PROJECT: you were you 2/?
you were you
ghosts in the daylight
James Bond/Eva Green/Daniel Craig; PG; 12,617 words; 2/?
a co-production of oxymoronassoc & fated_addiction
-
He is stone cold again.
It’s his eyes, she decides, that makes her the most uneasy. They have always been this particular shade of blue, too bright, too wide, too there. He doesn’t blink, holding the handle of the gun.
“What are you doing?” she asks again, and her arms draw away from her chest, her hand falling limp against her sides. She straightens unconsciously. Her mouth sets itself into a tight line. She cannot read him or look away.
He puts the gun down next to him. He leans back in the bed, resting lazily against a hand. She feels herself waiting for a smile; but the feeling is dwindling, disappearing into a real stretch of fear that she does not understand at all.
“Daniel,” she says quietly.
He scoffs. “You said you weren’t afraid of me.” He pushes himself up to sit again. When he picks up the gun, something snaps into place. It echoes in the room. Eva feels impossibly small. “Are you sure?” he asks lightly. “That you’re not afraid of me?” he says.
She does not like the way he is looking at her. She tries and musters up a response, but her mouth isn’t moving. She lifts a shaky hand to cover her eyes, her fingers pressing against the bridges of her temple. Her head is starting to hurt. There is her heart too; pounding in her ears, in her throat, and her mind starts to wander back to their conversation earlier.
“I don’t understand this.”
She curses in French. Her teeth press into her lip.
“You are - ” her hand waves between them. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do - scare me, okay. Make me angry, okay. I told you. I told you I can’t. I can’t do this emotional back and forth. I can’t. I keep repeating myself too - you are the only who -” her eyes begin to burn and all she can think is not now, not now or here because she cannot hide behind crying on cue. “My head is a mess,” she tries again. “I don’t exactly understand, you know, why you won’t admit to following me. I don’t understand why you went into my flat - my flat, Daniel. You know that -”
She falters because he stands. He stands and she isn’t expecting it, expecting how he suddenly looms from just a few feet.
His mouth sets into a frown. “You never rambled,” he says.
She lets out a dry laugh.
“I ramble.”
“Never,” he insists.
“You’re scaring me,” she breathes.
She is wide-eyed too when he steps forward, his mouth set grimly now, and all she can think is oh god, oh god, oh god. There is something in her that snaps out of her anger, that moves past it all, and just forgets about Daniel. She does not know this man at all.
He stops in front of her, pressing closely - he isn’t touching her and this isn’t like the lift. He raises the gun and her eyes follow, her head jerking away as she turns and looks to the side.
“You should go.”
He makes a sound like a laugh. He still isn’t touching her.
“You should go,” she swallows. “You should go now and I don’t ever want to see you again. You win -”
There’s a loud click, snap, and the barrel of the gun is pointed against her head. Her eyes widen again. She can hear him breath heavily. His hand slams against the door, just by her eyes and she forces herself to keep staring at the gun. Her heart stops.
“Tell me again,” he says. “Tell me again to go, tell me again that you don’t want to see me - tell me again that you’re not you. Because I’ve been everywhere, I’ve been so reasonably patient,” he gasps angrily, and her eyes blur, the tears starting to fall - he’s never seen her cry, she thinks, not like this, not for real. “I want to know, I need to know what’s going on so that I can kill you and get on with it -”
He stops. The gun presses harder into her temple and she feels his hand start to slide around her throat, his fingers pressing into her skin.
“Why, why -” his fingers tighten and she’s forced to look at him. His eyes are wider than she remembers them to be. “Why are you still alive?”
She cannot answer. Her lips feel dry. His hand is completely still. The gun is completely still. It’s what he does, what the last thing he may do is what she waits for. She is waiting for him because it is the only thing she can do.
They’re quiet. He’s breathing heavily. It’s the only sound in the room, making it bigger; outside the door, there is a conversation that passes, and for that brief, terrible moment, she wonders what might happen if she just started to kick and flail against the door.
She doesn’t move.
“You’re not Daniel.”
It happens then, Eva’s mouth opening slowly and the words, they slip. His eyes darken and that cruel, unusual twist of his mouth. There is memory, sudden and short, on set somewhere back. “You’re not Daniel,” she says again, louder. Her voice breaks. “I don’t know who you are.”
