Work Text:
Mathilde is not an orphan, so Mathilde does not become an agent.
Mathilde ends up at MI6 anyway.
***
Maman tells her about her father. Nearly every day there’s a new story, and at first Mathilde believes everything, and then she believes nothing, because the stories are unbelievable. But then she gets a little older, understands a little better, and starts to think that Maman’s stories about her father are true.
The world is a scarier place than Mathilde likes to think about, most days.
***
A box arrives not long after their strange trip to that strange place, with all the strange people. Maman puts it away, unopened, and tells Mathilde it’s a birthday present from her father. Each birthday from then on, a gift emerges from the box.
Photos at first, of Maman and a man with shockingly blue eyes and blonde hair, on boats and in cars and at various backroad points of Italy. There are other photos, too, but at first Mathilde only cares about the ones that include Maman.
As she gets older, there are other things, like a vintage Rolex watch. It’s a man’s watch, but Mathilde wears it on her slender wrist anyway, and many people think she is chic and interesting for the idiosyncrasy. There is also a pair of sunglasses, eye-poppingly expensive when she looks them up on 1st Dibs, which she also wears all the time.
There are ID tags, small and round, and stamped with a blood type, and a number, and the name Bond, JC. She wears one on a chain around her neck, Maman wears the other. Neither of them ever takes it off, not even to shower. Even when they are dressed to the nines, with borrowed diamonds around their necks, Madeleine and Mathilde Swann have matching metal tags hanging between their breasts, warm against their hearts. It’s the only piece of jewelry Maman takes to the grave, but Mathilde’s, eventually, ends up in a museum, along with most of her father’s things.
On her tenth birthday, she inherits a piece of land in the Scottish Highlands, beautiful and wild and remote. She visits with Maman, but something about the place makes her sad. Mathilde is a fanciful child and tells Maman the land is haunted. Maman helps her donate the land to the National Trust.
On her seventeenth birthday, she gets a car. It is a beautiful 1964 Aston Martin DB5, silver and gleaming. It drives like a dream and has some extra safety features that come with a thick manual, but not one issued by Aston Martin. This manual is in a three-ring binder, and comes with annotations in the margin written in a small, cramped hand. At the end is a note: Try not to wreck this one like your father did. Twice.
Maman keeps the Vantage. She goes for long drives in it, sometimes with Mathilde and sometimes alone, but she never steps into the DB5. That’s Mathilde’s car, and Mathilde’s car only.
There is also a truly astounding collection of bespoke and designer menswear, much of which she has tailored to fit her. Her father had broad shoulders and round biceps but was in every other way an average-sized man, and Mathilde has inherited his stature. She’s tall for a woman, with strong shoulders and an otherwise svelte frame. It doesn’t take much for her father’s suits to fit. She doesn’t wear them all the time, mostly just when she wants to make an impression. The older she gets, the surer she is her father wore the suits in the same way, to make a statement, an impression. As she collects stories of him throughout her life, she learns he succeeded.
James Bond made one hell of an impression on anyone he left alive.
***
Mathilde is a fanciful child, who grows up to be a curious adult. One day, she packs a bag, a vintage leather duffle that was part of her father’s things, gets into her Aston Martin, and she heads for Calais, for the ferry. Ultimate destination: London, Vauxhall Cross.
She’s heard every story of her father Maman has to tell, so eventually, she goes looking for the others.
For others who knew 007.
For the few who knew James Bond.
***
She goes first to Sir Gareth Mallory, the only M alive who knew Bond. He’s an old man, shoulders broken by time and, she thinks, guilt. It was his colossal fuckup, after all, that left Mathilde without a father. He is appropriately apologetic, and Mathilde thinks he looks small and insignificant in his overwrought study at his pretentious fucking Holland Park mansion. Maman barely ever mentioned Mallory, knowing him only as Bond’s boss, so it’s not like Mathilde has much to go on, as far as preconceived notions go. But from the moment she sees Mallory’s beaky nose and watery eyes and Savile Row worn even at home, she conceives an instant and startlingly intense dislike.
Mathilde is not impressed, and only takes a few notes.
(I see why you quit, Papa.)
But at least he puts her in touch with Bill Tanner.
