castillon02:

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.’ 

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“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. 

***