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midrashic · 5 years

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[headcanon] a map of hidden places i: new york city

{ a map of hidden places }

the first time james visits new york is more accident than anything; there’s a weapons expo and it’s january, and surely new york in january can’t be any more unpalatable than scotland in january. there are restaurants and boutiques whose names were, even then, synonymous with luxury, but james spends most of his time in the hotel room with the nanny playing with the puzzle ball he’d received that christmas. enid takes him to the natural history museum to see the mammoth bones, to central park to stare at the bare, shivering tree skeletons while he mounds old snow into various blobby shapes.

he doesn’t remember any of this; by the time he’s ten, new york is just a vague smear of concrete and solitude in his imagination, a glimpse of a faded marble facade that blends into all the other glimpses of all the other cities of everywhere else his father has ever had a conference.

for years, there’s the odd holiday abroad with his aunt, a trip with a school friend whose father owns a major hotel in the city or something. then there’s the navy. he learns new york in thirty-six hour stretches of shore leave, and he learns new york through the eyes of dozens of royal navy sailors, which mainly means that he learns very fast which bars near the harbor serve something roughly as strong as paint thinner for a measly two dollars per drink, or a dozen for a twenty.

but he learns other things, too. he saves up the days of walking on solid earth for the weeks when his feet won’t touch dry land and wanders into the neighborhoods that his well-to-do parents and guardians never let him anywhere near: bushwick, the lower east side, basically all of the bronx. new york city’s just hit its peak for violent crime, though someone only attempts to mug him once and gets a broken jaw for his trouble besides. the strangest thing for a brit is the gunshots that will ring out randomly, multiple times a night, but that’s true for every american city he’s ever visited.

he experiments with the subway. the tube in the 80s and 90s was no picnic, but hell, he learns, is a suspiciously empty new york subway car.

one strange thing: over the course of one particular weekend, he runs into a girl he slept with on shore leave in kingstown in a pizzeria named something uncreative like “48th street pizza,” an old university professor in a rare book store, a boy who was in the class above him at eton in bryant park, and then the girl again at a bar that night. (there is indeed a repeat performance.) this is a statistically accurate sampling of how often he recognizes a face from his past. back then, it was the third-largest city in the world, after tokyo and osaka, but it could sometimes feel very fatalistically small.

& then he’s in new york fairly often as a junior agent, but he doesn’t really tap the veins of the city until he’s a double-oh.

the thing about new york is that, for all that you tend to run into people you haven’t seen in years fairly frequently, it’s a great place to disappear. there’s no way to cover every possible exit when planning an ambush and a thousand laundromats, bars, and, hell, magic shops to duck into when you’re being tailed. vaguely seedy fleatraps that bill themselves as “youth hostels” where you can rent a room for four months and leave without anyone having asked you your name. the city seems to boast a disproportionate number of people sitting alone in the corners of coffeeshops, bars, hotel lobbies. it’s the first thing he thinks of when the name shows up in a mission briefing or news article: the pure relief of being quietly ignored, of being anyone, of being no one. he kills a drug kingpin and sips espresso at a café patio ten feet away as the police begin to boredly take statements. he garrotes a man in a bodega bathroom and no one notices for three days because it’s always out of order anyway. new york makes it so easy, so very easy to let a face become a file become a statistic. it has a carelessness with its people that he’s used to seeing in the third world, in places where the corruption is overt, in places that don’t even pretend to have a functioning police system. new york doesn’t care about you.

it also makes it so very easy to pick people up.

in a lot of ways, new york is a lot like london. it’s not every city in the world where you can get a sandwich at four am because the son of a bitch you were surveilling spent five hours haggling over uranium shipments with his contact, which was four hours and fifty minutes longer than he needed to spend. there’s a certain level of mercenary profit-seeking required to keep a sandwich shop open all night, damn circadian rhythms.

but new york takes it to excess. in london, you can probably find 24/7 takeaway within a reasonable walking distance, but in new york, you’re guaranteed to have at least five in the immediate neighborhood and eight more if you’re willing to go a little further for a substantial uptick in quality. during a particularly frustrating bit of downtime not longer after the quantum incident, bond strolls into a midnight karate class for no other reason than he’s bored and wants to see what kind of people can only do karate in the middle of the night. it’s a surprisingly friendly bunch, two night shift workers, a sleep-deprived college student, a jumpy little tweaker, and a single mother who decides to do this with her scant two hours of free time weekly. it’s taught by a petite woman who hits with the precision of an architect and used to practice jiu-jitsu competitively until a back strain caused her to switch to a sport with more standing and less rolling around on the ground.

