He remained silent on the way home. She knew he was annoyed that she was doing this again, especially as he'd been back in his own flat with Natalya for over a week, but the last thing she needed was for him to run off and do something insanely inadvisable. The man had been an excellent field agent, but he'd never had the slightest clue how to handle human emotions like a well-adjusted adult, and he no longer had the options of shooting some villain's lackeys or blowing up someone else's property available to him. She didn't want him going back to drink either. Sex would do him no harm, but Natalya wouldn't be off for hours, and M wanted to keep an eye on him for a while and didn't want him wandering too far. He ought to be grateful she hadn't dragged him back down to medical, but she didn't think there any pressing reason to do so; he wasn't necessarily getting any worse, it was simply that the timing of this latest episode had been unfortunate and rather public.
He responded in nothing but monosyllables until Lionel had returned with the bottle of his medication and joined them as they all sat down at the table for supper. Bond finally spoke when they had nearly finished eating. "This isn't going to work."
Why must you always be so dramatic? "One bad day and you're packing it in, is that it?"
"I'm clearly not fit to-"
"Nothing was irreparably damaged, other than your pride. According to Q, Phillips was more worried about you than about his bug project, which he began repairing almost immediately after we left the room. All that any of them are asking at the moment is when you'll return. If you need a day or two off, take it, but I don't see any reason for you to quit."
Bond looked away, but didn't respond.
"He seemed to be doing better, I thought."
"He is doing better, even if he refuses to see it. At least, I hope he is."
Lionel pulled his wife closer, and she gave up on the book. "Obviously something went wrong today."
"It wasn't anything serious. One of the techs has been working on a remote-controlled device that roughly resembles a spider. It got away from him, apparently, and ran straight over Bond."
"Hmm. The grasshoppers all over again."
"Worse, apparently, because it came from behind and went over straight over his back, rather took him by surprise I imagine."
"Well, anyone would be startled by something running over his back all of a sudden. I do understand it's considerably worse for him, but I don't know why he thinks it suddenly makes him unfit for duty."
Olivia sighed. "Because other people saw it happen and now he doesn't want to face them again because it makes him feel exposed, that's why. As though that pack of geeks could possibly care less? They might be some of Britain's best and brightest, but half of them carry asthma inhalers or epi-pens, they're hardly in a strong position to pass judgment on the state of anyone else's health. They're all besotted with him anyway, they've practically turned him into a bloody mascot, and Q is absolutely beside himself with envy."
"Not being seen as weak seems like it would be a major priority in his previous line of work."
"Of course it was, but he's well past that at this point, and his coworkers are hardly a slathering pack of wolves ready to devour him at the first scent of blood. And yes, before you say it - I know, old habits. I'm quite certain he was just as bad even before he was recruited by MI6; they do tend to pursue a certain type, and it's not generally the happy well-adjusted sort."
"You aren't happy?"
Olivia shifted up to give her husband a kiss. "With you? Always."
Bond jolted awake out of another repetition of the same usual nightmares. He reached out for Natalya and found nothing but empty air, and just barely managed not to roll off the narrow bed straight onto the floor of Stephen Mansfield's old bedroom. He ought to have insisted on leaving after supper, and wasn't sure why he'd stayed. His watch, which he'd left on the nightstand, showed 4:24 AM, but he was wide awake at this point and knew he wouldn't sleep again.
The house was quiet and just cool enough to raise gooseflesh once he threw off the sweat-soaked covers. He had half a mind to leave now, he finally had replaced his mobile and it wouldn't be difficult to call a cab and slip away. Olivia would be alarmed come morning, but was that really his problem?
