if there's no-one besides you
0.
the thing about the bond boys is that they're all orphans.
1.
he lost his father in a car accident and his mother died giving birth to him. his uncle (though he's not really his uncle, but rather his cousin or something twice removed) james teaches him how to drive a car and shoot a gun and teaches him the two words that he takes with him to the grave.
'stay alive' he says, and winks, and he says it again for good measure. 'the best way to get through life, junior, is to stay alive'.
2.
he never really has a normal life, not with his grandmother charmaine - which is not so much childhood as much as it is prep school and suits and 'hello, how do you do's - and not at warfield which ends up taking him across the globe on field trips turned serious kidnappings. it's never inherently his fault, but his uncle has a lot of enemies, and junior's desperate to prove that he isn't a loose end.
3.
he likes tracy and phoebe and they like him, he's sure, but they tend to grab his hand for no reason and smile too widely, and it never really clicks until gordo teases him about it. iq questions him about it, says something about assuming that his uncle's reputation would have preceded him but junior's just started living for himself, never mind having someone else live with him and be his first friend.
he thinks he's already fine with stepping over iq's half-finished gadgets to get to his bed, and he twists the watch that was made just for him and has saved his life a dozen times over, and he's already living life for two - why complicate that?
4.
he never tells anyone where he got his jacket from until tracy assumes that it's his uncle's, and it startles him and he finds himself telling them that it's not his uncles, no, it's his fathers who flew a plane for a living and taught him how to tie his shoes.
(they're quiet for too long, and he never talks about it again.)
5.
he'd only been to the bahamas once for a late christmas, but the rest of his life had been sequestered away in a dark house in england. he tells iq, while they pretend to sleep on a train to istanbul, that he thinks traveling in his blood and he only really feels alive when he's in a new place in a foreign land.
iq surprises him when they get back to the academy by printing out a dozen different horizons and pinning them to the ceiling.
'you always look up,' iq says after junior asks if they won't annoy him. 'one of us has to look forward'.
6.
gordo graduates first and makes them swear to 'hit him up' at stanford. the days seem a little darker and shorter without him, and when everyone starts thinking about the future junior knows that everyone expects him to jump into the navy and find his way into sis.
instead he researches the places he has yet to go and looks for every study abroad program he can.
he's been given wings and he's going to fly.
7.
they spend their last christmas at home and fight over who gets the most marshmallows in their hot chocolate, and when they're all settled, somehow junior gets pressed in-between the sofa's arm and iq with phoebe on iq's other side and tracy stretched across the rug, head in gordo's lap, and trevor reading a magazine in a nearby chair, and he smiles and settles back and knows that he's going to miss this.
8.
his uncle never really mentions the fact that he stole his car.
9.
you see, the thing about the bond boys is that they're all orphans.
that doesn't mean they don't have a family.
10.
he leaves one morning after a mess of adventure and wonderful people and experiences he'll never forget. it fills his lungs and makes him breathe.
junior has the whole world in front of him, but contrary to the popular assumption that comes with a name like 'james bond', he doesn't never look back. in fact, he looks back often.
(why wouldn't he, when he has memories as good as those?)