Felix knew exactly what James liked to eat. On missions that allowed the time, he found restaurants that served the perfect beef brizzola, garlicky spaghetti bolognese, or fresh crab with rich butter and thick toast, for example.
AFTER missions, on the other hand...
“I know you know how to make scrambled eggs,” Bond said. Another look at the little plate in Felix’s hand seemed to give him the energy to heave himself into an upright position on the bed. “I showed you the last three times I was over here.”
“You mean you don’t want a dry, rubbery, lumpy scrambled egg with enormous chunks of green onions?” Felix asked innocently. “And you’d prefer buttery soft scrambled eggs with finely chopped chives?”
“Yes,” Bond said, glaring at Felix through one eye, the other closed and crusty because he’d taken some train shrapnel to the face.
“Too bad!” Felix said. He smiled at Bond. “Agents who do stupid shit on missions get stupid shit eggs to eat for breakfast. You’re lucky I only cooked you one.” It was only luck, too, that had caused Case to switch sides to haul Bond’s ass out of trouble, luck and Bond’s ability to make connections. It was only a hunch that had put Felix in his car and out in the desert so he could find them and drive them to safety.
Bond’s hand, trembling, rose up from the mattress just enough to flip Felix off.
“Oh, I see you’d rather have Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” Felix said, suppressing a grin. Bond would be fine.
Bond wrinkled his nose, but he paused and seemed to think about it, which was incredible considering Bond’s disdain for sugary American everything. “I’ll eat the eggs,” he said, and he grabbed for the plate.
Felix yanked it away. “Oh, no, no,” he said, smiling some more. “You’re injured. Come on, James, here comes the choo choo...” He motored a forkful of egg towards James’s face.
“I’ll chew your cock off, you assh--mmmph.” Bond swallowed. He shuddered dramatically. “You didn’t even salt them. It would have been kinder to leave me to the tender mercies of the sun,” he said.
“You can have salt on your eggs when you can lift the salt shaker,” Felix said. This time he did grin, and then he dodged to avoid Bond’s vengeful lunge.
Bond’s teeth clicked in the spot where Felix’s arm had been. The movement made Bond cradle his bruised torso, but his mouth upturned at the corners and his eyes sparked with challenge when they met Felix’s.
In the ensuing scuffle, the offending scrambled egg got knocked to the floor.
“I planned for this,” Felix informed him. He ducked out of the room, fetched the plate he’d left in the kitchen, and presented two sunny-side up eggs with bacon twisted into a frown underneath. He’d punctured the yolk of one of the eggs to match Bond’s injured eye.
Bond laughed.
Was this the sweet care that Bond would have received from Case, from a woman who would fuss and dote? No. But Felix had a feeling that Bond wouldn’t want to recover anywhere else.
@hexiva gave me this image prompt! I couldn’t muster up a real deal secret spy exchange, but I thought Bond and Felix would have fun faking one. <3
Bond had donned his trenchiest coat and chosen a furtive-looking briefcase from the MI6 prop department for this mission. After a quick stop at a Tesco’s, he made his way to the rendezvous point, a section of the road that was shadowy, but not too shadowy. Stewards, his tail and his most irritating trainee, had to have something to see, after all.
Bond’s breath puffed through the frigid air. Felix’s fancy drone circled and landed on top of a snowbank nearby, one of the least subtle gadgets Bond had ever seen in his entire career, and he had once piloted a personal-sized helicopter. Stewards didn’t seem to notice it. Bond suppressed a wolfish grin in favor of looking appropriately shifty-eyed.
A short while later, Felix sidled up to him out of the darkness. “You got the goods?” he asked, loud enough for the drone’s microphone to pick up.
Bond smirked and leaned in close to Felix’s ear. “You got the payment?” he breathed.
Felix shivered. “Down, boy,” he muttered, then withdrew a suspiciously bulging envelope. “Your payment’s right here!” he said loudly.
