Reflections on a Changed World
Chapter Text
Bond trudged back to the hotel with the weariness of a man making his way through a heavy accumulation of snow and not the dry dusting that it had been so far. By the time he got to his room and slumped on the couch, his feet were numb and his nose and earlobes tingled with chill. Falling snow had melted in his hair and frozen into a thin helmet that broke and turned into icy rivulets down the back of his neck and behind his ears. He sighed at his general discomfort feeling, somehow, that this had all been earned.
After a few moments he stood and slowly took off his overcoat and shoes, balling his toes to get the feeling back. He poured himself a brandy from the bar, finding some satisfaction in the way it burned on his tongue. He slumped back into the couch.
So, what was the catalogue now? He was a broken man—an unreliable agent, a psychopath, a patsy, and now a whore. It was a good thing his conversations with CG O'Hare had been limited, God knew what she would consider him. A brute, perhaps? Savage? Bond drained the glass then went to the bar and refilled it. Then he pulled the darts out of his jacket pocket and looked them over, then pulled out the Clie and held it in the other hand. He put them both on the desk beside the autoinjector and transmitter Judy had given him then pulled his Walther from its holster and lay it beside the other two. Bond stared at them for a few minutes, running the past 24 hours through his mind.
Perhaps he was a broken toy now. A defective machine. His time in North Korea had cracked some indistinct component within him, and the damage was detectible to seemingly everyone he encountered. They sized him up, saw a wounded animal, and they struck. M had been right; the worldhadchanged while he was in that prison. He had fooled himself into believing it was otherwise, that he'd proven it by defeating Gustav Graves. But Graves had merely been a sideshow—the latest in a long line of megalomaniacs who believed that enough money insulated them from the laws that governed the rest of the world.
But the world had been changed by a very different kind of megalomaniac, and now western civilization itself was at war for its very survival. More lives were at stake than could have ever been threatened by Graves or Alec Trevelyan or even Elliott Carver. The intelligence agencies had turned ruthless and feral. Bond had never been the type of agent who was romantic about the world of espionage, but he would have never imagined a time when the CIA would blackmail him to do their bidding like some low-level enemy operative they'd turned. Even Judy and her RGB masters had simply assumed he would be vulnerable to his basest instincts for revenge, retribution. And why not? Weren't those the instincts driving foreign policy now? Yes, he thought, the world had changed. It was a brutal, corrosive place now, and he was a product of a different age.
Bond finished his second drink and put the glass down disinterestedly on an end table. So where did that leave him? Thrashing about in the water, seeing if he would sink or swim? Deciding whether he'd lost a step and was no longer a fit for this work in this new world? Bond mulled this for a long time, then went to bed.