What she says is insanity, complete insanity, and when his fingers press into her throat again, she feels his nails drag against her skin. They relax, spreading over her skin, his thumb sliding over her jaw. He is staring at her, maybe even waiting, his gaze heavy, searching for something that he needs, that he needs from her; it hasn’t changed and for whatever reason, she wonders if it ever does. The gun stays pressed against her head.
He suddenly jerks back.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “Fuck, fuck,” he snarls. He pulls himself away from her, and she tries to move past him, her legs giving out as she sinks to the floor. Her dress swallows her and her back rests against the wall, flat as she draws her legs against her chest.
He is cursing, half-snapping at her, half-not, and she can only keep her gaze at the floor. Her heart is still racing and she can still feel his fingers at her throat. She starts to rock herself slowly, wishing that she had gone home, straight home, that she had told her assistant to stay. She can smell him, taste him, and he’s everywhere again, in her home, in her head, all over her skin and everything is spinning.
Eva swears, her fingers pressing into her temples again. They slide into her hair and she pulls lightly. There is a scuffle and she squeezes her eyes shut. The door slams and she is holding her breath.
He is gone.
6.
It isn't her. It isn't her.
It.
Isn't.
Her.
He's walking down the plushly carpeted hotel hallway, his mind reeling. It isn't her. It never was her. Fuck.
"Fuck," he swears again, harshly. He takes the fire stairs as fast as he can, cold cement slapping his feet as he descends. It isn't her.
Something has gone wrong, gone terribly wrong. He plays it all back. He sees her face. He sees her lack of fear and then her absolute terror, her lack of recognition. It isn't her. She's someone else. She's someone else with Vesper's face. Vesper's voice. Vesper's...everything. Except not even the slightest.
And that name she kept calling him. Daniel. Daniel. As common as James, but not even remotely similar. His mind is playing in reverse, double time. Daniel. Mister Craig. Knowing wink. A smile from some bitch who makes her living on Channel 4 mini-series. Fuck. There's someone else. There is another.
He's in the underground car park now. He's getting in his car, movements automatic. The Aston roars to life and he guns it, tires squealing on the coated cement.
There is another.
He drives straight home. He opens a bottle of vodka. He sits--nay, lounges--on his expensive leather L-shaped sofa. He thinks. He plots. He decides. He will find the truth. She cannot keep it from him any longer.
On the way out the door, he turns off the lights.
There's no such thing as breaking into the Ministry of Defense, but this is about as close as you could get.
He steals inside the building late at night. The hallways are still brightly lit, but the offices, behind their plate glass walls, are shadowy and silent. He thought for a moment to do it from her house again, but it was risky the first time and she'll have put counter measures in place. Or, worse, she might be at home. He'd rather deal with the consequences later, rather than sooner. Besides, ironic as it is to say, she might make him lose his nerve.
So he goes into work late at night, coolly and confidently flashing the security guard a smile as he clears the front foyer and enters into the depths of MI6. He's only slightly drunk, not that he'd ever admit it, but the half-empty bottle of Grey Goose and six mauled lemons in his tastefully and bleakly decorated flat would say otherwise.
He doesn't try to avoid the security cameras or even act like he's here to do anything other than the task he's set himself. He knows she has her spies watching, always watching, and that someone is probably hovering with their finger over speed-dial in some back room full of monitors. The thought makes him laugh softly, the corner of his mouth quirking up sharply as he shakes his head.
Records are kept downstairs.
Paper copies are as risky as electronic these days, though maybe less so, as ironic as it would seem, the sole duplicates either destroyed on the spot or kept with their parent, down in the depths of the basement. He knows where the department is, so vaguely called "Information Acquisitions and Research" which really, in his mind, means trumped up librarians. He doesn't know or care what they really do, just that they have the information he needs.
The plate glass door is unlocked when he reaches it, but the department is dimmed, with only the emergency lights casting a pale glow over the rows of cubicles and, further back, beyond another plate glass wall, endless rows of shelving crammed with binders and neatly labeled cardboard boxes. Bond sighs and pauses for a moment to adjust his cuffs as his eyes adjust to the gloom. He is resigned to a long search, fortified on the vodka. It stands to reason, he thinks, that there will be an index and it will be straightforward from there.