He pulled his clothing back on and wandered downstairs, dropping himself onto the sofa without turning a light on, and pondering his options. Q Branch hadn't been a bad experience, although he missed the adrenaline rush and vivid color of life as a double-o. But apparently even Q Branch was too much for his burnt-out nervous system, now. Where could he even go? He'd killed most of his enemies over the years, but there were still enough people out there who might like a pound of his flesh to be a problem, especially if they caught wind of his "difficulties" lately. Theoretically, he ought to be safe inside the walls of MI6, but Miranda Frost had proven that to be a very dangerous assumption recently enough. The medication seemed to finally be putting a dent in some of the weirdness going on in his back, but he was still having regular nightmares and apparently he'd never be able to go near a damned insect or anything resembling one again without losing his shit completely. He'd never be whole again, not even close, that much he now knew to be true. If he'd kept the cyanide pill, this wouldn't be a problem he'd have to deal with. It wasn't a problem he wanted to deal with.
Bond glanced around the room, looking for likely hiding spots. Knowing M, much like his own flat, this home was likely crammed full of hidden weaponry. She would never rely solely on MI6 security.
Lionel was a light sleeper, and had been since the children were young. He knew the sound of steps heading downstairs very well and the third step from the bottom had a very distinctive squeak if you didn't know exactly where to step to avoid it. Judith had gone through a rebellious phase as a teenager, had turned sneaking out at all hours into a game of cat-and-mouse with him, but he'd soon had the upper hand in that contest.
His wife's house guest, however, didn't seem to have made it very far. He found James Bond standing in the middle of the living room in the dark. He reached toward the light switch, then stopped, something about the man's posture sending off alarm bells. He was holding something in his right hand, and staring at it intently. Once he began to raise the object toward himself, Lionel recognized it for precisely what it was. He approached quietly, although Bond didn't seem to have noticed him, lost inside his own thoughts.
Lionel knew what sort of creature this man was; his wife was one and the same, and both the natural instincts and the training inculcated in such people made them inherently treacherous. Lionel himself possessed little of the first and even less of the second beyond what basic training in the RAF had taught him, but he was no coward, either.
Lionel reached out and grasped Bond's wrist as firmly as he could, bracing himself for the reaction he knew he'd get. The wind rushed out of Lionel as his back hit the floor, hard, and he saw stars dance before his eyes momentarily as he was roughly pinned to the ground, but he never lost his grip on Bond's wrist. The streetlamp outside framed Bond's head in the midst of their wrestling, his sleep-mussed hair sticking out in messy halo, and Lionel could feel hot breath panting against his face as he struggled to hold on.
"If you want to shoot yourself, Tigger, you'll have to shoot me first."
Bond froze, all movement ceasing, pulling back slightly to stare down at his opponent in the dark. Lionel wished he could see the man's face more clearly, but it was too dim. "Please let go of the gun. Let someone pick you up this one time. Just this once, Tigger-"
Lionel could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and could practically hear Bond's doing the same. Was the man caught in the middle of another flashback? How aware, exactly, was he? Minutes that felt like decades oozed by, and Lionel knew this night may well be his last depending on what happened next. He held his breath, waiting to see what this strange man his wife had brought into their family home would do. He heard the click of a safety catch being put back in place, and a dull thud as a pistol landed on the rug. Lionel breathed out, feeling lightheaded.
Light flooded the room, and Lionel craned his head to the side to see his wife, staring at the both of them on the floor, but Bond didn't react in the slightest. Olivia moved to pick up the now-abandoned pistol, leaving the room with it to deposit elsewhere. Bond pushed himself away from Lionel to sit on the carpet, hunched in on himself. He ran a hand through his hair roughly a few times, but said nothing.
Lionel, with some effort, managed to pull himself up onto the sofa, just as his wife returned. "I'm getting too old for wrestling, Tigger. My back just won't tolerate this sort of thing anymore."
Olivia didn't so much as smile at his feeble attempt at a joke, her hard stare trained solely on Bond where he sat on her living room carpet. Bond, incongruously, began laughing in an ugly sort of way that Lionel suspected had nothing to do with what he'd said.
"You were cheated, M, do you know that? Absolutely swindled."
Olivia came to stand over Bond, but didn't or couldn't respond.
