continued

[titusnowl]

---

The Fabulous Adventures of James & Bond, Part Two

"How do we know this intel's not fake?  If she's offering it up after just one lay - "  James ignored the glare Bond shot at him - "seems mighty suspicious.  She could just be double-crossing us."

"She could be."  Bond shrugged, unconcerned.  "But even if she does double-cross us, the intel should be good.  I mean, she'll just tell Von Zetti we're coming or something, not outright lie to our faces."

"How the hell do you know?"

"That's just how things work."

James' expression was indescribable.  "The way things work is that some random spy you picked up in a bar won't lie to our faces."

"Yeah?"  Bond rustled open a fresh pack of cigarettes.  "I mean, why go to all the trouble of making up a fake map?  Besides which, she's the one who brought up the entire double-crossing idea.  As far as she knew, we were legitimately answering that ad looking for work.  If this was a set-up, she had to go to all the trouble of calling HQ to get that ad put up, coming up with fake intel to hand out, and then finding the people who replied to it before they went straight to Von Zetti.  Just to fuck somebody and then fuck him over?  There are easier ways to get laid."

James scowled.  "I don't know, maybe it's a fetish or something."

Bond laughed, and had to relight his smoke.  "She's a Spy.  Spies are lazy, right?"

James had no answer for that.

"Anyway, the intel we've got is the intel we've got.  It'll buff out."

"For your sake, I hope so."  James turned around, back to the desk.

"For my sake?  I'm touched, Engineer.  Touched right in my black little heart."

"'Cause if you're wrong, I'm gonna beat you to death."

Bond stretched out on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles, shoulders propped up on all three of the available pillows, and ashtray balanced carefully on his midriff.  "You keep saying that I'm going to end up shot and tossed in a ditch.  If it doesn't work out like I have planned, you won't have a chance to beat me to death."

The look James shot back over his shoulder was almost amused.  "I'll find you in the afterlife and beat you back to death."

"Afterdeath?  Are you threatening to beat me until I turn into a zombie?"

This time the look was definitely amused.  "Yes.  And then you'll really be fucked over, because zombies never get laid."

Bond snorted, considered repeating last night's 'jealousy' accusation, and decided not to be repetitive.  "I'd argue that point, but we don't have the internet."

"Don't remind me." 

Time to change the subject.  "So it's decided.  We work with what we have, and if I made the wrong call, you beat me into undeath.  But you know what we'll need?"

James sighed and turned the chair around.  "This is going to mean work for me."

"No, no, not at all!  Not, like, real work, anyway.  See, we need gadgets.  Just some simple things, you know, easy stuff.  No problem for you, you're smart as hell."

"What kind of simple things?"

"Oh, maybe, like, a belt buckle that's also a grappling hook?"

James tilted his head thoughtfully.  "You know, I actually have a grappling hook design that's pretty small already.  It's not exactly belt-buckle sized, but I could work with it."

Bond grinned, enthusiasm growing (along with the size of the gestures he was making with his cigarette; he moved the ashtray to the nightstand to avoid mishaps).  "See?  Easy stuff.  And also a pen that does something - there's always a pen that does something.  Maybe if you click it twice, it dispenses knockout gas to take out minions."

James snorted.  "Shit, son, you don't need knockout gas to take somebody out.  Just kick 'em in the back of the knee or catch them in the throat."

Bond looked appalled.  "I can't do that!  That's not classy at all!"

James rolled his eyes.  "Can you even get your hands on knockout gas?"

Bond grinned.  "Tranqs were standard issue back then - here - now, whatever.  All I have to do is go back to that bar and get the address for the local UIEEI-approved distributor, and bingo!  Knockout gas for fun and profit."

James thought for a second, then nodded.  "Pens are piss easy, that won't be a problem.  And I'll need your disguise kit.  It won't be much good for disguises now, anyway, so I can retool it, maybe add some things, make it a sort of multitool - "  He suddenly realized that he was catching Spy's enthusiasm, actually enjoying this discussion.  Quick, act grumpy!  "And I'll need space to work in.  And tools.  And supplies."

Bond sat up eagerly.  "Make a list while I'm in the shower!"  And with that, he disappeared to the bathroom.

The list he got was long and he didn't know what half the things on it were, but over the course of the afternoon, with multiple hops out to shops and back in to the hotel for clarification and then back out to other shops, he eventually got most of what he'd been asked for; he then picked the lock on an unoccupied room on the next floor so he could take a nap away from the sounds of a working Engineer.