he does try to sleep with her, but they actually end up sharing a platter of nachos in between (fittingly) manhattans at a bar and chatting about differences in karate conditioning techniques and shitty b-movies. the bartender joins in for the latter. he walks away that morning to another endless round of negotiation with the cia feeling strangely refreshed for a man who got no sleep and no sex.

bond ends up censoring his new york reports more than any other locale, not because missions go wrong in new york more often than anywhere else, but because they tend to go wrong in utterly baffling and sometimes embarrassing ways when he’s in new york. in the reports, he changes the timely plague mask-wearing flash mob that allowed him to escape his pursuer to a traffic jam, the girl wearing a dress made of lettuce that beat a terrorist into submission with her tomato purse into a well-placed police officer, the message he got painted on his nails in gold glitter to a simple note (it worked, the fsb searched him and found nothing and apparently manicured men in brioni are common enough in the city that no one even gave him a second look). new york is many things, but it spits on the dignity of the profession.

felix hates new york, hilariously. he calls it “the big asshole.” he hates the garbage sitting out on the streets, the way you can never tell whether a puddle is rain or urine, the flimsy little metrocards, the food deserts, the traffic, my god, the traffic. (bond has to agree: it’s bad. he once walked to laguardia instead of waiting for a taxi.) the only places he hates more than new york are minnesota and south sudan, which are the foreseeable consequences of a boy from texas spending his first winter away from home in the midwest and being a sane person with a functioning sense of smell. but for some reason, international criminals turn up in new york a lot more often than they do in ann arbor or south sudan, so felix has no choice but to spend sometimes weeks or months at a time in his third-least-favorite place in the world.

(bond knows why he really hates new york: in 2003 he was chasing a jewel smuggler and ran straight into a fruit cart. he was washing fruit juice out from behind his ears for a week and he lost the target. after that, anyone would hate this place.)

when bond is in midtown west, he makes a point of stopping by the trenta tre pizzeria, which boasts pizza that isn’t oily, isn’t too chewy or crisp, and boasts a sauce with a salty-to-sweet balance of flavors that make his eyes roll back in his head. he’s had the real deal, pizza lovingly crafted by hand, topped with buffalo mozzarella, and wood-fired in a tiny neapolitan back room. he knows better than to tell an italian--or anyone who he needs to think of him as a well-traveled sophisticate--but he prefers this.

coincidentally, the pizzeria is located next to a bodega that displays its fruit on wooden stands on the sidewalk. behind the peaches lives a cat, well-fed and sleek and a shameless thief of chicken parm pizza toppings. he doesn’t know her name--the owner is from rural ethiopia and doesn’t speak english, mandarin, arabic, french, german, spanish, russian, or any of the four other languages bond speaks--but in his head he’s named her selina after that greatest of feline burglars, catwoman. selina is good company after a violent mission, and almost never sheds on him, which is more than he can say about the other cats in his life. if he lingers after the pizza to pet her a little longer, no one needs to know.

the events, the new trends, the previews, the releases, blah blah blah. the access is touted more than it actually matters. he’s sure that- if he actually lived in new york he would appreciate the convenience of dwelling in the obligatory stop of every tour and the go-to place to drum up media attention. but he doesn’t and he has enough frequent flier miles that his grandchildren will probably be getting complimentary upgrades and if he really wants to be at the premiere of a much-hyped performance of la traviata he’ll make it there somehow. he does notice that the access has given new yorkers a strange sense entitlement--when a fashionable event happens someplace other than new york, the resentment is deeper, the sense of loss sharper--as if everything important should happen in new york. still. he brings home a tea flavored with the newly discovered ruby chocolate months before it becomes widely available as a souvenir for q. there are compensations.

when q finally punches down his fear of air travel for long enough to make it to new york, bond keeps him out of manhattan. they drift around brooklyn and queens, wandering streets balanced on the knife edge of an existence that is almost suburban--dogs everywhere and strollers between the specialty shops and markets. they sit in a soda fountain famous for its egg creams and share a sundae named after elvis. q orders three different sodas--he’s a connoisseur of exotic beverages--and pronounces the house blend the best cherry soda he’s ever tasted. bond smiles at him around his ice cream float. the place is packed, every seat filled, but here, at a little round table tucked into the corner, he and q might as well be invisible, being aggressively ignored by everyone except the soda jerks. just two people, forcefully alone together. the last two people in the world.