"You gave them Zao and got nothing in return. I never left, I'm still in that damned room, with Her, and I'll never get out-" Bond descended into hysterics again as Olivia stood watch, and Lionel couldn't quite tell whether he was laughing or crying or both at the same time. Perhaps there was no real difference, in this case.
Lionel stood, his abused back complaining, and stepped around his wife, who had clearly run out of ideas. Feeling the danger had mostly passed, he took a chance and reached down to grasp the man's shoulder. "Come on, Tigger, time to get up."
It had gone past 5:30, and there was no point in anyone trying to get any more sleep. Olivia retreated to the kitchen to make tea for Lionel and coffee for herself and for Bond, along with some sort of breakfast. Mentally, she went through her inventory of guns, and where each was hidden in the house, trying to determine if it was possible to fit all of them into the gun safe in the basement. She knew he'd have his own arsenal back at his flat, as well, and there was no way he could return there until the place had been scrubbed clean of them now. He'd be pissed off, of course, but that was too damned bad.
She'd already informed Tanner that she wouldn't be coming in today, barring some major incident that required her presence, and told him to tell Q that Bond wouldn't be in either. Tanner had hesitated, the question hovering on the tip of his tongue, but in the end he'd simply said his customary "yes, ma'am," and hung up.
Checking the current supply of eggs, she determined there was enough to make french toast. She had always made french toast on Sunday mornings if she was at home when the children were young, as a treat. It had been years, but she still remembered the simple recipe well enough. She didn't know how Bond felt about french toast, but she suddenly had a craving for it herself.
"I think you've rather badly disappointed her. She's fond of you, you know."
"She has an odd way of showing it."
Lionel couldn't stop himself from laughing at that one. "Yes, she does indeed. She'll go charging barefoot into the pits of hell to drag you out by her fingernails, but she'll yell at you the whole way out. That's just how she is, I'm afraid, one can come away with two distinctly different impressions from either watching her or listening to her. I did tell you not to take her bluster seriously, didn't I?"
"Hmm."
Lionel studied Bond's profile where he sat on the other end of the sofa, staring out at the morning light now spilling in through the window. The man was a collection of contradictions. He reminded Lionel of his wife in a multitude of ways, and he was beginning to understand why Olivia was drawn to him as something like a kindred spirit. And as it was with Olivia, somewhere buried under all that conceit and ego was decent human being. He seemed very slick and impressive on the surface, with the well-tailored suits and the cultivated air of danger that he wore like a suit of armor, but the longer Lionel thought about James Bond, about everything Olivia had said of him and everything he'd seen firsthand, the more cracks he discovered in that facade.
"You were fairly young when your parents died, weren't you? Olivia mentioned once that you were an orphan."
"Not particularly young. I was eleven at the time. An aunt took me in, I was hardly abandoned."
"I'd still say that's fairly young."
Bond shrugged. "I didn't always see a great deal of them before they died, and spent most of my time afterward in boarding schools, which I would have done either way. It changed very little on the whole."
"No siblings?"
"No. Is there a point to this interrogation?"
Lionel laughed again. "It's called a 'conversation,' Tigger. It's actually quite a common thing to do with friends or family."
"As you've just established, I haven't got much of either."
"I'd say you qualify as the former, certainly. Or something in between, for Olivia at least."
"That's rather stretching it, don't you think?"
"No, I don't."
Minutes passed, and Lionel didn't receive any further reply. Bond was still staring out at nothing. "I know your type, Tigger – you all think you can handle anything and everything that the world throws at you all on your own, but that's a sack of horseshit. Human beings just weren't built like that, no matter what all those snobs in those expensive boarding schools tried to beat into you as a kid, no matter what fairy tales we all tell ourselves. You start thinking about doing something permanent again, you tell somebody. Tell Olivia, tell your Natalya, tell me, tell whoever happens to be there."
Sighing at the absolute lack of response, Lionel stood up and made his way toward the kitchen.
Olivia was still standing over the stove, turning the toast over in a pan. "You took a terrible risk this morning."