When he got back, James was carefully tightening the screw holding the clip onto the barrel of the pen Bond had given him (a graduation gift from his grandfather; Bond had been disappointed in it since the day he received it, because it was only a pen, so giving it up for this purpose was The Only Right And Proper Way For The World To Work) with the smallest screwdriver Bond had ever seen.  He hovered in the doorway.  "Are you done?"

James looked up with the satisfied smile of a proud craftsman.  "Just about.  Still got some stuff to iron out on the multitool and the CO2 cartridge isn't loaded in the grappling bucklet yet, but I've got everything just about figured, and the pen's done." 

Bond reached out a hand for it reverently.  "This is so cool."  His voice was awed and utterly sincere.  "Tell me how you did it."

Engineer, of course, was all too willing to explain in detail, and Bond at least tried to pay attention to all of it, scattering compliments on the design and the execution and the cleverness of the inventor with gleeful abandon.  He had gadgets.  Sure, technically a disguise kit and a cloaking watch were gadgets to begin with, but those were mass-produced; every Spy had those.  These were custom-built gadgets just for him, made by his own personal Q.  Life was beautiful and everything was good and right. 

The said 'personal Q' was clearly appreciating Bond's appreciation of his effort - no Engineer ever feels as if he's properly acknowledged for his hard work, especially by a Spy.  It was enough to make James almost like the guy, for the moment.  At the very least, he had no overwhelming desire to wring his neck or punch him in the nose at that precise juncture. 

He'd been working all day, and had gotten kind of dirty despite the lack of manual labor involved - dots of solder on his clothes, dust and grease on his ungloved hand - so after having almost his fill of compliments and preening, he rose to take a shower.

He even let Spy stay alone in the room with his inventions, with nothing more severe than an order not to touch anything.

Not that Spy listened, of course.

"Christ goddamn, I have gadgets!"  The kid-on-Christmas grin was still plastered across Bond's face as he rifled across the desk, flipping the modified disguise kit open and shut and examining every facet of the belt-buckle grappling hook.  Then his eyes lit on the pen, and he snatched it up.  "Ok, so it should be one click for ink - " he tested it on a scrap of paper - "and two clicks for the knockout gas - "

A slight hissing sound, and he thumped to the floor.

When James emerged from the shower, there was at first no sign of the Spy.  "The hell'd you go?"  God knows what kind of trouble he could've gotten himself into; James should never've left him alone with that stuff.

A soft groan from the far side of the bed answered him.  Spy had, in fact, gotten himself into trouble, apparently, and he was just starting to come around.

Up until this moment - since he was a teenager, in fact - Bond had been carefully maintaining a practiced nonspecific accent which was vaguely French and vaguely not.  Now, as he lay on the floor groggily pulling himself back to consciousness from the fog the knockout gas had put him in, he swore weakly in a completely different and more recognizable accent.  "Tabernac d'ostie de marde de - fucking god 'ell, is dere a doctor in de 'ouse?  I need a hasprin."

James, who had been leaning over to help him up, froze for a moment, then snickered.  "What the hell kind of accent is that, Spy, you goofy fuck?"

Bond glared at him with barely-open eyes.  "It's not fair to make fun of a dying man."

James was still snickering.  "You're Canadian."

"Not on purpose.  Is dere hasprin, or do I just die?"

James relented and picked Spy up bodily from the floor, depositing him on the bed.  "There is 'hasprin'."  Another snicker, and another blurry glare.  "Hold up a tick."

He rustled up two aspirin and a glass of water and handed them over.  Bond muttered his thanks - he'd already sworn to himself not to speak aloud until he felt up to putting his accent back on - downed the pills, and lay back on the bed with his eyes closed, listening to Engineer get back to work to finish up the last of the gadget-tinkering.

After a few minutes he felt decently revived.  "At least we know the stuff works."

James laughed - not at Bond, but a genuine one of amusement mixed with pride.  "It sure does."

---

Bond knocked himself out again an hour later, while trying to see if the pen had a safety.  (It did not.)  When he came to, he discovered that James had already laid him out on the bed, and on the nightstand were two aspirin and a glass of water with a lemon wedge.