There is a reception desk that stands near the front of the center aisle leading back towards the library of documents. It's one of those C or maybe S shaped modern affairs. It's polished top is uncluttered except for a box of tissues, a mesh metal in/out box, a small house plant, and a neat stack of manila envelopes perched far away from these other, centrally located objects, situated near enough to the end and edge of the desk that someone walking too close would almost always knock them to the floor. Bond frowns, but cannot ignore the anomaly. He approaches the files; he has to walk by them anyway on his way into the stacks. There is a pale yellow sticky-note stuck to the topmost file. Written on it, in heavy block marker-penned letters, is "007".
Bond swears angrily and grabs the stack of files roughly, flipping through them, a frown on his face, like a child denied a sweet. It's all here, everything he came to look for. On the bottom file is another sticky-note: DO NOT REMOVE FROM OFFICE -M.
"Meddling know-it-all," he mutters to the empty room as he shoves the files under his arm and stalks from the room.
He takes the file home of course. No one comes to intercept him in the halls and even Gary, that token gesture at security in the foyer, doesn't look up from whatever he's watching on his mobile phone. He takes the lift down to the underground carpark and dumps the files, without regard to their contents, in the passenger seat of his Aston Martin.
He almost clips a bin on his way down the alley that leads into the employees’ carpark, and revs the engine in agitation before pulling out into the traffic. It's late, so there isn't much of it, but he still drives like he's being followed, swerving in and out of black cabs and lorries like it's his job.
Well, technically it is.
He takes the files up to his flat, pushing the pile of round wooden balls in their stamped tin plate his decorator put on his coffee table to the floor, where it crashes with a hollow sound against the stonework. He tosses the files down before retreating to the island bar that separates his kitchen from the living area to where he left the bottle of Grey Goose. He pours a healthy measure into the cocktail shaker, dumping in ice, peeling a thin curl of lemon, measuring the not-vermouth. In a few moments time, he's made himself a doubles quantity of drink, but despite these pains, dumps it unceremoniously into a large tumbler, taking it back to the coffee table where he spends a minute sipping in silence, staring down at the blank, emotionless beige that he hopes contains some kernel of information that will tell him - well he's not sure what.
Something to relieve this burning in his gut that isn't from the vodka.
It's not that he hasn't seen her file before. He saw it after that whole affair was over, after Russia, after he let it go and pushed her to the back of his mind. He'd be afraid to look at it before then, that his emotions would have further overwhelmed him, but by then there was a cool and heady sense of disassociation that allowed him to analyze her life like a stranger. Like she was a stranger.
He sits down on his cold designer leather couch, placing his drink, without a coaster, onto the table. He pauses, leaned forward, elbows on his knees as the fingers of his right hand touch first one folder, then another. He's not sure which one he wants to read first--the one whose contents he already knows or the one whose contents he already found with a quick Google search. He feels like this kind of anticipation will only lead to an anticlimax. He shakes off the feeling and shuffles the folders alongside each other, flipping their covers back, first one then the other. Her face stares up at him, doubled.
And yet there is something supremely different between the two. One stares insolently into the lens of the camera, with the hint of a quirk in the corner of her mouth, a standard government employee identification shot on a bleak off-white background, while the other looks softly wary, like she isn't quite comfortable posing for this quick, candid portrait that whoever made the file picked to use, her smile slightly stilted, strained, awkward.
He reads the first pages, picks up his drink, takes a healthy swallow. It tastes bitter in his mouth. There is nothing new on these pages that he hasn't read before. There is no great enlightenment. There is no great conspiracy. M was right. It wasn't important. Until now. He sighs and leans back against the couch cushions, closing his eyes.
He wonders if M will give him that one, final dossier.
This is literally one of the stupidest things he has ever done, which he thinks even as he wrestles with the flat-screen TV he never uses, drunk on another half a bottle of Grey Goose.
