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“Darling,” his mother had said to him at the age of seven, “there are stranger and scarier things out there than men.”
It was like she’d known even then she would die gasping for breath, crushed beneath feet of snow, only ten meters away from her dying husband, but a lifetime away from her son.
– ♠ –
When he was twenty-nine, Bond once saw a woman change her face.
It was only for a moment, a second glimpsed from between stalls in a crowded street market in Phuket: a Thai woman in a pink flower frock glanced at the man on her arm as he watched another woman, platinum blond with the high cheekbones and vaguely starved look of a Paris model, and then she lifted her hand to her face and she was her. She pulled like she was peeling off a papier-mâché mask, and when Bond blinked her hand was empty and she was looking at the man on her arm, still in the same pink flower frock, but now blond and high-cheekboned and vaguely starved-looking. When he noticed, the man smiled and kissed her cheek, and they went on their way. Nobody glanced at them twice, except to generally murmur about the kind of man who walked around with a woman that tall and fair on his arm. Like he always had.
When he was thirty-five, a rogue chemist he’d been chasing through another crowded market in another crowded city ducked into an alley and someone with a much broader nose and bluer eyes walked out in his clothes. Bond shot him in the head and reported in his success.
– ♠ –
It was Mathis, actually, who first told him about the Door.
“It comes at a cost, of course,” he said. Mathis was one of the old-school spies, the ones who trusted their dead drops more than their digital tracking software, the ones who believed that new assets should be told everything they might need to know on their missions, including the language, the local criminal networks, and the old lore. “It always does. Technically you are supposed to be able to pass through three times, though I don’t know anyone who has.”
Vesper laughed. James hadn’t. “But you know someone who’s gone through it once?” she asked.
Mathis said nothing. Not then.
– ♠ –
There were stranger and scarier things out there than men, but Bond had only seen them through the corner of his eye until he walked through the gilded doors of the Casino Royale and came face-to-face with something weeping blood.
It took him two unforgivably long rounds to figure it out, the way that his bloody eye would linger on the hands of the men who were bluffing, how Le Chiffre seemed to have no discernable playing style and yet was winning every hand. He glanced over at Vesper, over whose features a permanent storm had seemed to settle; at Mathis, who wasn’t looking at him at all, but stirring his drink, three turns clockwise, three turns counterclockwise, as if the fate of the world depended on it.
The next round, Bond didn’t bother looking at his cards. Le Chiffre glared at him, a glare that became wilder and more hateful as blood started to bead, then to blossom, from his left tear duct. Bond’s fortunes swung wildly—well, that was what happened when you bet blind in a game of poker where every player was as frightfully skilled and determined to win as he was—but Le Chiffre’s stack begin to drop, a little at first, then more and more.
Unforgivable, really, that Bond was so busy focusing on that eye that he hadn’t been watching his drink. Digitalis, the medical team told him later, after he’d almost died slumped in a company car and Vesper had resuscitated him. An old trick, only preternatural in how tired it was—poison in a drink you hadn’t seen being made yourself. Le Chiffre watched all his drinks being made with that hawksblood eye, of course. He learned a lesson then, about magic and its seductive pull, the way it drew the eye to it and left you blind on the periphery for the ways in which men could be perfectly strange and scary on their own.
He learned a different lesson in Venice, but one no less forgettable. One no less painful.
– ♠ –
There was a Door, Mathis had said. In a city, hot and desert-burnished, one with a long and furious history but lacking a name the locals would freely give him, James walked into a bar and breathed in air too cold to be entirely natural. It was early, but there were shades sitting in the old-style leather booths, a shimmer in the air like heat mirages by the barstools. He walked down the steps from the street and they seemed to stretch out forever, five shallow steps turning into ten, then fifteen, and when he set foot on the cool, stone floor he was fully underground and a glorious selection of bottles in languages that even he couldn’t identify were shelved against a wall of stone brick. The lights were low and the air was dusty with sand and grit.
He walked to the bar and ordered a vodka martini: three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shaken, with a large, thin slice of lemon peel.
“I’m not sure you came here to drink, friend,” said the bartender.
Bond squinted for identifiable features, but none were forthcoming. “I didn’t,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me who you are and why you’re here, then, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to help?”