“AH-HA!” Stewards shouted from the shadows. “I KNEW IT! YOU’VE BEEN SELLING SECRETS TO THE AMERICANS!” He bounded forward with his mobile held aloft---a bloody iPhone, not even a Q Branch special. “Don’t try to deny it or eliminate me, I’m recording this as we speak!” Stewards said. He had bulging biceps, but the hand clutching his mobile looked underdeveloped; he clearly hadn’t been doing his grip strength homework.
“And we would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for this meddling kid,” Felix said with a laugh. “Why don’t you check what’s in the briefcase, Sherlock Holmes?”
“Oh! Er, hand it over, then,” Stewards said, shuffling a little as he held out his hand. He was wearing one of those extra-puffy name brand jackets that looked warm but sounded like opening a crisps packet whenever the fabric rubbed together.
“Or I could empty it right here,” Bond said, and he opened the briefcase and let as many jaffa cake packages as he’d been able to stuff in there rain out onto the snow.
“Ooh, that’s what I’m talking about,” Felix said, smiling. Jaffa cakes were his favorite. “James, you really do love me.”
“Of course I do, darling,” Bond said, leaning in for the most married-looking peck on the lips he could manage. It wasn’t their usual, but they had both agreed that spite was an excellent reason to demonstrate domesticity, and this little twat had interrupted one too many of their outings.
“Shite,” Stewards breathed, finally realizing that he’d fucked up, and that maybe a retired Double-Oh hadn’t been meeting up with a retired CIA agent for the reasons he’d suspected. “You were going on dates? But you kept avoiding my tail!”
“Maybe because we didn’t want a snot-nosed baby agent hanging around and asking us to change his diaper,” Felix said, glaring.
“Ah. Erm,” Stewards said. He fussed with his mobile and glanced down both ends of the street.
Bond tsked. “Didn’t even plan your exfil strategy, did you, Stewards? Well, no matter. I’m not going to hunt you down---I’ll see you on Monday, after all. Some remedial training seems to be in order. Perhaps your fellow trainees can help with that. I thought this encounter might make a good instructional video.” He smiled.
Stewards blanched.
“Maybe think twice about trying to spy on your goddamn spy instructor, kid,” Felix said. “We’re about to go home and get fucked in the good way. But you?” He slit the payment envelope open with his hook and pulled out a cheap blue dildo, which he tossed at Stewards. It pinged off Stewards’s phone. “Seems like you’re about to learn all about fucking yourself.”
Bond collected the jaffa cakes back into the briefcase, because Felix would whine later if he didn’t, and then they linked arms at the elbow and walked off, just to seal the impression that they were extremely queer and married. Which they were---had been since after Bond’s latest faked death, which had involved some logistics that needed Felix to be his secret widower---but even when they’d decided to make a go of retiring together, they hadn’t ever advertised their relationship so blatantly.
It was kind of nice.
Once they were out of Stewards’s line of sight, Felix withdrew his arm from Bond’s and balanced his mobile on special notches in his hook, using his other hand to work the app that guided the drone back to their location. He had clever, dexterous fingers, did Felix.
“I smuggled one of Q’s latest prototypes in the lining of the briefcase,” Bond said casually. “Just in case you want some foreplay.” And just so Stewards had one more point of failure to his name.
Felix tucked his drone under his arm and caught Bond’s gaze, his eyes hot. “You’re a bastard and I love it,” he said.
Bond laughed. “I want to make love to you a little bit,” he confessed. “Just have really, ridiculously married sex. For non-spite reasons. How’s that for bastardry?”
Felix smiled and shrugged. “All our sex is married, you idiot. But if you’re asking about love? We’ve been partners in crime, fucking, retirement---I guess love can figure in there too.” His mouth curved wryly and he made a mocking fanning gesture, his Texan twang deepening as he said, “Oh, how will I ever stand the adoration of such a fine figure of a man?”
