Work Text:
Afterwards - after Moneypenny, three VW Beetles, I think! and take the bloody shot; after washing away grime, blood, and sin, and collecting more in the rolls of sand and scorpions stings, Bond lifts a shot of whiskey and toasts the indignation furrowing M's brow. Where the hell have you been, she asks, as if she has any right to ask (maybe she has the only right to ask), and he doesn't quite laugh but he doesn't quite manage a smile either, knocking back the whiskey and feeling his feathers curl.
(She can't see his wings - nobody can. But they can see the cut of his suit, the elegant trim, the fitted waist, and that's the closest they'll ever get to the other-world).
"Enjoying death," he says, as though he is sincere.
M levels him with the look, and Bond returns the stare, daring bite me with his eyes and the swirl of his drink, round and round and round.
She is the first - the only one - to back down.
Bond takes the decanter as he leaves because it means more to her than he does.
MI6 quivers beneath his feet, even after all this time. These foundations of concrete and stone are not enough to contain him, not enough to hold him, tame him, tether him to the ground, and glass has always been a poor reflection of human ingenuity; walls of water, practically so, but easier to bend to his will, merely molten sand and stone. They’d be better off with actual waterfalls (oh, how he hates the damp clinging to his skin) but Heaven knows that London sees enough of rain.
It is a city consistent in its lacklustre, if nothing else, and Bond can appreciate the familiarity of such a dull, unassuming routine. The lights of the bustle warm and cool, the sounds rise and fall, and the people wander, mingle, trot, but never does London ever go - it stays, it waits, and it remains, and Bond thinks rightly so.
It is he who comes and goes, as is his right. Those who seek to control him are few and far between (what’s left of them is few and far between), and London has learnt its lesson. To trap an angel is a grave offence - but to home one?
To home one is perhaps the greatest sin of all.
(Good, Bond thinks, and though he steps light and long-forgotten into the ground, there is such a weight to his presence, such a heavy, heavy weight. Let London know that I have returned).
(Let London know what stalks the darkness in its streets).
(Let London know what is the darkness in its streets).
It had not always been this way.
Once, he had watched, lazing days and decades away without a care for the creatures that scrabbled the Earth. But you are holy, the men had cried, you are beautiful, merciful, divine. We call you angels, they had claimed, we call you angelic, loving, and pure - so what do you call us? What do you call us from that unreachable place above?
Foolish, they had replied - and Bond remembers laughing, remembers hysteria and blood. But delightfully entertaining.
Men have come far since times of old, but human nature is human nature, and they haven’t changed at all. They still fight and kill and love and lose, expect the worse and demand the best and settle for nothing, nothing in between, and they fascinate Bond just as they bore him; a morbid curiosity driving him on and on and on.
He hadn’t meant to linger for so long, but linger he does, wandering, never staying. A beautiful woman once dared to ask why he fell - what was so tempting, she had said, batting eyelashes and quirking her mouth of sin - and Bond had laughed unrestrained, bearing fangs and sins of his own.
Mankind are all the same, such mindless, starry-eyed things, he had purred, twisting a lock of her hair about his finger with a leisurely motion of lavish. How egotistical you are to flatter yourself with delusions of romanticism and temptation. What makes you think I have ‘fallen’ at all?
He could go if he wished - go, and never return. England doesn’t need him, MI6 could do without, but oh they both want him in ways they certainly shouldn’t, craving him nightmares, bloodthirst, hellish eyes and all. He is just as much a game to them as they are to him, and Bond as revels in the insanity of it all he lingers a little longer, enjoying this barefaced masquerade enough to disregard Heaven calling him -
He cannot say if Above is home when it is beneath the metropolitan shadows that Bond has found his own.
M calls him 007 because he’s a weapon, because he’s something to be feared.
He calls her ma’am because he likes the way the word drags his mouth up and reveals his teeth in a smile.
She knows when she’s being patronised.
It’s the only thing he likes about her.
MI6 is not naive enough to think it’s saving the world; they’re only slowing the inevitable, starving off pain and misery because there is nothing else they can do. They don’t need to watch Bond smear handprints down his suit and lick blood from his lips to tell them that peace is an unattainable concept.