#007 fest #teambondvillains #fandom: this is the end #relship: your loving arms (keeping me from harm)#ch: secret agent man #ch: shiny new steamship #event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019 #ella headcanons #series: a map of hidden places

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midrashic · 5 years

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quantum (of solace)

what blazes in your mem'ry are his hands and teeth arranged in some wild hunter's grin. this man now splashed and gored across the sands, his hands drenched red with the lives of your kin & all the years that after racked your life & all the weapons that you've learned to wield the way you've made yourself into a knife & clotted every wound into a shield.

when james (that cold-eyed bastard) asks what chanced between you and the demon of your dreams you gaze at the ash-scorched sand-waste, entranced your voice flown elsewhere with the old regime (but as you feel the ground and heavens turn, your eyes betray you've left his corpse to burn.)

#007 fest #teambondvillains #fandom: this is the end #event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019 #ch: sympathy for the defiant dead #[meme voice] is this poetry

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midrashic · 5 years

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a café drink: homecoming

a cocktail recipe from the universe of “honour amongst thieves,” aka the fic where moneypenny makes friends with a ragtag bunch of killer misfits.

the story.

in her third year with seven, eve spends four months trying to figure out what made her british jamaican mother's black cake so unbelievably, deliciously thick. for months she brings variations on the same recipe to every dinner, every meeting. alec spends a lot of time watching her struggle with flour and various combinations of alcohol in a postcoital baking fit, calling out very unhelpful tips from where he’s lounging in her bed. she doesn’t succeed in replicating her mother’s recipe, although she does learn a lot about proper temperature control in baking. but that year, q invents her a black cake cocktail for her birthday. it, like her, is a work in progress; q keeps messing with the proportions in an attempt to mimic the smoothness of real black cake while keeping the same flavor profile. you can put a lot more hard liquor in a cake without choking than you can in a drink. but this is what he serves her on her birthday, and this is the recipe, written in eyeliner pencil on a stolen napkin, that she keeps beside her first gun and her mother’s battered old pocket siddur in the shoebox in her closet.

ingredients: easy mode.

1 part (8oz / 240ml per part will make about 8oz / 240ml syrup) raisins 1 part sugar 1 part water 1oz dark rum .5oz port wine .5oz cherry-flavored brandy ice orange peel for garnish

ingredients: hard mode.

1 part (2oz / 60ml per part will make about 1 cup / 8oz / 240ml syrup) raisins 1 part dates 1 part prunes 1 part candied / glaced / dried cherries 5 parts superfine sugar 4 parts water 1oz dark west indian rum (preferably cockspur) .5oz port wine .5oz cherry-flavored brandy ice orange peel for garnish

instructions.

in medium saucepan, toast fruit on low heat until fragrant (5-10 minutes). add water and sugar, bring to a boil, reduce and simmer for ten minutes. when cool, strain into a container; the syrup keeps for up to a month.

combine .75oz / 22ml of the simple syrup with the alcohol and ice. stir. strain the ice out if desired and serve with an orange twist.

#007 fest #teambondvillains #fandom: this is the end #relship: six #ch: a name that starts with m #ch: shiny new steamship #midrashic: kitchenology #midrashic: proseology #event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019 #fic: honour amongst thieves

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midrashic · 5 years

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a 007fest masterpost: 2019

i spent july hard at work at something i love! unfortunately, it was not fandom-related. on the other hand, i have a much deeper understanding of why people start prepping for 007fest in august.

here, take some poetry & recipes! i think that level of engagement qualifies me to be a henchman manager, at least?

[ p o e t r y ] css-error.love:00:7 | james bond x q. what might you do for love? quantum (of solace) | gen, camille-centric. funeral pyres & fallout.

[ r e c i p e s ] cocktail: the patriot | apple pie in alcohol form, as experienced by eve, cocktail connoisseur cocktail: homecoming | jamaican black cake on the rocks. set in the honour amongst thieves ‘verse.