***
She collects many stories from Bill Tanner, whose kindly face belies his decades in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He knew Bond before and after he was 007, through both of his retirements, and multiple resurrections. He never knew Bond the sailor, but he gives her some names of men and women with whom Bond served in the SBS. He tells her stories that paint her father as an asshole, a rogue, a wild card, and a fanatically loyal agent who never, ever gave up on a mission, even up to the moment he got shot off a moving train.
(Quoi? Maman didn’t tell me that one!)
Tanner sends her down an SBS rabbit hole, where she meets an array of colorful men and women, some still in the Navy, some not, all of whom add to her treasure trove of stories about her father. Bond’s naval career was colorful, to say the least, full of as many reprimands as commendations, and it’s just her luck the mission that got him recruited to MI6 is no longer classified. She acquires copies of the files and translates the dry military jargon into a story about a cockamamie plan to rescue a stranded intelligence asset from a group of pirates off Madagascar. The whole thing sounds completely made up, but Mathilde knows by now that’s par for the course for James Bond. If the story doesn’t sound like the plot of a spy novel, it’s not a 007 story.
***
The moving train story sends her to Eve Moneypenny, who only just retired as the chief of staff of MI6.
Moneypenny is beautiful, hardly changed from the one photo of her Mathilde possesses. It shows Moneypenny in a pub, playing darts, mouth open in a laugh as Bond rolls his eyes behind her. Mathilde asks for the context of the photo, and gets a story about beating Bond at darts, even though he cheated like a fish drinks water.
She asks for the story about the train.
Moneypenny doesn’t speak for a while.
And then she tells Mathilde about a mission gone horribly, horribly wrong, and the reason Skyfall Lodge is haunted.
She has other stories, too, about Spectre and Nine Eyes and Safin and a man-made virus with no cure, but Mathilde focuses on Skyfall. It’s an inflection point, like that SBS mission in Madagascar, a fulcrum around which Bond’s life swung in a new direction.
Moneypenny also says a name, one Mathilde has never heard before.
(Maman, why did you never tell me about Vesper Lynd?)
***
Chasing the ghost of Vesper Lynd leads Mathilde to America and the CIA, and a clutch of retired agents who remember a ghost named Felix Leiter.
Chasing Felix Leiter leads Mathilde to Cuba and a woman called Paloma. She tells Mathilde a great story about a party and a mid-shootout toast, truly one of the best 007 stories Mathilde has ever heard from anyone, anywhere.
(Papa, I’m a little worried about your alcohol consumption.)
Paloma leads toward Safin, though, so Mathilde asks no follow-up questions. She’s not ready to chase that ghost.
Maybe she never will be.
***
She collects stories about Le Chiffre, about Quantum, about Silva, about Spectre. She collects stories about her own ghosts, her grandpere and grandmere, about the life her mother left behind. She collects stories about Andrew and Monique Bond, about an avalanche and Hannes and Franz Oberhauser. She collects a hair-raising story about Eton.
(Vraiment, Papa? At thirteen!)
She collects stories about as many missions as she can, about other agents, soldiers, spies, women glamorous and doomed, men clever and cunning. She chases ghosts three times around the world.
She never chases Safin.
***
Eventually, she returns to the UK. She has a list of names, ghosts found with no one left to collect their stories. She chases Bill Fairbanks, 002; she chases Scarlet Papava, 004; she chases Edward Donne, 001; she chases Sam Johnston, 0012; she chases Nomi Francis, 007.
She finds graves at the end of every story, but for one.
***
Alec Trevelyan, once upon a time 006, is an old man. Older than his years, hard living and serious injuries have left him riddled with tight, pulling scar tissue, and arthritis in damn near every joint. His hair is more gray than gold, his hands gnarled with arthritis and busted knuckles, the tip of a brutal scar is just visible at the base of his throat. He’s a living poster for why survival is often crueler than death for a double-oh.
His green eyes are still sharp, though, and his grip is strong when he shakes Mathilde’s hand, but she sees how he flexes his own hand after letting go.
He knew James Bond longer and better than anyone, and he has many stories for Mathilde to collect. He fills in the blanks left by stories other people have told her, he expounds on James’s time at the naval college, on his years in the SBS, on that shitshow mission in Madagascar. He tells her about Vesper Lynd and the scar she left on James’s heart, he tells her of Felix Leiter and the other double-ohs, he tells her of Olivia Mansfield. He tells her how James was different after Madeleine, for the better only, even with a new scar laid across his heart. He goes through the photos Mathilde brings, telling her story after story until the sun sinks behind the horizon and he lets her stay in his guest room, and begins the next day with a fresh set of stories.
