Notes and French translations can be found at the end of the work. Thanks for betaing go to isthisrubble.
For Essi: my metaphorical mother, guide to Shakespearean drama, and the light of my life.
1.
His flat is barren and the floorboards pure ice against the soles of her bare feet, a shadow of a life left behind and she wonders whether this will ever work out. She pushes around heaps of yellowing files, catching sentences here and there. Hand written notes jammed under an ugly porcelain bulldog on the coffee table and she gets the sense this is all there is to his history: dust and lies and secrets all around and not a single thing more.
2.
There's a spot in the mattress - hidden by the wafts of stale sweat and expensive cologne - that smells of gunpowder. She finds it one night, when James flees the sheets from the grasps of his nightmares, and she noses into his space to find only bitterness. It is, she realises with a sudden pang, the spot where he used to keep his gun. Before. But still, she sees the way his hand reflexively slip towards it upon waking, because old habits die hard and they're all too used to death now.
He clatters about in the kitchen, looking for his favourite whisky, and she rolls onto her back in bed. Too tired to pry the drink from his hands and far too alert to fall asleep again. It's barely living, but it isn't dying, and she's finally beginning to understand why her father used to sit on the bench outside, smoking cigarettes for hours on end in the dark. Her eyes water dangerously with sorrow ungrieved and she holds her breath, blinking back the tears.
The mattress dips on James' side and she rolls into the confines of her own space with her back turned to him. "Are you alright?" she asks into the darkness and she's not sure whether it's meant for him or herself.
"Yes, just a glass of water. Go back to sleep."
His voice is tense and her body rigid with lies upon lies, even if they are the ordinary kind. I love you. This, she decides, is not how she wants to live.
3.
She takes him to Paris, her life packed in a suitcase in the trunk of the Aston and the grime of London slipping past her one last time. Maybe she'll come visit. Maybe she'll forget all about the place, and who could blame her?
Nothing but bleak days and haunting memories of ropes digging into her wrists, explosives tied to her feet, and a helicopter burning bright like a meteorite as it plummets from the sky. Perhaps James will leave too, she thinks, though it won't be for her. He's made enough sacrifices for something that's temporary at best and she likes to think she's given him all she has in return: body and soul fed to a hound for his loyalty.
4.
Sorbonne out of the windows of Le Lapin Blanc is no longer the place she remembers: the air cold and stale and the voices on the street too shrill, babbling in rapid fire French that sounds a tad off key to her. Paris was bound to change, rationally she knows that, and yet.
She closes the window and goes to sit on a white bed in a white room and suddenly this all seems so very wrong. She traces the pastel pattern of the overthrow and thinks back to Tangier. Sheer white curtains and rough linen sheets against her skin as she wriggles her way out of a dress half asleep. And long before that - three years old - clinging to the ornamented balcony railing with an ancient colonist city unfolding beneath her to merge with the sea.
Then Bond, tearing apart the few happy years of her life and wine coursing through her blood like hate. And James, sitting in the rubble with the unwavering devotion of an old guard dog without a master.
He doesn't belong here, with her. He belongs in a time gone by. James Bond is an artifact, a shadow, a spectre of the past, and all life is willing to treat him to is death or something close to it.
"This is the end, isn't it?" he asks without a hint of resignation in his voice, because he's been reading people for too long to miss this coming. Her throat tightens with the thought of the promises he's been trying to keep, a civilian life he's tried to regain only to find it is no longer there.
"Yes."
"And what now?"
"We crawl back into the shadows."
"So it all comes to nothing."
"On n'apprend pas aux vieux singes à faire des grimaces."
She smiles the only smile she has left these days: a parting of her lips to bare her incisors, innocent white against blood red. This is just another goodbye.
A whisper in her ear, tearing her from a dream like the voice of her mother telling her she'll be late for school if she keeps dozing. An illusion torn to shreds in the face of reality, but in her memories, Mama's smile is bright white and James Bond's eyes an even brighter blue. In that moment she thinks that she truly does love him, but in her own particular way that is best acted out at a distance.
5.
The train to Geneva is packed with people murmuring in Swiss German and their very own, tilted brand of French. In the midst of it Dr Madeleine Swann stands on her own with her suitcase wedged between her thigh and the door. It's just like that first time she left home: a quiet optimism seeping into her soul despite the fact that her parents were getting a divorce. It's just like seeing the glass panes of the Hoffler clinic for the first time: knowing she'd live life in the narrow space of invisibility she'd made her own in the thirty odd years of living in the footsteps of an assassin.
