Archive of Our Own

Eve’s standing in the concourse at Victoria, awaiting an alert that turns out to be a ‘false alarm’ message, when she spots them. They’re lined up in the window of one of those little Tube station gift shops that sell Union flag oven gloves and little models of red phone boxes and a dozen varieties of tat emblazoned with ‘I <3 London.’ A whole shelf of those ceramic bulldogs, like the one M had on her desk—the M Eve still thinks of as the proper M, because three months might be a long time in espionage but it’s not long enough to forget someone ever existed, especially not someone as formidable as her. Eve remembers handing it over to Bond in that box; the opaque sort of pleased look he got when he saw it, like it was a letter in a private language. And maybe Eve couldn’t read it, but she understood.

Now, she briefly ponders buying one for Mallory. Something to cheer up the too-neatness of his office: still new; still not quite comfortably inhabited. She dismisses the thought just as quickly, though. It’d look out of place, with him behind the desk. There’s something the old M had—something Bond has, too—that he lacks. A fierce, uncaring awareness of their own ridiculousness; a defiance in the face of the future that’s either grand or sad, depending on how you look at it. A belief in the universal. And maybe, these days, it’s not necessary, but she feels its absence, anyway.

The call to head back to HQ comes through her earpiece, and she turns away from the trinket stall, leaving behind the row of shiny china dogs with their smiling, painted-on eyes.

She doesn’t think about the silly thing again until Bond comes back from a mission in bits (figuratively speaking—always pays to spell that out, in their line of work) and sentenced to a week in Medical.

Double-O agents in hospital beds tend to be a danger to themselves and others, unless they’re sedated or thoroughly incapacitated. On the whole, they’re not personality types who cope well with monotony. Eve’s not quite sure what she’s looking for when she lets herself into Bond’s flat—books, maybe? A personal laptop? An iPod? She can’t imagine it, somehow—but she finds precisely sod-all of obvious personal or entertainment value. The decor is minimalist Spartan- posh, showroom empty, without even any of the pseudo-homely touches a decorator might put in. No kooky light fittings, no framed landscape photography prints, no nick-knacks artfully arranged on the shelves.

Just that ceramic bulldog, sitting on the mantelpiece above the empty grate, looking entirely out-of-place, too tacky and too cheerful both at once. There’s a chip out of its right ear.

Bond pretends to be asleep when she sets it next to the teacup on his bedside table. It makes her smile.

The attack happens while Eve is in the office, and she never does find out who to murder for letting the bastards get into the building in the first place.

It’s contained quickly, and in any case, Bond is elsewhere—probably trying to flirt Dr Waugh into declaring him fit for duty—when it happens. Eve gets to the medical bay before he returns.

She stands by the empty bed for a moment, glances down and then wishes she hadn’t. Someone hasn’t swept up properly, and there’s a smudge of fine white dust on the floor near her feet; the kind you get when china shatters.

The next time Eve sets foot in Bond’s flat is two years later, and it’s a different flat, in a different part of London, by then.

Late afternoon, and they’re both already well on the way to steaming drunk. Eve thinks that’s excusable. She sees plenty of funerals in her line of work, and most of them are those of people who died way too fucking young, but this one. Jesus, this one.

Sometimes you just don’t know how to mourn someone. A genius with an undergraduate’s wardrobe and cherub’s face, who died not because he had a field agent’s death-wish, but because he was just too clever. Who died because MI6 snapped him up and gave him his very own Aladdin’s cave and made his brain a perfect weapon, knowing all the while that weapons always get into the wrong hands, eventually.

Who was her friend.

Eve kicks off her sensible shoes and rolls up the neat black pencil skirt that suddenly feels like a hobble around her knees, and collapses lengthways on Bond’s black leather couch. He looks back at her, and turns wordlessly to fetch the whiskey.

They don’t talk much. They drink, and later they fuck, not because they’re in love—they never will be, and certainly not with each other—but because that’s how people with the emotional stability of active volcanoes and support networks made up entirely of professional liars get comfort. It’s clumsy and drunkenly hazy and desperate, and when Eve wakes up in the morning there’s fresh coffee brewing on the counter and Bond is nowhere to be seen.

That’s okay. She still doesn’t feel like talking.

She washes off the remnants of yesterday’s makeup in the shower, dresses, finds her sensible shoes in the front room and shoves her feet back into them.

That’s when she notices. Well, it’s not as though she was paying much attention to Bond’s interior decorating—or lack thereof—last night.

It’s on the mantel. Looking as ridiculous as ever. That daft little china dog.

Eve frowns and steps closer. Touches it, leaving a fingertip mark in the faint patina of dust that covers it.

She thinks, at the time, that she feels disconcerted because it’s wrong, because something that fragile shouldn’t survive when real, breathing, flesh-and-blood people can be there one minute and then not. There’s dust on her finger when she takes it away. She wipes it off on the fabric of her skirt and scowls.

