Some assumptions have been made. Most importantly, the timeline has been compressed whenever possible; if no night scene takes place between scenes, it is assumed those scenes take place on the same day. Travel time is not taken into account but honestly London, Italy, and Austria aren’t that far apart. Austria to Morocco is a little dicier, as is how Bond and Madeleine got to London in a stolen helicopter from the North African desert, but those are plot holes for a greater woman than me to fix.
November 2: The Day of the Dead is actually a three-day celebration. The last day, corresponding to All Souls’ Day, is actually called el Día de los Muertos, though the name also refers to the whole holiday. In real life, the parade might take place before the actual holiday; the first Day of the Dead Parade in the real Mexico City was on October 29. For simplicity’s sake and because this is fiction we’ll assume that the parade actually takes place on the day itself.
November 3: Bond gets back to London and is immediately chewed out, because I can’t imagine M letting him continue to fuck around after… all that happened. Moneypenny comes over that night.
November 4: Q injects the smart-blood tracker.
November 5: In the morning, Q finds the car stolen. Bond attends the funeral, saves Lucia Sciarra’s life, and then attends the SPECTRE meeting at midnight.
November 6: In the evening in Japan (which means midday in Austria), C votes on the Nine Eyes measure. Tanner and M get the news that the Aston was pulled out of the Tiber, about twelve hours after Bond’s street race, which seems like a reasonable length of time to recover a submerged car. Bond visits Mr. White that afternoon.
November 7: Bond fucks around, I guess. In London, Q is probably getting chewed out all day. Alternatively, he hops on a train to Austria, which will take him about 20 hours.
November 8: The Hoffler Klinik. Bond tells Madeleine her father died “two days ago.” South Africa is bombed. Bond and Madeleine leave for Tangier and L’Americain. That evening/early in the morning of the 9th, Bond finds the secret room.
November 9: Nine Eyes is passed. On the train, Bond and Madeleine talk about self-defense. That evening, Moneypenny and Q beg M to help Bond. Mr. Hinx attacks.
November 10: Bond and Madeleine arrive, blow up the facility, steal a helicopter, and get back to London (somehow). That evening, Nine Eyes is set to go online at midnight. The events on Westminster Bridge happen around or just after midnight. It could be argued that the events in London happen on November 11th, giving Bond and Madeleine more time to get back and letting Blofeld’s wounds heal a little, but again, compression.
Bond retrieving the Aston could happen anytime after November 10th, but it’s probably at least a week given that the Aston was a, uh, hot mess on November 4th.
Notes: Bond’s first retirement trip after Spectre. Technically a prequel to Effects of Retirement, showing the first pic from Bond’s POV, but you don’t need to have read it. For the mi6cafe prompt ‘Spirits.’
“What do you usually do when you’ve finished a mission?” Madeleine asked while James drove them back to the hotel they’d been staying in. He listened carefully for any breaks in the purr of the Aston’s engine, but she ran as smooth as butter and felt silky and solid beneath his hands. Q had done a fine job of restoring the old girl.
He and Madeleine had needed their few weeks of recovery in the hotel, as much as he hated to admit it. Time for the cuts and bruises to heal, time for the bloody brain damage to be assessed, time for Madeleine to stop waking in the night with memories of violence, time for Bond to stop drinking himself to sleep in order to prevent the same thing.
They did a lot of walking around London. Madeleine caught up on her professional journals. Bond made a lot of scrambled eggs and read a lot of suspense novels. Reading gave him a headache now, and he was much slower at it, but the brain was plastic, Madeleine had said after assessing Bond’s neurological functions. Her professional opinion was that all Bond needed was some retraining.
Bond had had lots of injuries. He knew about retraining. If he sometimes threw a book at a wall because the words were too slow to make sense, he always picked it back up again and managed to stare the thing into submission.
Now they were hale and healthy, ready for adventures beyond a book’s pages. As much as he wanted to take his new-old Aston for a spin around the country, he also wanted…well, the usual. “I tend to go somewhere tropical,” Bond said. “Swim, drink, have sex. Relax.”
“Let’s do that, then,” Madeleine said. “A transition. You still have time to decide where you want that transition to lead to.” She eyed him.
Bond ran a hand down his whiskery jaw. “I always need mission specs after the tropics,” he confessed. “But they don’t need to be Six’s mission specs. I just need to learn how to set my own parameters.” He’d never been good at being his own boss.
