Martinis and golf are enough in common for a cross-over.

It's not as convincing as it could be, is it?

Warning: monkey crack ahead.

• **

The bar was crowded and filled with smoke, which suited those meeting there just fine. Tokyo’s a good place to go when you need to get together off the record—a fact that the two men in the darkest corner where well aware of. They were secret agents, working under code names for their respective countries: and with the war in Korea rapidly becoming more important, it was only natural that they should be discussing it.

Colin Antwerp—his real name was Felix Leiter, but that didn’t appear on his passport—had arrived first, to sit waiting, wondering if his friend and partner, Britian’s top agent, possibly even the best in the world, was going to get there at all. The information he’d been given about one Colonel Flagg’s adventures in Korean army service hospitals was too good not to pass on, but as always, he worried about James.

Still, the guy seemed to be able to look after himself pretty well. Felix—sorry, Colin—held onto that thought. 007 wasn’t in the habit of being killed, and he was fashionably late whenever it suited him. The American agent shrugged, ordered another drink, and sat back in his seat to wait as long as it took for James Bond to turn up.

• **

The first thing Bond saw as he drove the slightly battered Bentley into M*A*S*H 4077 was a tall man wearing a red towelling robe, dozing in the sunshine. The information Felix had been able to give him seemed to suggest that this was the place to start looking for any traces of SQUIRM in the allied armies in Korea, and he figured he might as well start at the beginning.

He braked the Bentley—poor, battered Bentley, but at least it was better than an army jeep—and leaned out the window. “Hey, fellow! Is this the M*A*S*H 4077?”

Hawkeye opened his eyes slowly and blinked in the sunshine. “It is. Who’s asking?”

“Bond—Major James Bond.” He’d chosen the rank carefully, trying to be high enough up to carry weight but low enough to be ignored if he needed to be. “Who are you?”

“Captain Hawkeye Pierce.”

“Why aren’t you saluting, captain? For that matter, why aren’t you in uniform?”

“I’m not on duty. Besides, I don’t know you from Adam.”

“You can see I’m wearing an army uniform—and that I’m a major. How much evidence do you need?”

“It’s not about the evidence. I’m a doctor, I don’t have to salute to anyone. Especially Brits.” Hawkeye pulled his hat back down over his eyes and proceeded to ignore the stranger.

So this was what Flagg had been reporting. Insubordinance. Lack of respect for the traditions of the army. Laziness. What about actual disobedience? “That’s an order, solider. On your feet.”

Seething with anger, Hawkeye got up, and sketched something resembling a salute, if you had a very good imagination. What a cheek this guy had! To come in here and order someone who’d worked fourteen hours solid the previous night to do anything. He consoled himself with thoughts of the chewing out this Brit would get from Henry Blake.

Bond nodded. “That’ll do. I think we should go and see Colonel Blake.”

“You know him?” Hawkeye relaxed a little. Perhaps this guy only looked like an enemy—and by that, he didn’t mean a North Korean.

“By reputation, yes. They say this is the best M*A*S*H in Asia.”

“Best care anywhere, that’s us.”

“You must work hard.”

“Nah. Mostly I’m out here for the golf.”

That made Bond smile, seeing at once Flagg’s real problem: that the men here were getting through the war by making light of it, but he expected them to be serious and deadly. Somehow, Bond felt that Hawkeye had probably chosen the saner option. “I might join you for a round or two, then, but I do have a job to do first. Which way to the colonel’s office?”

“It’s the one on the left. You can’t miss it.”

“From directions like that, I rather think I might. I’d be grateful if you’d show me.” Hawkeye looked doubtful. “At home, I’d try and claim it was in return for a ride in the car, but I don’t think this rust bucket will stand up to that sort of thing.”

“That’s all right—I’m sure we can find a dark corner in the store tent,” Hawkeye said, walking round the car to get in. “Butt I’ll want dinner and a movie first.”

Bond started to drive down the hill again, coming into the first few tents. “Where’s the colonel hide himself, then?”

“Over there, on your left. Past the mess tent—that’s this big one—there, where Radar’s just coming out.”

BWAH! OK, crossover delish.

Am, the only thing in there that jarred was his "Hey, fellow!" For some reason, very unBondian to me, the juxtaposition of those two words.

I lurve the rest. Keep it coming.

(and hope the board doesn't crash again)

I don't know the time frame for Matty Groves, but I think that you need to have one of the characters step out for jelly doughnuts during the research binge.

They're at a prestigious private invite-only arts festival at a stately home in Hampshire, and they're dealing with what they've figured out is an incubus. The research is in the family muniments. So if they want jelly donuts, they ring for them - if they're really lucky the owner won't bring the plate with his hawk on his wrist. He has a nasty habit of wandering around the place with it on his arm. I wouldn't fancy trying to wrestle with a tiercel over pastry.

Nearest town is about five miles away.

I'm also Manchild deprived, damn it. ASH in a Turkish bath, ooh.

