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Bond is honorably discharged from the SBS on a Tuesday.
When Hendrics asks why he’s leaving, he curtly tells him he needs a holiday from the Service. When the others ask, he tells them the same—no more, no less. Let their imagination supply the other details; it will be far better than whatever cover he would bother putting together.
Carlos stops him on his way out and warns Bond that if he gets himself killed off duty he will find out and he will resurrect him so he can get a slow and painful death at his hands, just you wait. Bond nods when he’s ordered to keep in touch, pockets the cell number that his troopmate hands over, and promptly resolves to toss it in the first bin he can find. He’s gone through enough goodbyes to know this should be the last time anybody here sees him. It’ll make the break cleaner.
He drives off base and does not look at the Union Jack fading from his rearview mirror.
–-
His new flat is in about as good a part of London as could be hoped for on a middling government paycheck. The door creaks when he pushes it open, and it reeks of musty old linoleum and crumbling plaster.
In the next few hours, he learns the following about his new residence:
- In the time between settling his contract and moving in, the pipes have not, in fact, been fixed by the landlord.
- The previous tenants did not clean up entirely when they vacated the premises.
- His upstairs neighbors are determined to break the sound barrier.
All in all, it’s about as much as he expected.
He drags his stuff in, halfheartedly considers sending a complaint to the landlord about the leaking, then promptly collapses on the couch. He gave himself some time to settle before getting the job. Future Bond gets to worry about the pipes for a change.
Welcome to London, I guess.
--
Three days later, he reports for duty at Vauxhall Cross.
They put him through physical tests, because apparently coming off active duty in the special forces isn’t good enough to pass MI6 requirements, even though the basic physical requirements are the same. It’s almost dull, by this point.
The last test is the resistance to interrogation test, and Bond was honestly expecting the secret spy people to have more eloquence when it came to extraction. But apparently brute force is the way they go, so he laughs at their threats through blood-stained teeth and runs away to the spot in his head where things don’t hurt when they come at him.
He doesn’t end up in medical after it’s over. That’s encouraging.
--
They give him a number too long for anybody to bother remembering and assign him to some appropriately mid-ranking division so that he doesn’t have any important jobs but does have mountains of paperwork. The missions consist mostly of scouting and information gathering, missions too trivial to waste the higher agents on but too important to give to a completely new recruit.
He detests it with a passion he’s thus far reserved for latrine duty.
His colleagues are no better. The ones that were ever competent have long since graduated to higher and more important duties, leaving those who are far too well suited to poking paperwork and jabbering to the powers that be. (They are quiet minions, at the very least. That is about all he can say for them.)
He does not trust the faceless little people that come and go like flies. They, in return, trust him as far as they could throw him. It’s not surprising when half the office comes to hate him. Bond doesn’t particularly care; he came to MI6 for the action, and he’s willing to burn a couple bridges while he’s waiting for his chance at it.
So he counts down the days until his parole time is up and he can apply for a switch to harder field duty, and tries not to look jealous when he sees the older agents leave. He bears the missions that Troop 2 could have handled without issue with a stiff lip, watches the number of successful milk run missions on his file tick up, and carefully ensures that his reputation remains as spotless as he likes it.
And if the two desk warriors in Cubicle 7 find their coffee mugs empty, or one of the weaselly old managers comes back to find everything on his desk moved exactly two inches to the left—well, accidents always happen.
--
Exactly ten months to the day he joined MI6, he gets the email saying he passed parole and now can apply for a transfer out of his current section. He could kiss the minion that switches his designation.
Bond sends the application out, and waits for his next assignment.
And waits.
And waits.
--
It’s an objectively terrible day when he runs into the man who recruited him.
Bond’s just come back from yet another stakeout—completely dull, the information he got wasn’t nearly good enough to warrant an entire week of sleep deprivation. The older agents that actually did most of the work got all the useful stuff, and they didn’t even need to freeze their backends off in a Bucharest alley.