It occurs to her after lunch, while she’s staring at the screen of her computer, trying to will herself into some semblance of awareness. Its ear wasn’t chipped.

Eve tries to picture it—Bond, a tiger in a bespoke suit, walking into one of those little tat shops and handing over cash. It seems unimaginably ridiculous. It seems indescribably sad.

Bond goes missing in the field—again—three months later. Eve arranges for his things to be put into storage when they clear out his flat.

And then she gets on with the job. Puts him into storage, too, in a little locked corner of her mind. Tries not to look up in hope whenever an unfamiliar tread approaches the door of her office, when she gets a call from an unknown number.

She doesn’t get out much, these days. Some evenings, she gets as far as picking up the phone to call her sister, or one of her old friends from uni, but she always hangs up before it starts to ring.

It’s taken her this long to break the habit of heading down to the basement to talk to Q when she gets up from her desk for a break, and now she finds herself doing it again. It’s not even as though they were great friends. They didn’t socialise outside of work. (Who does, here? Who even has an ‘outside of work’?) But. Someone to share a packet of biscuits with and bitch about the quality of the break room coffee, someone to make god-awful, tasteless jokes with because that’s what it takes to keep from breaking—well, that would be something.

She’s lonely.

It’s a Monday and she’s full of good intentions, so Eve decides she’s taking a bloody lunch hour for once. She grabs her handbag and walks out into fine drizzle that’s clinging to her hair and soaking the sleeves of her jacket before she’s even reached the end of the street. A drip gathers and rolls off the end of her nose, and she’s pondering heading back to ask someone for an umbrella when she hears the noise.

She half-turns, and her hand darts to her hip for the gun she no longer carries. Then the blast throws her off her feet and, for a split second, everything just vanishes.

And then the world is back, and there is rubble and acrid smoke and screaming, and the rain is still falling, turning the ash to sooty liquid and smearing it across her face like camouflage paint.

The storage section of the building is in ruins.

But when Bond shows up again six weeks later, several scorched-looking cardboard boxes of his belonging materialise in Eve’s office.

She calls a courier and arranges to have them taken to his new place; resists the urge to peek inside.

Eve visits this flat twice. The first time, she looks and—sure enough—it’s there, that ridiculous china dog, sitting on a bookshelf alongside a pile of dusty hardbacks that Bond has probably never opened in his life.

He watches her, opaque, wearing his ironical half-smile like armour. He touches her hand as she stands before the door, waiting to leave. For a moment, he looks her in the eye, and there is something terribly weary there.

She looks away. He lets her go.

The second time, she stands in the centre of the living room, arms folded around herself, while around her men and women in protective suits pry bullets out of plaster, take photographs. Scrape samples of dried blood off the polished wood floor.

That same stack of books is still there, on the same shelf, dustier. Shards of red, white and blue china scatter the shelf, spill off it onto the floor.

Well, there’s no point saving it this time. No hospital bed to visit; no reason to store anything away for later. There isn't going to be a later.

Eve goes into the bedroom alone. Not much in the way of personal effects here, either. Old habits, and all that. Neutral colours; minimal furniture. A single framed print on the wall, a photograph of some harsh northern landscape, maybe Scotland but emphatically not Skyfall. Wardrobe of expensive tailoring and workout clothes and nothing in between. Well. Somehow, she can’t picture him in jeans.

Something in the bottom of the wardrobe, though. A shoebox, half-hidden under shoes, the lid held on with duct tape.

Eve frowns, and lifts it out. She slits the tape with her nail file.

The china dog is nestled in a bed of old newspaper. There are cracks where it’s been broken into several pieces and glued back together, the spaces where china has splintered and flaked away evened up with Polyfilla. Mending it must’ve taken hours. But its right ear—that’s still chipped.

Finding that her hands are trembling, Eve sits down heavily on the bed, the box in her lap. She stares at it for a long while.

M sets down the china bulldog on the corner of her desk. It’s no use as a paperweight—paper in offices having gone the way of the dodo by now—and it mostly just serves to garner her strange looks. Comments, of course, are rarer.

An agent whom she’s sending out into the field, probably to die, asks her, once, where it came from. He’s a young man and a believer in old lies; fiercely brave; a little bit smitten. M smiles at him, quirks an eyebrow.

“A man I knew once,” she says. (The stupidest man I ever knew, she doesn’t add.) “You remind me of him.”

They all do, a little, so she’s not really lying. They’re all haunted. It’s just that some of them haven’t met their ghosts yet.

She smiles, and she sees that it reassures him. She’s good at that. Yes, people think she’s a touch eccentric, but that comes with the territory. She’s many other things, too, and they’re what make her good at her job. She doesn’t believe in the universal, but she’d love to live in world where she could. She’s clear-eyed; does what has to be done. Pragmatic. Unyielding. Constant as the sun. Indestructible.