixed on her as she looks out into a basin of the new world he’d brought her to. “It's not worth anything. Just a stop on the way to somewhere else. I always wanted to get away from it. I did. But I never stayed anywhere, either. I went all over. As far as I could. My family—my grandmother, Martin, Eamon—they all called me selfish. Someone you couldn’t rely on to stick around. Except when I needed something from them, and then they couldn't get rid of me.”

Marie dips her head. Softer with self-admonishment, “Maybe they're right. Maybe all I'm doing right now is being selfish. Stupid. Not thinking too far ahead. I never did—I always wanted to just live in the moment, not worry about the future. Or anything, really. Now I…I worry every day.”

Hearing that from her stirs long-steeping guilt. For things Jason wants her to know he wishes happened differently. Things he wishes could be different now.

When he opens his mouth, Marie must see it from the corner of her eye. Glancing over, voice firming, she says, “Let me finish.”

Jason nods. She twists her head away, continuing, “I worry. But no one—no one ever trusted me like you do. No one ever relied on me this much.” She bites her lip. “I had a lot of friends. But a lot of the time they—they didn't really know who I was. We were just people who were together, until we weren't.”

Flexing her fingers over rough wood, gazing down into imperceivable depths, Marie pushes her professions from her throat. “But you—you know me. More than any—I didn't used to know I could be that for someone. I didn't know I could do any of this. You showed me I could.”

Jason fights the impulse to refute that he could have benefitted Marie at all. He wants, stupidly, to swallow it up again—his sheer gratitude that she’s still there.

But Marie isn’t like him. She isn’t hiding from herself. She’s turning to Jason fully, reaching for him, taking his hand.

“It's beautiful here. I like the people, and the ocean is always warm. This is where I always wanted to get to. But,” squeezing his fingers, eyes unwavering, ”that's not why I'm here now.”

Her honesty makes him ache. Half-helpless as he says, “Marie—”

Unfinished, she drowns him out. “There's things I want that—I don't know. But I have hope. I have to believe in something. In you and me. But you need to, too.”

“I do,” Jason insists. Clinging to it, a solid shore to reinforce him as he swears to her, “It's the only thing.”

At last Marie seems emptied of any more words. Jason takes the chance to sweep her in. She goes easily, sapped of energy, sinking into his hold. Jason fits his mouth to her ear, finally murmuring, "I'm sorry."

This closely held, Jason can feel as much as he can hear the unsteady thread of Marie’s voice as she whispers into his neck, "I miss him." Jason tells her he knows she does, kisses high on her cheek, snakes a hand through her hair. Longing surfacing from deeply-buried depths, Marie keeps her voice hushed as she confesses, “I wish you could meet him. Though maybe you wouldn't like each other very much. He can be prickly.”

Jason pulls away. Slowly, hand still clasping Marie’s shoulder as she wipes her eyes. She smiles, albeit weakly. “Though, so can you.”

Rubbing dampness off her cheek, he promises, “I’ll always do what I can.”

“I know.” Marie sniffs, swiping the back of her hand over her face like she’s putting the day behind her. “Come on. Let's go home.”

—

On the drive back, Marie holds Jason’s hand. Until tiredness overwhelms her, slips her fingers from his, lolls her head against the window. Neither got much sleep last night. She’s exhausted—from her anger, her speech, from what Jason puts her through every day. What Marie needs him to acknowledge she's giving to him. Eyes half on the empty road ahead, Jason keeps looking at her. Irrepressible golden light saturates the jeep interior, spilling over Marie’s face, her closed eyes and slack mouth. Jason’s never seen her hair this long. Marie once told him—that two years ago, in her little car, in the black unending night, tunnelling through the cold air, the drifting snow—she had watched Jason sleep. Months later, Marie said it like it was something she needed to confess. As though there were anything reproachable in that—in her interest, her study, of a stranger who had told her impossible things.

Pulled in by their front porch, woken with Jason’s hand on her jaw, Marie mumbles something she doesn't really mean about making sure they eat dinner. As if she's depleted whatever source of energy had carried her through what she needed to tell him, she’s so tired she’s almost drifting again. Protests weak when Jason comes to the door beside her and lifts her into his arms.

Carried over a threshold, laid to rest. She’d put fresh sheets on the bed. She brought a spray of irises back the other day, lilac forms gently wilting on the bedside table, sweet floral scent as Jason pushes her hair off her face. Eyes lidded, reaching out for him.