The horrors never cease, though, because his flight lands early enough that when he drags himself into headquarters his handler wants his report in now, agent, I don’t care if the world’s burning down you’re going to get that paperwork done.
He makes an executive decision right there that he’s not surviving this without a detour to the MI6 café.
Five minutes later, he shuffles through the bland hallways, black sleep delayer in hand and trying to look only as dead as the people around him.
“Oh, Mr. Bond! Fancy seeing you here. I was just looking for you.”
The recruiter is playing civilian, apparently. He’s got the dumb dopey grin the paperpushers get when they’re trying to be a nuisance, and he’s dashing up to him with just enough innocence that he doesn’t immediately look like a jerk. Bond glares at him and briefly wonders how much trouble he’d get into if he just…ignored the man.
But he’s already in the brig for maybe accidentally tipping over Saunders coffee mug (it was a small spill), and Mr. Amos or Tom or whatever his name was clearly is high enough that it could be an issue if he doesn’t engage with the man’s social conventions. “Well enough,” he grunts, and continues his shuffle.
The blasted man follows him like a puppy. “Ah, as it always is. And the job? How does it—”
“It’s work,” he says.
The recruiter nods. Then he smiles again, and Bond’s awake a second too late when he sees the look in the man’s eyes.
“I see.”
Bond flees as fast as he can without making a scene.
--
A couple days later, he finds out he’s been deployed to Section Y.
--
Back in the days when the Iron Curtain was the only thing anybody ever worried about, the Y station was a passage point for all the agents that made it out of the red. Now, it’s a sort of in between–a place where success is measured by the distinct lack of decorum and quiet disappearances of utterly insignificant people.
The head of the section sizes him up, and whatever conclusion she’s draws from his file and his psych evals is probably not flattering because Bond gets treated to the time-tested I’ve never met you, but I swear by the Queen if you so think of screwing things up you will live long enough to regret it lecture.
It’s not surprising, all things considered. Bond takes it as a challenge.
She makes an older agent drag him along for his first mission. The agent is a hunk of scar tissue and bone, and he can’t seem to decide if he’s going to ignore Bond or break his jaw.
Two firefights and one foot chase through Belgrade later, said agent leans decidedly towards the latter option. Mission was successful, though, so he can’t really complain.
He gets a week off before he’s sent out again, this time on a nasty little mission that’s closer to an SBS hazing than anything else. He comes out with a couple more scars and another notch in his ledger.
The look on the section head’s face when he shows up almost made the rope burns worth it.
--
Slowly, he learns the tools of his new trade.
He is assigned to more trivial missions, at first, and the only thing that makes these ones different from the ones he did before is that his leash is longer and more importantly, he’s got a chance at getting out. It doesn’t take long before the section head sends him on longer missions, ones that leave him panting at the end of the night and sometimes add to the black blotches on his file.
(It’s funny how MI6 counts death. If you shoot a man after he draws on you it’s just quick reflexes, but if you shoot that man before he draws it’s a court martial for you. Not that it matters. A threat eliminated is a threat eliminated.)
Slowly, he learns. He learns how to make a man shake without ever laying a hand on him and how to light a warehouse on fire and come out looking completely innocent. He learns to watch for the tic in a mark’s hands that tells him they’re nervous, and he learns to soothe and smile and cajole his way to a jackpot. His body becomes more than a tool—it’s a finely built weapon, one that speaks in gunfire and fists and secrets exchanged in so-called privacy.
The section head doesn’t quite take a liking to him, but she doesn’t seem to still be actively considering disconnecting his head from his shoulders and he once got her to laugh, so he thinks that’s a good enough start.
He came to MI6 for the challenge. He’s willing to wait.
--
A year in, they put him up in a Zagreb flat. It’s not so bad, by Bond’s reckoning. It is not crumbling and the flat is not so bad and the neighbors are just the right type of apathetic. The new parts of the city are big and loud and just bright enough that it’s easy to disappear, and there’s never a shortage of work.
