Chapter Text
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function, and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectively is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape, which it doth latch:
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;
For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight,
The more sweet flavor or deformed’st creature,
The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature:
Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus maketh mind untrue. (113)
Florence was the first time Bond thought that his mind was playing tricks on him. After leaving MI-6 with Madeleine Swann riding shotgun in his newly restored Aston Martin DB5, they had road-tripped their way through the Continent like ordinary tourists.
It was nice to visit places for pleasure instead of planned assassinations. He’d not actually played the tourist since his days on leave in the Navy, and Madeleine was happy enough to show him how it was done. If anything, her insistence in being a tourist and experiencing the best in the ways of food, art, history, and culture had a desperate tinge to it. As if she was trying to show him what the world looked like in bright sunlight as opposed to shadows and under the cover of radio silence and hacked CCTV.
As if she were afraid he would slip back into the shadows if she didn’t keep trying to make him connect with the world. No amount of cajoling or reassurance that he wasn’t going back seemed to make her believe that he wanted this for real.
She left him for a few moments in the Uffizi Gallery so he stood in front of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus while he waited. From the right angle, with her long red-gold hair and classically beautiful oval face, Venus looked a bit like a voluptuous 0011. In fact, he recalled that Suzy had even dressed as her for one Halloween party—while 0011 hadn’t been entirely naked at the time, she’d not left much to the imagination. She’d been wearing little more than a tiny bikini, artistically placed shells, and a wicked expression. He remembered that field agents and Q-Branch boffins alike spent the evening tripping over their own feet. She won best costume.
One of the few people unaffected by 0011 had been Q, who’d given his agent a long and long-suffering look before sighing expansively and turning back to Moneypenny. Later that evening, Q had been the one to fetch a blanket from his office to bundle her up in and sent her home safely via one of the agency drivers.
He looked out for his agents in small ways, Bond realized. Double-ohs had a high mortality rate and few human connections, and lived accordingly. They knew they were disposable, sent out with the worst of assignments, and no mission that a double-oh was given was an easy one. If it were, a lesser agent would handle it. Every mission could be their last. And after a while, it took a toll. They lived in a kill or be killed world where trust was rare because betrayal was not.
Double-ohs were monsters in human shape. Bond himself was one of the worst, underneath the cultivated veneer of charm. Q never seemed to mind or flinch away. He treated them decently, with the same care and consideration he showed any of his precious bits of technology. He’d protected them, lobbied for assignments best suited for each of his agents’ strengths, and under his care the constant turnover of double-ohs had slowed down considerably. In return, Q was quite possibly the best protected person in England, second only to the Queen herself. The delightful thing was, he had a loyal, lethal, and half-feral wolf pack who would burn down half of London if he asked them nicely, and seemed entirely clueless to it all.
A man with an hideous cardigan and messy black hair materialized at Bond’s elbow. A sharp bolt of expectation shivered through him as though he’d touched a live current. Some of the tension he didn’t realize he had loosened in his shoulders.
“If you ask me what I see, I’m going to say things your young ears shouldn’t hear,” Bond said.
The man looked over at him with a frown. “Mi scusi?”
Bond blinked rapidly and the man’s features lost all familiarity. It wasn’t—
“There you are,” Madeleine appeared at his other side, sliding her hand into the crook of his elbow. “Who is this?”
“No one,” Bond said quickly. “I’m starving. Lunch?”
Madeleine smiled but her eyes were glacial as they walked away. “James. What was that? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just someone I thought I knew. I didn’t.”
The smile became more fixed, but she let it go as he led her outside to a small bistro he’d discovered some years before. But if she had any thoughts on the postcard and the kitschy souvenir pen he bought from the gallery gift shop before they left, she kept them to herself.
*******
After Florence it was Rome and the Vatican before they headed for wine country. Bond’s collection of postcards grew with every interesting place he went.
“Are you going to send them?” Madeleine asked lightly over breakfast one morning. Unasked went the question: Who do you think of when you buy these?
Bond paused. “I thought I might just collect them. I don’t know.”
The door opened and the sound of real laughter preceded a couple stumbling inside, fighting with an umbrella and shaking water from the torrential rainstorm everywhere. They chattered to each other in rapid-fire Italian, and again Bond felt his pulse quicken. The woman was tall and dark skinned, wearing a black dress that showed off her slender figure excellently, a pair of pointy stilettos in one hand. The man was skinny and laughed with a wild abandon as she brandished the shoes at him in half-hearted threat.
The recognition fled Bond as soon as it came, leaving hollowness behind. The scrambled eggs and toast turned to stone in his stomach. Of course it was neither Q nor Moneypenny. For one, neither of his friends ever looked at each other with such soppy expressions, and the one time he’d caught Moneypenny brandishing a shoe at Q, he’d snatched it and started musing over the ways he could weaponize them. When he talked about removing the heel, she’d tried to snatch them back, resulting in a brief tug of war that ended the with Quartermaster fleeing Moneypenny’s office and with M just shaking his head and hiding in his office for the rest of the morning.
“It’s normal to be homesick, you know,” Madeleine said, quietly. “Especially after such a change and traumatic circumstances.”
“Traumatic circumstances is every other Tuesday for a double-oh,” Bond said. “And you’ve seen my flat. What do I have to go back to or miss?”
“Friends, coworkers, lovers, family,” Madeleine said. She hesitated, gathering her thoughts. Bond felt his spine stiffening.
“We don’t have those,” he said. “Having connections isn’t encouraged. Just gives enemies a pressure point to use.”
“No one goes through life alone, not even your kind,” she said. “There has to be someone to go home to, otherwise why would you bother returning? You can’t give everything and not have something in return.”
“We don’t live long enough for it to matter.”
“You did,” she said. “You had friends. An entire team. They trusted you, and you trusted them in turn. Your boss, that woman. The computer geek.”
“I doubt they so much as think of me,” Bond said. “They’re too busy saving the world to be concerned with a wayward agent.”
After a month of being gone, no one had attempted to contact him, not even about SPECTRE. Bond really didn’t want to admit to himself or anyone else that the radio silence stung a bit. He’d gotten used to Q’s even tones in his ear, and teasing messages from Moneypenny, and the occasional invitation to a pub to watch football with Tanner—or just an update on team scores when Bond was out of country.
She smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t think that. Your Q seemed perfectly annoyed when you showed up with me in his hotel room.”
“Q is always annoyed with me,” Bond said, finality in his tone. “Do you think the rain will stop anytime soon?”
Madeleine took a breath and visibly restrained herself from saying anything further. The look on her face was complicated, like she was fighting her instincts to keep digging but was half-afraid of what she might excavate for both of them.
Finally she smiled. “A quiet day in with a book would be lovely, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure we can find a good way to pass the time.”
That night he looked through his postcards threw them all in the trash.