Author's Notes: An inversion of "shades of blue," the Vaughn angle, slightly skewed. Inspired by Wen's image of a woman eating a lemon on a bus, and by fragments jotted in a little black notebook which, until now, I had almost forgotten. Some references to "shades" but it can stand alone as it is a entirely different breed of monster.

Summary: Postcards from the journey to redemption.

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Jodhpur (1/2)

by darkstar
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(Postcard 1)

She isn't hungry, but that's irrelevant, she'll have to start eating again sometime so she stops at the tea stall by the side of the road. A torn beige canopy stretched, as if on the rack, by long thin poles and dark brown cords. One pull in the right spot and she could bring the whole joint down; that can be said about many things.

She drops three coins into the bowl beside the common table and slides her backpack around so that it rests on her hip, an easy angle for retrieving the tin bowl and cup she bought in the market. She fills the bowl with rice, sticky and bland and, by now, cold; and then pours tea from the tarnished silver pitcher into the cup. The scent of lukewarm spice. She drags a stool a small distance from the table, an unconscious sigh of relief when she is at last able to sit, her left leg hitched up on her right knee, balancing the cup. The rice disappears with businesslike efficiency, and to her surprise she keeps it down.

She keeps her back turned to the men she knows are looking at her. Desire? Maybe. More likely, it is curiosity, perhaps even suspicion. A woman, an American woman, traveling alone down the back roads of a dirty city to the bus stop. She can almost hear their derision: go back to your man, you Yankee whore, go to your home because this isn't it.

The usual.

Another sigh, a slight rise and fall of shoulderblades, the exhaled breath blowing her damp bangs out of her face. The heat in this city is a living creature: you had no choice but to embrace it, hold it tightly to your chest, or it devoured you. That's why, she theorizes, that's why they compare love to heat. Remember this. She wonders how many women in this city die of heatstroke every year.

Certainly all of this is unexpected, but sometimes the realization of that hits her all over again. The normal questions: what are you doing here, where are you going to go next, do you know what you've done, does Vaughn hate-- no, wait. She won't acknowledge that last question; she'll address the others instead:

/I am here because Noah was right about one thing, at least, this is a country for disappeared souls. They won't find me here, they won't even think to look. It's too poor, too dirty, too hot for a girl like me, that's what they'll think. I am going to the next city. Wherever that is. And the next, and the next. Until I reach the end./

A pause, another swallow of the bitter tea. Tiny dark grains stuck between her teeth from the bottom of the cup.

/Of course I know what I've done. Abandoned the mission for something formerly known as love, and in the process most likely earned a bounty the size of the national debt. Two months of bliss and then someone pulls the canopy strings, the entire joint comes down on my head. Another abandoning, but this time to what? Nothing. But I can't stop long enough to think about that, can't go back. I'll just have to hope a reason catches up with me along the way./

She stands up, crosses the yard to wash out her dishes using a hose near the building. As she puts them back into her bag, the last question drifts back to haunt her, bitter and rough as the tea grains over her tongue.

/Does Vaughn hate me?/

We'll see, she whispers, we'll see.

On the way to the bus stop, she finds a post office.

"How much to send a postcard to America?"

The man behind the country consults a grubby clipboard. "Seven American dollars for the postage."

"Here's twenty. You forget about this conversation and about the postcard." "Certainly, Madame." He grins: teeth the color of rotten ivory stained with ink. "Certainly."

Ignoring the epileptic convulsions of the metal fan, she scribbles onto the back of a postcard. Six words, one number.

Signed, S.

-------------------------------

(Postcard 2)

Moti Sweets: the decaying sign on the stone building underneath skeletal telephone wires. Exposed plumbing along the wall, the dislocated ribs of the walls, the metal orange and brown with rust. Don't drink the water. On the second story balcony, a shirtless man is hanging his t-shirt out to dry in the noon sun.

Impossible, he thinks. I must have read it wrong.