He goes down to the old parts of town, one day. He stands on a street where they haven’t gotten to renovating the old block buildings and watches the people go by. (If he squints, he thinks he sees a blonde boy among them, old enough that the adults don’t really care what he does and young enough that he’ll be called a street rat.)
There are still children playing football, in the alleys that divide the crumbling buildings from the new work. There are still boys who learn to fight, and there are still some who don’t get out.
He doesn’t go back. Once is enough.
--
MI6 recalls him eventually. He’s gotten good at Station Y—good enough that the Chief seems almost sulky when she calls him in to let him know that Vauxhall wants their prospect back.
London is grey and rainy, and Bond might have remembered the cursed housing market but somehow he forgot all too quickly the damp cold that sinks into his bones. He’s also introduced to a man with grey at his temples and a scar down his face, who shakes his hand like he’s considering crushing it and matches his stare when he looks him over.
Not half bad, for a new sort of handler.
--
His handler puts him with one of the older recruits—not so useful that Bond’s going to look like a liability for him, but broken enough to the life of a spy that he’s got to work to keep up.
When they meet each other, Ronson grunts a greeting, then immediately makes grabby hands for the mission briefing.
A man of focus, then. It’s a start.
--
He’s stuck in medical, waiting in the queue for a routine post-mission medical check and half heartedly trying not to scratch the latest bug bite from who-knows-what. Ronson’s with him, too, except Ronson apparently can come out of a burning warehouse looking spotless and Bond hates him a little for that.
Two huge agents lumber out of the med room, chattering away in some cursed mixture of Russian and English. One–brunette, middle-aged–is rather animatedly waving a pen at his friend’s face. The blonde one punches his friend in the shoulder. They laugh as they swagger away, looking for all the world like a bunch of tipsy drunks.
Ronson notices him staring because Ronson always notices. “That’s 006 and 007,” he says. “Two of the special agents. Only answer to M, get all the goodies from the Branch.” He barks a laugh. “Bunch of government hitmen, but what can you do?”
Bond watches them until they turn the corner. They make a fine pair, the two agents. The big blonde brute and the tall charmer, striding down the halls of MI6 as if they own the entire place.
Later, he will say this is the moment when he decides he will be a double-0.
--
He works, fights, bites. The rumors around him start to swirl again, filled with the stuff that seems to dog him everywhere: madman, charmer, lucky fool. He does not try to stop them—“madman” is the word the other agents use for “bloody good fighter” and “charmer” means the same.
Ronson shows up in his life like a spectre, showing up to drag him out on missions and disappearing just as quickly. That lasts about as long as it takes before one nice explosion lands the two of them in medical together. Turns out, being chained to a bed in medical for extended periods of time together is an oddly connecting experience. So is digging bullets out of each other’s shoulders while running from a cartel.
They give him double-1 status a couple years in. Ronson shows up with a bottle of far too expensive wine, and it’s a right party. (They spend most of it trying to outdo each other with dumb military stories. And fine, Ronson, maybe that story about the chickens and the drill sergeant is good but it’s nothing compared to the bar crawls he used to do back in his twenties when he still served Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. Wasted youth? Psh. He wrote the book on that.)
The new status means new digs, and it means even more time spent hunkering down in various disreputable parts of the world.
He goes on. He watches the black blots in his file tick up until it looks like someone splattered ink all over the report.
Not that anybody bothers to care. MI6 doesn’t count kills in self-defense, after all.
--
He’s sent to Vienna to grab some hard-drive from a rather discreet member of the Sicilian mafia. (Ronson is not with him, because they trust him and they trust Ronson and that means he gets to do things alone now.) It’s a typical break-and-enter operation, nothing unusual, nothing more dangerous than the average work of an active duty agent.
It’s almost boring when the guards spot him on his way out.
Three hours and five corpses later, he limps back to the main road. He’s got a shiner on his eye that’s going to sting tomorrow, and his mouth tastes all salty. Also, his leg hurts. That isn’t so bad compared to the shiner, though.