ASH in a turkish bath, talking about his penis. ASH in a turkish bath, talking about and lifting the towel...no, I am not going there.

Not out loud, anyway.

Anne, BTW, did I say thanks? For enjoying Amanda?

Well, Deb, now I want to read Matty Groves!

I wouldn't fancy trying to wrestle with a tiercel over pastry.

No. But if you wrote about it, you must tell billytea. He'd be delighted to see a tiercel in action, especially if crullers and jelly donuts are involved.

Is billytea a falcon fancier, or an astringer? Sensational! I worked with them when I was younger - well, actually, when the earth was still cooling.

More "Needfire."

I told him what I think he was hoping to hear. I owed him that; besides, it was no less than the truth. "I've loved you since the first day I walked into the Carolan, and you took off your glasses, and didn't hide your eyes from me."

"Have you? Truly?"

"Truly. Even more than I've come to hate your father. Why do you think I stayed?"

• * *

It seems impossible, looking back at this remove of time, that Richard Giles could have lived in such close proximity to us for so long, and not realised that his only child and the girl he feared, and couldn't control, and so clearly wished elsewhere, had fallen in love.

In fact, he realised nothing. I've often timed it, moving slow and damaged down the near-empty years with little else to occupy my mind but those moments, bright as a kingfisher's plumage. Rupert and I took each other in that punt on the Cherwell when I was three months short of my sixteenth birthday. The cataclysm, the end of life as I had lived it, happened on the night of my eighteenth birthday. The math is inescapable: for twenty seven months, Rupert and I slipped through the connecting bathroom door between our bedrooms at night, me bucking against him, Rupert vulnerable and beautiful and somehow completely dominant as he pinned me, both of us learning quickly, of necessity, to stifle any sound, even as my nails left imprints in the flesh of his back and I felt his heart against me like bottled thunder. That need for silence, the understanding of what might happen should Richard come to know, added an extra spice.

Sometime during the winter of my seventeenth year, Richard caught the flu. I had trained for years as Slayer, killed whatever had come my way that required killing, and stifled my yawns at the waste of energy needed to wield the stake when all I really needed was a simple spoken command, and the vampire would sprinkle into something that looked like beach sand, pebbled and grainy. Sometimes, cleaning out a nest when I was beyond Richard's eye, I would conserve my energy and break the rules: the spell, three French words, would freeze them where they stood. The stake wasn't even required. I would stand, smiling, and watch the look of outraged surprise echo in every ridged, distorted face before the command executed and they disintegrated.

In fact, I was never the Slayer so much as I was two other things: a very potent witch, in the way only one born of the blood can be, and a thorn in my Watcher's side. I close my eyes now, trying to remember a moment between us of genuine liking. There was nothing. I was polite, as befitted the relationship as written. He was polite, as was expected of an upper-class Englishman in his dealings with his ward. But beyond that, there was nothing from the man who was supposed to watch my back, and from the only thing I'd had resembling a parent in the flesh from the age of eleven.

We knew, of course, that Rupert had been chosen to become a Watcher. He was born to it, and born for it; unlike his father, he showed every attribute a Watcher should have, all tempered with something his father lacked: the ability to care, to love. More and more, Rupert came on the piratical forays his father would arrange, sending me in to clear a lair of demons here, a coterie of vampires there. Richard would take what he found there, all the esoterica, the arcana, the books and amulets and charms. Once he took an eye, left behind in the damp grass when I drove my stake through a particularly pugnacious vampire. The eye was made of something he hadn't seen, and he was right to take it, but I sang under my breath and he heard me. The song was The Twa Corbies, about a pair of ravens stealing body parts from a newly-dead knight. For a moment, there was genuine hate in the air between us.

When Richard came down with flu, he at first denied it. He hated being sick, resented it furiously, refused to admit it. I was to find out why that evening, when a report from the common room at Magdalene made it clear that something was moving through the college, feeding, and must be dispatched.

Richard lay in bed, feverish, coughing. His glasses, for once, were on the night table beside him. I told him not to worry, I would do what needed to be done.

"Take Rupert." He tried to focus on me, and failed. "Take him and let him be a Watcher for once."

He is a Watcher, I thought, a far better one than you could ever be, but I said nothing, merely nodding. Richard muttered something, and we leaned over him, his son and his ward, trying to hear him.

"Don't let the bitch use her filthy sorcery," he said clearly. His eyes were somewhere between us, vague, fevered; I felt Rupert's indrawn breath at my side. "Watch her. I know she uses it. The Council wants it stopped - she's a corrupted excuse for a Slayer. You watch her."

Oh my, Deb! that's amazing. I especially like the "bottled thunder", but it just kept building from there.

eta punctuation because, though I'd like to keep her in the cellar with a computer, food and handy dandy shackles, so she writes Just For Me!, she's not really my Deb.

Thankee, thankee. More to come, obviously....