Chapter Text
Death of the Author
It had all started after a compulsory appointment with one of the shrinks that dwelt in Psych - second only to Medical, when it came to MI6 most hated departments; his career had been only at the beginning back then, he had just brought to term his first kill and James didn't know how to tell the way too young psychiatrist that no, he didn't feel any guilt over the life he had put an abrupt end to: it might have been the first man he had murdered since becoming part of the secret service, but he hadn't become a Commander of the Navy without spilling any blood - the shrink was a few years too late to catch any whisper of existential crisis.
But, to be fair to the guy, he had given a rather stubborn agent a good suggestion - an instrument to elaborate on his own whatever might be bothering him after a particularly hard mission: he had told him to put things in paper, so that he could look at them from another perspective and analyse them without baring his soul to someone else.
If the other shrinks knew that one of their colleagues had encouraged an agent to work alone on his issues, they would have probably skinned him - James was endlessly grateful, instead.
Not that he had taken the piece of advice seriously since the beginning: he already wrote reports about his missions and he had never found that it particularly helped him with making sense of whatever horrible thing he had experienced out in the field. James warmed up to the method slowly, once he realised that nobody would be reading those tales - that he could skip over things he didn't need to see on paper and indulge on others that he wished to remember in greater detail: they were personal and he could do whatever he wanted with them.
That was when he started fixing his mistakes on paper, changing the course of the mission to be closer to what it should have been; it made him feel better - especially when even through fiction it was hard correcting what had gone wrong - and it helped him to develop a greater eye for the dynamics of a particular situation, forcing him to think and reflect on all the variables that could potentially stand in his way and make a mess of his plans.
It didn't cure him of his rash and impulsive nature - nothing could, really - but it helped.
A little.
Well, James didn't think that anyone in MI6 thought that he had gotten any better but he didn't care about them: he knew himself and he could see enough improvement that he felt proud about his development in a better agent - arguably the best MI6 had had in a while.
And that was everything James had wanted to be: he hadn't planned on becoming a novelist - surprisingly, though, he loved it. He loved crafting characters that could be as cocky and as shrewd as he wanted them to be, to give them a heart of darkness but enough redeeming qualities that the readers couldn't help but sympathise with the villains; he loved throwing shade at the world of espionage, criticising his line of work with an honesty that he never could openly voice in front of his colleagues; he loved giving hope even when all he had to give were tales of terror and twisted humanity.
James had never been so grateful about someone snooping through his things, breaching his privacy with so much carelessness that it had made him bristle with a deep-seated annoyance he rarely felt - to be honest, he hadn't decked the woman only because she looked like she could have been someone's grandmother and even he had some form of self control. Oh, but he had shot her quite the glare; even as she had introduced herself with a card that stated she was employed by a small publisher and had told him they would be interested in printing one of his works - which had needed quite some polishing but apparently his prose had been the right balance between thrilling suspense and romance so purple that it almost was too cheesy to read.
James hadn't accepted that time.
Neither the second.
Nor the third.
By that time, James had figured out that the woman was a regular customer of the little cafe he had gotten attached to and it didn't take him long to admit to himself that she would eventually wear him down.
The fifth time she offered, James accepted with a sigh and asked her for her email, so that he could send her one of the few manuscripts he had typed up: it was based on one of his first missions as a Double-Oh and, therefore, it was packed with his younger self's abundant idiocy and cockyness that, admittedly, didn't really made him a likeable character on paper - or so he had thought: apparently readers ate it up when the hero was a complex bastard that had to work his way into their hearts and earn himself the readers' approval.
James didn't pretend to understand any of that and he just blinked at the cheque he was presented with when his first book - It's Never Paris (he still cringed at the title but someone had explained to him why it was a strategic marketing choice) - had sold a thousand copies in ten days.
Not that he had needed the money - he was paid more than enough for risking his life on the regular - but it still had been shocking to realise that there were people who thought worth it spending a tenner on his story.
James didn't keep anything of what he earned as a novelist: each time he was paid, he picked a charity and he donated the money - hospitals, orphanages, research.. anything that piqued his interest and that came back clean after a thorough background check.
He had no intentions of financing frauds.
With his second novel - Twice Dead in Moscow (he did the smart thing and didn't point out that he had risked dying way more than just two times while on a mission in Russia) - James started to receive what his publisher called fanmail and, really, people didn't know that his ego didn't need any more stroking: to put it in M's words, he soon wouldn't be able to walk past the door if his ego kept growing like some kind of weed.
By the time his third book - An Austrian Conspiracy (yes, he had given up on trying to suggest a title) - appeared in libraries, people had started to ask for signed copies and interviews; the first he could obviously do but his fans would just have to deal with the fact that they would never see his face: it already was dangerous enough being published, even if under a pseudonym - he certainly couldn't afford letting his face be linked to those novels.
Besides, he might not have been ashamed of his writing, but he wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea of MI6 learning about his little job on the side; he didn't really know why and he didn't even waste the time to actually understand his feelings regarding the matter, he just didn't want to be seen as anything else but the ruthless and womanizer agent that was admired by the whole agency for his ability to carry through even the toughest jobs.
His seventh novel - Tokyo is Forever (he was ready to swear that the titles purposefully had been getting worse over the time because everyone at the publishing company knew just how much he hated them) - almost "broke his fanbase"; apparently his villain had been so loved that his readers couldn't cope with Irma Bunt's death and wanted him to know that they would really appreciate it if he brought her back to life.
James didn't resurrect her - he wrote spy novels, not fantasy ones: he couldn't even imagine how a bullet between the eyes couldn't have resulted in a rather permanent death - but he wrote a short story centred about her character that sold way more than even his publisher had expected.
Then 007 was sent on a mission to foil Le Chiffre's plans and Guillaume Lien disappeared from the literary scene - just as unexpectedly as Vesper had waltzed out of his life, drowned in a sundress so red that every time he recalled the event, James couldn't help thinking that there had been blood in the water.
Somewhere in a London suburb, a boy with a head full of numbers and a rather colourful imagination had nicked a battered copy of Murder amidst the Dunes from his mother's bedside table and had absconded with it in the garden; she never let him peruse her library but if there was something that only made Gabriel Rathaway even more stubborn about doing something, it was being forbidden from doing it.
Once he started reading it, Gabriel understood why his mother had never let him put his hands on it: to put it plainly, it was a little too racy for a ten-year old boy (the idea of his mother reading that kind of stuff while his father snored or did the crossword next to her made Gabriel mildly uncomfortable) and the author sometimes went a little too deep in the detailing of torture scenes.
But he liked it. Sure, it made it a bit difficult to sleep that first night and he really could have done with less amorous interludes, but Gabriel had really enjoyed the story.
And even if he would never admit it, that day the seed of his future career was planted at the back of his mind as the printed words enchanted and ensnared him: one day, he was going to work for the Secret Service.
Much to his mother's future disappointment.