His handler comes in almost immediately when he calls. Good man.
“Mission successful, sir,” he says. His mouth is wet. That’s weird.
“Injuries?” he hears his handler ask. Bond winces. He doesn’t need to be so loud. Bond can hear him just fine.
“Some, sir.”
“Be precise. How many, and where?”
Bond doesn’t bother answering. They’ll find him soon; he’s sure of it. He’ll wait here for extraction. The ground seems rather soft.
--
He wakes up to the whirr of a helicopter and the unfortunately-familiar feel of ties around his wrists.
Someone taps his head gently. “Hush up, dummy,” a familiar voice drawls, “you’re supposed to be dead for another two hours.”
“Ronson. You’re supposed to be in Italy.”
“They recalled me.”
For a little while there is nothing but the noise of the chopper and Ronson softly chanting under his breath. Bond distantly remembers that his mum used much the same words whenever she got her tax reports.
That jogs a memory. “Are you cursing in Chinese right now?”
Ronson side-eyes him. “It’s Cantonese. Stay still.”
And because he likes Ronson, he does stay still. At least until he makes a break for it while the helicopter refuels.
--
Medical catches him eventually. He promptly gets put on leave for three weeks. Bond shuffles home with a couple bottles of painkillers and a cheerful warning from his handler that if he so much as pokes his nose through MI6’s door he’ll get a bullet to the leg.
The pipes in his new flat aren’t leaking, at least. That’s a relief.
--
Three days in, and he’s reread all his favorite Patrick O'Brian novels. Five, and he’s considering opening those boxes he never bothered to unpack when he moved.
Bond is never getting caught by medical again.
--
He’s flopped on the couch, watching mindless telly and calculating how many shots it would take before his neighbors got annoyed enough to come investigate when his phone—the personal one, not the MI6 one—pings.
He startles. His mum and maybe two other people have his personal number, and of those people exactly none of them would text when they could call and scold him in person.
Slowly, he reaches for his phone, flips through the contact information to get to the message.
Hey, Bond. How’s it going? - C
Bond takes another look at the cell number and thinks, oh.
--
They end up meeting at the pub.
Carlos looks the same as he always did. Davis looks a bit older, a bit more worn down. Bond chalks that up to the promotion he got when he left—being corporal can’t be easy, not if Troop 2 is still made of hooligans and marines.
When they ask about his work, he rattles off the standard issue cover identity—security guard at so-and-so company, pretty boring, the demos are the most exciting part, and what have you been doing?
Davis pipes up first, talking about Hendrics’ promotion to the leader of Squadron C and his own promotions that have got him halfway to leading the troop himself. Carlos joins in, with various and sundry gossip surrounding the people they once knew.
They do not mention where they have been for the last three years. He does not mention the dead men in Vienna, or the blood in the water. There are secrets that lie between them, and both Bond and they know better than to try and bridge the gap.
They leave in time for the SBS fellows to make curfew. None of them look back.
--
It’s two more agonizing weeks later that he’s deemed sufficiently recovered by medical to return to duty. Ronson claps him on the shoulder and tells him about all the paperwork he’s got to catch up on.
Slave driver.
--
The work goes on. Bond eventually gets upgraded from “00 agent sidekick” to “budget level 00 agent”, though he’s been reliably informed that considering the property damage he causes the latter category really isn’t accurate. Bond maintains that this is an unfair assumption. It’s not his fault things are flammable, after all.
He runs, he fights, he works. There’s always some sort of crisis, and if the terrorists don’t make trouble then the Americans certainly will. Ronson works too. He is good and loyal and he does not change. It’s a marvel that man hasn’t gotten promoted yet; he’s just the type that his old superiors would like.
No matter. They go on as they will.
--
“I had a mission in Singapore,” Ronson tells him one night. The two of them are huddled on Bond’s couch, and there’s some cheesy sitcom going on the TV. (Ronson picked it. He’s the one who came back alive this time, so he picked it.)