Groaning, Lionel fetched ice out of the freezer, dumping it into a bag and dropping it on his sore shoulder. "Don't remind me. Not the first time I've been pinned down like that, but he's a lot heavier than you. When was the first time? I think we'd been dating about four months? I made the mistake of sneaking up behind you to try and kiss you. Thought I was being cute."
"You are cute. But in my defense, I had warned you not to surprise me."
"How was I supposed to know you'd do that, exactly? You'd told me you worked for the military, but you hadn't exactly been forthcoming on the details. Understandably, but still."
"Nonetheless, Lionel, I told you to be careful with him, he's always had something of a hair-trigger. You could have been killed, easily. Even inadvertently – as you said, he's heavier than I am, and you're not young anymore."
"I'm fine, love. Bruised, and I'll definitely be getting trouble out of this shoulder for a while, but nothing happened."
"Nothing happened this time."
Lionel leaned against the edge of the sink, watching his wife. She'd never spent a great deal of time in the kitchen, but french toast had been one of the few things she could be relied upon to make well. The children had always looked forward to Sunday when she was at home. There were many people who assumed his wife was absolutely cold and heartless, and she often used that perception to her advantage. And her tongue could be sharper than an adder's tooth, for certain, but he knew better.
"I couldn't just stand there and let Tigger blow his head off, 'Liv."
Olivia sighed, tipping another slice onto a plate. "It would have made a frightful mess of the living room, certainly. That rug would have been ruined. It came out of my mother's house."
Lionel bent down and kissed his wife. "Would've made a frightful mess of your boy, too, and I know you don't want that either. I'd better go fetch him before breakfast goes cold."
The morning was passing like the dripping of molten lead. Bond felt more numb than anything else, as he sat on an old cast iron chair with peeling paint in the back garden. Autumn was wearing on and the leaves were rusting on their branches before falling, no longer of any use to the trees as the short days of winter approached. Lionel was busy raking them onto a compost heap at the far end.
His recently purchased mobile phone rang, and Bond pulled it out. He stared at the caller ID, hesitating before finally answering. "Natalya... ...No, I'm fine, everything's settled down... Because she's a bloody mother hen, how should I know? It's nothing... Fine... Fine. Tell Phillips to stop fretting about it already, I'm not angry with him... Yes, I'll see you tomorrow."
"You ought to tell her, James." Olivia was standing in the door, looking at him for a few more moments before finally stepping outside, shutting it behind her and taking a seat next to him.
"She has enough to worry about. This doesn't concern her."
Olivia practically sneered at him, as she did when he'd just said something she thought was impossibly stupid. "You clearly need to talk to somebody, and I don't think Natalya would resent it in the least. If she didn't care about you, she wouldn't be sticking around this long."
"I don't want to burden her with this."
"She's not a child, James, why don't you let her decide what is or isn't a burden? If you don't want to talk to her, then talk to me, or Moneypenny. Hell, talk to Lionel; I know how you men are about showing the slightest hint of underbelly to one another, but he's never been one to buy into that horseshit and he wouldn't be bothered in the least. Clearly the routine nightmares about North Korea are wearing on you, but you've been having them for weeks. What changed? What was going through your head this morning, exactly, that suddenly made you think you needed to shoot your own brains out in the middle of my living room?"
"What makes you think anything about it is sudden? You said yourself in Hong Kong that I should have taken the cyanide pill. Perhaps I'm just trying to correct a mistake."
Bond flinched slightly when her hand suddenly slapped the table between them, something else he never would have done before North Korea.
"You are going to make me eat my own words, is that it? Yes, you flouted protocol when you threw out the cyanide, and at the time I was quite justifiably angry about losing Zao, but you've already corrected that particular mistake. Bloody hell, James, do you think I'd be expending this much effort on keeping you alive now if I hadn't already forgiven you? This mess is partly my fault anyway, for not seeing Frost for what she was before everything was shot to hell."