“I think,” he said, “I’m not supposed to do that either. Give my name, in any case.”
“But what shall I call you?”
Faerie bars and spy hangouts were strangely alike. James knew better than to give his name in either, anyway. “Call me 007.”
A laugh like diamonds on glass. “Fair enough. What brings you here, then? Business or pleasure?”
He wasn’t sure whether Vesper fell into either of those categories anymore. He shrugged.
“A mysterious one. But we’ve got the market cornered on mystery, I’m afraid.”
“There’s a woman,” Bond said.
“Isn’t there always? Unless it’s a man. So, 007, this woman,” and the bartender said his call sign with a multitude of meaning that only M had ever managed before, “she’s dead, then.”
“Yes.”
“Vexing. And you wish she weren’t.”
“Obviously.”
“Obviously, you say. But you don’t know the rules of this place. You’ve seen this world, walked the streets adjacent to it, but you’re not a part of it. This is a place of order. We’re big on rules. We love subverting them.” Almost idly, the bartender took something sparkling—something that looked like dragonfly wings, but brighter, almost luminous in the dim light—and placed them gently in a mortar. It raised the pestle. “So we’ll bring her back for you. But there’s a price you must pay—there’s always a price—the giving up to us of a piece of your heart. That’s simple enough, I suppose you suspected that. But here’s what whichever friend or enemy sent you to me might not have told you. If you’re strong, strong enough to find me again, strong enough to will to yourself the Door of the Dead—if you can, you may come to this place three times, but the third time, you won’t be able to leave. Fair?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t be so careless as to need this place again.”
“No,” the bartender said. “You’re not our usual sort, are you? Go carefully, 007. I’m not the only thing down here with rules. Or the only trap that would like to snare you in my grasp.”
– ♠ –
When he walked out of the bar, it was with Vesper’s hand in his.
– ♠ –
He got the information on Yusuf out of her and left her in Kazan, the broken love-knot lying in the snow between them. A debt repaid.
– ♠ –
Bond intercepted ciphers that a linguist told him had been written in the faerie tongue.
Bond dismantled an Otherworld bomb with two minutes left on the clock and saved roughly a football stadium’s worth of people from getting sucked into the wherever.
Bond learned where to find iron bullets. Who to call when he needed a map that wouldn’t shift when he wasn’t looking. Who to trust. (No one but himself.)
Bond served. Became a strange and frightening thing in his own right.
– ♠ –
Bond dreamed of the Door.
He dreamed of a drink he never took, faerie-nectar sweeter than chrysanthemum honey on his tongue. He dreamed of the bustle of a late night-early morning crowd, no faces that he could pick out but one, angular and sharp, all black hair and white skin and red, red lips, a glimpse of Vesper in the bar’s mirror, a wisp of her perfume. He dreamed of the thing behind the bar, its knife-sharp smile, and the absence of its features mingled with the blurred potency of Vesper’s until they were one and the same, until the defender of the door was the one with angular, sharp features and black-white beauty and red, red lips.
“007,” it said with its wine-stained smile.
And Bond opened his mouth and said—
– ♠ –
And then the new 002 shot him off the Varda Viaduct.
– ♠ –
Dust and heat thick on his tongue. Waterlogged, mud-slick, one shoe missing, holding his kevlar jacket to his bleeding shoulder with a shaking hand, feeling his ribs shift uncomfortably with each step, he walked, down a winding, sandy road where he’d seen no one for eons and would continue to see no one for eons more. Was he dead? He didn’t feel dead—he was in too much pain, he thought, unless there was truth to Bible stories as much as faerie stories, in which case he might very well be dead indeed—the sun pounded down on him and he could taste the salt of sweat and the copper of blood and the ash of desolate exhaustion. He shuffled on, because what could he do? It wasn’t in him to lie down and give up, even if he had no hope that moving on would bring him any solace.
Except he struggled over a low, rolling hill and saw a fruit stand by the side of the road.
He wanted to run to it, but there was no strength in him for that. Instead he trudged forward, one foot in front of the other, under the painful blue and white sear of the midday sky. He kept his eyes fixed on the outline of the person sitting in the cart’s shade, blinking as little as possible, in case that would keep the mirage fixed in front of him. Miraculously, he drew closer. And closer.