Bond looks at him. “I’m your mission partner. I saw the briefing.”
Ronson shakes his head. He sags. One of his arms clutches the ratty couch cushion like it's a teddy bear. “It was messy.”
And Bond might be stupid, but he knows when there’s some story there that really doesn’t belong to him right now. That still doesn’t mean he knows what to do with that.
The sitcom’s still going. Bond turns the volume down. When Ronson slowly starts leaning into his side, he doesn’t move.
--
It takes a nice clean mission in Cairo before he finally gives up on this grunt work entirely. He sends in an application to his handler, requesting an interview for the so-called kill section.
About a week later, he gets an email from the office of the leader of the free world.
He stands in front of the wooden doors. They’re still utterly dull.
And then he walks into the door and M has Mum’s face and this is the part where things get very confusing.
--
He needs a drink.
Scratch that, he needs several drinks .
--
Afterwards, Bond puts his clearance to use and starts digging through the MI6 archives.
He can’t access his mum’s—M, she is M, she’s apparently been M all this time and he didn’t know —file of course; that would tip her off and besides, he’s pretty sure there’s only about three people in the UK who get complete access to that one.
Two hours later, there are four people who can access the file.
His parents are listed–full legal names, without any sort of cover-up whatsoever. Olivia Mansfield and her mission partner, married in Switzerland in the 1960s. There’s a picture of her as a young agent. She’s posing with a gun, arm casually thrown around the shoulders of someone who might be his father. (He has no idea if it is. He hasn’t seen his father in decades.)
Then he scrolls down a bit more, to the line that really counts:
Children: N/A
And that’s the part that stings the most: the fact his mum never bothered to even show her face to him but made sure that he wasn’t listed as one of her weak points.
He looks at their last text message thread. It was a week ago—she’d just asked if he wanted to go to that nice Indian place and he’d said sure, Mum, if you can take the heat. She’d said nothing for 3 minutes straight, then told him not to get too cocky before a spice-master.
He closes the file. He can’t let this sway him. After all, he has a job to do, and a promotion he’s got his eye on.
Personal entanglement doesn’t particularly concern him, now.
--
He’s four years into the job when he gets assigned to help the prince of MI6.
007 is almost half a foot taller than Bond, and that alone makes him hate the confident bastard. He tells him as much. 007 looks at him and nonchalantly says that if he’s going to be an idiot, he might as well be a creative one.
That gets him to shut up, if only to reassess his insult inventory.
The mission is as chaotic as 00 missions come, and Bond can’t keep up no matter how hard he tries. The man tries to shake him off at every turn, and after the third time he’s been ditched during a routine rendezvous he considers going back to the hotel and letting the bastard fight the blasted criminals alone, if he’s so determined.
(He still tracks 007 down. Out of spite, of course.)
They return to MI6 victorious. 007 gets all the credit, of course. He sashays behind M’s plain wood doors for his ritual debrief, while Bond gets to go fight through five different levels of bureaucracy so that he can submit his prescribed mission debrief so that he can finally call a cab to go home.
True to form, the pipes in his new flat have started to leak.
--
This is when the fights start.
Bond knows exactly what this is about. Look, M can call it whatever she wants, but he knows why he’s been put on detail with 007 but hasn’t gotten a promotion yet.
They both know that the thing that keeps Bond from his last promotion is the same thing that keeps M from kicking him out of the service entirely for insubordination and him from using his training to blackmail his way up the ladder. There is an entire ocean under their bridge that sounds like conversations over glasses of bourbon and phone calls at boarding school.
He misses his mum.
--
“Why do you want it so much?” Ronson asks one night, when they’re both off mission and Bond’s chosen to crash at his friend’s flat with the normal tribute of wine, takeaway, and dumb mission stories.
He mulls it over for a moment, rolling it around his head along with his last swig of vodka.
“Why not?” It’s a genuine question; he’s never really considered not trying for 00 status. It’s just something that seems as natural as his promotion to 11 status or his switch to lone missions.