Bond scraped his jaw off the ground, not quite believing what he'd just heard. Olivia - M - had never admitted directly to making a mistake before, not to him at least. He scratched at the back of his neck, too shocked for the moment to respond.
Olivia sighed, slouching uncharacteristically. "You've borne the brunt of my error, I'm afraid, and there's not much I can do about it at this point, but I would appreciate it if you didn't end your own life so rashly. I have more than enough blood on my hands as it is and, I assure you, absolutely no desire to see you dead."
Something clicked into place. Bond already knew M harbored some sort of inexplicable affection for him that she did not extend to her other agents, and which she had tried over the years to not let slip out lest it attract attention from her detractors at MI6, often over-correcting to the point of undue harshness. He wasn't stupid after all and being able to read people was one of the things that had made him so good at his profession. He'd even used that affection to his advantage over the years, pushing at boundaries she never would have allowed another agent to get anywhere near. But the extent to which she had involved herself in his life recently had been... extreme.
So, she felt responsible, and he couldn't even argue with her. She wasn't the only one at fault but was certainly on the list. She hadn't deliberately handed him over to North Korea, but her oversight had nonetheless in part put him there. He ought to be angry with her, he had every right to be. Part of him was still furious with her, as he had been in Hong Kong, when she'd goaded him on, calling him useless, then cleared a path for an easy escape. She'd purposely set him loose like a hound to chase down her enemies whilst maintaining plausible deniability about her responsibility for his actions. She must've thought, or at least hoped, that he could finish the job, despite everything he'd been through, and he had.
He wondered, now, how much of a surprise it had been to her that he'd almost immediately gone to pieces after the job was done and dusted. It had certainly come as a surprise to him as he suddenly lost the control he'd exercised over himself nearly his entire life.
What was the point in lying to her now? She knew him better than just about anybody, had certainly known him longer than anyone else still alive. "I don't know if I can live this way, M."
She straightened up where she sat, looking at him piercingly. "You're too impatient and too impulsive, James, and those have always been your greatest weaknesses, far moreso than anything happening recently. I won't insult you by demanding some sort of false promise, but I am going to ask you to give this more time. It's been more or less two months since you left North Korea. That's hardly any time at all. And I'm sorry to say that the sensitive nature of your work with MI6 has deprived you of the sort of resources you ought to be given. I'm already looking into hiring someone with better training in this sort of thing even if certain corners believe you all ought to be able to stiff-upper-lip your way through it, but it will take time to vet the candidates and gain clearance for them. You're hardly the only field agent to survive long enough to need such services."
Bond couldn't prevent himself from making a face. "Psychologists and therapists are always worse than useless, it's not just MI6's, although granted they're particularly egregious."
"If you don't want anything to do with them, fine, but someone else might. The option ought to at least exist. I won't force you to do anything, that clearly doesn't work well with you and never has. But I think you ought to return to work in the morning. Natalya, at least, will be glad to see you, along with your little flock of acolytes down in Q Branch. If nothing else, it will annoy Q terribly, and I know that's always an enticing prospect for you."
Bond walked back into Q Branch the next morning, doing his level best to pretend nothing had happened, but apparently no one else had got the memo as several of the techs almost instantly crowded around him, asking after his health. Even Natalya had turned up to look over him, her suspicions and worry clearly written over her face. He'd managed to distract her with a kiss, although that had soon been interrupted and she'd had to retreat back to her own office.
"I'm so sorry, Mister Bond. I spent all yesterday trying to find the glitch in the spider's controls, and I really think I've fixed it now, so it shouldn't happen again."
"It's fine, Phillips."
"I swear I'll make it up to you, you need anything at all, just-"
"It's fine, Phillips." He pushed past the overcaffeinated young man, heading back to the scene of the crime from two days ago to see what he could salvage from his own project. He had no memory of what had even happened to it. But upon entering the room, he found the partially constructed device sitting in an open cardboard box on the workbench.