Madeleine nodded. “We can work on that,” she said.
***
The first thing he and Madeleine did in Freeport was make their way to the beach and order the fruitiest rum drinks they could find. The second thing they did was people watch.
“She’s cute,” Madeleine said, nodding at a dark-haired tourist with a perky little arse that she obviously didn’t mind showing off.
The sex last night had felt like goodbye, but even so, James stared at her in disbelief. “Did you just skip the breakup and go straight to wingmanning me?”
Madeleine shrugged. “If you don’t want her, I’ll try my luck,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking for something else?” She glanced at the bare-chested bartender; he had a swimmer’s muscles and a pouty pair of lips. Not bad at all.
“Maybe,” James admitted. “Here, take a picture.” He handed his mobile to Madeleine. “To James Bond, retired.” He held his fruity glass in the air as if in a toast and heard the ‘click’ of the photo being taken. “I’ll have to send it to Tanner; he’s running the book on when I’ll be back, and he says he wants proof that I’m doing things that aren’t killing people.”
“Hmm,” Madeleine said. “Sounds like a man of little faith.”
“Or a man who knows me too well,” James said, trying not to sound bitter. He’d been in this place before. Every time after a mission, there came the thought: why go back? Why do it all over again? And every time, he returned to Six like a homing pigeon, because he needed a purpose and he was shite at coming up with one himself.
Madeleine smiled. “Have you bet on yourself yet?” she asked.
“What?”
“You’re a man who doesn’t like to lose,” Madeleine said. “Especially when you gamble. I think that if you bet on yourself, you’d figure out a way to keep from losing.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” James admitted. He could probably talk Tanner into it. He raised his fruity glass again. “To mind-tricks, then.”
Madeleine tapped her pineapple ring against his. “To new beginnings,” she corrected. “Full of possibility.” She glanced again at the perky tourist, at the bartender.
James let his eyes linger on the square line of the bartender’s jaw, the smooth curves of his pronounced pectorals, the flirtatious glances of his dark eyes—all very beautiful, but also very different from what he’d have fancied if he were home. (Tall, dark, nerdy, witty; he had a type.) He would never go for this if he were in London; times were better now, but he’d been raised not to take a big gay shit where he ate.
Of course, he wasn’t in London, and he wasn’t exactly employed any longer. What was anyone going to do? Fire him? Try to blackmail him at the job he no longer had? Call him a slur so that Bond had an excuse to ‘accidentally’ trip them into a wall a few times?
“I think I’ll get another drink,” James said, knocking the rest of his glass back in a long, sweet swallow. He walked towards the bartender with purpose.
It was time to start living life for himself instead of his country.
The damning thing about being an Omega was that, even on suppressants and blockers, there were still some aspects of his biology that would resurface from time to time, whether he wanted them to or not. Sometimes, in the more reckless and violent bouts, one good, rough shag would be more than enough to sate the tingles that flared up from the base of his spine like glowing embers waiting for a chance to spark. This, he could actually handle pretty well. Most of the time, however, the urges, if you could call them that, manifested in subtler means—like a demanding cat that would persistently wound at your feet to get your attention, even if it meant tripping you flat on your face in the process. Urges, such as the need to simply… cuddle, to be held, to bask in a comforting scent. To feel safe.
These were the ones that he really, really despised. Probably because they made him feel needy in ways that were even more vulnerable than actually calling up someone for sex.
“Is there a reason you’re naked in my bed?”
Bond’s eyelashes were sticky with sleep when he flickered his eyes open to peer at Q, who was arching a curious eyebrow at him, hands high on his hips. He looked more disapproving than he sounded, and Bond shifted just so his head was propped up on one hand now. He hadn’t thought he would have come close to dozing just lying there, but the cozy bed, soft linens, and warm blanket had truly calmed him more than he had expected.
“I’ve missed you?” He tried for a smile, which came out better and more genuine than it had in the past couple of hours, since he had had the time to recharge himself for a bit here… nestled in the comforting, fresh scent between these sheets that was familiar and entirely Q’s.
