Chapter Text
The gun barrel was cold, and hard. This was not an egomaniac, and that was bad; egomaniacs gave monologues, and used ridiculous weapons, and actually provided a chance to escape.
“You think a gun to my back will make me give it up."
“No, Mr. Bond.” The gun cocked. “I think it will kill you.”
The funny thing about bullets, he thought as he hit the floor, was that they came out of something so cold, but they were so hot, every time.
——————————
Additional cast:
Konkona Sen Sharma as Mandeep Rao
George MacKay as Radish
Susan Wokoma as Fletcher
Colin Morgan as Peter Moorehead
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I got gloss on my lips, a man on my hips, tighter than my Deréon jeans…
Q swatted at his phone and groaned. From somewhere near the foot of the bed came a gravelly voice.
“Interesting. I would’ve taken you for the Tchaikovsky type.”
Q rolled left, alert at once, and scrabbled for the nightstand drawer. His phone hit the ground along with his glasses and bounced, Beyoncé echoing from under his bed.
“Q, if you hit me with a sex toy, we’re going to have to have problems.”
Q?
The voice slotted into place. Q groped for his glasses and wiggled them one-handed onto his face
“Bond?”
Impossible. But there he sat at the foot of the bed, wheelchair braked, face a mask of smug amusement.
“Good morning, beautiful. I thought you told me once you wore pajamas.”
Q scrubbed his hair out of his face. “It’s hot outside. And it’s a blackjack, not a sex toy.”
“Are you sure about that?"
“I’d offer to hit you and prove it, but then I’d have a corpse on my hands.” Q boosted himself to his feet and grabbed yesterday’s tee shirt from beside the bed as his alarm ceased. “Let me get dressed in peace. Don’t leave the house. I have questions for you."
“Leave. Through this carpet. Very amusing.” Bond struggled for a few moments and finally got turned around. “Put on something more dignified than pants. You’re meeting with M this morning.”
“I’m debugging the Queen’s computer this morning,” Q retorted. “Her Majesty would do me a very large favor if she’d stop using Windows Vista.”
“You think you’re debugging the Queen’s computer this morning,” Bond called over his shoulder as he muscled his way into the hall. “I’ll wait in your kitchen.”
Q waited until he was sure Bond was well down the hallway before shucking the shirt and getting fresh from the bureau. Meeting with M. Hilarious. Bond had been the first of the 00 agents to go missing or take a career-ending injury in the last ten months, but he hadn’t been the last. M didn’t have time for tech meetings. M barely had time for anything but keeping Six afloat. For that matter, Q barely had time for tech meetings. The Queen had told him she understood he had a queue to get through almost three months ago, and if she hadn’t already been beyond gracious with the wait period, he might have upgraded her system just to save himself the work. He’d had three deaths in Q Branch—one stroke and two suicides, and he was trying not to let it hit him too hard—and he’d had to take on the workload.
Six was a mess, not to put too fine a point on it, and neither of them had the time for mucking about.
By the time he got into the kitchen, Bond was staring intently at the cabinet over the electric kettle with Q’s broom in his hand. Q opened his mouth, not entirely sure whether he was going to say don’t or what are you doing, but before he had the chance a huge orange tabby jumped into Bond’s lap and then onto the counter. Bond let out a pained hiss and dropped the broom. Q strode across the room and snapped his fingers.
“Lovelace! Kssst! Off there!”
The tabby let out a disgruntled rowr and jumped to the floor. Q picked up the broom and set it against the counter. Bond raised an eyebrow.
“Lovelace?”
“It’s his name. His sister’s around somewhere. Probably under my desk. She hates strangers.”
“And you’ve named her, what, Stormy Daniels?”
Q offered him a look halfway between confused and disgusted. “Ada. Ada and Lovelace. You know. First computer programmer, all that?”
“Ah.” Bond looked up at the cabinet again. “Thought that’d be a bit odd, you with a cat named after an adult film star.”
Q made the disgusted face again. “No.” He reached over Bond’s head and pulled out the coffee. “And don’t get so excited over the kettle, tea is for my days off these days.” He sighed and reached for the coffee machine. “I suppose you’ll want a cup.”
“Black, if you don’t mind.” Bond raised an eyebrow. “You’ve actually bought a coffee machine?”
Q started coffee and pulled out a pair of travel mugs. “It’s more convenient, mornings. So what happened? Last I’d heard you were in hospital and they didn’t expect you to live.”
“I’ve been out almost four months. Just waiting to finish physical therapy so I can get back into the field.”
Q almost said something about the futility of hope, expecting to get back into field work with a mostly-severed spine, and then decided not to. It was too early in the morning for that kind of argument.
