For D, because of promptfill reasons over on tumblr. Basically D posted about something Sherlock and James Bondy, and I answered the call. So yeah.

This has another few hundred words at the end of it, to round out the story, than what was posted on tumblr.

Enjoy!

The position was called M because it was in honor of the three most famous people who had held it over the years—Melvin, Martha, and Michael—and it was just coincidence that Martha's successor was named Mycroft.

Sherlock and his brother had been dragged into the business by their mother, each of them working more as domestic Bonds than anything else. Sherlock was too flashy and Mycroft sometimes moved too slowly to work at the international level. The true bearers of the title "Bond, James Bond," worked far-afield most often. All of the high-tech gadgets that the rest of the world used today had been developed under the strictest secrecy for use of the British Bond program and by the Cross and Ryan programs in America decades ago.

The thing is, Bonds, Crosses, and Ryans weren't allowed to talk about their service time. If it came out of course—in a sudden gunfight as enemies of the state tried to exact revenge on a particular agent—then it could be explained. Mostly because it had to be explained then. Mummy had made him promise to never tell another soul, when she'd forced him out of the program in his mid-twenties—his drug addiction had been permissible when he'd had it under control—and so far he had made good on the promise.

When Mummy retired and Mycroft was selected to replace her, Mycroft had allowed him to come back on a freelance basis—he had gotten clean of the drugs in that time, and found ways to occupy himself. He'd found that he truly enjoyed forensic science, and crime solving wasn't all that different from solving who-stole-the-missile-plans or where-is-the-headquarters-of-this-year's-evil-organization. Sherlock had enjoyed settling himself into a life where he could choose what he wanted to do rather than being given orders.

St. Bart's had everything he needed—well appointed labs, a mortuary, and two pathologists who served differing purposes. Mike Stamford let him in whenever he could and talked endlessly about an old medical school chum who would get on with Sherlock famously. Molly Hooper was sweet and coddled him if he looked pathetic enough—just the opposite of the kind of woman Bonds normally met, and just the kind of woman to never get herself or him killed.

Eventually Mike had introduced him to John Watson, and the pathologist had certainly been correct. He hadn't gotten along with anyone this well in ages, let alone felt the strings of fast friendship between them. John knew how it felt to be put out to pasture for something fixable being deemed unfixable, and that had made all the difference.

That left Molly. Sherlock had never been very good at forming lasting relationships, especially with women. It came with the territory of being a Bond—women were often looked at, in the field, as a means to an end. He'd been trained since his mid-teens to know how to smile and glance, how to compliment and inflect his tone, all to achieve the best results. To Sherlock's great frustration, he fell back on that training more often than not—which was all well and good when you never saw the woman again, but not so well and good when the woman was someone you had a particular fancy to.

With John's help he'd figured it out—though Molly had been suspicious of him for the first eight months of their relationship. Sherlock tamped down on any offense which rose—how could she possibly think he was insincere?—because he did deserve it. He didn't like realizing he deserved things like mistrust, but here he had only himself to blame. He wanted to defend himself, somehow.

And then Molly had started getting excited about the new Bond movie—most of them being based on old field reports by Bonds through the sixties and eighties. She was into both the idea of Bond as well as the man they had playing him this time around. The actor was well-proportioned and might have fit quite well at Molly's side, and this ignited a spark of jealousy in Sherlock. He liked being tall, was used to being tall, but compared to the actor he knew he seemed a bit stretched out and gawky.

He deeply wanted to tell Molly that Bonds didn't look like that—they didn't look all Hollywood, they looked like himself and Mycroft and the bloke down the street and the boy next door and sometimes even John. And they didn't wear tuxedos, they wore English suits if they wore formalwear at all. So Sherlock started looking for ways to subtly tell Molly that if she wanted James Bond, she didn't have to look any further than himself.

Sherlock tried to do James Bond kinds of things for Molly—he brushed up on his one-liners, wincing as he tried to do the punny ones with a serious face. He quietly made sure Molly was around whenever Mycroft tried to foist a mission on him, dropping words and hints of just what he was up to. It went over her head as she busily planned a night out to watch the new Bond movie—Sherlock had started to give up by then, too, sulking that Molly preferred a glamourized, tanned, tuxedoed Bond rather than the real thing.

Molly came 'round to it in her own way though.

She was halfway through explaining why he would like to see the Bond movie—solving mysteries, finding things, covert operations and quick bits of fighting—when in the midst of a sentence her mouth dropped open. Sherlock had been tuned out just a bit, so it was the sudden silence which had him looking over to where she was cleaning up the plates from dinner (he had procured several skinned hedgehogs and had been curious to how they tasted in a goulash…he didn't tell Molly what he'd made, of course). He got up from his chair, crossing the room in just a few strides.

"You're—you're—Sherlock, you're—" Molly wasn't able to finish the sentence because Sherlock kissed her. He knew that Mummy wasn't watching him anymore, but it was better that the revelation that he was (or used to be) James Bond be kept a bit quiet. He didn't want the lecture from Mycroft about never revealing a secret identity unless strictly necessary. He was however, looking forward to Molly being extra cuddly towards him whenever she did manage to drag him to that film.

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