Felix still got self-conscious about his looks sometimes, his scars and prosthetics. Bond bumped their shoulders together again. “I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he said. “I’m sure between the two of us, we can figure it out.”
Supportive Sunday is a day when we encourage you to support someone in the fandom!
Here’s some ways to do that:
Kudos something you like
A short comment (“Loved this!” or “Extra kudos!”)
A more detailed comment (“X made me laugh out loud!”)
Make a rec post
Send a creator a short anon ask about their work! (“What inspired X?”)
Send a reader who’s commented a short anon ask showing your appreciation! (“Your comments make my day!”)
Reblog this post with a rec
Dust and Sunlight, by mr_quartermaster
[00Q; 38k]
Royalty, lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, all the citizens from the kingdom of Vauxhall gathered for their annual Prosperity Feast. But there’s evil lurking in the dark, threatening to steal Queen Olivia’s crown and subjugate the kingdom. Sir Bond, the most loyal protector of the Crown, and Q, one of the most powerful sorcerers in the land will have to join forces to save their kingdom from destruction.
Written for the 2020-2021 00Q RBB and inspired by the beautiful art of @ksansart "Between dust and sunlight, can I steal a moment of your time?"
Give Thanks, by literaryoblivion
[00Q; 1k]
Bond wakes up after a mission gone wrong and remembers getting to the safe house at least but not the bandages wrapped around his leg.
The By-Road To Glenroe - Part 1, by TheIskra
[M-centric; gen; 558 words]
Gareth Mallory's captivity in 1995. Meant as the first chapter in a series but we'll see how far I get.
Cold Front, by angel_xx
[James/Felix; 2.7k]
Bond had a mental breakdown after being reprimanded by M, and Leiter consoles him.
“You think I didn’t hear about that? National intelligence fetuses in the womb heard about that. I won fifty bucks for each of your fifty years in the old office’s pool.”
In the background, waves lapped against wood, the high cries of shore birds echoed, and Felix’s feet thump-clunk, thump-clunked against the deck of a boat. The CIA had paid for pretty good prosthetics before cutting Felix loose.
Bond glanced up at his computer screen, where he was triangulating Felix’s call. He was in San Francisco. After the accident, Felix’s new profession had taken him all around the western seaboard---as far away from D.C. as you could get in the continental U.S., which was fair. Bond had moved back up to Edinburgh after Six had booted him out.
Felix continued, “I figure even old, almost-dead retired folks might like to have some fun once in a while. And it just so happens that I have a lead on a shark-finning case.”
Oh, God; Bond should have known. “They tried to eat you!” he said. “How did that turn into you becoming a shark rights activist?”
“Shark welfare activist,” Felix corrected primly. “And it wasn’t the fish’s fault that it had been starved and trained to eat human flesh, it was the fault of that sonofabitch you gutted for me. Besides, the agency’s got a client who pays pretty well for shark finners. Something about efficiency and food waste, and the fines for offenders amounting to peanuts. One of those bleeding heart Silicon Valley types.”
“So you want me to fly across the Atlantic to help you take down a gang of shark butchers,” Bond said.
“I want you to fly across the Atlantic so we can beat up some bullies together, yeah,” Felix said. “If you’ve still got it in you. You’re retired, after all.”
Bond had only been retired for six months and he’d been wanting to kill someone who deserved it for two. His landlady had started teaching him how to crochet, for fuck’s sake.
(It was really going to fuck with Q when he got a crocheted Walther PPK in the mail, but still. Crochet was only a couple of letters off from ‘crotchety.’)
“I suppose I could come and make sure you don’t fall in again,” Bond said.
“Uh-huh,” Felix said. “Sure.” He hung up.
A moment later, Bond’s email pinged with his ticket details. Economy, but Bond supposed that was what you had to deal with when you were a civilian.
A moment after that, he got another email:
Steak when you get here?
This was their old tradition: Felix always treated Bond to a meal when Bond went Stateside, but it was steak when Felix was offering something physical to go with it and seafood when he wasn’t.