(He misses you so much, Papa.)
Alec Trevelyan followed Bond through the Navy and into MI6, followed him into the double-oh program, followed him into one scrape after another, but he didn’t follow Bond into retirement. He didn’t follow Bond to that island, to Safin. Alec aged out of the double-oh program not long after Bond’s second retirement, he’d been in Station F when Bond died on the other side of the world. He only learned of it after it was too late to help his oldest and best friend.
Mathilde sits with Alec for a long, long time, holding his twisted, broken hands and letting him stare into her eyes until the last tears have run from his.
***
There are only two names left on Mathilde’s list before she will have collected every story about James Bond she can possibly chase down. Safin she may never pursue, but the other name is one she has heard a thousand times over the years she’s chased her father’s ghost around the world. The name has passed from her mother’s lips, from Sir Gareth Mallory’s, from Bill Tanner’s, from Eve Moneypenny’s, from Alec Trevelyan’s, almost everyone who has told Mathilde a 007 story has also mentioned another name, as if his life was stitched to Bond’s, never to be sundered. Mathilde feels like she already knows him, like she’s had a hundred conversations with him already, and maybe, in a way, she has.
After all, he was the first ghost from her father’s life to reach across time and space and touch Mathilde, his small, cramped writing filling the margins of a self-made car manual.
Try not to wreck this one like your father did. Twice.
Sebastian De Courcy.
Q.
***
He looks like the one photo Mathilde has of him.
It shows her father and Q working on the Aston Martin, the bonnet up and both in coveralls, with matching streaks of grease on their cheeks. Q is noticeably younger than her father, fresh-faced and boyish though he must have been around thirty when the photo was taken. He is all pale skin and dark curling disaster hair, silver-green eyes behind nerdy glasses, and plush red lips that Mathilde just knows got her father into trouble at one time or another.
(I am a grown woman, Papa, I know about sex, though I try to be a little more discreet than you ever were.)
But he is older, now. It’s been twenty years since…the island. Sebastian De Courcy is somewhere in his fifties, though early or late is impossible to tell. He's still boyishly handsome, his face only faintly lined around his eyes, but his dark curls are liberally streaked with gray. He dresses like a professor, smells of bergamot and tea leaves, and when he sees Mathilde, he sucks in a shuddering breath and sits down so hard the park bench under him rocks unsteadily.
They don’t speak for a while, but it’s a rare sunny summer day in London, so Mathilde doesn’t mind. She tilts her face up to the sky and closes her eyes, enjoying the simplicity of the moment.
“I met your father in the National Gallery,” Q says abruptly. He has a lovely voice, a smooth tenor with an embarrassingly posh accent.
(I bet you teased him about that, didn’t you, Papa?)
“He was sitting in front of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.”
Mathilde studied art. She’s familiar with the painting, at least as a vague impression of a ship.
“I made a comment about the inevitability of time, and he told me I had spots.”
“Did you?”
Q huffs and it’s almost a laugh.
“You are his daughter,” he murmurs.
They fall silent again.
“The car is great,” Mathilde offers.
Q nods.
“Any crashes?”
“Not even un petit choc,” she says proudly. The car is as good as the day she got it.
“And you are your mother’s daughter.” Q smiles. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Mathilde says. “But we can start with Silva.”
Q sighs and shakes his head.
“I’ll never live that down.”
“I don’t care about the hacking,” Mathilde offers. “I want to know about the tube. Did you really tell him to put his back into it?”
Q laughs so hard his thin shoulders tremble in his truly awful tweed jacket.
“I did, and he reminded me of it constantly.”
They talk for hours. When the sun begins setting, Mathilde accompanies Q to his home, a deceptively tidy townhouse that is probably far more expensive than the plain brick exterior lets on. They cook together, and Q regales her with stories of her father. He tells her about Nomi, too, the 007 after Bond, and he tells her that after Nomi, there hasn’t been another 007 assigned. There just aren’t as many double-ohs these days, the program isn’t eliminated, but there is less and less need for, well, assassins. There is still a surprising amount of human intelligence collecting, given the sheer scale of electronic surveillance these days, but the double-ohs are a dying breed.
Mathilde thinks about the number of graves she’s visited, including her own father’s, and the memory of Alec Trevelyan, shuffling like a man decades older than he really is. She’s not sad to hear the double-ohs are dwindling.