He pulls the postcard out of his shirt. Calcutta, it says on the front, in white script. The picture shows rain (ha), a shiny black and yellow taxicab, a man pulling a rickshaw down the street right beside it. Blue flowers by the side of the road. He flips it over, and reads the message for what is only the hundredth time, by now:

VAUGHN Jahveri Bazaar Moti Sweets Rm. 3

He enters the lower floor, which smells (in no particular order) of sugar cane, salt sweat, and chickens. The old woman behind the counter grunts at him dismissively until she notices he is an American; and then she hurries to offer her most humble aid to whatever he might need and would he like a candied banana?

"Have you seen this woman?"

He slides a photograph across the cracked wood, trying not to step on the scraggly hen pecking around his ankles. Jack gave him the photo, it's not an official picture. Nothing about this is official. If anyone finds out about this trip, he could end up mopping floors for the rest of his CIA career.

Which brings him to the question, again, of why he's here.

/It's not like you owe her, Vaughn, remember she was the one to walk away. Left you hold the entire freakin' mission in your lap like some lovestruck junior high kid with a crush on a college girl./

Shut up, he tells himself, I'm not here for us. I'm here to salvage the mission. If we can get her back before any more time goes by, we can at least save our asset.

The old woman is peering into the picture as if trying to read her fortune, or perhaps just the price of her information; now she's pulling her husband (equally old, equally chicken-scented) to the counter. The man wipes the sugar from his hands on his pants and picks up the photo.

"You wife?"

"Yes." A simple lie; it works best with these people. A husband tracking down a wayward bride, the oldest story in cities like this, one that will be met without questions.

"Very nice. A nice woman. But sad, I say to my wife, she is sick in the heart--"

"Yes. Very nice." He interrupts." Can you show me to her room?"

The couple exchange glances.

"She pay thirty-five American dollars for room. We say, no, too much, but she insist."

No sense wasting time bartering; he throws thirty-five dollars onto the counter, watches it disappear into the old woman's apron. The hen skitters out of his way as the man shows him to the stairs.

"Very nice. You wife very nice."

"You mentioned that. It isn't going to get you any more money."

Now he's alone in the hall, in front of her door.

He wipes the sweat from his temples with the back of his arm, but only succeeds in smearing the heat from one part of his body to another. She must have been out of her mind to come here, he says to himself. And then: she must have been brilliant. A needle in a big, hot, haystack.

So what will he say when she opens the door?

(Hi honey, I'm home. Miss me?)

or

(Really appreciated that goodbye note you never left. You know, the one that says "Dear Vaughn, don't worry about me, I'm not dead, just quitting.")

or

(I spent three weeks tearing the place apart looking for you, not knowing if you were dead or if the FBI had you, or if Sloane had found out. They told me they'd put me on administrative leave. I didn't care. They told me they'd put me in protective custody. I didn't care. Then Daddy showed up and told me his little girl had gone on extended vacation with James Bond.)

but he knows those are useless, the only thing he'll be able to say is

(Sydney, God, you're all right.)

Part of him wonders what he'll do when he sees Noah in the room with her, perhaps right beside her, hand wrapped around her waist or resting on her shoulder. But he'll be a gentleman about it, there will be no fistfights or challenging of duels.

Enough of the stalling. He knocks.

No answer.

He knocks again.

The sound dissolves into the wet heat of the hallway. This time he opens the door; expecting, he doesn't know, the making of love, or the sound of a shower, or even blood stains and a body count. What he finds is unexpected: emptiness. Vacancy. A neatly made bed, the indigo blankets worn but clean; a window with dark green shutters opening to a small balcony. The emptiness spills into the street outside, ringing hollow against the sounds of cars and bicycles and merchants.

Despite himself, his first feeling is of that is abandonment. She's left me again; no, wait, that's not true. I never had her to keep in the first place. Then comes the anger, swelling under the heat as a bloated mushroom.

/She dragged me out to the middle of India with her cryptic little postcard, never mind the risk to my job or my life if our respective companies found out....then she doesn't bother to show./

A slammed door. A suitcase thrown onto the bed, cracking open, spilling his t-shirts, underwear, and deodorant onto the floor. He bends to pick them up, a reflexive gesture, and that's when his hand hits the book.