Ronson looks at him. “You’ll die in five years if you get your number,” he says, as casually as if it were a report of how many cartridges he used on the last mission. “Six years, if you’re smart. 006 was the best after 007, and he barely made it five and a half before the bomb took him out.”
Oh.
Despite himself, Bond feels a grin tugging at his lips. It’s not the one he normally uses around Ronson—more like the one he uses with the marks on his missions—but it’s a grin, and that should count for something, right?
“If I’d wanted to survive, I’d have stayed in the SBS,” he tells him.
Ronson tilts his head. “So it’s a death wish.”
Bond barely restrains a huff. He doesn’t get it, probably never will. Good old Ronson, happy to bark and nip the heels of the scum of the world and come back to nap by the fire. He doesn’t get the way the knife edge between life and death isn’t just a thing to walk on, or that winning is the point of the entire bloody game, no matter if the world burns or he burns.
He takes another sip of vodka. It scorches his throat on the way down. He grins, and maybe there’s a few too many teeth for his own good in it.
“Guess it is.”
--
Bern, Cairo, Rome. They all fly by in the shouts of the doomed and the missions that take him to the farthest corners of the city.
He snaps at his handler, smiles when he needs to (he never quite got the face to be a playboy, but he’s got other assets), pulls the trigger and cracks a grin afterwards.
He can’t get promoted yet anyways. The 00 Section was never plentiful—there are only so many brutes England can keep in her back pocket before even she starts to feel awkward. And besides, the current fellows are good and competent, and retirement isn’t something that happens for them.
Bond walks the halls, takes the missions too hard for the other agents and too trifling to waste the lords on, and bides his time. He grumbles at M every so often—just to remind her that he exists, that he’s the best of the 11 agents and that there’s only one reason why he doesn’t have a red mark on his file yet. The months drag on.
Then a body washes up on the shores of France, and the prince of MI6 is no more.
--
He’s called to M’s office two days later. Bond steps in with his hackles up and his hand twitching for a gun that isn’t there.
M—and it is only M this time—looks at him when he enters and slides a small file over to him.
Bond flips it open. The face of the Prague section chief looks up at him.
--
Lahore is not clean.
The contact writhes under his hands like a possessed man, and for a moment it’s just the thing thrashing under him and his fingers gripping and pulling and the water is cold-hot-cold again and there is nothing to do except to keep his hands down and in the sink.
Every muscle in his arms feels the moment the man goes limp.
Bond stands up and breathes. His head hurts. His fingers ache. The tap is still running. It squeaks when he turns it off.
Dryden’s contact is slumped beneath the sink. Bond waits for a moment to be sure the man isn’t getting back up, and walks to fetch his gun.
This of course is the moment when the man rises like some drunkard zombie. Bond spins, and then the man’s down for good because resurrection doesn’t stop bullets.
He walks out as if there wasn’t a bloody brawl in the loo and he didn’t just gain the first mark in his book. He boards his flight to Czechia—second class, how wonderfully considerate—and proceeds to go dead to the world for most of the flight.
--
Prague is almost pathetically easy. He knows the drill, and Bond can’t stop the small smirk of satisfaction when Dryden realizes his gun’s empty.
He returns to MI6 with a couple more scars and the blood of passage on his hands.
--
It does not feel wrong to take the callsign of his predecessor. Everyone knew that the oldest dog in the force was going to kick it someday or another. 00s trade in mortality, after all.
Somehow, that doesn’t stop the equipment man from staring through him the first time Bond picks up his gear from Q-Branch.
He walks down the hallways, past the common sections and into the sections reserved for the higher agents. They eye him warily, and some eyebrows are raised when he ignores the 11 section for the office of the lady who rules the Service.
He stops for a moment in front of the door, looks again at the plain tan wood. It’s utterly dull. Completely unfitting for the ruler of the free world.
The door swings open silently. He nods to the nameless secretary, and steps into M’s office.
007, reporting for duty.