James Bond 1. Chapter 1: This Is The End

"Do it," Silva rasped desperately, his eyes squeezed so tight bright colours oozed across the inside of eyelids. Whether it was the brush of Her hair on his temple or the faint, lingering scent of Her perfume, he could almost make himself believe they were the lights of Hong Kong at night. "_Do it!_" He pleaded forcefully. What was She waiting for? He was giving Her power back, if he'd ever truly had it in the first place. Surely She could see this was the way it was supposed to be. He held Her finger firmly to the trigger of his Glock and pressed the barrel harder into Her temple. _Free us_, his mind wept, _Free us bo_-

First he felt the dull thud of the hilt of the knife hit his back, then the throbbing burn began to emanate from the blade. He roared in pain-not from the knife, too many knives had been taken to his flesh for this one to truly hurt- but from their destiny being torn from them.

He turned around stiffly to stare down that treacherous usurper. _Go away!_ his mind raged. _It was meant to be this way! It has to be this way! It's _always_ been this way, it's Hers to end! Not yours, not mine, Hers, only Hers!_

But with one of his lungs filling up with blood and lymph, he could only manage a savage growl as he advanced on his supplanter. Rolling his neck and his eyes, he grunted as he shuffled jerkily forward. _She's not yours, She's not yours! Who are you to come between us? She took your name too, you're just a number to Her. Who do you think you are? _He collapsed to his knees in front of his literal backstabber.

"Last rat standing," Bond insufferably answered.

His vision blackened and his breath shallowed out as he fell forward, never knowing if he hit the ground.

_April 13, 1968 - Gibraltar_

"There was nothing we could do. Eclampsia can still sneak up on us like this. Young, first-time mothers are especially at risk," the doctor explained mechanically but not coldly to the Spanish man and older Portuguese woman.

The woman rounded on the younger man. "_Bastardo!_" She slapped him and continued yelling at him in Portuguese-inflected Llanito, "You did this! Your filthy hands pawing at her, seducing her! And you only married her for our money! But now she's gone! You took her from me, but you damn well won't get anything else from us!"

"Mrs. Duncan, please," the doctor spoke soothingly. "The baby lived. You have a son, Mr. Moreno," he said turning to the younger man. "Against all odds-by all rights he should have gone with her, but he clung to life, and his prognosis is excellent all things considered. He'll grow up big and strong, he's already shown such strength. You have a son to be proud of. Come and meet him, both of you."

He led them down the corridor to the NICU where the baby was being kept for observation. The little sign on his incubator introduced him to the world, the son of Olívia Madalena Rodrigues Duncan Moreno, whom she lived just long enough to name Tiago Ángel Duncan Moreno- the first of his many names.

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**Author's Notes: **I have a process blog for this fic on Tumblr (gimmeshelterfic) to collect quotes, pics, meta, and other bits of inspiration, so if I go a while without updating the fic, you can at least verify I'm still thinking about and working on it!

Feedback most appreciated while I hammer out the details of this story as I go.


	2. Chapter 2

Tiago's earliest memory was of people yelling.

"My God George, not another one!" Carminda Duncan yelled at her son-in-law. "That's the seventh nanny you've chased away! Tiago's only three!"

"Shut up Carminda, don't you start in on that," George Moreno grumbled. "Just make sure the next one's not another frigid bitch."

"Language!" she scolded as she bent over to pick Tiago up. "Don't listen to your father, ever," she said to him in Portuguese.

"And speak English to him, damn it!"

Carminda scoffed, "Portugal is not the one who closed the border. I have no reason to be ashamed of my homeland, _Carlos_."

George put his finger in his mother-in-law's face and snapped, "Call me that again and you'll never see Tiago again."

"You take Tiago from me, his grandfather will have to have a talk with his friends at the Dockyards-"

"The ones who are more senile than he is?"

"-And when you're out of a job," her voice climbed over his interjection, "Don't even pretend you'd choose your son over your drink and those _mulherinhas_ you carry on with!"

"Like your daughter?"

Tiago landed on the floor with a thud and a smack echoed across the room. "How dare you talk about Olívia like that! She's up in heaven watching you carry on like this, ignoring your son-"

Tiago was whimpering at the throbbing ache in his bottom as he crawled away from the noise into the sitting room. Once there, he pulled himself up on Granpa Duncan's plush easy chair. Its softness comforted him, but he could still hear Daddy and Avó yelling at each other in the kitchen. He furrowed his brow and stuck out his lower lip. He began walking around the room, pulling cushions and pillows from the chairs and sofa, dragging them over to the furthest corner of the room. He made a nest of pillows, which he settled on before heaving the cushions onto himself. He had something of a tent going, of which he was the pole. For all his efforts, he could still hear the yelling. He whimpered some more and began rocking back and forth.