A paperback, thick as three fingers stacked on top of one another, left partly under the bed. (On the cover, a brunette in a black evening dress, low cut in the back. Blood red lips.) The Blind Assassin. His first impulse, however much it reverts to a three-year-old, is to throw the book out into the street for the cows to trample. He is tired of paper clues, the postcards and photographs and symbolic books that she's read and flaunts like insults in his face. He wants hard evidence: he wants her voice. More specifically, he wants to hear her forming her lips around the hard-soft-hard edges of apologies, or even a plea for help. Vaughn, he left me, Vaughn I'm so sorry, Vaughn, I need your help. He anticipates his refusal: Nice to know, kid, but you're on your own. We're by the books now, haven't you heard?

All of which he knows he will never say. He knows because, despite himself, her book is in his hands and his fingers are turning the pages as a man caught in a craving. Looking for a scrap of paper, a pencil mark. At the back of the book he finds her message for him. Hotel stationery, taped onto the pages, a delicate creamy blue, expensive paper. The Nile Hilton.

/Looks like Bond's taking care of his woman./

He reads the words. Only because it's the job. Of course.

***

Vaughn:

So if you're reading this, I have a chance. Guess you got the postcard. I guess you think it's part of some grand master plan Noah and I have concocted, a scheme to mess with your head or lead you on ghost chases. Two corrections to that idea: there is no master plan.

And there is no Noah.

You have these rights concerning your thoughts of me: hatred, betrayal, suspicion, condemnation, disgust. Exercise them as you will, only leave me one grace. I want back in. Make that happen and then you can leave me to work out my own penance however it falls.

Look, I'm taking too long with this and I can't do that. I can't stop yet, not even to wait for you, they could be one step behind me. There's a place we can meet, but we can't go there directly. We'll need diversions. We've got to move carefully, they could be right on my back and I wouldn't know it until it was too late. I'm running blind, Vaughn, running to ground. This is the country to do it. You'll know where I'm going if you read the book.

Tell my father this is not his fault. He warned me.

S.

PS

Be sure to check the dresser for jumping spiders; they crawl in here to get out of the heat. I used the bug spray on them and it seemed to work quite nicely.

***

The dresser. Right. He pulls open the top drawer, waiting for the aforementioned spiders, but finds only cobwebs. The second drawer: more cobwebs, and a broken razor. The third drawer: a generic can of bug spray. On impulse, he opens it and tests it by squirting it against the wall. Definitely bug spray. But then he tries the bottom: it's loose. He unscrews it and a rolled up piece of glossy paper falls into his hands. Another postcard.

A parasailer with a huge silk parachute of green and blue and orange floats to a landing on a dirt road in a wet, dark valley. The trees seem soaked to the bone; he envies this. On the front, in orange block letters, it reads VARANSI.

On the back, the same abbreviated message.

VAUGHN Page 321

He opens the book, flips the pages. 319, 320, 321. A thin scraping of pencil has underlined three words. Bus. Station. Sink.

Here's his logic: he has no obligation to follow her across the continent, merely on her word that she'll tell him (maybe, someday, eventually) where she's going. He could pack up, go home to air conditioning and a hockey game-- oh for a court of ice right now-- and leave her to her rice and stale tea and the footsteps she hears so closely after her own. But he won't.

He closes his suitcase, the book inside for safe keeping, but leaves the postcard in his pocket. Inadvertently leaving it next to his heart.

The Mission, he tells himself, we must complete the Mission.

-------------------------------

The bus station at dawn is no different from the bus station at night. Grimy, red-eyed with smoke and exhaust, groaning with the weight of its vehicles, with weariness, protesting moving parts. A description not far removed from herself.

She walks into the bathroom that is the color of old mustard and locks the door behind her. Francie always said lock the door, girl, you never know who's lurking in these stations. It was a train then, now it's a bus, but she supposes the principles hold true.

The light bulb over the sink gasps for life and with each shudder the light flickers, flickers, flickers. Her reflection trembles with the wavering glow. Or at least that part of her reflection she can see in the mirror, which is more like a cracked piece of discarded windshield. There's graffiti on the tile, red and black and hot pink. Make Love Not War-- V., '67.

You idiot, she whispers, don't you know? There's no difference. Both shoot you down, both leave casualties.

