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He feels –
Panic, untamed, and fear losing control within his chest. Deep breaths flood into his throat, and the hot, sandy air of Morocco is relentless as it drowns him, choking his lungs into dry, ancient caverns and tombs of old. Bond tries to focus on anything but the sound of the drill whirring behind his ear, the screech of metal, the whiz, the crunch, the scream of bone and flesh, but his head rings with it, like a great church bell tolling out into the gloom.
The cat is in his lap, a thing ignorant in its domesticity. It would be innocent, Bond supposes, if it were not a cat, and he forces a smile to contort the agonised tilt of his lips to distract himself from this catastrophic shit-hole of a mission.
(It is a mission – M’s last. Bond will see it through even it if kills him).
(Even if it doesn’t, perhaps).
A momentary madness overtakes him when the drill stops; the rush of relief he feels is the breath he cannot gasp, a wheezing, short-lived thing. Blofeld thinks he’s hilarious – thinks he has mastered this game, orchestrated it into perfection – but it is the survivor who deal the aces, and there’s already one waiting up his sleeve.
Q-branch, he thinks, recalling the Quartermaster’s reluctant parting-gift. The watch is beyond his reach – hands tied, body bound, the world’s best-dressed, most stubborn, I’ll-never-roll-over-and-die wolf of a lamb, but he will get to it, as he always does, be it via pain or madness or –
He feels hands across his face, fingertips along the stubble. Breath, hot, warm, almost gasping into his chin, nonsensical words pitter-pattering into his skin like a rain of stops and starts, commas and periods and syntax jumbled into one. He tries to whisper back, to piece together a reassurance from the pained wheezes of his throat, but for a moment, his tongue refuses to work just as his eyes refuse to focus. He swallows, mouthing along to misery, and the voice at his ear gasps in return – a word, something familiar, something old and worn and something James.
“– do you recognise me?”
Bond blinks, turning bristle and a tight, clenched jaw into the palm. Colours blur with pain, shapes distort into form, and through the haze of agony as his heart slows into calm, Bond sees –
He sees –
Curves, lines, and fragments of reality. He sees yellow, neat and tidied away, hair with only a few golden hues of sand trickling around a pale shape. He sees a frown, pink lips pressed into concern, and eyes of bright, watery blue staring steady into his own.
He hears a voice, rushed, ocean waves crashing against the shore, and he thinks –
Madeleine.
“I’ll always recognise you,” Bond says; he cannot even bring himself to lie.
London. Home.
M’s safe house is simple enough to find. Bond knows these streets, knows the alleys, the paths and roofs, and the way the fog lingers in the air. Arrogance finds itself a smile on his face at how easy it is to get into the safe house, and he would berate M, berate MI6, and berate what’s left of their security if he had the chance, but C has played his part, and there is a time and a place for mockery.
Now is not that time. Now there is a man to stop, a country to save, and a Queen to protect. There is a woman at his side, a gun in his hand, and – soon – an arsenal of minds and dedication at his disposal.
Bond hears them coming up the stairs. M, first, his stride long and sure, leading the way. Tanner is second, following dutifully in his boss’ shadow with a step lighter but no less controlled, and Bond can hear him talking in his characteristic short, breathless tones of concern. Lastly is Q’s ascent of the staircase, a civilian thump-thump-thump of a laptop bag against his side, and Bond doesn’t bother drawing his gun when the door bursts open and M steps inside.
He doesn’t need them, but at the same time, he isn’t sure why he has waited for them either.
“Is it safe?” Tanner asks, his shorter stature attempting to peer around his boss. Q’s unruly mop of hair is there somewhere, and Bond allows himself to smirk as M makes an exasperated noise and leads the trio inside.
“It’s safe,” M says, but his posture is guarded as he walks towards Bond, shoulders tense, head tilting as he scans the room. It is likely that his eyes dart about, categorising every nook and cranny of the apparent safe house, but Bond struggles to discern the finer details of M’s expression through the gloom.
He thinks nothing of it, watching Tanner and Q file in. The Chief of Staff emits a soft noise of surprise at their unexpected guests, but Q is silent, unusually so, and the back of Bond’s mind twinges with something like pain, or doubt, or the frustration at something forgotten –
Q, he has to remind himself, staring steady at the sharp angles and pale, youthful contours of the man’s face, this is the Quartermaster.
Redundant though the observation usually is, Bond thinks nothing of it. He disregards the audience lingering at the edges of his sight – Q, Tanner, Madeleine, the lights from London sleeping below – and focuses on M’s demands, listening to the movements of his frown and observing the twist of his lips, the dip of his brow. He looks composed, unshaken despite the tatters of the 00-programme awaiting orders around him, but he does not look like M, Bond realises, just as he doesn’t quite look like Gareth Mallory either.
“007,” comes the reprimand – a snappish breath, low with exasperation and gunshot short, but wholly and undeniably M, and Bond files his wandering thoughts away.
He doesn’t apologise.
In the corner of his eye, two heads dip low, mouths muttering quietly beneath the weight of their thoughts, London’s shadow obscuring their eyes. Somebody’s face contorts into a frown, but Bond, glancing towards them, cannot identify whose.