The stupidest thing. If only he'd known he could have done this years ago, indeed before it had ever started, and gotten over her. Maybe. He doesn't know yet what these discs will contain. He's too lazy or impatient, depending on who you ask, to read the boxes. Mostly the latter. Moneypenny had sent one of the interns out to the local HMV, and when that wasn't enough, further into the city to collect the flimsy plastic boxes with their rippling clear sleeves over mediocre Photoshopped titles. She was smart enough to remove the plastic wrap herself and Bond merely has to pry the discs from their cold shells and cram them into the player on the side of his tellie.
The first film he puts in he can barely watch.
It's awful and implausible and historically inaccurate and reminds him why he never goes to the cinema besides not having the time. The lead actor is thin and reedy and terrible, with a weak chin and a propensity towards over enunciation.
"Ponsy git," he tells his television, mashing the buttons on the remote to stop the disc before she ever appears.
He goes to his kitchen then to make another drink, to fortify himself against what's to come. In this moment, as he zests the lemon, he recalls just exactly why they employ low-paid people in Research to watch these sorts of terrible things instead of forcing agents too except when necessary. Unfortunately, he feels this is necessary.
The next disc he puts in seems to be a film that had potential before it met its editor. She plays a schitzo. Her hair is red instead of black-brown and this makes his purse his lips in speculation. He doesn't care for the film, but she ensnares him nonetheless. There is something about her that speaks to him. She's fragile. She's brash. Her character's desperation reminds him of hers.
The movie ends and he feels unfulfilled still, so he picks another disc and puts it in. It seems to be a period piece, as much as the 1960s can be period. It's French. He wishes he'd picked something else, but then, there she is, so very much younger than she is now, chained to the gates, a cigarette dangling the most negligent way possibly from her sultry, insolent lips. He does not like her. They go back to her apartment with her brother. It goes downhill from there.
It isn't the nudity that bothers him, though he studies her body, trying to remember if he remembers any inch of it. He just hates the movie though. He is no old man wishing to be young. He's a man who loves life and who eliminates it. He finds himself curling his lip, sucking down his martini at these foolish children and their stupid games.
Even she cannot improve it.
7.
The phone ringing wakes him up.
Not his mobile, which has fallen somewhere inside the sofa he is sprawled across--it's the landline. It's important. His brain screams at him to wake up. He's laying on his couch, hungover as fuck, the sun streaming in the huge windows. The DVD menu has irritating music, that keeps repeating over and over again, as it has presumably done for the past four hours.
He staggers to the kitchen, picks up the handset. "Bond here," he barely manages.
"Bond? Putting M through to you."
"Shit," he swears. "Shit shit shi--"
"Double Oh Seven?"
"-it."
"I do hope that is regarding your behavior and not my presence. I need you in my office. One hour."
The line disconnects with a click.
Her assistant meets her in the lobby with a coffee and Griffin in a waiting car. Her brows are knitted into concern. “You didn’t sleep,” the other woman guesses, and Eva shrugs, hidden behind her sunglasses. She does not feel like talking right now.
The car has a different driver though. Outside, Eva takes a nervous cigarette. Her eyes dart everywhere; there is healthy stream of cars, cabs, and people walking in and around the hotel, and when she squints she catches a small group of tourists pausing for photos somewhere off to the side.
“You have several missed calls,” her assistant says. “Your mum. Your publicist - and er, Mr. Craig?”
Eva tenses. “Daniel?” Her voice is hard. It cracks slightly, but her assistant doesn’t catch it. When she nods, Eva moves to the car. She opens the door quietly and watches as Griffin scampers over the seats to greet her. He licks the tips of her fingers and then turns, bored. “Why?” Eva manages. “Did he say why he was calling?”
“Couldn’t reach you,” her assistant says. She does not say he was worried about you, he wanted to apologize, there are flowers at your flat because that isn’t what Daniel does; his apologies are in person. This isn’t his fault.
Eva slides her fingers under her sunglasses. She pinches the bridge of her nose and shakes her head.
Her assistant touches her arm. “He’ll call back,” she says gently.
“I know.”
She tries not to laugh. Already her head is starting to replay the night before; she couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep, and just sat there, hours after he left, staring at the carpet. She’s sure her hands are going to start shaking again, should she think anymore of it, but she’s never really understood what to do with any of this.