He had just gotten back from a three-month mission. Not that it was high-stressed (not until toward the end), but the long periods of isolated waiting and tracking his targets had not been pleasant on the part of his brain where his Omega instincts resided. By the time he had gotten back to Six to submit his reports, the cold, impersonal halls that were usually neutral to him had become almost suffocating, unbearable against the itch that had wedged itself under his skin for the past couple of weeks. He had been trying to ignore it best as he could, but apparently, his resolve hadn’t been enough because when his action had finally registered back into his mind, he had already been unlocking the door to Q’s flat using the spare key that had been given to him, and had let himself in.
Looking at the haphazardly pile of discarded clothes on the floor just a few paces away from Q’s feet, he supposed the rest of what had happened was clear.
Q scoffed and rolled his eyes at Bond’s answer, and for a moment, Bond wondered if he had done the wrong thing by stopping by uninvited like this. After all, he and Q had only been having casual sex so far, and it wasn’t as if he was about to offer any of that right then in this state anyway. Whenever he was like this, sex was actually the last resort for Bond, and was only there because it came with a side-serving of physical closeness.
(He had tried having sex to ease these primal needs for loneliness avoidance before, and it had always backfired on him by increasingly aggravating the issue.)
“If you—” Bond began, his stomach sinking a little, not least because he didn’t want to leave this pleasant bed to go back to his own stale and cold one.
Selfishly, he hadn’t thought about this, about him probably crossing the line by appearing in Q’s flat out of the blue, when he had been taking off his clothes and settling his achy body between these sheets. And now, he sort of regretted it—because being with Q was easy, and losing it would mean losing a sort of safety he had grown rather used to, and appreciative of, in the past year.
Not to mention they still had to work together.
“Honestly, you couldn’t have fed the cats before you barricaded yourself in? They were positively miffed when I came home just now.” Q shook his head with an exasperated sigh and turned toward the closet. He rummaged through his clothes with Bond’s blinking eyes following his back, and emerged clutching a pair of pyjamas bottoms that had planetary prints on them.
Q was not in the habit of sleeping completely in the nude, and Bond suspected this had something to do with the fact that the young man had poor blood circulation.
“Have you eaten anything yet?” Q asked, changing right there in front of Bond without a hint of hesitation.
“Uh… no,” Bond said slowly, watching Q, the pyjama bottoms riding a little low on his hips, get into bed next to him.
“Figured.” Q leant against the headboard and opened the laptop he had brought with him on his lap. “Rest for now, we can eat later. I bought takeaways.”
Bond looked at Q for longer than what was necessary, trying to process what was going on and what it all meant to him and to their relationship. But other than the fact that his sleep-deprived, addled mind wasn’t working at optimal speed, there was a purring Omega in the back of his skull as well, and since this was undoubtedly a very good bed to be in, with the owner of said bed right beside him now even, Bond supposed there was no reason why he should waste this chance with complicated thoughts.
And so, Bond allowed himself to lie down, one arm reaching to drape across Q’s middle, and pressed his forehead against a patch of soft, warm skin of the younger man’s bare torso, a small sigh tumbling out from his lungs.
For the first time in a long time, he was contented and safe.
So, I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this before, but in the Skyfall scene with Q and Tanner leaving a trail for Silva to follow Bond, there are take out boxes on Q’s otherwise neat table. Now, as Q had likely been in Q branch the entire time since Bond left, I’m assuming that Tanner turned up to support him through arriving with a takeout for them both because he realised Q’s stressful day means he can’t have had time to have eaten. I really appreciate this tiny detail as it adds so much characterisation for something so small, as it confirms Q and Tanner as established friends and, most importantly, that Tanner is the Mom Friend™
the MI6 squad all deserve.
tanner is also drinking beer supporting q while he works but he’s the long suffering friend trying to support bond and his quirky mother
i love soft mutual pining roadtrip aus because they boil down to “local dumbasses need to travel thousands of miles together in a cramped vehicle and needlessly share shitty motel beds in order to finally admit they’re in love with each other”
I live for jealous bond/Q before they admit their feelings to one another
James trying to wind up Q by flirting with Moneypenny in front of him just because he kinda lives for seeing Q type that little bit harder on his keyboard
Q ignoring Bond all day during one of his visits to Q branch and talking with Tanner, laughing a little too hard at his jokes just to see James roll his eyes and walk out the room
Q watching James on a mission and gritting his teeth whilst James buys a pretty girl a drink just to hear the irritated snort from Q in his ear
James physically threatening to shoot a man in a bar because he comes up and asks Q to dance
Shadow In The Light 