All he could make out was that they were yelling about him. He wanted them to stop. What had he done? Maybe that was why Nanny Amina wasn't there today, and why Daddy had brought him to Avó's. Didn't Avó just say something about Daddy not wanting him? Did neither of them want him and they were fighting over who would be stuck with him? At that thought, he let out a piercing wail and tears began streaming down his cheeks.

"Oh goddammit," George exclaimed. "I don't have time for this shit. I have to go to work, deal with him, would you?"

"Of course I will, that's the human thing to do with a crying child, especially your own flesh and blood!" She yelled at his back as he strode out of the house. She then went into the sitting room to his corner fortress and pulled back the cushions. His face was red, his expression pure agony. As she fell to kneel on the floor in front of him, she cooed, "Oh my baby Tiaguinho, what's wrong?"

After a few gulps of air, Tiago was able to choke out, "Yelliiiing..." trailing off into another wail. "An'- and Daddy left, and..." he sobbed some more as his grandmother pressed him to her bosom.

"Oh Tiago, baby, don't you love me too? Don't you want to stay with me?"

He relaxed slightly, and nodded into her chest. "Uh-huh," he blubbered. So Avó did want him around, at least.

"Your papa, I swear, I don't know what we're going to do with him." She patted his back and rocked him for a few minutes. Then she took Tiago's face in both hands and asked excitedly, "Do you want to teach your papa a lesson?" Seeing how happy the idea made her, and wanting to punish his father, Tiago smiled and nodded vigourously. She wiped the tears from his red-rimmed eyes with her thumbs and told him, "Grab your favorite toys."

She scribbled out a note, reading it aloud to Tiago as she wrote. "'_Carlos_, Took Tiago to the island. Knew you wouldn't mind. We'll be back in a month or so. Carminda'"

Avó's island had no name, no country, no legal title. It sat between Madeira and the Canary Islands unmolested by any conqueror. It had been discovered by her Madeiran fisherman ancestors over four hundred years ago, and they had claimed it as their own. Within a generation or two, they had fully transitioned over to acting as merchants, earning a good fortune from the lodging fees and selling the catches of the other fishing boats they allowed to use it. Any formal business arrangement had fallen apart by the mid-1800s, when the family came to regard it as a better holiday home than business venture. Now it had only one rather comfortable cottage that was kept well by the various fishermen that still used it as a way station, only now they paid in their best catches to feed the family whenever they were there. Everyone knew it was _Ilhéu de Rodrigues_. That was the closest thing it had to a name.

"And it's the furthest north coconuts can grow!" Avó had told him while they took in the sun on the deck of her yacht, off the east coast of Gibraltar where they had anchored in the afternoon. She had had no intention of actually taking off to the island on such short notice, she told him, but that was only because it required a lot of preparation to sail the 12 hours it took to get there from Gib. Instead, they had merely taken the yacht from its berth near her house on the western side and sailed around the Rock "to throw him off the trail," she had explained with a wink. Over a leisurely all-day picnic, she regaled him with lush descriptions of the landscape ("the bluest ocean you will ever see!") and the feasts that awaited him ("You have not had _cavala_ until you have had the _cavala_ from my island.")

Now, at a lull in the conversation, while Avó lay back on a deck chair, Tiago rested his chin on the deck rail, gazing out past the Pillars of Hercules where this paradise apparently lay. When a dolphin breached the waters in the distance, his eyes lit up. "Avó! Are there dolphins too?" he called to her.

"Dolphins, oh yes. In fact," her voice went wistful, "come over here, Tiaguinho, let me tell you a story about your mama and dolphins." Tiago padded over to his grandmother and climbed into her arms, always eager to hear stories about Mama-or Mummy, as his father insisted he call her. When he was settled, Avó squeezed him once and began, "Your mama loved dolphins, and one time when she was about 12, we were in Madeira and she saw a sign for swimming with dolphins. She begged us to let her go, and I was so scared for her that I told her no! She cried and cried, but then your Granpa, always a diplomat, told her it was just because she was too young, and that she could swim with the dolphins when she was older. She calmed down and we thought that would be that.

"A few days later, we set off for my island, and oh!" Avó placed her hand on her forehead. "As we approached the island-and thank heaven we were going as slow as we were-some dolphins came up right next to the boat, and before we knew it, there was a _splash_! And your mama, pleased as could be, was swimming with the dolphins! We stopped the boat as quick as we could, but she was still so far back. We didn't want to go back with the boat and maybe hit her, so we had to blow up the life raft and Granpa paddled it back to her. It took almost ten minutes to get to her after she jumped. When we got her back on the boat, she could barely walk, her legs were so tired. But she was smiling and laughing and said 'I'm older now! You told me when I was older I could swim with dolphins and that was _days_ ago!' And we were just so happy she hadn't drowned, we couldn't get angry at her."

