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Every Christmas, they each have their own lies to tell.
Mallory heads home to his wife and children, suffering through a traditional Christmas dinner with a smile, his mind on the stack of paperwork on his desk and the overseas missions that may make his phone beep out an alert at any second.
Eve volunteers to staff the office over Christmas and New Year, claiming she has no family near enough to visit and that she needs the extra cash anyway, for that new skirt or sniper rifle she’s been eying. After hours she sits in a nameless London institution and reads wartime adventure stories to a man who no longer remembers her name.
Q has dinner every year in Oxford with an old professor. The rumour is they were once lovers, the young Turk and aged lecturer, and Q has become very adept at smiling serenely and never quite admitting to anything. No one ever thinks twice about the dark-haired toddler playing at their feet, who seems very young to be the professor’s daughter.
On Christmas Eve, everything quiet, Bond picks up his coat and gives the bulldog on Moneypenny’s desk a friendly pat. “I’m going to a funeral,” he says.
No one ever asks where, or for whom.
The locals twist their mouths in doubt when he tells them of his travel plans. The weather is bad, the roads may be closed, and there will be barely any scenery to admire. “Come back in the summer, lad,” the woman in the newsagent’s tells him. “You might find a day or two of sun, even.”
Whenever he assures them that he knows the way, and of course that he is a local himself, they hear only his crisp English public school accent and exchange glances that threaten to blossom into laughter. He drives on.
People die in these mountains every year – seasoned climbers, tourists, and the volunteer mountain rescue teams dispatched to save them. In height alone, they’re laughably small hills to someone like him, who has scaled and skied Alps and Rockies alike, but when he stands at their foot and gazes up their fogged slopes, he is six years old again. He speaks the way the locals speak. He has parents. He has never held a gun.
Skyfall is only rubble, these days. Kincade tells him that someone still owns the land, but at present there are no plans to rebuild. There’s no coal under these moors, no game that’s worth monetising. Moss has grown and leaves have fallen. This was a home not long ago, but now it’s no more than a ruin.
At the chapel, he kneels down by his parents’ gravestone and works lichen away with his pocket knife.
“How goes the war?”
The voice startles him no matter how much he expects it. She’s the reason he’s here, the only reason he’s ever here. Even so, in this land of ghosts and childhood nightmares, she’s still the only one who can make him jump.
“Unexpectedly well,” he tells her, picking himself up from the ground and dusting off his knees. “Mallory runs a tight ship.”
Her mouth purses in what would once have been anger at the implication. Now, she smiles. “And yet they still keep you around.”
“I’m as tight as they come,” he says.
They never once hugged while she was alive. Now he puts his arms around her, sharing his warmth, holding on for much longer than he knows is healthy.
“Dear boy,” says M, and pats his back. “Dear boy.”
She lives with Kincade now, somewhere among the hills with an inexact address and a PO Box in a distant town. The precise nature of their relationship is something none of them has ever offered to discuss. She seems happy, though. Being dead has done her a world of good.
In a village coffee shop already threatening to close for the night, they drink piping hot tea and chew on surprisingly dense fruitcake. Bond always brings her gifts from London – “supplies”, he calls them, even though Scotland is hardly Somalia and Kincade is heartily enthusiastic about his Amazon account. M never turns down her nose at tea or chocolates, or the latest news from the front line.
Most of what he tells her is gossip, as though Eve and Q are churlish grandchildren who never bother to visit, Felix the token American cousin whose exploits are a scandal told and retold in gasps around the dinner table. He explains a lot of old news, some fact or two behind the headlines she’s seen in the Herald and already mostly guessed. Everything else is strictly classified and she no longer has any clearance.
On the other hand, she’s also dead.
Her injury had been severe enough that there was barely any trouble convincing the world she’d died in the chapel. An elderly woman in the cold of the Scottish night, amid explosions and surrounded by lunatics? By the letter of his official report on the matter, she could have been dead ten times over and no one would have questioned it. He suspects that Mallory knows something, though, and Q knows something, and Eve... well, Eve smiles enigmatically and says nothing at all.
“I’m glad you have people around you who you can trust,” M says.
“I always did.”
“And yet you always broke into my home, pilfered from my kitchen, used my access codes...”
He shrugs. “You had the nicest biscuits. And the most understanding dogs.”
Ever since they first met, he’s always seen every smile from her as a sign of victory.
She drives him back out to Skyfall and his rented car. The night has come in quickly, and the wind is picking up. “We have a spare room if you’d like to stay.”
He replays the phrase in his mind, searching for a tone that cares either way. He shakes his head. “I can’t.”
Much as he’d like to tell himself that she looks the same, she’s getting older and so is he. Experience can only make up for so much. He can only hope he’ll gain enough wisdom to know when to stay dead the next time.
Under their feet, not too far below, is a caved-in passageway where part of him is still buried. “The good part or the bad part?” Kincade had asked him once. “The soft part,” he’d replied.
“Will you come back,” she asks him, “when I’m gone?”
He casts a look at the gravestone, although the light is bad enough that he can no longer make out the names.
“Yes,” he tells her. “Of course.”