She finds work at a clinic in Lausanne, fixing people, who are painfully self aware of the mildly deranged ways in which they fall off the rails time after time. She tapes her own diagnoses and plays them out in the quaint space of her minuscule living room, writing reports clean on paper with a glass of wine for company. It's been like this for years: just her, all alone in the big bad world with her thoughts echoing through time.
She sits back at her desk with a sigh and thinks of the Christmas she finally realised her father was going insane. The two of them up in the run down house in the alps where the wind creeps in through the cracks in the walls and windows. She remembers the gooseflesh rising on her calves from the creak of the stair and the exact moment she spotted the light under the mirror. Secret doors to hide secret lives: her father illuminated in the eerie light of a dozen monitors and nausea settling in the pit of her stomach.
"Madeleine."
"Qu'est ce que c'est?"
"Je peux t'expliquer. Madeleine."
And why had she not told him to stop, instead of pulling on her boots and screaming at him in her nightgown with the winter wind blowing in through the open door?
The last word she ever uttered at him remains 'bastard' and he'd died up there in solitude, for her. Their last unfinished game of chess sitting untouched in the drawing room.
It must still sit there; he must still sit there, dead with his face tilted up towards heaven in a last prayer. She wonders whether James closed his eyes, before leaving all to be as it had been for the decade prior - covered in soot and dust with the imprint of a gun and the track of a ring slid across a table.
6.
A knock on her door in the dead of night and Madeleine wakes to the vile cold of February with her heart scrambling into her throat. She kicks her way out of a tangle of sheets, reaching for a robe as the digits on her alarm clock materialise as 04:35.
Another knock, blunt like a palm banging against the door with urgency and the sound of a familiar voice. "Madeleine!"
She tears the door open, James Bond tipping inwards from a sudden loss of balance and she can tell he's been drinking. Their arms reach automatically for one another's like old friends exchanging a hug.
"James," she blurts, eyebrows pinching together in confusion, "What are you doing here?"
"Have you seen the news?"
"Not since last night. W-"
He tears himself from her grip and storms into the flat with an unnerving sense of purpose. Madeleine notices a smear of blood on her forearm as she shuts the door, and of course he'd show up out of the blue bleeding all over the fucking place. He finds the remote, fumbles with it to turn on the telly only to have her rip it from his hands.
"James, look at me. What is this nonsense?"
Her irritation dies away at the silent desperation in his eyes, something screaming 'please just trust me' and she's taken back to Blofeld's desert hub with her father's figure mirrored across every screen and James Bond brought to his knees, begging her for an ounce of trust. She sucks in a breath, because she can almost hear the sound of the gunshot and somewhere in the back of her mind the memory of Blofeld's manic grin forces itself onto the surface.
The television screen turns on with a static sound and there's the instant background sound of sirens accompanied by images of flames and rubble, people's wailing drowned by a reporter. A terrorist attack in Berlin, two more in Paris, and a fourth in London. An image of half of Whitehall's right wing crumbling into the Thames and next to it the newly restored bridge deformed by Blofeld's helicopter mere months ago.
"Merde."
"Shit, indeed." He rubs a hand across his face, tired of having the country he's fought so hard for be defaced and beaten yet again.
"Do you think it is them?"
"I've not a clue." He shakes his head in resignation. "I've not a bloody clue. Someone else has dealt with the aftermath of SPECTRE: Tanner, or Q perhaps. And I-"
"James," Madeleine takes a step closer, instinctively reaching for his hand. "Listen, this is not your fault. You are not responsible for fighting all the evil in the world single handedly. You are no more than a man in the face of chaos. Besides, you are bleeding."
He glances at the split skin over his knuckles, blood trickling down his fingers. Still desensitised to pain then, Madeleine notes and points him to the sofa while she fetches the first aid kit from under the kitchen sink with shaking hands. There's a bottle of bleach right next to it and for a split second she is nine years old again, clasping her clammy hands around a Beretta.
She pulls out the medical kit and slams the cupboard door shut defiantly. James turns down the volume on the news, eyes darting around impatiently.
"If it is vodka you are looking for, I don't have any."
"Shame."
Madeleine hums noncommittally and clicks the plastic case open on the coffee table to reveal rolls of gauze, tiny flasks and a needle she doesn't want to get acquainted with. "Hold out your arm, please."
James obliges and she dabs it with disinfectant that primarily reeks of rubbing alcohol. He hisses, staring into the wound like it's on someone else's body even though the pain is his.
