Archive of Our Own

He doesn’t go to M’s funeral.

He knows she wouldn’t have liked it. M was never one for fuss – too much noise, too many important people in one place, too much of a security risk. She would have been frustrated with the speeches made by people who didn’t know her. Frustrated with death. A long time ago, before he knew her properly, he had not been able to imagine her dying at all: could only imagine her staring death down with those hard blue eyes, snapping at it until it fell into order behind her.

Funerals are a personal thing, and M disliked anything personal. She disliked being studied. She preferred people to take her on face value – to accept without question the image of her that she presented.

To trust, absolutely, in her. To have no doubts.

So he doesn’t go to M’s funeral, because it feels dishonourable. He has already said goodbye to her in the same place where he once said goodbye to his parents. He puts the bulldog she left him on a table in the foyer; it is the last thing he sees before he goes out, and the first thing he sees when he comes back home.

--

“I have been informed,” Q says to him, clipped and prim, “that you did not pass your last physical.”

He doesn’t move from where he’s standing – somewhere to the left of Q’s bench-top, where he can just see 008 on the screen moving through the ventilation system of a building in Karakas.

“You can’t shoot like you used to,” Q says.

“A bullet in the chest will do that to somebody, I’ve heard.”

“It’s been at least six months.” Q types some command and a light in the corner of the screen, red before, flickers happily to green. “Physically speaking, you should have recovered your aim by now. Or at least adjusted to the restrictions caused by the damage.”

“Mmm.”

Q looks up. “You’re uncomfortable about this topic.”

“I’ve been cleared for active duty. If there is anything you find unsatisfactory about that, feel free to take it up with M. It was his decision.”

“I didn’t say I found it unsatisfactory,” Q points out. “I just said that you were uncomfortable.”

He stands there and says nothing.

“Well,” Q says after a moment. “I suppose whether or not you die in the field has nothing to do with me. I’m just here to provide you with the tools to postpone that event for as long as possible.”

“I’m glad we’ve finally sorted that out,” he says, as evenly as he can.

Q nods. “I’m currently busy with 008. Come back in half an hour and I’ll have something for you.”

He goes out in silence. His fingers are flexing for the grip of a gun, for the soothing reassurance of a trigger underneath his fingertip. Something within him is quietly furious – but something else, buried deeper, as deep as it can get within his bones, is as glacially cold as it was on the day that Vesper died.

--

He has never paid much attention to Q. In his mind he’s filed Q away as some indulgence of M’s – the past M, that is – perhaps she saw something of her son in him. Or her husband.

As much as M tried not to be, she always was sentimental.

--

The woman is a drug lord’s mistress; she is married to a banker, who is at the moment overseas, and when he lights her cigarette for her the smoke seems to leak right out of her body.

“I know who you are,” she says, no seduction in her tone. “I know what you want.”

He gives her his most charming smile. “Then you know more than me already.”

“You want to kill Matthias. Am I correct?”

He ponders for a moment whether or not to lie. But it is only for a moment. “Yes.”

She watches him. This woman is different to all the others – the nameless, faceless, numberless others – her gaze is sharp and assessing, and when she flicks the ash from her cigarette down onto the table she looks almost indelicate.

“I have two children,” she says. “A boy. Only eight. And a girl, she is now four.”

He keeps smiling at her. He cannot imagine what she is trying to get at.

“I want to be given assurances. Once Matthias is dead, and once it becomes common knowledge that I have helped you kill him, people will come after me. They will not hesitate. Matthias has many friends.”

“You and your children can be given protection.”

“I need to be sure of it before I can help you.”

“You have my word that when the time comes,” he tells her, “you and your family will be kept safe. I can do nothing better than that.”

For a long while she considers him. She runs her dark eyes over his face, over the neat lines of his tailored suit, over his hands. You can see her thinking: you are nothing more than a killer. Your word counts for nothing.

“I will help you,” she says at last, and stubs out the cigarette.

Her apartment goes up in flames two days later. She and her children are still inside it. She is collateral damage; she is simply a name that he mentions in his field report.

“Excellent job, as always,” M says.

--

Vesper still comes to him, if he is not careful enough to shut her out.