“Hello,” said the creature who he had last seen behind the bar of a speakeasy in a city with a storied history and no name. It sounded surprised to see him. It smiled, a flash of white, white—teeth? Perhaps—and said, “Well, hello, stranger,” like it was genuinely pleased to see him.
Bond looked at it. At the cart of pomegranates it was sitting in the shade of. “So, I’m dead then.”
“Well, you were shot off a bridge and then drowned, so yes,” it told him. “Dead, but not defeated. You ended up here, after all.”
It patted the patch of dusty road next to it. Bond sat.
“Pomegranate?” it offered generously. Bond shook his head.
“I want to use the Door again,” he said.
With quick, deft motions, the bartender—fruit-seller—defender of the door had a ripe, rosy-pink pomegranate sliced open and deseeded before it spoke again. “For whom, might I ask?”
“Myself,” Bond said.
“Irregular,” it said, but it sounded pleased. “Highly irregular. Strange for you to end up here at all, instead of just going… wherever you’re like to go. And to use the Door again… well.”
“You said people have used the Door three times.”
“I said that you could use the Door three times if you had the strength for it. Most don’t. It’s a rare handful with the spirit to even get there once, let alone twice. Only two, in human history, have ever gotten far enough to use it twice. And you’re the third.”
“Lucky me.”
It studied him. “Tell me, 007, why do you want to return? It’s not that you’re afraid of what comes after… a motivation that base would have never gotten you this far in the first place.”
“Does it matter?” Bond sniped.
“No. But I’m curious. Do you know how rare it is for something as old as me to discover a novelty?”
Bond looked out at the shimmering waste before him, the heat and the pure lapis-blue of the sky and the beaten gold of the sand and the endlessness of it all. “I died on a job,” he said. “I never finished it. As incapable I was of letting her be… I can’t let it go. I can’t let the job go undone.”
“And this job, does it feel the same responsibility to you? The same passionate loyalty?”
“It’s not about responsibility, or loyalty, or passion,” Bond said. “It’s about love.”
A sigh, strangely melancholy for an inhuman thing. “So it is. Well. You know the drill. Pass through if you like, but if you do, give back a piece of your heart.” The shade pointed to the road, just over the next swell of land.
“In a moment,” said Bond, and they sat there, strangely companionable, a dead British spy and a gatekeeper that lived beyond Bond’s comprehension, if he lived at all. At last, he stood, and continued his slow, deliberate pace on the road. When he reached the crest of the hill, he saw that the road ended in a… door, of sorts, a plain wooden doorframe sticking out of the sand, a veil instead of a door fluttering with the faint, faint breeze. He glanced over his shoulder and raised a hand to the guardian, who, after a long moment, raised a hand back. Then he sojourned on back to the world of the living.
– ♠ –
“007,” the boy said through red, red lips, “I’m your new Quartermaster.”
“Brave new world,” Bond said, and meant it.
– ♠ –
Except he came back… wrong. He was cold, all the time. And brittle, and careworn, and bits of him kept falling out, first the metal fragments in his shoulder, then his grip on the pull-up bar, then his clean and perfect vision at the range. He gritted his teeth and trained, trained, trained, remembering the way Vesper had shivered under the warm sun of the city with a long past and no name in her soaked red dress, he wondered if this was it, if this was the cost, everything that made him of value to his second love, Queen and Country, but if it was he would take it back, he would force them to accept another price.
He took Severine to bed and as she slept, he watched the dragon tattoo on her right shoulder blink at him lazily. You’re more of a mess than we are, it said in a purr-like growl. Bond turned his head away and watched the horizon rock.
– ♠ –
He burned down Skyfall and lost M and kneeling there, in the chapel, clutching M’s corpse to him as fire flickered in the distance like a dying sun, was the first time he’d felt warm since his return.
He still wasn’t sure which one was the price: the manor or the matriarch.
– ♠ –
He went back. What else could he have done?
Bond killed a man and put down a black dog stalking him, trailing after the scent of death with gore dripping from its jaws. Bond followed an informant into a music den, where the rich and rootless got high on music, lay in sonata-struck stupors or sighed with Bach drifting from their lips. Bond beat a man into a coma with his bare hands.
