Personal.

[quigonejinn]

1.

James still has trouble sleeping, and it has been weeks. Months. Maybe even a year. Once in a while, when he has been particularly exhausted and without quite realizing it, he lapses into REM states. He struggles out of one on a first-class British Airways flight to Cairo -- really, to Cairo for once -- from a dream where Vesper had Camille's face.




2.

M has had it be personal a few times. She spent the last decade and a half in Whitehall, moving up the beaurocratic ranks, but she put in her years on station before that, back when there were clearly defined stations and clearly defined wars. And yes, even then, it had occasionally been personal. She ran a honeypot, once, where the girl lost her nerve in the middle of getting the target into bed. He held her down and did it to her anyways. It was a small operation, which was why M had to do field recruiting. It was also why she had to stay on the other end, on the headphones, checking the recording and listening to the girl sob over, quietly, over the creaking of the bedsprings.

The man asked who she thought was going to come save her.

When they didn't need him after a couple months, M killed him from close enough that the sweat from his forehead, once he realized what was going to happen, got onto her knuckles.

M was never double-oh, but she had the kills, the instincts. Back then, they didn't make female double-oh's, and yes, she took that personally, too.



3.

James and Camille are in the resort, which was been rented out for an indefinite period. Nationalization is another word for it. James is pretty sure that if he looked in the cellar, he'd find the bodies of the owners and most of the staff, shot through the head. Now, him and Camille are in the corner. Camille has her knees drawn up to her chest, and with the flames running up and down the walls, the room is searingly hot. James knows that; in some corner of her mind, Camille does, too. The rest of her mind, though, is lost in being a child and watching the house burn. Maybe the couch over there is the body of her mother and sister; the overturned table could, perhaps, be her father.

Somehow, James knows, when she was little, she got out of the house. Medrano probably carried her out. She might have been too young to fuck, but not too young to be frightened, to make Medrano feel like more of a man. Maybe afterwards, Medrano passed her to somebody who didn't find her too young to fuck, though he didn't do that before leaving marks on her. James hasn't seen her naked, but Camille is pressed up tight against James's hands. He can feel the burn marks rubbing against his fingers, through the fabric of her shirt and the bra. How old was she? Five? Six? What would they have looked like when she was younger and before they'd had a decade or two to smooth down and lessen?

Apparently, though, some scars don't fade or lessen.

So James does the kind thing: she is too heavy, too large, to carry through the ruins. He isn't sure that he can make it through himself, now that he came back for her, so he picks the gun up, and he shoots her in the head. One shot. Despite the heat, despite the danger, he holds her until he feels her muscles go soft, and then, he lays her down on the ground and fights his way through the smoke and the flame.

After interrogating him and promising him safety if he answers all the questions, James beats Greene to death using his bare hands.









IN SHORT, YEAH, GO SEE IT.