She spends the night at Q’s, and he takes the next day off work. He’s more confident about taking time off, now, and he’s approaching retirement anyway. It’s good for his successor to get his feet wet when Q is still there to clean up any messes. It’s more than he got, when he was promoted, and he tells Mathilde about his first days on the job. He talks about the terror of the bombing at Legoland, something he’s never even talked about with therapists. He talks about the confusion of the days that followed, scrambling to relocate, to remake Q Branch in the midst of a crisis, finding out Bond was still alive.
“Un moment.” Mathilde stops. They’re working on the car, tuning up the engine, but she straightens and sets her wrench down, reaching for her recorder and notebook. “Were you there when Moneypenny shot him?”
“Yes, I was on the cyberterrorism desk.”
“Tell me about that.”
And so Q goes back, to his earliest days at MI6.
Mathilde likes Q immensely, and as they work on the car, she thinks about the photograph tucked in her bag, of the two men working on this very car in a considerably worse state of repair. She thinks of the light in Bond’s eyes, as he looks at the person behind the camera, gesturing with his wrench at Q, that cruel mouth softened in a smile as he said something to the person taking the picture. And Q, staring at Bond, pale eyes shining with so, so much love.
A day turns into a week turns into a month. Q goes back to work, but Mathilde stays in London, crashing at his house while she continues to collect his stories.
His life has not been empty. He has photos on his mantle, some with Moneypenny and Tanner, some with people who look like they might be fellow Q Branch lab rats, and others who might be old uni friends. There are no photos of anyone who might be a partner, though there is a photo of Q and Bond, the latter in one of his bespoke suits, the former in a hideous cardigan. They’re standing shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed, both sporting similarly exaggerated scowls.
Eventually, Mathilde snoops.
She’s the daughter of a spy and a psychologist, of course she snoops. If Q didn’t want her to snoop, he wouldn’t have given her a key to his house. She finds the photo album during the second week, under Q’s bed. There’s a box, a not small box, filled with postcards with no signature from all over the world, and a pile of kitschy tchotchkes like they sold in airports. There are a few concert and movie ticket stubs, a printout of an airplane ticket to Austria, an old laptop covered in stickers, a pair of glasses, thicker frames than Q currently wears. And a thumb drive, conspicuous in its innocuousness.
She plugs the thumb drive into the stickered-covered laptop, using one of Q’s surplus chargers to boot the old thing up. It must be twenty-five years old, at least. They don’t even make computers like this anymore, but she has more sense than to plug anything made by Sebastian De Courcy into one of her own devices. Who knows what kind of boobytraps he set on the thing.
There’s a password. She’s always been good at guessing passwords.
Shockingly, 007 works.
(He’s not trying very hard these days, Papa.)
It’s all photos of Bond.
Some are real, maybe saved from a phone or digital camera. Some are obviously surveillance photos, and a few look like they were pulled from satellites. There are also scans of reports, mission logs, even psych exams. She laughs out loud at those, reading Bond’s hatred for psychology in every response.
(How much hell did you give Maman, eh, Papa?)
There are also two retirement letters, one short but respectful, addressed to the M that was Olivia Mansfield. The other is only two words and is addressed to the M that was Sir Gareth Mallory. Mathilde laughs at that, and keeps clicking through files, the old laptop’s interface clunky and unfamiliar. It must have been cutting edge, once, but it’s hopelessly antiquated now. She wonders how much of current computers derive from Q’s inventions and patents, decides he would never tell her so there’s no point in asking. He’ll talk about Bond until he drops from exhaustion, because everything is at least twenty years old and mostly declassified, but he is frustratingly tight-lipped about anything current, like any good spy. And Q has been a good spy for over thirty years.
But his Bond box is barely hidden. The password on his secret Bond photo album is hardly even a password. Mathilde wonders what it means, that Q isn’t holding this secret so tightly anymore. Has he just not had someone over in so long he doesn’t worry about a new lover finding mementos of another long gone? Does he have a lover steady enough to know about Q’s star-crossed love for an agent called 007?
(Did you love him back, Papa? At least a little?)