When she slides into the car, she gathers Griffin into her lap, pulls him against her chest even as he fidgets restlessly. She barely hears her assistant talk to the drive and leans back into her seat to close her eyes.
“Did he say anything?” she asks again. Her voice catches. You’re not her. I can fix it. Eva does not want to go home. It sounds so irresponsibly silly; home isn’t hers anymore, and the notion that it’s been taken away from her hurts. It makes her angry and she doesn’t know where to begin with the why.
“He seemed worried,” her assistant offers. The other woman is unfazed by the question again. “I don’t know - he usually calls you directly, right? I didn’t want to tell him that you didn’t want to go home.”
“It’s all right,” she says. Griffin nuzzles her neck and she laughs, closing her eyes. Her lips press into his fur. “I’m sure.”
Her assistant nods. Eva keeps her eyes closed. She listens to the radio, faint from the front, and tries to will Griffin to relax in her arms. He does, eventually, and pulls away from her neck, shifting into her lap to settle. She lets her fingers run through his fur and drops her head against the glass.
What does she say now? It sounds stupid, crazy, and completely insane to call Daniel back, apologize and try to dance around the fact that someone like him, but like him, has his face and she couldn’t tell the difference. There are nuisances, but she does not have the energy for them.
“You have a few days,” her assistant says then, and Eva forces herself to pay some attention, listening to the woman recount the schedule for the next couple of weeks. It will be New York, then back to Paris, and then for a few days, should she want it, she could go and see her sister. It’s her life.
But she remains quiet, her eyes opening as the car slows in front of her flat, just by the gated entrance of her neighbors. She smiles gratefully at her assistant brushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Take the day,” she says simply. Her fingers curl around Griffin’s leash. “We’ll be busy, after all.”
It is as simple as that suddenly. When the car stops, they say goodbye - although, Eva is certain that her assistant will manage to come back to check on her later. She walks quietly to the door, letting Griffin jump from her arms and scatter impatiently to the ground. She remembers her keys somewhere, at the bottom of her bag, the bag that her assistant gave her to carry her things from the previous night.
Her shoulder brushes against the door. Startled, the door swings open slowly.
Eva freezes.
The confrontation in her office leads to an anonymous black car bound for Primrose Hill.
"You can follow in that...thing," M tells him curtly, stepping inside with her assistant and shutting the door smartly in his face.
It's like she thinks this will give him time to think. Instead it just gives him time to seethe, in pulse with his pounding headache. He follows the black car at a respective distance through the streets westward; it won't do to have her alight chastising him for tailgating.
They pull up outside Eva's house. It's anything but subtle. M gets out of her car, straightens her severe suit. Villiers follows her, casting a frowning glance across the roof of the car at Bond's Aston. He doesn't give a shit. He double-parks her neighbour, alights from his car.
None of them have a key, but neither do they hesitate as they alight through the garden. No dog barks and M nods, solemnly. Villiers jimmies the lock. Bond smirks. His hangover is really kicking in now, but he ignores it as they file into the flat. At the curb, M's car pulls away. He'd smile if he didn't feel so awful. It's poetic, really.
M moves straight into the lounge, her eyes skimming briefly over the furnishings and then dismissing them. Bond watches her from the doorway. His head is pounding.
"I'll be a moment," he says, not waiting for M's reply or Villiers's censorious stare. He can barely abide the man, the posh public school lordling.
He goes down the hall to her kitchen and begins opening her cabinets in a systematic search. It doesn't take him long to find what he wants. He shuffles the bottles. They clink against each other and he's sure M can hear, but he persists. He is disappointed; there are no high-end whiskeys littering her cabinets. He pours himself a generous tumbler of Irish whiskey and removes himself back to the lounge.
"Well," M says, and it is not a question. She has arranged herself, like a cold peacock--no, hawk--near the French doors to the garden. Villiers hovers at her elbow. Bond wonders why he's here. Clearly M feels the same. "You can go. Wait with the car." The man frowns but nods curtly, does as he's told. He's a good little butt boy.
"Does he still pee on the carpets?" Bond asks with a smirk, taking a healthy swallow.