Headlights slam into the side of the car, truck-lights pouring through the fractures of his consciousness. Glass shatters over his head; blood bespatters the dashboard.
They put a bag over his head when they rip him from the wreckage.
Bond tries not to think about it, but he wonders if it makes any difference.
Blofeld’s footsteps lead him to a skyscraper of concrete and wire, a building abandoned to foundations of calamity and stone – MI6 in the skeleton shift; a skeleton shift that will never end. Bond doesn’t linger in the hallways, his pace the breath before a trigger is pulled – a decision, assured, his steps light and strong and fast. The tower is a labyrinth of cold, empty corridors and memories from years ago, but Bond presses on, up, up, up when the only path home is down beyond metropolitan soil and into the dirt and the darkness below.
Barren rooms lead him onwards, a tomb of a building crumbling as he walks his fated path. He steps over plaster and brick, ducking beneath long-forgotten archways and through doorframes of mould. Treading carefully, he tracks Blofeld as if there are footsteps to be seen, engraved into the concrete by the weight of his sins. The corridors seem endless, a maze weaving restlessly like SPECTRE’s reach into Bond’s past. One hallway in particular is wide and spacious like a gallery hanging only the finest art, high ceilings beckoning dust to quiver up into every nook and cranny, collating like storm clouds over the vast, lonely space. Uniform shapes adorn the walls – rectangles, portrait in orientation, but colourless, faded and grey like half-hearted paintings in this abandoned museum.
Bond glances between them, watching for eyes and watching for traps.
He sees –
Black and white, lines and grey. He thinks briefly of old photographs, corners burn and care long forgotten, paper pages of a past pushed aside, but moves on without further consideration, narrowing his attention back down the barrel of his gun.
He feels –
Nothing at all. Had he seen the faces hanging there, perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case; perhaps the portraits would have executed Blofeld’s design; a rush of sadness, a swell of bitterness, or a cold, hard anger as Bond takes to the stairs.
(Perhaps the photos would have meant something to him).
(But perhaps not).
He doesn’t shoot Blofeld. He doesn’t kid himself by thinking that he’s better than that.
It is a statement, nothing more, nothing less. It is not mercy, or kindness, or a weakness of the heart. (Bond doubts he has a heart anyway; maybe it had burnt to a cinder alongside Skyfall, alongside the bloody, breathless body of M, or maybe winter had taken it so long ago, swept it up in an avalanche and crushed him far beneath the snow, and it’s fitting, Bond doesn’t say, just as it’s fitting that he lost her to water and ice, and eyes as cold as his own).
The click of the magazine is a gunshot. It’s descent to the pavement is a grenade, but the shell of one, an impossibility now, and Blofeld jerks back as Bond lifts the gun and discards it into the river tempesting below.
It has no use anymore.
(Like him).
Bond steps back, finalising the distance from Blofeld’s scrabble across the ground. Dust scatters from his hair as he turns, concrete fragments falling onto his shoulders and tumbling down his suit, slicing the crinkled folds of shirt – a shame. Casting his gaze out into the London night, he spies a haze of luminescence to the left: people, their disjointed, fluorescent figures backed by a blur of curious lights of blue and white. Bond cannot discern who stands there, but he cannot bring himself to find out, discouraged by the bustle of a dozen unknown faces amidst the migraine-glow.
Instead, he looks right. Dark cars seep into the darkness at the end of Westminster bridge: the lights there are low, inviting, like a torch in a blackout or a single, wavering candle waiting at a dinner for two. There is a figure there, but just one, and Bond feels safer with the solitude before he has even identified who awaits his approach; dark coat, shadowed expression, and posture military rigid, he thinks of M, and agents, and Tanner’s perpetual concern before recognising the golden sand of Madeleine’s hair.
She says nothing, or maybe there is nothing to say.
Bond slows his stride to a stop, and hears the sole of his shoe scrape against the pavement. It is not a falter (but for anybody else, it would be) but rather, a lapse in confidence that takes him by surprise – only momentarily, a 00-nature entrenched, but enough to tip the scales and shiver suspicion down his spine.
There is something wrong.
(With him).
And he looks to Madeleine’s face for reassurance and finds –
A frown, eyes of Austria blue, and hair of igneous sunlight curling around a face so familiar and yet – and yet everything about this woman is Madeleine’s beauty, her intellect, her sharp, unforgiving mind, but she is not Madeleine, and she is, and she is nothing more than a face so indiscernible that she cannot be the woman that Bond has come to know –
“James,” she says, Madeleine’s voice ringing out from Madeleine’s lips, and Bond –
Does not know this face.
He does not –
“ – where will you go?” she asks, hands buried deep within her coat. They have fought for long enough, bled and scarred for not enough, and Bond cannot bring himself to ruin her touch with one last desperate, aching, yearning reach of his own.
“Back,” he says; it’s the only place he can go. (It’s the only place where he recognises himself – the only place he might, anymore).
Madeleine inclines her head, not quite smiling, and not quite expressing anything at all. Melancholy doesn’t suit her – but then, when she turns away, Bond cannot be certain whether happiness suits her more.
He cannot imagine her smiling.
In fact, he cannot imagine her face at all.