Work Text:
If a less glamorous place exists than the motorway services just off junction 18 of the A74, Bond cannot imagine it.
He's been in some piss-holes in his time: third-world prisons, dingy alleys that smelled like urine and vomit, vermin-infested flophouses. The service station where he and M have briefly interrupted their journey north isn't as sordid as any of those, but it has a banal dinginess all of its own. It's the energy-saving overhead lighting that's not quite bright enough. The scuffed plastic tables and moulded seating bolted to the floor. The greasy smell of stale fast food.
Bond likes to think of himself as a man who doesn't wear his emotions openly, but it's been a very long day, and something of his reaction must be written on his face, because M glances at him and says, "I agree it's hardly Monte Carlo, but beggars can't be choosers. I'm going to sit over there. Get me a cup of tea."
"Tea," Bond says. "Yes, ma'am."
M sits down at an empty table – the one which is placed against the restaurant's back wall, furthest away from the windows, Bond notes with approval. It's just gone three in the morning, and there are fewer than ten people in the place, including the staff. Most of the other patrons are lorry drivers swigging tea out of disposable cups. At a table in the corner, a couple radiating exhaustion face each other in silence, a sleeping baby in a carrier between them. A woman sitting by herself picks distractedly at the label on the bottle she's holding, her expression preoccupied.
No threats here. Just tired people, too wrapped up in their own problems and concerns to care about the greater fate of the world.
It occurs to Bond that, for once, he's one of them.
He orders a cup of coffee and a pot of tea from the girl at the serving counter, smiles at her and uses her name (Ashlee, according to the badge on her uniform) when he thanks her. She's young, and pretty underneath the Goth make up and piercings. Charm has always come easily to Bond, and by now the habit is so ingrained it's second nature. Right now, he doesn't need anything from Ashlee except two hot drinks and the right change from a ten pound note, but that could shift in an instant, and if it did, then a few seconds invested now in building even the most tenuous rapport could be invaluable. (Silva and his men crash into the restaurant in an explosion of glass and bullets, and a second later he's crouching behind the counter, returning fire, and he might need Ashlee to create a distraction so he can get to M, and if he told her to do it, would that sliver of trust from a stranger's smile be enough to carry the moment? Severine had trusted him; he hadn't saved her. Just the opposite.)
"Is your mum all right?" She nods over Bond's shoulder, indicating the table where M is sitting.
He considers correcting her, but in the end only says, "She's just tired. It's been a long day."
Ashlee smiles in understanding. "Not too much further to go, I hope."
"No," Bond agrees. "We're nearly at an end."
He carries the tray back to their table. M is resting her chin in her hand, her eyes half-closed, and for a moment he thinks she's fallen into a doze. Then he sees that she's looking down, at something sitting on the table in front of her – her phone. Her fingers are moving, rapidly swiping right-to-left across the screen as she flicks through images. Then the phone abruptly disappears, palmed discreetly back into a coat pocket on Bond's return. He says nothing as he sets the tray down on the table and lifts their drinks off it: insipid coffee for him, a one-cup teapot of something which claims to be, but almost certainly is not, English Breakfast for her.
M picks up the plastic single-serving of creamer resting on the lip of her saucer and regards it with disdain. "Look at this. Non-pasteurised dairy-free cream substitute. It's an abomination. There are millions of cows in this country, it's not as if there's a milk shortage." She eyes his coffee. "I take it they were out of vodka martinis."
"I am driving," Bond points out.
"As if that's ever stopped you." M regards the creamer for a second before setting it decisively to one side. She pours herself a cup of black tea. "Well. Drink up. We can't afford more than ten minutes. We need to keep moving."
He nods in agreement, but they both know this break is for M's benefit, not Bond's. He can ignore his tiredness, or fight it off through a mixture of adrenalin and sheer bloody-mindedness. But he can see weariness settling over M like a shroud.
They sip their tasteless grey drinks in silence. Bond watches the exits, the other customers, the cleaner mopping the floor. It's mostly habit, but it gives him a reason not to look at M. She looks… old. He's never thought of her as old before, but now he sees it written in the stoop of her shoulders, her pallor, the deep lines etched on her face. It makes him feel uncomfortable in a way he doesn't want to examine.
"I suppose," M says at last, "that this would be a good moment for me to say thank you."
"I'm just doing my job."
"No," M corrects him. "If you were doing your job, you'd be in London, taking orders from Mallory, and I'd be in a safe house somewhere, or dead already. This is not your job."
"My duty, then."
At that, M almost smiles. "If that's what you want to call it."
A phone rings, and Bond raises an eyebrow when M takes the offending piece of technology out of her pocket. They'd both dumped their MI6 phones before leaving London.
"Oh, don't look at me like that," M says tersely. "If I thought this phone was traceable, I wouldn't still have it. This is mine; no one at MI6 knows about it. Excuse me." She taps the phone's screen and lifts it to her ear. Bond makes to stand, to step away from the table and give her privacy, but sits again when M waves her free hand at him.
"Hello, darling. No, it's all right, I wasn't asleep. Still at work, actually. There was some nasty business in town today, you probably saw it on the news… No, I'm fine. Absolutely fine. Oh, did the officers wake you? I'm sorry about that, they were supposed to keep an eye on the house from outside, not barge in and disturb everyone. Are the twins upset? Well, you can tell them Granny will get them something extra special for their birthday to make up for it. No, it's just a precaution, everything is fine. Go and get the children settled. Good night."
M ends the call and sets the phone down on the table. She looks at it for several long moments, her expression unreadable.