Wouldn’t miss it, Bond wrote back, smiling.
Some things had changed after retirement, but he and Felix could still get up to their same old tricks.
It had been half an hour since they’d heard Franklin’s men drive off; long enough for an untrained backwoodsman (like most of the ones in Franklin’s gang) to give himself away if he’d been left behind.
“This is all your fault,” Felix heard James say, and saw him cautiously peeking out from the pile of hay he was hiding in.
“My fault?” Felix whispered, poking his head halfway out of the hay stack next to James to glare at him. “What did I say? Did I say, ‘James, you should seduce Franklin’s wife right in front of him, so he tries to have us killed’? Because I don’t recall saying that.”
“You said I should, quote, ‘Piss Franklin off enough that he shits or gets off the pot,’” James reminded him. “It was either seduce his wife or crash his car, and his wife was closer. Now, if you’d had a getaway vehicle that wasn’t an American piece of--”
Something rustled in a shadowy corner of the barn. Felix froze and James did the same next to him.
The barn was a drafty wooden thing, old enough to have a hay loft up top like in the movies, with stalls and hay for a few cows on one end of the main level. The hulking iron skeletons of a few tractors dominated the other side of the barn. Franklin’s searchers had checked the stalls and the tractors, but luckily they hadn’t bothered to investigate the big feed piles of hay.
Felix was pleased with his choice of hiding place. People always thought about looking in boxy, closeted places, but they rarely questioned those obvious features that seemed to be right in plain sight.
Unfortunately, it seemed someone else had found a good hiding place, too. A homeless person? One of the farmer’s family members?
Felix heard a huffing breath, a shuffle of limbs across the hay, and then a low but immensely reassuring, “Mrrrrrrroooooo.” A brown Jersey calf with ears like gravy spoons wandered out of the corner, peering at them with interest.
Felix laughed. “Hello there, darling,” he said. “Come to join us on our midnight adventure?”
Next to him, James eyed the calf with barely concealed wariness, and he stiffened as the calf galumphed a little closer to them.
Felix grinned. James was such a city boy sometimes. “That’s right,” he cooed at the calf, enjoying James’ unease. “We’re just some harmless old spies, nothing to be worried about.” He clucked his tongue at it, wishing he had some sugar to give it. “They keep the calves separate from the mamas sometimes,” he explained. “Something about a stomping hazard.”
Next to him, James fished a protein bar out of his suit jacket. “Think it can eat this?” he asked Felix. “Got to make allies where we can, after all.” He favored Felix with a lopsided smirk.
Handsome bastard. “I’m not a cow expert just because I’m from Texas,” Felix said, and immediately ruined the pretense by adding, “They’ve got four stomachs and I’ve seen them eat whole bucketfuls of old peppers. There’s no guarantee it’ll like it, especially this young, but most things are safe to try.”
James broke the protein bar into thirds, eating one third himself, offering one third to Felix, and holding his hand out to the calf with the last third.
Felix chewed and hummed his approval. Peanut butter; his favorite.
The calf toddled forward and sniffed at James’ hand for a few moments before its long tongue darted and licked the bit of protein bar up. It chewed, swallowed, and surged forward, nosing its way up James’s jacket until it was staring right in James’ face.
“I think it liked--urk!” James recoiled as the calf’s tongue came out and darted across his face, leaving a trail of thick cow saliva from his chin to his cheek.
For just a moment, the calf and James stared at each other, James’ eyes wide and his mouth dropped open in surprise.
Felix had never wanted a camera so badly in his life.
"Not tonight, sweetheart, I’ve got a headache,” James finally said, laughing a little as he pushed the cow’s face gently away. “Also, your tongue is a little too rough for my tastes.” He rubbed his hand over his face, wiping off the saliva.
“Their tongues have to have good gripping strength because they’re missing some of their front teeth,” Felix said, flashing back to his grandmother telling him the same thing when he was young. His parents had been eager to escape to the city, and that was where he’d been raised, but she’d been country folk, and they’d visited her often. “Watch a cow eating grass--it’s their tongue that pulls it up to their mouth.”