Bond went back, and Q smiled, and tutted at the ragged tears in his bespoke suits, and had honeyed tea waiting for him along with his after-action reports. Always warm, no matter how long Bond spent away.
– ♠ –
Q was not like Vesper. Where she had been—was still—sharp, Q was arch, tempering his criticisms with irony and self-deprecation; where she was vulnerable as broken glass, he was smooth and impenetrable as sheet metal. Where she was like the cold grasp of winter, of snow on a Russian street, he was the sweetness of summer kissing skin for the first time, turning something pale as him to burnished, rosy gold.
Q was not like M. The things she had found palatable—the cold calculation in her head—Q was capable of it, but he refused it. He weighed the life of each of his agents as though it was something precious, as infinite and priceless as an egg in the hand, Q, for all that he lived in a world of code and encryption and bare, sleek numbers, was more than math.
Q was not like Bond.
He had to remind himself of that. Q was not like Bond. He wasn’t damaged, broken, dead. The way Q stared at him sometime, almost captivated, almost trying to figure him out, like Bond was one of his precious codes, part of his precious heart—it was nothing. It meant nothing at all.
Until it did.
– ♠ –
On the Day of the Dead, he followed a ghost, supernatural in nature, through the parade crowd, into a helicopter, and nearly out of it again. A few days after that, he sacrificed the most beautiful car he’d ever seen to a river sprite in exchange for a quick getaway, after having discovered that not all ghosts were supernatural in nature. They were stranger and scarier things out there than men. Except where there weren’t.
Madeleine Swann was not like Vesper. Sunlight glinted off her hair as tidily as spun gold. Her lips were pale pink, not blood-red, except for one night on a train when he looked at them and did something perhaps a little ill-advised. She was pale, and she was beautiful, but she was not—she was not—
He killed Franz on the Westminster bridge and when he looked back, she was already gone. He knew he’d never be able to find her, no matter what tricks of spycraft he pulled, no matter what favors he called in, no matter what deals he struck. She knew all the old tricks, too, after all. He’d closed a door and walked beyond it.
On the other side of the bridge, Q had stayed.
– ♠ –
“Would you like to have dinner with me, 007?”
“Call me James,” he said, and Q smiled, beatifically, like he was falling in love.
And then dinner, again. And again. And then bed, hot kisses trailing down Q’s white skin, his nose buried in his black hair, mouth to mouth against those red, red lips. And then desserts, and pasta carbonara from a kitchen that slowly became his own, and cats curled up on his toes, and late nights watching terrible police procedurals when he couldn’t sleep, and Q’s fingers tracing his scars, and none of it drenched in blood, none of it drenched in magic, with its cruel, terrible price. Q never spun him a love-knot out of hair and heartsickness, Q never doodled sigils onto his skin with invisible ink, Q only ever said, “Be safe,” and kissed his mouth like nothing could ever part them, and yet that was somehow enough, enough of a talisman for him to carry through the dark times and follow back into the light.
There were stranger and scarier things out there than women, too. Like love.
– ♠ –
Four years after James retired, Q did as well. There were no stranger or scarier three words than these: happily ever after.
– ♠ –
Except.
– ♠ –
Except one day in November James came home to screaming.
Not screaming. A terrible gurgling sound, the sound of someone trying to scream but unable to, and he reached for the gun he still carried at all times and reached for the door and later he wouldn’t be able to tell which he got to first, giving his statement, wrapped in a scratchy shock blanket and numbly, coldly, reiterating every detail in a way which made the coppers look at him askance. It would seem important then, whether he got to the door first or his gun, but he wouldn’t be able to remember.
He shot Hinx four times: twice in center mass, twice in the head. He hauled Q out of where Hinx had been holding him down in the bathtub and performed CPR for fourteen minutes, broke his ribs, pumped his heart for him until sweat was pouring down his face and he was sobbing for breath and other reasons, until the paramedics got there and half-heartedly took over, more for his sake than Q’s, he could tell, because Q was already gone. Gone. Gone. The words echoed in his head like the beating of a metronome, of a heart, of his own, lonely heart.
“James,” Moneypenny said as the MI6 operatives swarmed in to take over the crime scene, “I’m so sorry,” but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t mourn, didn’t grieve, didn’t do anything except mildly scold himself for letting the security measures slack; after all, they both had enemies that wouldn’t rest just because they weren’t actively being antagonized any more. Why bother rending his clothing? Q was gone, true. But it wasn’t like he was gone for good.
