1.

The pain is a relief that she's glad to feel.

Lying silent at the bottom of the shaft, she bleeds and waits to die while above ground, Sydney and Michael no doubt enjoy a little reunion.

As far as Lauren is concerned, she's got the better end of the bargain.

2.

She let them win, she let Michael shoot her and it's almost funny when you think of it. She chooses to suicide by spy and gets the worst shot in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Lauren wouldn't have missed, Treadstone trained her better than that. She's not been allowed the luxury of a miss in years, never lets herself forget the times when she has.

Her father never wanted her in the line of fire. Conklin saw to it she never has been.

She's always been the one pulling the trigger.

3.

She still thinks about her first kill.

You aren't supposed to. You tell yourself its the job and they're just targets, nothing more. Some days, you almost believe it.

With her life draining away, Lauren doesn't need to care for all the pretty little bureaucratic lies. She can feel the weight of the gun in her hand, see the beads of sweat on his forehead, and hear the sound of his body as it hit the floor.

She fucked him before she killed him.

Valentine ops were one of her specialties, she always got close.

So much blood and so many deaths. She know she should feel something but remorse was drilled out of her years ago. This is as close as she can come now, her blood spilling for theirs.

4.

She passes out, noise from above chasing her into unconsciousness.

5.

She wakes to warm blankets and deft hands, someone checking bandages on her wounds.

The same hands lift her head, help her swallow some water.

She passes out again before she can see a face.

6.

Days - weeks maybe - pass in tiny bites of consciousness.

When she's awake, she's tended to by a young nurse. The girl seems to speak only Italian but Lauren can hear a Basque inflections in her words.

Two more pieces for the puzzle forming up in her mind.

Always the most important one, her benefactor, remains out of sight. Orders are spoken too low to hear and he is only visible as a shadow on the wall.

Still, familiarity hangs in the air and suspicion begins to gnaw at her belly.

7.

She wakes on a cool morning, her uniformed keeper nowhere in sight, and knows.

Treadstone operatives worked always alone but still the legends grow. Especially the legends that surround the man who brought the unit crashing to its knees.

"Why am I here?" She doesn't know where 'here' is, he has kept the secret too well, but she knows there is a reason that she is. Bourne was the best of them. If he saved her, brought her somewhere, he had a reason to do so. There's always a reason.

He surprises her by answering, she truly hadn't expected it.

"Why not?'

8.

He looks the same as the last photo released in those days when they had been dispatched to kill him, perhaps a little harder about the edges.

Understandable, given the reports.

"I cannot tell you much," she says calmly when he next appears at her door.

"I'm not asking you to." Bourne looks almost nervous, it's not what she would have expected. "Eat your soup."

Reflexively, she glances down knowing he'll be gone when she looks up.

9.

Bourne doesn't like questions and she learns not to ask. If he wants to tell her why she's here, he will. If not, she thinks it is unlikely anyone alive could force it out of him.

She contents herself to recuperating until she works up to running on the beach with him.

Sometimes, she catches him smiling and she remembers the file on the girl. She doesn't know why he believes he extracted her but Lauren thinks she knows the real reason.

She keeps pace with him on the sand, looks back at their footprints in it.

They're her answer.

10.

He doesn't tell her what happened, she puts it together.

Treadstone made them, it destroyed them too.

11.

The explanation he finally gives her on a beach in Monaco. He stops to catch his breath though he's not winded and says, "We can be better."

She believes him.

 

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