---

Engineers have a set of complex social 'bee dances' to facilitate working relationships.  Spies only have one: sex.  And as far as that went, Bond had lucked out some: the Engineer who'd eventually built his time machine was a lot younger and better-looking than the ones he'd tried before him.  It hardly even counted as a chore, except for the time-consuming process of inebriation that had to precede it if he didn't want to get punched in the face again.

He'd gotten that part figured out in very short order.  Say what you will about his abilities on bog-standard contract work - the briefcase-stealing he referred to so derisively - when it came to [i]real[/i] Spying, the webs of intrigue held together with sheer force of suave, he was comfortably confident in himself.  He'd bagged Joanna DuWitt-Harder and Lotta Butté without expending any special effort, after all, and observation and cautious experimentation enabled him to - not quite [i]bag[/i], but at least properly manipulate this James person he was stuck with.

If he'd been an Engineer himself, he'd have been able to put the process into a formula: variables pertaining to how much whiskey James had put down the hatch and where they were on the spectrum from "would as soon wring neck as look at" to "a decent business partnership" (itself governed by a separate subset of variables like "had anything happened to make James remember they were stuck in 1963" and "had Bond been teasing him"), data and figures all laid out precisely; solve for sex.

He wasn't an Engineer, though, so he was moving by a fairly well-developed instinctual sense of seduction.  That, a flow of small talk and compliments, and a great deal of whiskey being applied liberally eventually attained his goal.

Not a bad bit of work at all, he decided afterward, over a post-coital cigarette.  He'd head out to the bars again after James fell asleep, though.  No room for two people and a wet spot in that bed.

---

Sunlight lanced across the hotel bed like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and if Bond could have wished a similar fate upon it, he would have.  Dramatic flailing; the rustle, snick and contented sigh that accompanied obtaining, lighting, and inhaling the day's first cigarette; and then he was more or less vertical, squinting across the room

"They should outlaw mornings," he complained sleepily.  "They are cruel and unusual and serve no purpose in the life of reasonable creatures.  If I were going to take over the world, that would be my plan.  Take over the international airwaves to make an announcement: Do not adjust your set. We control the horizontal, we control the vertical, we will shortly be controlling the planet.  We demand twenty bucks and the abolition of all hours between sunrise and noon."

James set down the soldering iron for a moment and turned to look over his shoulder, tolerantly amused.  "It's two in the afternoon, Spy."

"No way."  Bond leaned over to check the clock.  "Well, Holy Lord.  We can outlaw two in the afternoon, then.  All it's good for is soap operas and business meetings for people with boring jobs, and the world can do without those."  He stubbed his cigarette into the nearest thing that resembled an ashtray and stumbled toward the bathroom, still sleep-eyed and only half-awake even after his speech (further proof that he could run his mouth without turning his brain on). 

The sound of water running, a pause, a startled yelp, and the water stopped.  Bond reemerged wrapped in a towel, barely even damp, with the disgruntled expression of a cat suddenly dunked in a tub.  "Forgot the faucets are backward," he said shortly.  "Please tell me coffee exists."

James grunted and nodded toward a room service tray.  Bond heaved toward it like a desert traveler spotting an open bar, poured an unreasonable quantity of sugar into a mug with the hotel's coat of arms on it, topped the sugar off with coffee, and half-sipped, half-chewed until the caffeine took effect.

Only then did he realize that he'd not only fallen asleep in bed with the damned Engineer last night, without even making it out to the bars, he'd somehow managed to sleep past noon on The Big Day.  Hell and Christ.  At least the previous evening's activities had had their desired effect, though, to judge from the said Engineer's increased tolerance of his waking-up routine,

"Put some fucking clothes on, Spy," James said, interrupting this chagrined reverie. 

There was a limit to the tolerance, then.  The exercise would probably have to be repeated until desired effect was fully achieved.  Bond was not unnecessarily bothered by the concept, but he still took the hint and retreated to the bathroom for a second try at a shower and a shave to get himself back to the current Dashing International Superspy fashion.

He emerged fully refreshed and brimming with anticipation, which he tried to sublimate by fussing over choice of neckwear.  Half-Windsor?  Full Windsor?  Bowtie?  "How are the quasimultometers coming?" he asked over his shoulder as he knotted and un-knotted.  Definitely bowtie, he decided.  Much more Ian Fleming.

James had almsot given up on ever correcting Spy's terminology, as long as he didn't act like he was denigrating the work by making up bizarre words for things.  "Just about done.  Turned out I had a bad pot in the disguise kit workover, so I had to desolder half the circuit to replace it, but it'll be ready to test in about ten minutes.  Everything else is good to go."