James quirked his eyebrows. “Aren’t you knowledgeable.” He steered the calf in Felix’s direction.
“Oh, no--”
“Oh, yes.” James grinned and prodded the calf a little.
The calf made a grumbling sound and its long eyelashes fluttered in Felix’s direction. It stumbled over to him and would have rubbed its nose right into Felix’s beard if he hadn’t raised his arm up in time. As it was, the calf spent a good few minutes rubbing its cheek again the fabric of his suit jacket sleeve, back and forth, back and forth.
He would definitely need dry cleaning to get all the cow drool off of it. Not to mention the nose wetness.
It was, however, undeniably cute.
Felix glanced up from the calf, caught an uncharacteristically soft expression on James’ face, and quickly glanced away again before he could make them both self-conscious. This was totally normal...sure...just two men and a baby cow, hiding from a money laundering gang in a barn in Alabama.
A few minutes later, the calf had fallen back asleep, partly burrowed in the hay with its head resting against Felix’s thigh. “How do you think we should exfil?” Felix asked. They had a few different options, but those were also options that Franklin was likely to be tracking. One of the reason Felix liked working with James was that he thought about things differently.
And sure enough, James’ eyes flicked meaningfully to the iron skeletons on the opposite side of the barn, the ones with the huge tires and the weird steel arms that did something agricultural.
“Oh, no--” Felix said again, but only halfheartedly. He was already resigned to his fate. He was going to ride a tractor to safety.
“Oh, yes,” James said, and he grinned again in a way that made Felix’s heart pound a little faster. “I’ve got to get this one on my record, you know. I haven’t done a tractor yet.”
***
They had to bribe the farmers, of course, and as much as the image of a besuited Bond riding a tractor tickled Felix’s fancy, they also borrowed some oversized jeans, plaid shirts, and Crimson Tide caps. There was a polite fiction about wanting an authentic Alabama experience for their social media. The details were very important, they insisted.
“It’s not hard, ’long as you remember you’re a few feet wider than the usual,” the farmer said, showing them the controls. “But I expect a pair of careful boys such as yourselves wouldn’t cause no accidents.” She slanted a look at them. “You park it right at the Walmart, now. And don’t deploy the sprayers on the road!”
With that sage advice in their ears, they got into gear, rumbled out the gate, and split up at the first opportunity.
Felix had never felt so tall or so invisible as he did while riding this placid iron steed. One of Franklin’s gang passed Felix on the road and didn’t even slow down, except in the obvious way that people briefly slowed down behind tractors before switching lanes and motoring quickly past.
It wasn’t the most comfortable ride (how far was it to the Walmart, again?) but Felix grinned a secret grin anyway. If only Grammy Leiter could see him now.
***
That evening, they met up at their rendezvous point, which was the county’s only fine restaurant. It still served country food, mind, but the mac and cheese was made with truffle oil, and it was the only place in thirty miles with seafood that wasn’t catfish or tuna casserole.
If they could flip Franklin the bird by appearing in public and making it known that they weren’t afraid of him, so much the better.
He and James both ordered a drink (bourbon for him, the usual vodka martini for James) and perused the menu.
The special, advertised in big bold letters, was veal cutlets. Ordinarily one of Felix’s favorites. He flicked his eyes above the menu and met James’ curious gaze briefly.
“I’ll have the lobster tail,” Felix told the server when she returned.
“The same,” James said, his eyes crinkled at the edges. “You old softie,” he added, once the server had left.
“I didn’t see you ordering it,” Felix said.
“I could never betray Bessie,” James said, placing a dramatic hand over his heart. “Our love was entirely unique in my experience...and thankfully brief.” He smirked.
“Funny, that’s exactly how I felt about my ride on the tractor today,” Felix said.
“Looks like we’d both prefer something a little more familiar,” James suggested, his eyes warm on Felix’s.