Her eyes are swollen on the edges, she hasn't sleep in three days and last night she cried. For the first time since she came to India, she sat down on the steps and released the dam that had been building, building, building. Then came the monsoon, the flood. She's sure she made a fool of herself. An old woman with three goats patted her on the head, offered her half of an orange. She accepted, ate it without thinking about the taste, although now she remembers how the sweet sticky juice ran down her chin and mixed with the salt of the tears on her lip.

She opens her backpack, Army Issue, and her fingers clench a dull silver gleam. Scissors. She sets them on the counter and turns on the water, wetting her hands then combing the moisture through her hair. She's learned this is how you breathe, in the heat, through a second skin of moisture. Cold showers, if possible, dressing while wet to trap the water against your skin.

Her hair as grown long, past her shoulders, for reasons that are now unclear. Before, it was simple. He said he liked it long, said it gave her back the glow. You're beautiful, he said, you're starlight in the palm.

Three days later he told her they were defecting to the other side, for protection, as he called it. She called it treason. He called it survival. She said choose, it's me or survival. I can't spend my life hiding in the dark, he told her. I can't love you if I'm dead.

So that's how they ended things. Messily. On the way to the airport she bled all over herself, the worst kind of internal hemorrhage, the kind that comes without blows.

Now she's stitched the old wounds together, but it still aches, aches, aches. That's why the hair has to go. She's planning on a blunt cut, up to the chin. Razor straight edges. And there's also a more practical reason. When she left the room she'd rented to head to the bus station, three men in a black and yellow taxi cab followed her for three blocks. She lost them in a camel market, but they'll find her again, eventually. It's only a matter of time now.

The hair cut is a token resistance. Not much else she can do. No more wigs, no more false identities, no more fancy disguises to pull from. There is, at least, one thing they might not expect. She pulls the sari from her bag, rubs the cloth between her fingers. It's a deep, saffron yellow, matching the embroidery on the orange shawl that she'll use to hide her head and face on the bus. When push comes to shove, Daddy told her, go native.

She strips of her American clothes, folds them in a heap in the corner. She'll sell them later, cheap. Before she wraps herself in the sari, she opens a bag of coffee grains and begins to rub them vigorously into her skin. They say the brown will last a week, if done right. Maybe it will be long enough, maybe it won't. A part of her knows that these are merely pennies spent to buy a little time: a day, two days, an hour, a week. Anything longer is too much of an investment, she lacks the cash.

She returns her gaze to the mirror, closes her eyes. Michael, oh Michael, what have I done to you? (she's fallen into his name, recently, quite by accident, because it's easier. She betrayed Vaughn. She's done nothing to Michael.) Have I killed you in this? Have I killed both of us?

The honorable thing would be to let him go. Shred the postcard she's taped underneath the sink, replace it with another, less selfish method. They're onto me, go home. Abandon ship, save yourself.

So she isn't honorable.

She wraps the shawl around her face, covering the nose and mouth and cheeks up to the bone under her eyes. No one recognizes her, not even the old woman with the goats, and she counts it a small triumph. Take that, Sloane, I've got something left to fight with. While they're loading the bus, she sells her old clothes to a fruit vendor in exchange for three lemons and a bag of raisins. And one flower, the fire red petals already wilting in her hand in the morning heat.

Twenty-five minutes later, the bus groans its way down the road, crossing a train track. A gray sky, a mud brick town at the horizon, a small white metal building to the left. A man in brown shorts walks barefoot down the tracks, his shirt slung over his shoulder. How mundane his life must be, she thinks, palm spread flat against the dirty windowpane, how boring.

How she desires it. Maybe that's what this was all about in the first place. Normalcy.

/I can't love you if I'm dead, he said. As if one would automatically lead to the other./

She bites into the lemon, through the peel, sucking the juice and pulp across her tongue, into her throat. She uses the bitterness as an excuse for the blur of tears that she won't let fall, not this time. They hover around her eyes, cataracts that erase the horizon, the town, the man, the sky, the world.

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(Postcard 3-4)

The ride to Varansi Station is not something his mind will want to remember when he gets off the bus, but he suspects that other parts of his body won't let him forget. The ache in his head from the constant barrage of sound: the omni-present livestock, the squalling brakes and babies, the guttural roar of the engine. The cramping in his legs from sharing the seat with a woman and her birdcage; the pain in his back from spending one night and one day rattling against the wall. Sleeping in snatches.

