Work Text:
He stumbled out the doors of the decontamination chamber, half-consciously throwing the parka to the ground.
Everything had a vaguely green, or maybe it was yellow tinge to it now, and Bond felt a spike of terror at feeling his body shut down, piece by piece, his tongue growing heavier in his mouth and his organs seeming to literally rebel against him. He swore he could feel his heart not pounding, but screaming at the inside of his ribcage; suddenly, a creature with claws and teeth.
“What exactly am I looking for?” Bond made out, while he could still speak. He would talk until he was dead, if he didn’t need all the feeling left in his body for his arms, which he used to paw clumsily at the things around him.
“A green box with a bright orange stripe. Probably tucked away somewhere.” There was the slightest hint of frenzy to her voice.
Shelves of blue cartons and pillboxes and gray debris fell to the ground with a clatter. Bond collided with a cart, but uncaringly continued his delirious stumble.
“The hell is all this stuff?” Bond demanded to know as he tossed yet more crates to the ground.
No answer. It had been rhetorical anyway.
Instead: “Hurry! You need that antidote now.”
Hurry. As if he wasn’t. “Come on. Come on,” Bond growled, to himself.
He stumbled towards a thick metal chest, throwing it open. Pressurized gas, or dry ice, or fog, or steam, or more nerve agent, rushed out in a soft white cloud. He tore the lid off the box inside and found two syringes.
Bond was starting to lose control of his body. He slumped down to the ground, fumbling to barely bring down the box with him. It fell to the ground, slamming into his knee painfully.
His fingers fell loose into the air, and he was unable to move, to get to the one thing that would save him. Bond tried again, and found himself wanting, and began to laugh.
“Bond. I need you to listen to me, soldier. You need to hold on. You need to- you need that antidote.”
This, Bond was certain, was no longer about strength. He was a puppet with strings cut. He imagined not a light in the dark but the light in the light in the light, expanding upon itself like so many rays of sun traveling forward.
“Bond! Bond, talk to me!” His handler’s voice was transparently panicked, now, or maybe Bond was imagining it. She had led him into that chamber, told him to look for a device that was no longer there, let him inhale poison into his lungs and suck static under the surface of his ears. She should have known. What right did she have to be concerned? Why was it bleeding into her voice, bleeding everywhere?
“Now you care about me,” James said, and it came out a little less sharp than he intended, the words coming sloppily off the tip of his slurring tongue. It made him smile. He still had it after all, his tongue. He’d talk until he was dead.
If there was a response, James didn’t hear it.
Any second now, James thought, the world would spin to a halt. But instead, it seemed to fracture. Everything narrowed to a single point, enveloping his head entirely in a blanket where there was no time, where there was only space and sound and noise and sensation.
Abruptly, he was back in boarding school, back slumped against his chair, fingers tapping on his desk, facing the world with a sense of complete and unyielding derision.
There was pain, too, or maybe those were the walls he had up as a child. His determination to cut every string that would hold him up.
James couldn’t say when exactly everything went dark.
“Bond!”
Bond wasn’t expecting to wake up again, but he did, the world coming back in hazy, than sharper relief all too soon. Metallic blood frothed at the corners of his mouth. The back of Bond’s head was pressed up against a concrete wall, and a gun barrel was glued to his skull.
“Wake the hell up!” A voice was barking, and Bond was slapped in the face.
One prevailing memory came back to him: he had been dying. There had been a voice in his ear, not unkind. Bond made a clumsy attempt at an innocent smile, spitting out the blood pooling along his gums. His interrogator was one of the mercenaries, angry-eyed and wearing that black face covering.
“Listen very carefully,” said the man, screwing the barrel of the gun into the side of Bond’s head even harder. Bond expected to be whipped in the face with it any moment. “We found that radio of yours. You thought you could call for help? How much did you tell them?”
Bond knew his brains would be painted against the wall as soon as he spoke up. The mercenaries must have saved him, given him the antidote, but their use for him was over as soon as he talked. He’d been found, and his last lifeline to MI6 had been severed.
“It doesn’t matter,” came a different, harsher voice from behind him. “Just kill him. We know he was feeding MI6 information. They’ll be on us at any moment.”
“They were already going to be on us. This rat was creeping around in the tent. I want to know what he was doing,” the one with the gun to Bond’s head barked.
“Suit yourself. You can die here with him.” The door slammed behind the exit of the second man.
For a moment, Bond’s interrogator’s gaze lingered on the closed door. There was a scowl on his face; if hidden under the mask, it was obvious with the way his eyebrows were drawn.
Seeing his opening, Bond lunged forward, grabbed the gun and pulled. He wasn’t going to die here today.