"Silva won't go after your family," Bond says. "It's just you he wants. Nothing he's said or done so far indicates otherwise."
M nods. "I agree entirely with your analysis." She smiles thinly. "But it's difficult to be objective where one's own loved ones are concerned."
"I wouldn't know about that."
The smile turns enigmatic. "I think you understand better than you realise."
He doesn't know what she means by that, but lets it pass. Bond is used to not always knowing what M means until well after the event.
Another minute of silence passes. Bond gives up trying to drink his disgusting coffee. The young couple with the baby get up and leave. In the absence of anyone approaching the counter, Ashlee the server busies herself wiping down the surfaces. M appears lost in thought.
Suddenly, she says, "I was 42 when I had my son."
Bond has no idea how to respond to that, so he adopts a wait-and-see approach and says nothing.
"Bit of a surprise, I'll admit," M continues. "I thought that particular window of opportunity had closed, but I reckoned without the astonishing fecundity that seems to afflict all the women in my family. I wasn't unhappy about it, though, not at all. I'd had my time in the field – almost fifteen years – and I didn't even meet my husband until I'd taken up a permanent position at HQ. Getting married at 40 didn't feel like a second chance so much as an unexpected but not unwelcome sharp bend on a road I had naively imagined would run straight."
A suitable response continues to evade Bond. M has always been able to surprise him. But never quite like this.
"People talk a lot of rot about motherhood," M continues. "They tell you it will change you. It does, of course, I'm not saying it doesn't. But everything changes you; that's the inevitable consequence of living. Aiming a gun at a man's head and pulling the trigger changes you. Making the decision to sacrifice these lives to save those ones changes you. Everything you do, every choice you make, leaves its mark on you in some way."
If that's the case, Bond thinks, some people are more marked than others.
M says, "When it happened to me, I found that motherhood mostly involved giving up my name for a title and having to explain everything ten times over using only very simple words."
Finally, Bond feels himself back on surer conversational footing. He knows the set up for a joke when he hears it. "So, just like MI6, then."
"Quite." M flashes a smile at him. "You see, I knew from the very start I would have to put up high walls between my family and my work."
"For their own protection."
"Yes. But it was selfishness, too."
Bond frowns. "Selfishness?"
M shrugs. "I wanted a castle with a drawbridge and a moat. A safe place to retreat to every night, so I could come charging out the next morning, ready to do battle again."
"That's a nice fantasy," Bond says, unable to keep the hard edge from his voice. He's disappointed. He's always admired M for her realism above everything else; it's a let down to realise she's just as prone to self-delusion as everyone else.
But M doesn't react to his tone. "It was. That was the problem: no matter how hard I tried, it never felt like anything except a story I was telling myself. It always felt less real than the work. Nothing else ever felt quite as important, as exhilarating, as real as the work."
And now Bond understands. "Nothing ever does."
Sex, gambling, alcohol, violence: it doesn't matter how deeply Bond buries himself in anything, everything always fades into insipid insignificance next to the work. It's the best and only drug, the only thing he's ever found worth caring about. Everything else is as insubstantial as a pretty mirage on the horizon, retreating from view even as he vainly pursues it. His own act of selfishness had been to pretend to himself that he mourned Vesper out of love. It hadn't been love, just his own version of M's make-believe castle.
M waves a hand, her gesture taking in the people scattered sparsely around the room – the lost souls with nowhere better to be at three in the morning than a Roadchef just outside Dumfries. "Look at them. That's who we're charged with protecting. The innocents. The civilians. The Great British Public. We carry the burden of knowledge so they don't have to. We do unpalatable things to keep them safe. We build high walls, with them safe on one side and us on the other. We don’t know them. We forget how to know them. Even when they're our own families." She looks, for an instant, deeply, terribly sad.
"What's your son's name?" Bond asks. It's the first time he's ever asked her a direct question about herself, and it feels almost sacrilegious.
M hesitates, just long enough that Bond thinks she's not going to answer, and they're simply going to move on to another topic and pretend that none of the gross violations of protocol of the past five minutes ever happened.
Then: "Stephen," M says, and she turns her phone around and taps it to call up an image on to its screen, a man hugging two young children in a garden. She hands it to Bond. "My grandchildren are, of course, the sweetest and most adorable of all children everywhere." She smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes.
"Of course they are," Bond says, solemn. The man in the photo on M's phone is a few years younger than himself, his face open, his smile shadowless. How would it feel, Bond wonders, to live in that image? To be a father, a husband – a son. He can just about stretch his thoughts far enough to picture himself in that garden, his children safe in his embrace, his family and home secure, inviolate. But when he tries to add M to the scene, it cracks and falls apart. He can't make her fit in that world, and if she doesn't belong there, he knows he has no place in it, either.
So here they are, two people hunched over a picture on a phone, like cave-dwellers awed by the sight of fire. Something beautiful they can't touch.
Bond tries to think of something appropriate to say, and eventually settles on, "He looks happy."
"I think he is," M says. "I hope he is."
He gives the phone back to her. When she doesn't move, he says, "We should go now."
M closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they are clear. Focused. "Yes, you're right." Then she gets up from the table and goes to the nearest bin. She drops her phone on to the tiled floor and grinds it with quick, smooth twist of her heel. She bends down and scoops up the mess of plastic and metal and drops it into the trash.
She comes back to the table, where Bond is waiting. They start to leave.
"Bond," she says suddenly. "You appreciate that I trust you to keep my confidences. They may not be state secrets, but they are mine."
"Your secrets are safe with me."
M nods once, satisfied. "Very good."
They walk out to face the night together.