She is there with the slow, soft hook of her smile. Looking up at him from underneath her lashes, she is daring him to do something – he is not sure what. She is there as he first saw her, beautiful but not dazzlingly so, not the kind of woman to turn heads on the street; but fierce, unbreakable, so that when you look at her you feel as if you are being tested. With that smooth and sardonic lift of her lip, she is challenging you. She is questioning what you believe.

He can remember every inch of her. In his dreams he is trailing his fingers, softly, down her spine. He is laying his head down upon her breast. He is listening to her heartbeat, surprised to find that it matches his own. She is whispering his name, though inside of these dreams there is never any sound; but these are things that he knows so well that they are a part of him already. He knows she is already his.

When he died in Istanbul, he felt her hand on his wrist. And he was glad.

--

“I want you to point this at my head and shoot me,” Q says.

He looks down at the gun. Then he looks back up at Q, who is wearing a bored expression.

“You’re not being serious,” he says.

“I’m being quite serious. I want you to aim for me, you understand? Because given your aim, or current lack of it, I’ll be quite safe. It’s the people standing on either side of me who are in immediate danger.” Q picks up the gun, weighs it archly in one hand, then holds it out to him. “Well, 007? Go on, then.”

Everybody in Q branch is watching him. Nobody has typed a single line of code since he stepped into this room. He takes the gun from Q and puts it back down on the desk.

“No,” he says.

“Oh for God’s sake, it doesn’t have any bullets.”

“That isn’t the point. You are my quartermaster, you are not my – ”

“It is my responsibility to ensure that you don’t waste the department’s resources,” Q says. “And if you can’t shoot straight, you’re throwing perfectly good ammunition away down the drain.”

He’s tired of this. He takes the gun from the table. He lifts it, flicks the safety off, points it at Q’s nose.

His hand is perfectly steady. The gun barrel doesn’t shake at all. The old, familiar chill has descended over him; the one which has allowed him to gut a man with a machete before, or garrotte one to death with a telephone cord.

It is a feeling which has not been present ever since Moneypenny killed him.

“Bang, you’re dead,” he says, sardonic. Then he throws the gun back onto the desk. “Satisfied?”

Q’s mouth twitches at him. “Very.”

Q hooks a finger into the trigger guard and picks the gun up. Ejects the magazine. Shows him the two neat rows of bullets: eight in all and packed within their cartridges, gleaming, deadly.

--

Moneypenny, frowning down at his newest stack of paperwork. “Did you even read this first, 007?”

He is jittery. Paperwork always makes him nauseous; the act of reflecting, on looking back on everything that he has done and not done.

“Of course I read it,” he says, which means, of course I didn’t.

“Your spelling is atrocious.”

He fingers the inside of his trouser pocket. “Perhaps I was hoping you’d give me some spelling lessons.”

She hikes a brow.

He is tired. If he is honest with himself, these past few assignments have worn him out. Every morning he is confronted with the terrifying prospect of being made redundant. He is not as young as he used to be; his back is a patchwork of slashed and puckered scars; in the mirror he is growing slowly silver, and the blue of his eyes are beginning to look fragmented and chipped.

“I think you need some leave, 007,” Moneypenny says.

“I don’t.” He smiles at her. “I’m fine.”

“Q tells me that you can’t fire a gun properly unless you think it’s empty.”

“Then you shouldn’t listen to everything Q says.”

Her eyes drop to his shirt. It is as if she is hoping to look straight through the fabric, to the scar that she dealt him all those months ago. “James. This problem isn’t just going to go away.”

“Nobody said it was a problem.”

“I really think you should take some leave. Two weeks. Go somewhere where you can get some rest.”

“If I need to rest, I go home,” he tells her honestly. “Moneypenny, I don’t need you to worry about me.”

“Well, somebody has to.”

In Macau, he’d ghosted his fingers over her blouse. Up close her scent had been fragrant, earthy, like good soil after a heavy bout of rain, like a place where things could put out fresh roots and grow.

He’d wanted her – thought that she’d taste as warm as sunshine on clay.

“Q means for the best, you know,” she says.

--

When he fell into the water in Istanbul, the currents rushed at him.

They caught great handfuls of his jacket and weighed him down. They swallowed him whole. He heard the roar of the waterfall and then, after he’d plunged down it, he heard nothing. He was at one with the water. He no longer felt as if he needed to battle it – he let it take him, carry him, drown him.

