[Mad] June 2.1.2 - Casino Royale Quote
Jun. 19th, 2009 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elementof_risk"Like you said--You do what I do for too long, and there won't be any soul left to salvage. I'm leaving with what little I have left. Is that enough for you?" -Casino Royale
He was fond of the films, for all that Bond was generally stopping the people he'd probably work for, all things considered. At the end of the day, MI-6 was never going to be offering him a job, anymore than the CIA would, on principle alone, but principles aside, one thing he found himself drawn to was the clear understanding that the lines blurred in operatives lives. Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. They all committed the same actions, ultimately. Buildings were bombed. People were assassinated. Objects were stolen. Intelligence was sold and traded. Interrogations were conducted. Pressure was applied. It was a world where the means justified the ends, and that was how the "good" guys slept at night. They did the things he did in the service of the greater good, so that made them somehow better than he was, doing it for himself, to ensure his own security in the world without queen or country to give a fig for.
But the same blood tainted their hands, ultimately. Embassies and palaces were bombed in proportional retaliation. Innocents died. Maybe they tried to ensure the collateral damage was minimal, but they accepted that there would be collateral damage and that it was the price they paid to keep the world safe, or their country on top of the power chain. They had their rhetoric to wrap themselves in and whisper to themselves to soothe back the nightmares, but he was forced to wonder if it really worked. What sins had Jack Bristow committed with SD-6 in the name of gathering intel for the CIA for years? How many terrorist plots had he helped Sloane advance? The endgame was valorious, to be sure, but it was a long game, and the price to get there high. What had Sydney done while posing as Julia Thorne? They used their bodies, their minds, their weapons as surely as he used his, and the only difference, in the end, was the why.
Bond knew it, and something about that honesty in Casino Royale tugged at him. The quote always hit him, especially coming as it did from one of MI-6's finest, however fictional. "You do what I do for too long, and there won't be any soul left to salvage." Even when doing it for the "good" guys, the game had a price that was high. And a small voice had to ask, as he watched her sleep, hair tangled a bit with sweat, but her breath soft and even and the only sound in the room, how much higher it was when you played for his side. He had no soothing words to lull him to sleep, no rhetoric to croon to the restless voices of the ghosts of his marks,no justification to back each step taken along a winding path.
It hadn't bothered him before, really. But she deserved better than some soulless monster. That wasn't what she saw when she looked at him, he knew, but others did, and who was to say who was right? If he had a soul to begin with, he knew he had to be in grave peril of losing it, of having very little of worth to offer. There was no other life he knew, nothing else in the world that made sense to him the way this did. He'd been born and raised to it, and his skills didn't really lend themselves to much in the way of honest living.
"You love me?"
"Enough to travel the world with you until one of us has to take an honest job... which I think is going to have to be you, because I have no idea what an honest job is."
Wisdom and life advice from James Bond films was probably not the best way to go, but he had no preacher, no god to turn to, no father, no mother, no mentor left. And whoever wrote the script for the film captured something that tugged at him. There was a chance, still, an opportunity to turn at the fork in the road and choose another path. For her. To give her what decency there was left in him, before it was gone, lost under some obsession that drove him to an early grave or something darker. He reached out and brushed her hair off of her forehead gently enough to not wake her, studying her with a troubled gaze. He didn't know what else to be, or how. And maybe it was too late, anyway. That possibility haunted him, that there was no out, no way back, not for someone like him, not really.
She'd never asked him to change, to be anyone other than who he was. He wanted to be the man she deserved.
He was out. Again.
This time, at least, the reason was better.
He hoped it was enough.
He was fond of the films, for all that Bond was generally stopping the people he'd probably work for, all things considered. At the end of the day, MI-6 was never going to be offering him a job, anymore than the CIA would, on principle alone, but principles aside, one thing he found himself drawn to was the clear understanding that the lines blurred in operatives lives. Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. They all committed the same actions, ultimately. Buildings were bombed. People were assassinated. Objects were stolen. Intelligence was sold and traded. Interrogations were conducted. Pressure was applied. It was a world where the means justified the ends, and that was how the "good" guys slept at night. They did the things he did in the service of the greater good, so that made them somehow better than he was, doing it for himself, to ensure his own security in the world without queen or country to give a fig for.
But the same blood tainted their hands, ultimately. Embassies and palaces were bombed in proportional retaliation. Innocents died. Maybe they tried to ensure the collateral damage was minimal, but they accepted that there would be collateral damage and that it was the price they paid to keep the world safe, or their country on top of the power chain. They had their rhetoric to wrap themselves in and whisper to themselves to soothe back the nightmares, but he was forced to wonder if it really worked. What sins had Jack Bristow committed with SD-6 in the name of gathering intel for the CIA for years? How many terrorist plots had he helped Sloane advance? The endgame was valorious, to be sure, but it was a long game, and the price to get there high. What had Sydney done while posing as Julia Thorne? They used their bodies, their minds, their weapons as surely as he used his, and the only difference, in the end, was the why.
Bond knew it, and something about that honesty in Casino Royale tugged at him. The quote always hit him, especially coming as it did from one of MI-6's finest, however fictional. "You do what I do for too long, and there won't be any soul left to salvage." Even when doing it for the "good" guys, the game had a price that was high. And a small voice had to ask, as he watched her sleep, hair tangled a bit with sweat, but her breath soft and even and the only sound in the room, how much higher it was when you played for his side. He had no soothing words to lull him to sleep, no rhetoric to croon to the restless voices of the ghosts of his marks,no justification to back each step taken along a winding path.
It hadn't bothered him before, really. But she deserved better than some soulless monster. That wasn't what she saw when she looked at him, he knew, but others did, and who was to say who was right? If he had a soul to begin with, he knew he had to be in grave peril of losing it, of having very little of worth to offer. There was no other life he knew, nothing else in the world that made sense to him the way this did. He'd been born and raised to it, and his skills didn't really lend themselves to much in the way of honest living.
"You love me?"
"Enough to travel the world with you until one of us has to take an honest job... which I think is going to have to be you, because I have no idea what an honest job is."
Wisdom and life advice from James Bond films was probably not the best way to go, but he had no preacher, no god to turn to, no father, no mother, no mentor left. And whoever wrote the script for the film captured something that tugged at him. There was a chance, still, an opportunity to turn at the fork in the road and choose another path. For her. To give her what decency there was left in him, before it was gone, lost under some obsession that drove him to an early grave or something darker. He reached out and brushed her hair off of her forehead gently enough to not wake her, studying her with a troubled gaze. He didn't know what else to be, or how. And maybe it was too late, anyway. That possibility haunted him, that there was no out, no way back, not for someone like him, not really.
She'd never asked him to change, to be anyone other than who he was. He wanted to be the man she deserved.
He was out. Again.
This time, at least, the reason was better.
He hoped it was enough.