(He does it anyway, of course. Tailored suits are sex’s creation, but he is an angel, an abomination, and he relishes in wrecking them to threadbare and ruin).
(Blood feels just as good on his shirt as his skin).
Medical think it is their decision as to whether he returns to the field, and Bond lets them have their petty arguments. They are blinded by tests, data, and scores, and think that numbers are enough to command him, to reign him in, tell him no. They believe it is a matter of whether he should return to active duty, whether he is capable, and Bond would laugh were the shards of M's decanter not clinking around in his pocket; his hand, playing idly with the edges, would beat psychologists black and blue were it not already stained scarlet, burgundy and red.
He has never left the field.
Skyfall, they say, and Bond says, don't we all?
He fails the word-association test.
(He always does).
They continue calling him 007 anyway, but truly, is he anything else?
"I see that self-resurrection isn't beneath you," Moneypenny says, inclining an expression sharpened into perfection towards him. She prowls the halls beyond M's office in six-inch heels and a dress capable of murder - and she is, and she has, and Bond smiles, donning a wounded expression.
"It is most definitely the staying dead part that I seem to have a problem with."
She was joking. He is not.
"Good shot, Moneypenny," he says, and he leaves MI6 feeling a little lighter; feeling a little less weighed down by the bullet in his chest.
It is the first conversation all week in which he hasn't had to lie.
"What do you see?" the stranger asks, hair just as scruffy as his dress; a suit, a little large, with cross-eyed checkered trousers and a navy tie, but it is the enormous winter jacket that sets him apart, a man bracing himself for the cold. He looks ridiculous - he is ridiculous for risking conversation with a being like James Bond, but Bond humours him anyway, just as he humours all of the human race.
The young man with the wonky glasses and the wonky haircut isn't impressed, but then neither is Bond right up until he goes to leave and the stranger calls:
"007. I'm your new Quartermaster."
Bond perches back down. He tries not to think of the last time he was so surprised.
There is a moment in which the life of the National Gallery continues spiralling around them.
"You must be joking," is what he manages to reply; he doesn't need to glance over to see the Quartermaster's lazy smirk.
Most people who smirk at him get their faces blown off, but Bond achieves restraint this time.
Q gives him nothing more than a gun and a radio. His good luck feels like an awkward pat on the back and a shove out of the door, but Bond merely pockets the equipment and brushes down his suit.
His wings shiver.
Bond slips the tickets to Shanghai into his jacket, but it isn't like he needs those.
Séverine leads him to Silva and gets shot for her efforts.
It's a waste of a perfectly good glass of whiskey, to be honest.
London welcomes him with a grim smile, as it always does, dim street-lights of eyes averting their gaze through the fog. Silva's presence sets MI6 on high alert despite the prison, the glass, the metal and the wires that trap the ex-agent at the core of their institution, and while Bond is assured that only numbers - tightly controlled digits and code - can penetrate Silva's cage, he takes to stalking the hallways anyway, uncertain of safeguards beyond his omniscient eyes.
In Q-branch, his restless pacing only continues, but he disguises it well with hands shoved into pockets and steel eyes fixated, preying upon the array of code that the Quartermaster fusses through. It is not a language he has bothered to learn - and my, he knows many-a-language, ancient scripts and forbidden texts and words he can never utter, only carve through those he forsakes and write its forgotten verses in saliva, tears, and blood. There are languages in his head that this world has not laid witness to for a millennia, and there are languages on his tongue that this world has never heard, and never will, for it could never understand.
But for all that Bond cannot grasp the complexity of computers and code, he is knowledgeable in Silva's other dialect - a dialect of murder, vengeance, and morals twisted and cold.
"Granborough Road," he says, watching the fragmented syntax spin about the screen. "Metropolitan line."
Q blinks behind the square frames of his glasses and then types Granborough into the decoder.
NOT SUCH A CLEVER BOY, it shouts back, and a skull flashes up onto the monitor, laughing along with the screams of MI6's security system howling around them.
