Epilogue.

Winter in London was proving to be cold and damp, as usual, and had made what seemed like every joint he possessed ache. His body had taken regular abuse in his profession even before the North Koreans had got hold of him, and the chickens were coming home to roost. He was beginning to understand that his days as a double-o had likely been somewhat numbered even without North Korea's delightful hospitality. He might have had a couple more years left in him, perhaps. In the end, it was almost disappointingly irrelevant.

The nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks still periodically reared their ugly heads, but he was getting better at managing it. Panic attacks were, apparently, just something that happened in Q Branch anyway, given the sort of people who inhabited it. Quite a few of his coworkers had them with some regularity. Everyone knew you didn't walk up behind Baker without speaking first, everyone knew Zhou hated even pictures of dogs, everyone knew you didn't yell at several people in Q Branch unless you wanted tears, and now everyone also knew you didn't let anything that resembled a bug touch Bond if you expected to get any more useful work out of him that day. It was another item on a list in the back of everyone's heads as they tried to work around one another without tripping over each other's messes, filed in the same mental drawer with the various food allergies and asthma triggers.

As the winter holidays approached, the general mood in Q Branch had become rather silly, and the level of focus on actual work had wavered as tinsel and baubles appeared around desks and various holiday-themed treats made their way to the break room almost daily. He'd finally regained the weight he'd lost during his captivity, and a bit more past that, mostly thanks to a couple of the junior techs' obsessive baking. Someone had even set up a tree in the corner by the second week of December.

The first batch of the classes he'd been enrolled in at Q's insistence had wrapped up, and the next batch wouldn't start until after the new year. It was mostly a lot of maths he'd not needed for the languages degree he'd earned a lifetime ago. He'd never been terrible at the subject, but there had been a few bits Natalya had needed walk him through, mostly because his instructors didn't seem to understand how to communicate with human beings. He'd managed passing (if not exactly impressive) marks.

It had been a curious experience though, walking onto a campus mostly full of kids between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one as someone who was suddenly staring down the barrel at 50 (he'd been dragged out to celebrate by Moneypenny and Natalya for his 49th birthday in November and still had no idea how they'd found out the real date). He'd felt so grown up and sophisticated during his own university days, but the children he was surrounded by now seemed to turn up in pajamas for the 8 AM classes half the time. There were literal cartoon characters involved in some cases. A few of the girls had flirted with him, perhaps finding his incongruous presence in their midst an entertaining novelty. There had been a time he wouldn't have hesitated, but at this point his primary impulse was to call their bloody parents to come pick them up, glittery butterfly hair clips and all.

Currently, James Bond found himself on the Mansfields' sofa once again, jammed between a pair of their grandchildren, two girls aged five-and-a-half (she'd been very emphatic about that half) and seven. Olivia was in the armchair nearby, clearly very amused by the situation. He'd tried to make excuses not to come over for new year's day, having already weaseled out of boxing day, but Olivia had summarily dismissed every flimsy one.

The two girls were watching some sort of cartoon on the television while Bond tried not to fall asleep in the middle of them. He'd spent the entirety of the night out with Natalya, Moneypenny, and, shockingly, Tanner (invited by Moneypenny, apparently). He'd returned with Natalya to his flat around 5 in the morning to get about three hours of sleep, which in the past would been enough to get by on, but was currently proving to be somewhat insufficient. Bond was startled out of near-sleep as a mug was thrust under his nose, the smell of fresh coffee wafting up.

"Seemed like you could use it, Tigger." Lionel was clearly trying very hard not to laugh at him as he retreated to another overstuffed armchair near his wife. "Dinner will be ready in another hour."

"Tigger? Oh Lord, I haven't thought about him in years." Judith Mansfield appeared in the door to the living room with a plate of sliced apples for the kids to snack on as an appetizer. Bond drank a third of the mug of black coffee in one go, peering over the rim of the cup at the woman he'd been introduced to earlier that morning. Judith Mansfield, divorced mother of two, had Lionel's brown eyes, but otherwise looked more like a slightly taller and much younger version of her mother.

Judith set the plate down on the corner of the coffee table and Sarah, the five ("and a half!") year old immediately scrabbled over Bond's lap and onto her sister's to gain easier access to the snacks. Bond flinched badly as a sharp knee dug into his thigh, and just barely managed to hold onto the coffee cup, not wanting to ruin the day by scalding a child, even if she had just likely put a bruise on him.

"Sarah! I'm sorry, she's a bit rabid when it comes to food lately, you'd think she was bloody starving but I swear she's not." Judith leaned down to whisper in her daughter's ear, issuing a quick "I'll deal with you later, missy." Bond couldn't help but laugh at that point, the exact intonation of the threat one he was intimately familiar with, having heard it a multitude of times across a desk from the head of MI6.