[ h e a d c a n o n s ] a map of hidden places i: new york city

[ f a n m i x ] pretty deadly things | bond learned a lesson a long time ago: beautiful boys are dangerous things. too bad he likes that. an unconventional courtship in 22 songs. also, a bomb plot, sacrifice, & something like love.

#event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019 #this is the tag where ella keeps all the stuff about her writing that isn't actual writing

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midrashic · 5 years

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bond learned a lesson a long time ago: beautiful boys are dangerous things. too bad he likes that.

an unconventional courtship in 22 songs. also, a bomb plot, sacrifice, & something like love.

[ on 8tracks ]

#007 fest #teambondvillains #ella wretas #fandom: this is the end #relship: your loving arms (keeping me from harm)#ch: shiny new steamship #ch: secret agent man #event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019

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midrashic · 5 years

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a café drink: the patriot

it is no longer july fourth here but it IS still july fourth somewhere in this godforsaken country, so this is fine 🎆👀🎆

the story.

when eve was an agent, one of her favorite things to do was sample local drinks. wild coffee in yemen, romani compot, rhubarb soda wherever there was an upscale supermarket. she never grew out of her childhood sweet tooth--something about the quick, sugary burst of energy during the afternoon or midnight or 72-hour stakeout slump. she’d live on smoothies if she could, has, in fact, spent a few days here and there surviving on liquids alone, and the cocktails. when she was an agent she wasn’t allowed to be picky. some agents like bond go the other way and train themselves to savor everything, to find strange food a sensual experience, if not always a pleasant one. eve just stopped tasting things altogether. she ate whatever she could, at bars she ordered easy, generic drinks like cosmos and gins & tonics and bond’s fucking martinis, and she never, ever let her distaste show.

now, though, she’s a young woman with a disposable income and a job that (mostly) doesn’t involve killing people, and she can be self-indulgent, she can be eccentric. she discovers a particular penchant for drinks that taste like some kind of dessert. she finds a cachaça thing that tastes exactly like an orange creamsicle. she makes bond cringe when she orders martinis that come with descriptors like “lemon drop” and “key lime pie.” at one point, she drinks something that tastes more like apple pie than actual blended apple pie. she’s going to try something called a “starfucker” the next time she’s at the weird little cocktail place that’s become her local. she can’t wait.

the real story.

weird, but true: one of my closest friends--a boxer, a cutie pie, a woman with a voice of command that could freeze serial killers in their tracks--reminds me of nothing so much as a 5′2″ captain america. so this is a cocktail recipe for steve rogers on his birthday. & it’s a gift for the definition of “spunk” that peeled itself off the dictionary page and started walking around boston. guess which is which?

ingredients: easy mode.

1oz / 30ml vanilla-flavored vodka 1oz / 30ml fireball whiskey 4oz / 120ml apple juice 2oz / 60ml ginger ale 1tbsp + .5tsp / 15g granulated sugar .25tsp / 1g cinnamon ice lemon wedge for garnish

ingredients: hard mode.

.5oz / 15ml apple-flavored vodka (preferably pearl apple pie, but smirnoff green apple & ivanabitch dutch apple also acceptable) 1oz / 30ml vanilla-flavored vodka 1oz / 30ml fireball whiskey 5oz / 150ml apple juice 3oz / 90ml ginger ale 1.75tbsp / 22g vanilla sugar .25tsp / 1g cinnamon a very small pinch each of ground cloves & ground nutmeg & allspice ice honey, cinnamon sugar, lemon wedge, apple slices, & cinnamon stick for garnish

instructions.

(rim a mason jar using honey and cinnamon sugar. jauntily arrange the lemon wedge and cinnamon stick in the empty jar.)

in a cocktail shaker, combine alcohol, juice, ginger ale, (spices,) and ice. shake vigorously for thirty seconds.

pour into glass (or mason jar over the garnishes). add remaining garnishes by sticking the lemon wedge on the rim (or, if you’re making the overachiever version of this cocktail, arranging thin apple slices and dusting with cinnamon sugar).

#007 fest #teambondvillains #fandom: this is the end #ch: a name that starts with m #midrashic: kitchenology #midrashic: proseology #ella headcanons #event: gee brain what do you want to do tonight 2019

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