[Sept. 10] [James Bond] "Ashes"

[tortillafactory.livejournal.com]

Title: Ashes
Day/Theme: Sept. 10 - When I see your heavens
Series: James Bond
Character/Pairing: Bond
Rating: PG

Four men in dark suits. Pallbearers. That was all passersby would see.

And then, when they came to rest, a preacher.

He read aloud from his well-worn Bible.

"When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?"

What indeed?

James Bond looked down at the coffin he had just set onto the ground. A good agent, and a good man, now reduced to this.

"Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust."

Bond remembered it a little differently from Sunday School: By the
sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

There was a cruelty in that - God's own words, but Bond knew, better than anyone, that there was always some cruelty in love.

It made sense, whether God was real or whether he was a necessary creation of the human mind, that he should be cruel. Selfish, even. Love seldom meant being nice or kind. It isn't nice or kind when a parent snatches a child up to keep it from running into the street. But it is loving. And maybe, Bond reflected, death was merely a parental sort of snatching-up.

Either way, he imagined it must be a wonderful sort of relief.

What is man?

Dust. Yes, dust. Bond believed that, even if he didn't believe the rest of the story.

Hallelujah and amen.