In the Kill Zone

A/N: Nicky's reaction to watching Bourne kill Desh.

Even as Nicky Parsons regained consciousness, she could distinctly hear the sounds of a scuffle coming in the direction of the bathroom. For a few moments, she struggled to recall where she was and what had happened. Then, the memories slowly, painfully, returned...Tangiers...Desh...Jason...

Jason!

Nicky walked towards the bathroom and stood at the doorway. The sight which greeted her stunned her into immobility.

Jason was standing, a cold expression on his face. He was holding a towel, wrapped around Desh's neck. Desh was struggling, writhing silently and desperately like a dying fish out of water. And dying he certainly was...the signs of suffocation were obvious.

Like a butcher culling a chicken, Jason waited a few moments to be absolutely sure he had accomplished his task. When he was done he let the body sink to the floor and stood there for a moment, panting in sheer exhaustion, staring down at his handiwork.

Nicky stood there, staring at the corpse of the would-be assassin, a kind of perverse mesmerism gripping her. Jason, however, broke the spell easily enough by tossing her Desh's phone.

"Code in it...we need to be dead", he said in a matter-of-fact tone as he walked out of the bathroom, leaving Desh's body behind.

Nicky mechanically coded in...it took her a few minutes to realize what she had just witnessed.

She had just seen Jason killing a man! Strangling him to death! She had watched a man die while Jason coldly and mechanically wrapped a towel round his neck and suffocated him...

And the strangest part of all this was...it seemed completely normal. A fait accompli. Just 'another day in the office' kind of thing.

During their walk back to their motel, Nicky reflected that, logically speaking, there was scarcely any real cause for alarm. Jason was, or at any rate had been, an assassin after all! He was trained, conditioned to kill...they taught him how to do it, for Christ's sake!

And she herself had sent him out into the field to kill...had given him his targets and his instructions...had received his confirmations that he'd completed his assignments and forwarded them on to her superiors...their superiors.

So why was she so shocked about what had happened? When, if anything, she should have been the least surprised?

Perhaps there truly was a difference between handing a manila envelope to an assassin and watching him do the needful yourself. Or maybe the difference lay in compiling dossiers on 'terminated' individuals as opposed to seeing a suffocated corpse in the flesh, slowly sinking to the floor.

Maybe there was something a lot different about an attack dog when it was in its kennel, as opposed to when it was out on the prowl, tearing its prey to shreds...

Because, if there was such a difference, then what she had seen...what had happened...had just crossed her over some invisible line into a whole different territory...

And in this brave new world of killers and corpses and endless running...she honestly didn't know how long she would survive.