"Brilliant."  Bond had no idea what Engineer'd just said, but it ended in 'good to go,' so it must have been alright.  He gave his bowtie a final twitch, straightened up and tugged at the bottom of his jacket, and nodded at his reflection.  Then he headed toward the door.  "I'm going to go find us a car," he said.  "You'd better have the maids iron your shirt while I'm out."

He shut the door and locked it behind him.  Almost immediately he reopened it.  "On second thought, I'll tell them for you.  Get it ready to hand over."  No engineer would ever actually remember to have his shirts pressed, especially this one, and especially while he was working on something.  He was lucky he remembered to eat - if he even did that, when a conscientious spy wasn't around to feed him sandwiches.  Obviously the man needed Bond for his own good.

---

Finding the car proved more trouble than he'd expected.  There just weren't that many Aston Martins floating around Naples, apparently.  In fact, he eventually had to settle for a fairly sporty-looking Alfa Romeo from a rental company.  It was, at least, silver, which he figured made it good enough for a first adventure automobile.  He had to do some fast talking to get it off the lot without being able to produce a valid license, and some fast driving to get it home before they ran the check he'd written for the deposit and discovered it was drawn on an entirely fictitious account in the name of an entirely fictitious person, but he considered that nothing more than a warm-up for the evening's events.  He got it back to the hotel before the sun set and reappeared in their room, swinging the key around his index finger.  "Do you think you can put spikey hubcaps or an oil-slick thing or anything into a car within about 90 minutes?"

James just looked at him.  "No."

Bond considered daring him, which had gotten good results in the past, but really, putting the engineer to work on the car would just get him all greasy, and then they'd have to get his shirt cleaned again, and meanwhile the clock would be ticking and he might have to put off The Big Day until tomorrow, which wouldn't do at all.  His moment of glory was so close he could taste it; minor sacrifices would have to be made.  He contented himself with a small sigh.  "Did you finish up the gigatronics?" 

The paragraph Engineer launched into in response began with a "yes," so Bond nodded and interjected and made the proper pleasantries while he slipped everything into his pockets.  Then he straightened his jacket again and grinned cheerfully. "There.  Time to go!"

"Go where?"

"To take out Von Zetti."  Bond was using the preschool-teacher voice again.

"What, right now?  On the basis of a map made on a bar napkin?"

"You go to war with the intel you have, not the intel you want."

"I can not believe you seriously just said that."

"Do you have the map, by the way?  It might come in handy."

"I have three copies of it."  James handed one over, rather reluctantly.  Bond glanced at it and tucked it behind the display handkerchief in his breast pocket.

"We've got a map, we've got a car, we've got gadgets - we don't have a car that has gadgets, but that can come later - I don't see what else we need."

"Some kind of plan might be nice, dumbass."

"We'll come up with one in the car!"

James closed his eyes, set his jaw, and concentrated on breathing and not punching the fucking spy again.  Then his eyes again and held out a hand.  "Give me the keys.  I'm driving."

"Why?"  Bond closed his hand around the keyring and put his fists on his hips.

"I'm not letting YOU drive."

"You have never seen me drive.  You've got no way to have a legitimate opinion here."

"I can imagine."

"Like you're really one to talk, Mister Almost-Kill-Us-All-On-An-Empty-Desert-Highway!"

"There were extenuating circumstances, and if you don't give me the keys right now there are going to be extenuating circumstances again."

Bond glared, but eventually relented and handed them over.  "Fine.  If I'm not driving, I can drink.  I'll be in the bar getting one for the road while you change your shirt.  And find a better tie, Christ goddamn."

"What the hell is wrong with my tie?" 

But at that point James was speaking to a closed door.

WIP sorry

Comments

[spazz-bot.livejournal.com]

JESUS CHRIST OWL. I LOVE YOU. :3

I ADORE the way you write dialogue, a good witty report is so hard to find these days. I wait with baited breath for next instalment.

Also, can has omitted scene plz?

[spazz-bot.livejournal.com]

Serously Owl, all day after I read this, it's been in my head.

It's like when I'm just starting a really good book and then I lose the book. It drives me mad.

GOOD JORB! More plz.

[chikkiboo.livejournal.com]

did you find the porn bit on the chan yet

[spazz-bot.livejournal.com]

noooo, I am an idort, could you email it to me?