As a last resort, he turns to the book. At first he skips the words, examines the pages instead: the dog-ears, the notes handwritten into the margin, a sort of diary. Places she went, dreams she dreamed, a fragment here on how she slept by open windows on steamed nights, a passage there about the man she slept by the window with.

In the back, underneath her stationery message, he uncovers hidden text. Not her handwriting; it must be Noah's. Would she want him to read it? Doesn't matter now, she gave him the book, didn't she? The message is brief, obscure, consisting mostly of a fragment from a poet he's never read. What a surprise. It's the ending that catches him off guard:

*** It ends here, Sydney. They take from us, and they take from us, and then just when we've somehow found the guts to get back on our feet, they take some more. So I haven't got much left to lose, now, but there's one thing I'm not going to let them control. You.

I never read this book, after you left. But I looked through it, once, and I remember a certain line between the two lovers.

/He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. Right, the usual choices./

We've gotten the throat cutting out of the way, now let's try the love.

***

I could have never said it like this, he thinks, I could never have been that honest. And then: why not?

She really loved him, he realizes, sick to his stomach with more than the unwashed bodies around him, with more than his own need of a shower. She loved that man. It's all over the pages, like a footprint, like a faint residual glow in the air.

He remembers her letter. /And there is no Noah./

You fool. (He addresses the epitaph to the man he's never seen.) You blind stupid fool. You had her right in your hands and you dropped her. You cut her throat.

At the next bus station, underneath a cracked sink, he finds her next postcard. White sand dunes by the river, before dawn, two boys perched on the top looking into the water. A boat filled with pilgrims drifts toward the shore, and a woman in a white sari and shawl stands on the prow. Impossible to see her face. Green lettering on the front: Asra. On the back, a page number: 401. He does his research, comes back with the next rendezvous.

Ahmedabad Flea Market. The Elephant Room.

He stops briefly at a fruit vendor to purchase two oranges before buying his ticket for the bus.

Day, night, day, he's stopped counting by now. He eats his second orange the morning they arrive at the Asra station, drops the peels on top of the small pile of lemon peels that was there when he took his seat. They must have been potent lemons, he can still smell their bitterness. By now he's read all of her notes in the book, surprised, at the end, when his name began to appear. Michael, Michael, Michael. Just his name, etched in different places, sometimes in smooth curling script, sometimes in block letters. As if she was attempting to conjure him up through the pages by repetition.

The station is a good thirty miles from the city itself; he buys a ride with a delivery truck but it is still noon before he reaches the flea market. He is amazed at the disorder. A table of coconuts, two lemons, and a kerosene lantern under a tattered banner: Asra Bazaar. A door and its frame are propped against a stack of other furniture prothestics: pieces of cabinets, halves of tables, and a lawn chair, its blue-white awning peeling like a sunburn. A mirror, full length, sits close to the door.

He approaches a man who is selling pet fish that swim in empty liquor bottles, also he sells American cigarettes, very good. The eight-year-old boy attending the cart smokes with the cocky assurance of a kid who knows he's doing something wrong and getting away with it. The boy has a New York Knicks t-shirt, a sign of prosperity.

He shows them the picture.

"No, we not seen the pretty one, such a pretty one, but you want a fish? Very good fish, live very long..."

"Where is the Elephant Room?"

"Near here, but very hard to find. Easy for American to get lost." The man pats the boy on the head. "Munori take you, for only ten American dollars. Yes, good deal. He take quickly."

He pays the man, declines a third offer for a pet fish, and follows the boy down the streets to another of the anonymous, bland, tea stalls he has grown accustomed to visiting. This particular one has the worst tea of the entire trip, but it does rent rooms upstairs-- complete with a shower and toilet. The owner of the joint isn't surprised to see him. (She said you come.)

At one time he would have thrilled at the thought that she was so close, that she'd left a place for him, but by now any thrill has been beat out of him by the road. He doesn't expect to find her waiting for him. He doesn't have the energy for expectations; he just wants a shower and a decent night's sleep. He's been in India two weeks and has slept in an actual bed for less then four days. He's worn threadbare, exhausted. He's running out of clean underwear.