"Hold still," she instructs, pressing a clean dressing onto his skin as she tries to unravel a roll of gauze with the other. She knows better than to ask what happened, recalling waking to him punching through the wall of L'Americain and she rather suspects he's had a drink or ten at the bar down the road.
The gauze wraps around his hand, stretching over skin and scars and she remembers the way they felt against the flesh of her hips without longing. They'd merely been - how had Papa put it? - two kites dancing in a hurricane; bound to be airborne for a moment at best, and it's a miracle they managed to stick to together like new best buds on a playground on the first day of school. It was better this way: kind words and kind touches in a broken world full of shards.
"Merci." He flexes his fingers experimentally and she rocks back on her haunches, muttering a half-forgotten 'de rien'.
"You know," she says and swallows audibly, "when I was little my father often read me his favourite poem before bed. I cannot recall it, but when he was finished, he would say: 'Madeleine, life is death's other kingdom and thine is the kingdom.'"
"Eliot. 'Eyes I dare not meet in dreams, in death's dream kingdom.'"
"Oui, précisément. It is just-" She licks her lips with the thought only just materialising to be grasped in full, "I never realised he already had one foot in the grave, when I was born. I assumed he had made that choice, after. But all he lived for anymore - killed for - was me, a cause he considered worth living for. Perhaps… perhaps some people aren't meant to have desk jobs. Perhaps some people have to stand in bullet rain and retaliate the hellfire for the rest of humanity to live and breathe in freedom.
"Despite what my father did for a living, no matter how twisted and immoral, I never stopped loving him in my own way. SPECTRE, MI6. They've wreaked havoc across the world in their own ways, but then titans often do."
She pauses, clasps her hands together. Takes a deep breath under his watchful gaze.
"I am grateful you kept your promise to save my life, but I meant what I told you when we left the safe house. The truth is, I am not meant for that sort of life; I belong in the light. And you are a creature of the shadows, an attack dog made for the battlefront."
"What happened to 'when given every other option'?"
"Like you said: perhaps you never had a choice." Madeleine rises to her feet, standing above him with an amused smile creeping onto her face, "Besides, you would have made an awful priest."
He laughs at that, the frown on his face splitting into genuine delight and her heart warms at the sight. "Thank you," James says earnestly and she shrugs. This is what they can do for one another, fix and heal what life insists on tearing.
"What are friends for?"
"I wouldn't know."
"That makes two of us then." Madeleine closes the first aid kit and tucks it under her arm. "You are welcome to have the sofa for tonight. Shall I get you a blanket?"
James nods, another thank you getting caught in his throat. "I'll be off in the morning."
"Of course. It is the nostalgie de la boue."
"I'll send you a postcard."
7.
Dr Madeleine Swann lives her life as she always intended to: with absolute devotion to herself, waltzing through the cobblestone streets of an old city in a bright dress.
She writes an esteemed article on trouble de stress post-traumatique and cuts it out of the journal to hang in a frame on the living room wall. On a whim, she indulges the young man in the opposite office by agreeing to a single date. She joins the rest of her co-workers for the occasional drink, smiling at the way they argue about the garbage disposal schedule with passion.
And when she goes home to find her solace in the quiet of her flat, there's a vibrant postcard tucked between the bills on her doormat. Madeleine tacks it onto the the fridge with the rest of them and searches for the Maldives on the paper map of the entire globe she's taped to the wall. She commemorates the spot with a red dot, a date, and draws a line from Chittagong in pencil. Somewhere, someone is gone, and in his shadow lives another man, who writes her little arbitrary truths from his life of lies.
Les tuer, Les menteur.
Partout.
Notes:
1. Title from Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Words, Wide night".
2. Le Lapin Blanc - the white hare - is a hotel near Sorbonne, which, as the name suggests, is mostly decorated in white and the lightest of pastels. It seemed rather fitting for Madeleine.
3."On n'apprend pas aux vieux singes à faire des grimaces." French saying (lit. 'You cannot teach old monkeys to make faces') which is considered equivalent of the english version: "You can't teach old dogs new tricks."
4. Madeleine's exchange with her father:
"Qu'est ce que c'est?" What is this?
"Je peux vous expliquer. Madeleine." I can explain. Madeleine.
5. The "Eliot poem" refers to T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men.
6. "nostalgie de la boue" French expression (lit. a yearning for the mud) which refers 'to a person's fondness for cruel, crude, depraved, or humiliating things.'
7. Madeleine's lines from the movie, which I used as the final lines: To liars, to killers. Everywhere.
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