– ♠ –
It took him years to find the Door again.
Strength, the guardian had said. Spirit. And he’d been drained of both. But the longer he went without finding it, the angrier he became. Fine, punish him. How soft he’d gotten, how weak, how unable he’d become to protect the only thing mattered in his life. But Q—every moment delayed was an instant of life that Q ought to have been living, every minute that passed technological updates came along that he would complain about missing whenever whatever cosmic force decided that Bond had the strength to find the Door again—and he would—eventually he became so incandescent with rage he thought about just killing everyone around him and waiting for the Door to come to him, and at last it opened. Off a nondescript alleyway in Phuket, an slim green set of double doors carved intricately, not in the Thai manner, but in some alien tongue. At last. He pushed through brusquely and entered—
Their apartment. The one Q and he had shared. It smelled the same—citrus and bergamot and cat hair—and only the smallest of touches suggested that something else had happened other than Bond walking into his home after a trip to Tesco: their squashy chairs were situated under windows that looked out at nothing, only darkness, and not the benign darkness of nothing but the total absence of light, as though they were underground. Candles lined the hallway—Q’s eccentric collection of them, frost-scented and summer-scented, some stubs and some in jars and one that his nieces had made for a science project—creating a walkway of light to the dinner table, where a romantic meal for two had been set. Pickles, the calico, blinked green-yellow eyes at him from where she was stretched out halfway under the couch, then curled more securely around herself.
Q leaned against the counter and smiled a little nervously. A bottle of wine was open beside him.
“This is cruel,” James said, though his throat felt dry as the deserts he’d searched. “Even for you.”
The Q-thing pouted. “Even for me? Ouch. I thought you’d be happier to see me. You’ve been searching all this while, after all.”
James swallowed. “I am happy to see you,” he said, his voice gentling. “I… I need to use the Door again.”
The Q-thing frowned. “You’d be the first,” he said. “The first to use it thrice, the first to not return. You understand that, right? Whoever you’re using it for—what you give up this time is your life. I keep you. Forever.”
“It’s worth it,” James said, his voice rough and sanded dry. “His life for mine—no question. It’s worth it.”
“Most people, when they lose someone, miss the time they spent together more than the person itself,” the Q-thing mused. “You won’t have another moment with him, you know. You’ll still never see him again.”
“But he will live.”
The Q-thing inclined his head.
“Then yes. I understand.”
The Q-thing looked at him a long time. James tried to appear strong of spirit. Finally, he huffed out a laugh, and shook his head. “I was fascinated by you, you know,” he said through its red, red lips. “The man who went where so few had gone before. The man who brought himself back to life. Whose talent was resurrection. I’d never met anyone like you, and I’ve lived… a long, long time. Not lived, precisely, but you know what I mean.” James breathed. Something important was happening here, every spy-sense, every carefully honed instinct for the supernatural told him. “I did something a little stupid, I’m afraid. I fashioned myself a mortal form, and followed you back to your world. And then I did something even stupider.”
“You fell in love,” James breathed.
“I fell in love,” Q whispered, and held out his arms to James, and at once James had burrowed into them, and at last, at last, hot tears fell down his cheeks, and something warmed in him that had been cold and dead as long as Q. This was—this was better than he’d ever hoped for. A last moment with the man he loved.
“Q,” James sobbed. “I thought—I thought I’d never see you again.”
“James,” Q sighed. “James Bond. Even death can’t keep you from me.” Q pressed those lips—those red, red lips—against James’s forehead. “This is your third time walking into this place, my love. You can’t leave me now. You can’t leave me ever again.”
“I’ll kill you,” James said wetly. “For making me suffer like that.”
“In human form we have to obey the human laws. I missed you so, James.” Another kiss. “I love you. I’ve loved you since the moment you told me your name.”
“You tricked me into it.”
“I like to believe that all roads would have led here.” Another kiss, deeper, savoring. “James. James. You can use the Door if you want, I’ll come find you anywhere. But I hope you’ll stay. I hope you’ll stay with me.”
“Yes,” James said, “yes,” and it was the least strange, scary thing he’d ever done.