He opens the door, falls across the bed, which creaks under his weight as if threatening collapse. Let it. He'll sleep on a mattress and bare boards if he has too. But right then, right before he gives in to the united protest of every muscle and bone in his body, he notices the table beside the bed.

A small black bowl, filled with raisins. On top of the raisins, the dried petals of a red flower, a dark bright red as newly lit fire. A postcard underneath the bowl, a picture of another red flower. Delhi, it says, in white pointed letters, like the tips of swords. Beside them, a torn piece of napkin with one word scratched across it in pencil.

Michael.

When he sleeps, he does not dream of The Mission.

-------------------------------

She stands under the shower, face up into water so cold she gasps for breath, but not only from the water. The cold brings out the bruises on her wrists, her elbows, her ribs, hardening them into little blue-green-purple knots of flesh and bone. Her knees are shaking, she can't keep herself straight up, she braces herself by pressing her arms against the sides of the stall. Even then, she isn't sure how much longer she can stay on her feet, she can see her elbows trembling.

The coffee trick didn't work, or it didn't work well enough. Two days of sweat and heat later, it disappeared and she was white again and the men who stopped her in the alley knew it. Three men, big, ugly, with brass knuckles. A quick beating, to calm her down, then it was into the back of the truck. But they didn't know her, no one had told them she was desperate.

She got a hold of a gun. She left the bodies in the truck.

So what does she have to go on? They're freelancers, not agency boys, they like the color of blood and bruised flesh, they're not too bright but big enough to make up for it. Do they know where she's going? Impossible. It was a secret, Noah's secret he shared with her. Even if they took him down, he'd never crack. She believes this. Do they know where her room is? Probably not, they would have hit it already. It would have been easier to take her in the room than try to hunt her down on the streets. Still, it's a gamble. She should change rooms, but she can't. Vaughn's on his way.

Her elbows lock suddenly. Vaughn. Coming here. They might be waiting...

Suddenly she finds herself in a heap on the floor of the stall, the water beating down onto her shoulders, pounding against her skull.

/Breathe, Sydney. Breathe. You took them out. They would have come already if they knew. They would have come./

She beats her fist against the wall, Michael, Michael, she whispers, into the water, I don't have any choice. I have to keep going. I can't stop now, I'm so close. I'm just two cities away and then we'll see each other again and it will be over.

There's still a part of her, a part of shadows and treason, that hopes it won't be him at all but, somehow, that it will be Noah. She has no illusions, she'd forgive him everything, she'd be clay in his hands, he could mold the truth into anything he wanted to and she'd believe it. That's what love is, remember, it's that devouring heat. All the cold showers and rainstorms and wet clothes in the world can't shake it from your skin, once it has you.

She would cry again, under the camouflage of the shower, but she can't. Every tear has already been wrung out of her body, she feels that she's been left draped on the clothesline, limp. Bewildered. Wasted love rising from her body like steam.

She turns off the shower, at length, to hear another unexpected sound: the tap-tap-tap-tap of rain on the tin roof, a sound of barely contained fury. A downpour. She hungers for the moisture, more water, more water, every pore of her body cries out for it. Wash the heat from me, wash the heat away. She wraps the sari haphazardly around her body, leaves the bathroom, crosses the room, to the window. Her fingers run down the smooth spines of the dark emerald green shutters and she can feel the wind through the cracks.

She throws the shutters open and steps onto the street. Bare feet, bare arms, bare head, no disguises now. The wet silk sticks to her body, a double layer of skin to hide the bruises, a skin that can't feel heat but absorbs only water. She tilts her face back until she feels the drops pounding, hard, insistent, against the hollow of her throat. Two-syllable rain drops. No-ah. No-ah. No-ah. Mich-ael. Mich-ael. Mich-ael.

(I can't spend my life hiding in the dark.)

"I am only as dark as you make me."

She whispers.

"You are only as dark as I make you."

She whispers.

(I can't love you if I'm dead.)

"I am only as dead as you make me."

She whispers.

"You are only as dead as you make me."

/I am only deadasyoudarkas youonly love heatdarkdead as you only lovedeaddark love like wet silk I am only you/

She stands underneath the belly of the thunderstorm and stares straight up.