All of the pieces had been meticulously gathered up by somebody after M had removed him on Monday and been placed aside for him. After retrieving a toolbox from the shelf, he spread the components out across the bench, and went back to work.
"Err... doing alright there, Bond?"
Q was standing just slightly farther away than normal, looking in his general direction but not quite directly at him, his hands shoved in his pockets. Bond rolled his eyes and continued his work. Soldering wasn't his strong suit, especially on really tiny finicky stuff, but he could manage when not distracted. "Do you need something?"
"No... not at the moment."
Q's diffidence was starting to get on Bond's nerves. He decided then that he preferred Q when he was complaining. "Whatever you want to ask, just ask it. I'd like to get this done today but it's difficult to concentrate with you hovering."
"Just... wondering if there's anything else I ought to keep clear of you. Besides bug-shaped things, naturally."
Everybody's business is everybody's business down here, it seemed. The spies upstairs had nothing on this lot when it came to being busybodies. "If there's something I don't think I can handle, Q, I'll let you know."
Q finally pulled his hands out of his pockets, his posture loosening just slightly. "Fair enough, I suppose... What exactly did they do to you?"
Well, Bond had to give the man credit. No one else had had the balls to just ask him point-blank. He could respect that, at least. Somehow it was less annoying than the game of dancing around it that nearly everyone else had been playing. He stood up and stared Q directly in the eyes. "Do you really want to know?"
Q met his stare directly, crossing his arms. "I'll admit I'm rather curious. It's not the sort of thing one in this part of the world generally encounters, outside of fiction."
Bond shrugged and, on a sudden whim, turned around, stripping his shirt off as he went, letting the scars on his back be displayed in all their ugly glory. "Take a guess, Q."
He heard Q step closer, and felt a puff of breath against the back of his neck as Q took a closer look. "A whip for certain – leather, I'd imagine. And something harder, just there. Wood or metal?"
"Both. The latter occasionally heated until glowing. Electricity was also involved, and you've already heard about the scorpions. There was the ice water as well, although near-drowning leaves no external marks. They didn't always bother to feed me, either, and when they did it wasn't exactly gourmet cuisine. I really can't recommend their hospitality at all."
Bond was distantly astounded at himself as he was suddenly able to discuss this without his heart jamming itself up in his throat. Q's interest was academic; he wasn't greatly emotionally invested in this, perhaps that was the difference. He might as well have been asking Bond about the weather.
"Hmm. We really ought to be able to do something better than a cyanide pill for this sort of thing. I suppose you're somehow immune to the stuff, it wouldn't bloody surprise me, you break every other rule."
Bond pulled his shirt on and turned back around. "I didn't take the pill, I'd thrown it out years ago."
"Oh you did, did you? Good man. Cyanide pills... bloody stupid idea, really. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it always struck me as wasteful as well as barbaric. All that training and investment right down the loo just because one mission goes bad... Something to circumvent the nerves, to prevent pain, though... Bioengineering and cybernetics are still mostly in the theoretical stages, of course, but enough time and investment... Well, something to investigate in the future, I suppose. I'll see about earmarking a bit of preliminary R&D on the next budget cycle, I think."
Good old irascible Q, Bond thought. It was just another problem to be solved, for him. The world needed people like that, though. No dramatics, no histrionics, just get down to brass tacks and fix shit. He'd been like that himself, more or less, before everything.
"Well, Bond, I'll leave you to your work. You know where to find me." Q swept out of the room and Bond returned to the bench, picking up the soldering iron again. It wasn't exciting, exactly, but having been a double-o, he knew exactly how these ridiculous little toys could make or break a mission, even if one had to break said toys in the process.
Half an hour later, Patel's head popped around the door frame. "Oy, Bond, someone's brought in doughnuts. They're in the break room, if you want one."
"Any chocolate?"
"A few, but you'd better grab one now if you want that, they go fast."
"You don't have to tell me twice."
Patel disappeared back down the hallway, and Bond pulled himself to his feet to follow her.