Her piercing gaze swings to him and pins him on the spot. "Really, Double Oh Seven. I'd think you knew your time and place. This isn't it. As much as I love breaking into the flats of mediocre movie stars, there is such a thing as national security, the job I--and you--have been hired and trained for. So I would keep my mouth shut, if I were smart."
Bond raises his brows and then the glass to his mouth.
Griffin stumbles into the hallway.
Eva follows absently. Her bag drops by the door and her hands fumble with the belt around her waist. She does not think much of the open door, or the strange sense of silence, digging out her phone from her coat pocket and turning to her messages to see if she can catch her mother first. She does not think of Daniel or the novelty of resurrecting friendships, sighing loudly as she enters her kitchen.
The cabinets are open.
There is a bottle of whiskey on the counter. She frowns, her brows furrowed. Then it’s Griffin, a low, husky growl calling from the sitting room; for a moment, she thinks Marton. The only person that her dog has ever really taken to immediately is Daniel.
She remembers giving Marton’s key to Daniel too.
Tensing, she walks into the next room as Griffin erupts into loud barking. Her mouth opens, and then closes, at the three visitors in her room start to stare at her entrance.
“Bonjour,” she says, and her voice is unexpectedly dry, her gaze moving instantly to the man with Daniel’s face, standing by her couch. His hand is wrapped tightly around a glass. The whiskey, she thinks. He holds her gaze too and she cannot bring herself to do anything but shrug, even lamely, shifting so that she moves to settle by a window.
The sitting room is the brightest space in the entire house. She hasn’t really fixed it, even after her flat was completely tossed apart. The paintings are still resting against her walls and the books manage to stay stacked neatly on the floor. It isn’t until Griffin comes scampering to her legs, that she notices the woman sitting on her couch; she remains quiet, lips pursed tightly, staring at her, then staring at the man - Eva barely notices the company behind the two of them, the back of another man watching her garden outside.
“It seems,” the woman speaks up finally. She’s calm, and Eva turns her gaze to her, watching as she stands. She straightens elegantly. “It seems,” she repeats, and primly, “that we owe you an apology, Ms. Green.”
“An apology?” she repeats, and the man scoffs into his glass. He earns a scathing look from the woman and Eva finds herself easing back against the window ledge. She is too tired to give into the rest of her questions.
“Yes,” the woman snaps. Her impatience manifests into a scowl. Next to her, the man snorts into his glass. “I want to stress how imperative it is that we maintain some kind of discretion - I am sure you understand, Ms. Green.”
She gets the feeling that the other woman is mocking her. Her gaze remains leveled though and she looks between her and the man. She feels ridiculously out of place all of the sudden, and reaches into her pockets, pulling out her cigarettes.
“I understand,” she says quietly. She pulls a cigarette between her fingers, then slides it into her mouth. Her lips curl briefly. “Although,” she manages, “I am confused to as why this kind of conversation is taking place in my flat. I suppose if one were to have discussion about discretion - ”
“I like her,” the man interrupts. His amusement is abrupt, and Eva shoots him a dark look.
The woman snorts. “When I want your opinion, Double-Oh-Seven,” she snarls, “I’ll be sure to ask.” She looks to Eva again. “It is, in fact, an usual set of circumstances that has brought us here as well as a complete lack of common sense - ” the man rolls his eyes but he earns a glare, “so it is my hope that we sort these matters out before I have to resort to other methods.”
The woman does not introduce herself, nor show any inclination of doing so. For whatever reason, Eva isn’t surprised. She finds herself glancing at the man again, the not-Daniel she thinks awkwardly; there is a slight exchange of words, murmurs that cause the other man to pull away from watching her garden and move to the woman. He is holding a coat.
“Ma’am,” he says.
Eva watches the woman nod. She takes the coat and Griffin seems to burrow back against her legs. She does not move to pick him up, not yet.
“Bond,” the woman says curtly. “Be sure to fix this mess.”
She turns and takes her coat, passing the man - Bond. His lip curls and he raises his glass to her back, turning away from them. He moves to face her garden. She can see him watching her through the window; her throat is tight, and her fingers rise to press at her temples. She rubs lightly.
“You have lovely home, Ms. Green,” she says politely.