The last two photos on the thumb drive are the only ones that include Q. The first photo is from the early days, Q looks hilariously young. It’s Bond and Q near the Thames, hair blowing in a strong wind, Q looks like he’s shouting at someone behind the lens. She guesses Moneypenny, or maybe Tanner, or perhaps a Q Branch flak that Bond deigned to acknowledge. There couldn’t have been many people in a position to hang out with James Bond and Q off-hours. The second photo is much the same, but some years later, maybe a decade or more. Bond’s hair is significantly silvered, the lines on his face deeper, it’s the face Mathilde only just remembers. Q even looks older, almost like an actual adult, though his disastrous hair is still solid black and his face youthful. But there’s something in his expression, something that speaks of experience he didn’t have in the first photo. They’re in Q’s kitchen, the one right downstairs, their arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
In both photos, Bond is looking at Q, his craggy face softened, a small smile lifting his lips. It’s an expression Mathilde almost remembers, she might have seen it once directed Madeleine, or maybe it’s not her real memory, but a trick of imagination, something imprinted in her brain after a lifetime of looking at photos of James and Madeleine together. But she knows that expression, knows what it means.
That night, as they cook another meal together, Mathilde watches Q.
“I found the box under your bed,” she says, testing the waters.
“You found the box I left for you under my bed,” Q corrects coolly.
Mathilde grins, unrepentant and amused.
Q averts his gaze, unable to see that expression, those eyes, and not do something embarrassing like cry.
“He loved you, you know,” she says quietly.
“Not as much as he loved your mum.”
“Maybe it’s not about degrees. Maybe it’s just about timing.”
“Your dad’s timing was not great.”
“Je sais. Maman says it was the worst thing about him.”
Q chuckles.
“Madeleine is, as always, correct. So, I had bad timing?”
“Je ne sais pas. Maman’s wasn’t so good, either. It’s not like she had a long and happy life with him.”
Q is silent for a while.
“Maybe that’s why it ended the way it did. Bad timing, all the way around.”
“It ended the way it did because Lyutsifer Safin,” she hisses the name, “was a psychopath.”
Q has no response. He’s had twenty years to replay that awful day, and he has long since resigned himself to the knowledge that there was nothing more he could do. Safin’s nanobots are like Silva’s hack, a rare instance of someone besting him, but Safin is the bitterest pill he’s ever had to swallow.
“M warned me about him, when she sent me to meet James that first time.” His lips quirk in a sad little smile. “I think she was afraid he’d be the death of me. Instead, I was the death of him.”
“Non, c'est faux,” she snaps, slamming her stirring spoon down. “You weren’t, Q.”
They finish and plate their meals and eat quietly for a bit.
“Please don’t carry that, Sebastian,” she says at last. “He wouldn’t want you to. I don’t want you to. S’il te plait, pour moi. Don’t carry that.”
Neither of them is eating anymore. They’ve made a beautiful mushroom risotto and they’re absolutely wasting it, just pushing food around their plates.
“I think,” Mathilde says eventually, “that he just didn’t want you to end up like the others. He loved you enough to let you go.”
Q’s hands shake so badly he has to set his fork down. He buries his face in his hands, and for the first time in a long time, he weeps. Mathilde embraces him, and those shockingly blue eyes, so dear to Q for so long, weep with him.
***
In the end, Mathilde publishes a book. She uses her full name, the one she changed it to on her eighteenth birthday: Mathilde Bond Swann. It’s one part memoir, one part biography of the father she barely knew. It’s entirely a great spy thriller. Certain things had to be redacted, like the existence of the double-ohs. They’re referred to only as elite field agents, and every name is changed. Vesper Lynd’s name has to be changed because Her Majesty’s Treasury has never admitted to an information breach. Paloma gets to keep her name, because that was always an alias. Q’s alias is changed, though, she calls him Zed. Moneypenny gets to go by her real name, as does Bill Tanner, because chief of staff is a public-facing position, and the Ms are named, because they are also public figures. The book does not help Mallory’s public reputation at all. Mathilde doesn’t particularly feel bad about that.
Safin is never named. Mathilde writes that she made a conscious choice not to chase the last ghost in her father’s file, that a madman had wanted to reshape the world and she refuses to give him a platform, even in death. Instead, she writes about Felix Leiter, about Paloma, about Nomi Francis, about Moneypenny, and about Q. She writes about her mother, and a phone call. Most of all, she writes about 007.
About Bond, James Bond.
About her father.
***
This book is dedicated to James, my father.
And to V, whom he loved first.
And to my mother, whom he loved last.
And to S, whom he loved best of all.