The candle at their table flickered. Felix abruptly became aware that half the other customers were married couples having a special evening out together.
Well, he and James bickered like one. They shared meals and hotel rooms like one. Might as well enjoy the other benefits.
“To familiar companions,” James toasted, raising his glass.
“To old friends,” Felix said, clinking his bourbon against James’ martini. “And to new experiences.” He returned James’ warm look.
Under the table, James’s foot pressed against his. Yeah, that was new all right. But this was James, after all, and Felix had a good feeling that this latest adventure, like most of James’ ridiculous ideas, would shake out just fine.
The modern-day adventures of James Bond and Felix Leiter
That time some Brits are smuggling gold into the US using aquariums full of poisonous fish. James and Felix investigate. They discover a secret shark tank and nearly fall in when the baddies discover their presence; Felix shoots some holes into the aquariums as a distraction and instead of retreating James decides to sprint-attack the smugglers amid of a hail of broken glass and spiny, poisonous, piscine projectiles. Afterward, they call an aquarium to come get the endangered sharks and they order fugu for their post-case meal bc fuck poisonous fish, seriously. (Based on the book Live and Let Die)
That time Bond is tracking some diamond smugglers based in Reno and he ends up stranded and beat up in the desert and Felix has to rescue him. They have their climactic battle with the bad guy on a hijacked Amtrak train; Bond is horrified at the dire state of American trains and Felix is impressed that Amtrak even exists at all. Bond wins big at the casinos and uses the money to treat Felix and himself to a gourmet post-case dinner. Bond’s car has (of course) been blown up by then, and they’re not in any hurry, so they get tickets on the train back to the east coast. A few days all alone in a sleeper car, whatever shall they do? (Based on Diamonds are Forever.)
Bond is sent to investigate some suspicious guano activity on yet another tropical island--a soft assignment from M, who’s still pissed at him for almost dying on his last case. Bond and Felix do some strategic bullshitting, resulting in the U.S. government getting suspicious of Bond’s ho-hum investigation and sending Felix to check things out. However, Bond and Felix’s sneaky paid holiday together is interrupted by the surprisingly real threat of Doctor No. Can they work together with self-taught biologist Honey Rider to foil No’s nuclear ambitions and survive No’s obstacle course of death? Spoilers: they can. And after ‘defeating’ the nearly-dead giant squid that was supposed to kill them--apparently No didn’t realize that they can’t survive on the surface--they make it a point to go out for calamari afterward. (Based on, as you might guess, Doctor No.)
Bond adopted an unhurried pace as he made his way through Dallas’ airport, taking in the floor mosaics and pausing to wonder at a blindingly Tex-Mex-colored geometric mural in the international arrivals exit. He was resigned to working with one of the pricks the States usually tried to pass off as law enforcement, but no one had said he had to be enthusiastic about it.
The Americans had reportedly found a few of the Crown’s new pound-coins two days ago at the scene of a murder--that was, nearly a month before the coins were released to the general public. As a favor to the alarmed Royal Mint, and with eyes twinkling with schadenfreude, M had dispatched him to aid the investigation. Not exactly a 00′s dream job.
At least, Bond thought so until he saw Felix Leiter, wearing a cheap suit and holding a sign for Richard Sterling, waiting for him outside the terminal.
Bond’s heart lifted, as it always did when he saw Felix. It had been over a year since the last time; he bore with the businessman-and-chauffeur facade for exactly as long as it took them to get bundled into Felix’s company BMW, and then he caught Felix’s eye in the driver’s seat mirror.
Felix grinned back at him, looking pleased as punch. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said.
“So what’s the story?” Bond asked, instead of admitting the same thing. Surely they hadn’t put Felix on this diddle of a job?
“I,” Felix gave him a haughty look, “am a very important liaison with an equally important Crown official, and together we’re going to run a very important mission to find the source of your stolen currency.” He winked.