Eva tries not to watch her go.
M leaves the room. They both watch her go silently before Eva turns her gaze back to him. He’s still watching the doorway out into the hall with a slight frown. He sets his empty glass down slowly with a final click.
“She means well,” Bond says.
“I-“ Her dog struggles in her arms and she rises, letting him hop off her lap first. “He needs to go out.”
They do an awkward dance in front of the French window. She eyes him warily. He seems too amused for the seriousness of this situation. Eva opens one of the doors and follows her dog outside where Griffin yaps cheerfully at the birdbath, the rosebush, the back fence. She follows him out, standing on her bricked terrace, arms wrapped around herself as she contemplates her garden, what’s just been said, what has happened to her carefully ordered life.
“Eva,” the man says, low, in Daniel’s voice. He’s too close behind her.
“Yes?” she says curtly, hunching her shoulders up.
“You want answers,” he says and it’s not a question.
She laughs, harsh and bitter and low. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?”
“I can give them to you.”
“Can you?”
“Of course,” he says and she can hear the smirk in his voice. She turns and falls a step back. He’s so close. Too close.
“I-“ she begins and then there is a soft thwack and an explosion of small wood fragments from the trim around her French doors.
“Get down,” he says, swearing and shoving her to the ground as she screams her dog’s name. Griffin’s head jerks from the back fence to her, then back before he bolts towards her. A tulip explodes as he gallops across the lawn into her arms.
“Damn,” Bond swears. “Get inside.” He has his gun out already, stalking down her lawn. She prays none of her neighbours see him.
For a moment, he’s angry their interlude has been interrupted, but as he eases himself down towards her back fence, he smiles. He’s going to kill two birds with one stone.
It’s an easy kill, as they go. He drags the body out of the way, calls the office for clean up, before he climbs back over into Eva’s yard. She’s huddled next to the curtain with her little dog.
“Come with me,” he says brusquely, without any preamble about his actions of the past ten minutes, grabbing her by her upper arm. She follows him numbly, still clutching her dog, who whines softly.
He hesitates for a moment, in her hallway, bathed in soft pale morning light from the star shaped glass inserts in her doorway leading to the foyer. This is stupid. This is rash. Yet he stole he passport yesterday. He had it all prepared, this end of his mission just made it happen. He'd smile if he was the type.
"Hurry," he says, ushering across the small front garden, the pavement, out into the street and around into his Aston Martin.
"This car..." she says softly but he's already closing the door on her and the dog she has clutched tightly into her lap.
"Fasten your seatbelt," he says briskly as he swings into the driver's seat, guns the car down her road too fast.
"I think I saw this car on Top Gear once," she murmurs faintly. He flicks his gaze over to her for a moment and then back to traffic, weaving in and out between cars.
Heavy London traffic gives way to the suburbs and then the highway. They're heading towards the ferries--not that he tells her, It's late afternoon when they arrive, in spite of his driving. English roads can only take you so far in a day. He rolls the car into the hold of the ship, flashes their passports. He even has one for the dog, thanks to the ever resourceful agents at the office, not that he'd taken a second look at the extra piece of laminated paper in the pile before now. Still, it's easier than paying customs agents off; they've become so tedious in this day and age. Almost makes him miss the Cold War, never mind that he'd barely been a double oh for six months before the wall had fallen.
"We should go up," he tells his silent passenger as he steps outside the car, leansdown to look at her with a frown.
She shakes her head, clutching the dog, who whins softly, as he had the past few hours, especially on tight turns in the road.
"He might like the fresh air," Bond says abruptly, slamming his door and walking way from the car, his hands thrust deeply in the pockets of his heavy woolen overcoat. Stubborn bitch.
She says nothing so explicit as "wait" as he hopes to hear, but there is a quiet release of expensive hydraulics and the door opens in a smooth sweep of air, closing with a smack that would make a lesser man wince.
"Come, Griffin," she says curly to the dog, who prances along side her, leaping at the looped end of his leash. She flicks a quick glance and him and just as quickly looks away at her little dog. "Good boy," she coos, leading him quickly past Bond and up onto the deck.
The corner of his mouth quirks and he shakes his head, following her.
Continue.