Avó shook her head and sighed. "She was always looking for the next adventure, she could never tell if they'd be bad for her. That's how she got you, too," she added with a sad smile.

They brought the yacht back into berth as the sun was setting. Daddy would be getting out of work about now, too, and coming to pick him up, Avó told Tiago. As they walked back up to her house, she speculated gleefully on her son-in-law's reaction to their supposed last-minute holiday plans. "Now we'll see how much he cares about my baby," she said. Tiago wasn't sure if she was talking about him.

Though they didn't see Daddy's car outside the house, Avó mused he could have parked a few blocks away, not finding a closer spot. They walked into the house and she called out sweetly, "Oh George? Are you here? Looking for someone?"

"Who's George?" Granpa Duncan's voice emanated from the kitchen.

Avó strode briskly into the kitchen, dragging Tiago behind her. "George, our useless son-in-law," she replied. "Where is he? Isn't he here? Did he stop by?"

"George? No, but Carlos did. Didn't realize we had another one." He went back to slicing corned beef, presumably for a sandwich he had been planning on making for dinner, but he seemed to be stuck on the meat-slicing part, as there was a stack of roughly sliced corned beef next to him but no bread in sight. Perhaps he'd meant to make it for lunch, even.

Avó went over to him and took the knife from his hand and pushed him towards the kitchen table. "Sit down, the doctors said you're not supposed to use knives any more. And Carlos _is_ George. He's been going by his middle name since the border was closed, remember?" Granpa merely shrugged. "Anyway, he was here? Do you remember what he said?"

"Mmmmm," Granpa hummed as he drummed his fingers on the table, "Something about how he'll deal with her when she gets back, but he might as well go have some fun tonight. Are he and Olivia fighting? Where did she go?"

Avó's jaw tightened and her eyes hardened. She turned sharply to grab a plate from the cupboard and slapped a few slices of corned beef on it before dropping it in front of her husband. "Eat this, I'll be back soon. _With_ Tiago, God willing."

Tiago found himself being tossed in to the backseat of the Duncans' car like a package, Avó slamming the door behind him. She tore out of their carport and up the road out of the South District. Ten minutes later, they pulled up in front of the block of flats he and Daddy lived in on Cooperage Lane, and parked in front of the fire hydrant. He was dragged out of the car again, into the building, and up the stairs to the door of Daddy's flat. Tiago barely had time to catch his breath before Avó began banging on the door and shouting, "Carlos! You'd better be in there! If you're not, I'm taking Tiago back with me for good!"

The door opened, and there his father stood in his boxer shorts, hair mussed and looking angry as hell. He grabbed Tiago by the shoulder and pulled him inside. "No. Tiago stays here. Especially after that stunt you pulled. It's good you came back, I was going to file a kidnapping report tomorrow."

"Oh I'm sure you were, if you could find your way to the Police Office through tomorrow's hangover. So _sorry_ we caught you before you could go out and have your fun," she snarled as her eyes blazed in triumph.

"The fun I'm having doesn't require going out," he retorted, as a female voice came out from his bedroom, "George? Should I go?"

"No, Cristina," he called back firmly, "Everything is being taken care of."

Avó fumed, "Oh for God's sake, let me bring Tiago back tonight, he doesn't need to be around for-"

"For what? Meeting his possible new mother over breakfast?"

"Like _marriage _is anywhere on your mind," she scoffed.

"It makes no difference, Carminda, Tiago's my problem," he said gruffly, then turned to his son and gave him a sharp push further inside. "Go to bed, now."

Tiago seemed to snap out of some kind of spell, his mind returning fully to his body to this high tension reality, and he scampered into his room. He pulled his duvet off his bed and wrapped it around himself like a cloak before he began pacing around his room, breathing heavily, trying so hard not to cry, knowing how angry that would make Daddy. Soon he heard the door slam. Knowing that Avó was gone actually helped a little. Now he knew where he was. He walked back over to his bed and crawled up on to it. From under his duvet-cloak, he reached out to switch on the radio on his nightstand. Tears began to leak from his eyes, and the combination of the duvet and radio muffled his crying enough that Daddy wouldn't hear.

As he finally started to drift off, the radio began to sing, "_Ooh, a storm is threat'ning my very life today..._"

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**Author's Notes:** Historical and translation notes over on the process blog ( post/97156346354).


End file.

James Bond, Drama, Tragedy