Judith stood, sipping at the cup of tea she'd brought in with her along with the children's snacks. "So, 'Tigger,' huh?" He she leaned forward, her face hovering over his, apparently studying his features for a few moments before retreating to take Sarah's former place on the end of the sofa. "You know, I can see the resemblance."

What is it with this family? Bond scowled slightly as Olivia laughed at him from the other side of the room.

"Does he bite as much as my Tigger did?" Judith glanced at him with mirth in her eyes before turning back to her mother. The gentle double-entendre was clearly intended, but not for him. Bond always knew when a woman was seriously (or even casually) interested in him, and that wasn't the case here, but Judith was clearly more than happy to have a bit of fun at his expense. Must be a family trait.

"More, generally speaking. But he'll eventually let you pat him a bit, if you go about it just right."

"To think of all the grief you and dad gave me over wanting to keep that cat, and here you are taking in your own bloody strays! At least mine kept the house clear of mice."

Olivia shrugged at her daughter. "True, this one was useless for mice, but he was good at catching rats. Very large ones. Thankfully, he's never been in the habit of leaving them on floor of the bedroom for me to step on. Which is not to say he hasn't left behind more than enough of his own messes."

Bond drained the rest of his coffee mug, leaning his head back against the sofa, acquiescing to the suffering that Fate had bestowed upon him. Lionel rose and walked behind the sofa, plucking the empty mug out of Bond's hand as he went back toward the kitchen. Feeling completely outnumbered by a room with four women who were completely unimpressed by him (even if two of them were miniature), he rose to follow Lionel.

Bond took the refilled mug of coffee from Lionel after stepping into the kitchen, leaning against the counter to sip at it. Lionel checked something in the oven briefly before turning back around.

"Don't mind Judith, Tigger, she likes to tease but she doesn't mean anything by it. She's usually trying to wind up her mother, mostly."

"I figured out that much. She takes after Olivia."

Bond sipped at his coffee while Lionel began washing up a pile of pots and bowls.

"Very much so, yes. Of our three children, she was always the one in trouble the most. Smart as a whip, but drove her teachers half mad. Always has her own ideas about things. Not unlike you."

Bond shrugged, having nothing else to add. He'd always felt out of place in this home, and the feeling had only deepened with the arrival of more of the Mansfields' actual family. Natalya had more or less moved back into her own place, but still occasionally spent the night, and he'd left her sleeping peacefully in his bed that morning. She had her own plans for the day that didn't include him, but he was sort of wishing she'd invited him along; it would have been the one excuse Olivia might have accepted.

"You really haven't got a clue what to do with all this, do you?"

"With what?"

"Ordinary family who invite you over on a holiday, friends you see regularly, a job that doesn't involve the constant threat of a violent death, that sort of thing."

Bond stared into the depths of his coffee mug. "I'd argue Q Branch definitely involves the possibility of a violent death, if unintentional... otherwise, I suppose I'm getting used to the idea."

"You don't sound too convinced."

Bond raked a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up oddly without even noticing. "I don't expect you to understand. I may be getting used to things, but I still wake up in the mornings and find a complete stranger in the mirror."

Lionel laughed, although not unkindly. "You think that's never happened to anyone else? I thought I'd spend the rest of my life as a pilot after getting out of the air force, traveling the whole world. The first commercial airline I'd applied for a job with sent me for a physical that included a vision test, and I was, for the first time, just slightly under the passing mark. That was the end of it. I was angry about it for months, years even. Nothing I've done since then is exactly what I'd envisioned in my youth, but you know what? It hasn't been a bad life. I could stay bitter about it forever, but what's the use? If you still want to shoot yourself, Tigger, no one can stop you forever, but you should at least consider not tossing out the baby with the bathwater."

Bond drank the rest of his coffee. A timer went off and Lionel grabbed a pair of oven mitts. "Go tell the girls someone needs to set the table, if you don't mind. I'll be along soon."

Bond slipped out into the hallway, leaning against the wall and taking a minute to himself. He'd be fifty in a year. He hadn't genuinely expected to be a double-o forever, it simply wasn't reasonable for a whole host of reasons. But for most of his adult life, at least in the privacy of his own mind, he'd fully expected to leave the double-o program in a body bag, provided there was even enough left to scrape into one. He hadn't made any long term plans because he hadn't foreseen a future where one would be needed. Men like him don't live long enough for old age to be concern, or so he'd firmly believed.

Q - his Q - had told him to always have an escape plan, but he hadn't fully understood what the old man was saying at the time, right in the midst of preparation for his own retirement. In hindsight, maybe it should have been more obvious. He'd said as much in the letter he'd left behind.

James Bond had never been very good at taking advice, but somehow he'd slipped through an unseen trapdoor in his life without even meaning to, suddenly finding himself on another side he hadn't even known existed.

Bond pushed himself upright and went to find Olivia Mansfield and her progeny, calling them to the dinner table.

It's not a bad life, really.