Thirty years ago, his parents died this way. They drove off the road and ended up in a river. Two days later, they pulled the hulking shape of the car out of the murk, dragged it back to shore.

In the dusty corners of the house they’d left behind, while he was still a child, demons reached for him. Their cold and skeletal hands rose up from the floorboards. Their shoulders were strung with kelp, and crabs scuttled out of their toothless, gumless mouths; their nails were the colour of sea grit, their skin the texture of sand, and their laughter stung as sharp as salt. Sometimes they wore the face of his mother, sometimes his father. And then sometimes they wore no face at all: they grinned at him, nightmarish, silently mocking, and he saw himself.

--

Q shows up one evening on his doorstep with a briefcase under one arm.

“You are going to let me in, 007,” Q says calmly into the intercom. “Or else I am going to hack into your apartment’s security system, and I’m going to turn the alarm on, and then I’m going to leave it on until you open the door.”

He sighs and opens the door.

Q steps into his apartment with the air of a pianist stepping onstage. There is an elegance to Q, a self-presumption, a confidence that manifests itself in the clean and efficient lines of his limbs.

Q crouches and places the briefcase on the floor. “I hope I haven’t interrupted your dinner.”

“What the bloody hell are you doing here,” he says.

“I’m not helping you, if that’s why you’re concerned,” Q says. The briefcase clicks open and Q bends down. “I know how you double-oh agents are allergic to help. Here, take this.”

He looks at the gun Q is holding out. “I’m not playing this game with you again, Q.”

“It’s not a game. Take it.”

He doesn’t move an inch.

Q swats at his pant-leg with the barrel. “Take it, or I’ll shoot something. Perhaps that expensive-looking vase over there.”

“Do you even know how to shoot?”

“Take the gun, 007, or else you’re going to find out. Hurry up.”

He takes the gun. It’s a Walther PPK, almost an exact replica of the one a Komodo dragon in Macau consumed about four months ago. Four lights wink to green when he wraps his palm around the grip.

Q straightens. “That one’s loaded, if you’re in the mood to check.” He does, and it is. “Alright. Now. Point it at me.”

“Q,” he says.

“Do it, 007.”

He huffs out a laugh. “What is this, Q? Are you trying to train me? You should understand that – ”

“No, you listen to me,” Q interrupts, abruptly snappish. “I’m not here to waste anybody’s time. I don’t know what your problems are and to be frank, at the moment, I really don’t care. The point is that you’re a liability if you can’t shoot in a straight line. I read your report and if you’d shot Silva under Westminster Station then M would still be alive. Since you’re one of my agents, and I have to sit there watching you get shot at on a regular basis, I’d rather just get through this now so that I can tell myself at a later date that I tried my best.” Q takes his wrist, wrenches his arm up roughly. “Now shut up and just do what I tell you to do and we might actually get somewhere.”

He can already feel the tremble in his hand. “Q, this is not a good idea.”

“I’m young enough to be allowed a few terrible ideas,” Q says. “Point the gun at me.”

“I can’t.”

“Try,” Q says.

He tries. But the ghost of who he used to be won’t let him. James Bond died, shot on a bridge in Istanbul six months ago and drowned; he takes his finger off of the trigger.

“If I shoot you,” he says, “M is going to take me apart with a pair of scissors.”

“I didn’t ask you to shoot me, 007,” Q says. “I asked you to point a loaded gun at me.”

“Q, I just can’t do it.”

Q wraps long fingers around his hand. Slowly, with a steady deliberation, Q guides the barrel of the gun so that it moves from Q’s forehead down past his cheek; past Q’s jawline; into the private crook of his neck; and then even further down, nudging the collar of Q’s shirt as it travels, until it’s pointed at the spot right over Q’s heart.

Q is watching him, unblinking, and for a moment the breath stops in his throat.

Then he’s jerking the gun away. “I appreciate the sentiment, Q, but it just doesn’t work – ”

Q kisses him.

His body responds immediately. His lips part and he’s licking into Q’s mouth, forcing him back, back, until Q’s body thuds heavily against the nearest wall. Q is slender but unyielding beneath him, hips bucking erratically; he makes a move to drop the gun to get a better grip on Q’s waist but Q stops him, fingers closing tightly over his wrist, holding him there.

