Rating: PG

Ship: J/I

Spoilers/Timeline: None, really. Say general S3.

Archive: CM, anyone else drop me a line.

Disclaimer: Jack, Irina, and Sydney belong to JJ Abrams and his various legal entities, not me.  Don't sue.

AN: Written for SD-1 October challenge.  Requirements: character death(!), costumes, and the included quotation by Dylan Thomas.

Summary: "She's marked him, the way she always has, the way she always will."

******

In his dreams, she wears solid black and lets her loose hair brush his skin.  She speaks to him in cryptic sentences and smiles beneath his lips, laughing against his skin.  In reality, she wears green and gray and pulls her hair back tight, beneath a blonde wig, and she levels a gun at his head when he rounds the corner. 

Then she's up against him, hands slipping beneath the bulletproof vest, slamming him into the wall.  His breath hitches and hers runs rough before she kisses him, and after, hands still beneath his vest, tendrils of the stiff blonde wig sticking to his neck. 

She's still smiling as she backs away, pulling his gun from his belt, leaving a small computer disc in its place.  She turns on her heel and fires two shots through the flat-pane window; she lets his gun clatter to the tile as she disappears down the outside wall.

He lets his head scrape back against the rough pillar and feels the sting of sharp glass where it cut through the fabric, just above his ankles.  It's some strange obsession she has, marking him this way. 

In his dreams, it's conscious, a choice to make him remember, to leave some part of herself behind.  In reality, it's accidental, the byproduct of two people too rushed with one another, of quick meetings in the dead of night.

******

In his memory, she's more herself, her voice more harsh and her accent more prominent.  When she laughs, it's deep and throaty, and when she whispers, her lips tickle his ears. 

In reality, his cell phone trills late at night, and he answers it half-asleep. She's speaking quickly, quietly, half a world away.  She disconnects without saying goodbye, and he lies awake long after her voice dies away.

******

She trails her fingers down his leg beneath a metal table heating in the sun, water droplets running in rivulets down their water glasses and dripping down onto their clothing; sun reflecting off the surface of the pool.

The hotel lies on the coast of a country without extradition, carved into a mountainside by the sea.  The sun bounces off the water early every morning, and the pool and the tables and the cool stucco walls glow crimson red.

He spends a week there in late November, a city on the other side of the world, where the seasons turn upside down.  His wingtips grind dry leaves beneath him as he leaves, and again when he returns, but for this week he lives beside the ocean and calls himself by a different name. 

He tells himself every night he will not come to her, and so she comes to him, draws him out, makes him remember.  He wakes every morning to brown hair trailed across his pillow; he sleeps with one hand splayed out across her back, where he can feel her breathe.

And when he wakes one morning with no breath beneath his hand, no hair beneath his cheek, he knows why she has gone; he knows she will not tell him where.  So he returns to his life behind the blank walls of a blank building, where the brown leaves crumple beneath his feet.

******

He finds her in a city at the edge of civilization, wrapped in brightly colored silk, sandaled feet scuffing through the blowing dust.  Cracks like spiderwebs cross the ground, so deep you can reach four fingers between the shingles of dirt and never touch earth.  He bends with both knees on the caked dirt and plunges his fingers in, feeling a dry, baking wind over bare, baking earth.  She kisses his lips, though they are dry and cracked as the ground, and she pours cool water over his head, running down his shoulders and onto the parched earth.  Her silk skirts whip around him and stick to his skin, wet and thick.  They bleed purple and red onto his shirt, onto his skin, and hours after he leaves the colors still stain him. 

She's marked him, the way she always has, the way she always will.

*******

He's paid for these rendezvous before, and he will pay again.  Sometimes he makes atonement with scotch; he's made it twice in solitary, six times in interrogation, and far more often through information.  When the intel is good, no one looks too closely, and her intel is the best. 

But their eyes dart to one side when he enters the room, and for a moment he wonders if they know, wonders if they can read every mark on his skin.

She says she'll leave Rambaldi behind, that she's moved beyond the foolish quest.  He smiles, and nods his head, and trails four fingers through her hair.  He does not say he believes her, because he knows better.  Because he knows what he will not tell her: that he will come to her either way. 

(Because he knows she has marked him; knows he cannot get away.)