"Oh fuck," mutters the Quartermaster, tearing through the cables to try and contain the damage. "Oh no, no, no, no, no -"
Bond breaks into a run, ripping through the wailing corridors so fast that he could be flying - but he's not, of course; too narrow are the walls of MI6, and too feeble are the foundations that support it to withstand the true weight of his ethereal form and glory. He could wreck this building, decimate it in one thunderous swoop of his wings, but he hasn't, and he won't, and he never will, and maybe that's sentiment or maybe it's madness, or maybe he's walked these concrete paths for so long that he's forgotten how it feels to blend the light and sky and make the clouds, and have the world at his mercy and laugh at it all.
Maybe he doesn't want to watch any more.
Maybe he wants to be.
"They warned me that you were an angel," Q says.
'They' could mean many things, but Bond just says oh? and adjusts the cuffs of his sleeves as he slips through the Metropolitan tube. The busy compartment doesn't so much as bat an eyelash at him, but the motions of jumping onto the speeding underground without clambering in through the cattle car doors is beyond their ignorant, rush-hour minds.
"Yes," Q continues, his voice as smooth as the communications refined. Computer keys click-clack under his command, but Bond reveals nothing to the CCTV cameras turning with the Quartermaster's influence. "I can't imagine why."
"Can't you?" Bond replies, squeezing through the crowds of people. Some grunt and frown and refuse to budge, but they would, Bond knows, if they knew exactly what was stalking through their blissful, oblivious lives. "Pity. My wings are quite impressive, I'll have you know."
Q's reply is instantaneous and unwavering despite the looming threat of sheer calamity ticking down elegantly between them. "Never fear," he says. "Your ego rather makes up for it."
Kincade has gotten older, as has the house.
(It is only Bond who retraces these paths with a face of an age of long ago, and eyes just as cold, perhaps more so).
Skyfall creaks and groans and welcomes Bond home - welcomes him as well as it can, with dust and memories scattered over broken promises and broken lives. Once magnificent, the manor is all but ruin now, but Bond has always had an eye for ancient, derelict things. There is beauty in Skyfall that he has seldom found elsewhere, and even as he tears up the floorboards, guts the heart of the house, and barricades the last of Scotland's sunlight far from this shambolic monarch of a home, Skyfall stands spectacular.
He embattles the house because he has brought desuetude upon it, and it is the least he can do.
Rather, it is all that Skyfall can do now, disused at it is. He'll make it a weapon and light it in flames, and if the sky is going to fall, then the earth can fall with it.
M gasps her last sorry breath in his arms and soaks his wings with blood.
His feathers are dark and glorious and now they droop just so, and Bond never expected it to hurt this much.
Skyfall burns around him, and Bond thinks, don't we all?
Afterwards - after Moneypenny, the funeral, and the ugliest bulldog trinket that Bond has ever seen; after day and after night, and after losing hours somewhere between Heaven and Hell, Bond downs an entire bottle of Jack Daniel's and uncurls his wings to the London dawn. In silhouette, he ceases to exist, merely a shadow against the skyline and a bird too close to the sun. Nobody can see his wings - unless he wills them, unless he dares them to see, but he is alone up here beneath the fog and rainy clouds, and he prefers it that way. Dusky feathers stretch out, two great wings enfolding the sky. Bond reaches up and runs his hand through the quills, tracing the blood splatters with his fingertips and feeling the ruin with his skin.
They are heavier than they used to be.
He wonders if she had been able to see them in her final moments; he wonders if that is the point.
He wonders if they'll lift him any more, but when he looks out across the cityscape and sees all the places he might not reach and all the places he may (even now; especially now), Bond picks up another bottle of whiskey instead of finding out. He hates Jack Daniel's but he doesn't particularly hold himself in any favour either, so maybe he drinks cheap whiskey to smother the despicable part of his soul.
Intoxication is a beautiful state he'll never reach, but he lets himself drift away anyway, sprawled across the rooftop with his wings spread afar.
He may have never fallen, but sometimes Bond doubts there is any further he could fall.