Bond squinted. “You already know where they came from,” he said.
“There’s a counterfeit ring running here, been a pain in our asses, good at giving us the run-around,” Felix said. “They were forging American dollars in South America and Mexico, and then they crossed the border here in Texas. They’ve also picked up an enforcer, a Brit named George Wickham. It was one of his scenes that the coins were found at.”
“Well, well, Mr. Wickham--turned up like a bad penny,” Bond said, pleased. “He’ll soon regret that.” George Wickham had turned traitor in Berlin two years ago after killing one of Station G’s best informants; picking him up would be worth the trip. Still... “And this gang is branching out into new British pounds? A month before they’re even available?”
“No,” Felix admitted, a trace of sheepishness crossing his face. “You’ll find that the coins are pretty bad forgeries, definitely amateur work. We only got away with saying they might possibly be the real deal because the originals haven’t been released yet. But I knew you’d like to get after this Wickham man, so...” Felix shrugged.
The shrug was just a hair too innocent. Bond started to having an inkling. “Felix... Am I going to find a bunch of metalworking equipment in your basement?”
“No, but you might find some if you dredged Trinity River,” Felix said, smirking. “Though you wouldn’t be able to trace the coins themselves back to me--I’m not an amateur at everything, after all.”
Bond hadn’t expected the easy admission. “Lot of trouble to go to,” he said gruffly, staring at Felix in the mirror. Tampering with a crime scene, for one, and not for official reasons, either.
“Yeah, but you kept saying how bored you were in London, and this looks like your kind of action,” Felix said.
Bond couldn’t take it anymore; he unbuckled his seatbelt and clambered into the front seat next to Felix. “You know, we can always make our own kind of action,” he said meaningfully.
Felix laughed. “I knew you couldn’t resist that opening.”
“Well, it’s hard to resist any of your openings, as you know,” Bond said, leering.
Felix grinned. “Down, tiger. First thing’s first: I’ll change into something a little more CIA agent and a little less chauffeur, and then I’ll feed you, because I know how much you like that.” He flashed Bond a smug look.
Anyone who saw that look and heard that tone of voice might well assume that Felix was talking about oral sex, but Felix knew Bond well, and Bond knew that Felix knew him well, which meant that Felix was almost certainly about to give him one of the best lunches of his life. Probably an unparalleled steak, given that they were in Texas.
“Secondly,” Felix said, “we’ll work this job and take down these pains in our financial asses, including Wickham, because I know you’ll like that too.”
“And thirdly?” Bond asked.
“Thirdly,” Felix said, “we’ll get to the kind of action that involves our asses in a much less metaphorical way.” He reached over and gave Bond’s knee a quick squeeze. “Sound good?”
“You do know how to treat a man,” Bond said, letting a little of his wonder seep into his voice--in just a few short minutes, Felix had transformed a dull milk run into a working holiday. “But you’ve forgotten what we’ll do fourthly,” Bond added, because he was always one to take a mile when someone offered an inch. (And in this case, he thought that Felix--who had offered him rather more than an inch--might let him get away with it.)
“Oh?” Felix arched his eyebrows.
“Fourthly,” Bond said, “we’ll get on a plane to somewhere tropical, and you’ll let me show you about as good a time as you intend on showing me. Deal?” He eyed Felix closely. This wasn’t a sure thing; they’d never gone on a real holiday together before.
But after a moment of contemplation, Felix chuckled and shook his head. “Always upping the stakes, aren’t you, James? Hmm!” Felix took one hand off the wheel so he could rub at his whiskery chin, pretending to think about it. “You know what, I think I just might be able to swing it.”
“Good,” Bond said, “because if not, we’d just have to report to your Treasury that we found some of their new twenties floating around in the Caribbean.”
Note: Thank you to Lin for prompting me to do some James/Felix that involved the UK’s release of their new pound coin! This didn’t get out for Felix February, but I’m glad to be able to post it for 007 Fest’s rare pair week!