“No,” Q says, breath coming fast. Q’s dark eyes are narrowed dangerously. “Don’t you dare.”

He bites Q’s mouth. “It’s preventing me from giving you my full attention.”

“Is it?”

He watches as Q’s fingers reel him in. As Q presses an open-mouthed kiss to the side of the barrel, the sly, coy hint of a flick of Q’s tongue. He crushes his body forward, suddenly and strangely unaware of what he’s doing; wants only for this to be over, this slow unmooring of who he is.

“You’re not dead, 007,” Q hisses into his neck. “You’re not dead.”

He slants his mouth over Q’s because he doesn’t want to hear that. Some part of him can’t bear it. He knows that, if he listens to it for long enough, he’ll start to believe it.

--

There is a secret, buried part of him that has not seen the sun for a very long time.

A quiet knuckle of stony ground; a dark crack in the earth at the bottom of the ocean, where there is no light.

On cold and rainy days his scars still ache. Vesper’s weight, so warm and familiar, drapes itself over his bones. What he’d said to Moneypenny – fieldwork’s not for everyone – he’d meant it: because out in the field, anything can happen. If you’re not prepared for it, you’ll be surprised one night by a ghost you thought you’d put down years ago. A girl will look at you from across a room and you will think it is somebody else.

“Stop thinking,” Q whispers into his shoulder. “Go to sleep.”

He wants to. But M is there in the shadows; her expression tells him that he has disappointed her.

--

In the morning he watches as Q navigates around the living room reclaiming his clothes.

Q’s face is carefully shut-off. The dark eyes are neutral. For six seconds, and he counts each one, Q stands there beating the non-existent dust off of a jacket.

“Here,” he says. He’s holding the Walther – Q gives him a sideways look. “This is yours.”

“Keep it. It’s programmed to you. If I try to fire it, it’ll blow a hole in my head.”

He blinks. “Reverse-firing mechanism?”

“Yes.”

He thinks, again, that he is being left behind. Q had asked him once about the inevitability of time; slowly, unstoppably, he is becoming a relic. One of these days he will wake and the single thing that keeps him going will no longer be available to him. His muscles will not pull in the way he wants them too. His reflexes will fail.

Q steps closer, absently pushing his glasses back up. “Tell me what you are thinking about.”

“I’m thinking about the day we met.”

“Oh?”

He looks at Q and says, without thinking, “You are so young.”

Q stiffens. Hostility goes into that slender spine. “I’ve told you already, 007, age is no – ”

“It’s a good thing, Q,” he finds himself saying. “You shouldn’t be so defensive about it. It’s not very often that somebody your age becomes a quartermaster. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before.”

“It hasn’t,” Q says immediately. “I’ve checked.”

“So you’re the first,” he says.

Q’s clever eyes search him. Q is thorough about it, taking his time, not rushing. They are now standing so close that if he wanted to, he could breathe in and it would be Q’s breath; he could concentrate and the beat of the air would be Q’s pulse.

“We still need you, 007,” Q says at last. “Despite what I said before – whether you can shoot straight or not – the fact is, we still need you. You’re still the best we have.”

“One of these days, I won’t be,” he says.

“Maybe,” Q says. Q’s hand comes up – rests at the junction between his shoulder and his neck, dipping lazily to trail at the hollow of his throat. “But there’s no need to get ahead of yourself. I’m certain we still have several years together. As partners. Nobody is holding us back, except perhaps you.”

He relaxes into the warmth of Q’s palm. “I’m not holding us back.”

“Aren’t you?”

Vesper trails a fingertip over his arm and he says nothing.

“You need to let them go, 007,” Q murmurs quietly. “They’re buried now. They’re nothing more than ghosts. They can’t hurt you. They shouldn’t be able to hurt you.”

“No,” he agrees, soft. “They shouldn’t be able to hurt. I know.”

Q smells like tea and cotton, a slight hint of gunpowder, the brief shock of electricity. Warm and familiar.

One of these days, when the sunlight streams in through the window, Vesper will slip away from him. She will dissolve. Her smile will be the smile on a photograph that he doesn’t have. M will fade, because there is another M now; and he will tumble his parents’ bones into the deep and forget.

He sways forward – feels Q’s body move in to catch him, to balance him out.

Perhaps it will take some years, but the day will come.