“Of course. And you got in how? I’m reasonably certain you didn’t levitate through a broken window, they’re bulletproof.”
“Picked the lock.”
“I have a security bar under the door.”
“Your security bar is only as good as the locks on your garden and cat door.”
Q’s head swiveled, and he stared at the front door with a sense of betrayal. Sure enough, the bar sat on the floor, the rake from his shed leaning against the wall.
“I was a bit disappointed, to be honest. No fancy security doorbell? No thumbprint lock? Not even a keycard.”
“Please, I work with electronics all day long.” Q picked up the security bar. “You think I’d trust the so-called ‘Internet of things’ with my home security? I haven’t even got a wireless printer.”
Bond let out an amused huff. “But you have got a coffee machine.”
“If you’re complaining, you can always get your drinks elsewhere.”
Bond took the offered cup of coffee while Q added enough sugar to his own to leave sludge on the bottom of the cup. Then he pulled out a third travel cup and poured, adding a generous dollop of cream.
“I don’t eat breakfast at home, so if you’re hoping for more you’d best prepare for disappointment. Be good, you menace,” he said, scruffing Lovelace’s ears. “Anything disemboweled stays on the kitchen floor, do you understand?”
Lovelace let out a happy row that said, very clearly, he didn’t understand a word. Q slipped into a jacket and beanie before pausing and holding the door open.
“After you.”
Bond glanced between his cup and the chair before tucking the former between his thighs and wheeling his way out. Q waited until he was well out of the way before making a show of locking the cat flap and pulling the door shut. Then he picked up his coffee cups.
“I take the Tube,” he said. “Parking’s a nightmare. How did you get here?”
“Taxi. But there’s chair access for the Tube. Good to know for future missions, I suppose.”
Q didn’t comment. Instead he made for his station, slowly picking up speed.
“Train’s coming, we’re going to miss it.”
“Isn’t there another?”
“Not the point.” Q watched Bond disappear into a lift box before hurrying down the escalator and racing through the fare barrier.
He thought he might actually have gotten separated from Bond and ended up with the pair of them on split trains—not a problem, precisely, except he was reasonably sure M would have his head on a pike for abandoning James Bond to a Tube station—but at the last possible moment Bond appeared, wheeling into the train and coming to a stop as a female voice called hold the train! across the platform. Q threw an elbow into the door, and a flush-faced woman with a scarf around her neck darted into the train and offered him a brilliant smile.
“Levi,” she greeted, and offered him a napkin with two pieces of toast wrapped inside. “Good to see you.”
“Victoria.” He handed her the coffee with milk. Bond coughed, and Q nodded at him. “I’ve got a colleague with me today. James, Victoria.” He bit into his toast with genuine appreciation. Victoria smiled and shook her head before sipping her coffee.
“When are you going to replace your toaster?”
“If I replace my toaster, what’s my incentive for bringing you coffee?”
“Mm. Good point.” She smiled awkwardly at Bond. “Nice to meet you, James. Your coworker’s a doll.”
“That’s news to me,” Bond said. Victoria laughed again and nudged Q in the side.
“My brother’s in town this week,” she told him. “Getting in today. You should meet him.”
“Will it get my mother off my back?”
She grinned. “Maybe? Although he’s an excellent cook, he might be offended by your toaster.”
“I have an excellent toaster, it’s at yours. When are you going to break down and get a coffeemaker?”
“If I get a coffeemaker, what’s my incentive for bringing you toast?”
Q smiled back at her, apparently genuine. “I suppose you’ve got me there. Mm. My stop.”
“I’ll bring him this evening,” Victoria said, as he held the door for Bond. “Try to come alone, after Anthony I’m really not up for a double-date. And don’t kill yourself on an electrical short!”
Q’s answering smile was slightly strained. “I’ll try, thanks.”
The walk to Six was brief, the entry—thumbprint, keycard—even briefer. The door swung shut behind him, and there was a rap from outside it. Q rolled his eyes and turned around.
“I know the print pad is low enough for you to reach, they’ve been wheelchair-accessible since I started working here.”
Bond didn’t comment. He simply wheeled inside and made for the lift. Q headed for the subterranean levels.
“You’re wasting your time,” Bond called after him. Q ignored him.
He was met almost instantly at the lower level lift by R, her face twisted into a pinched frown as tight as her bun.
“What are you doing down here?”
Q gave her a puzzled look and strode for the kettle. Coffee was all well and good for waking up, but he needed something more palatable to actually think. “Work. I need the last known location of 002’s kit if it’s been found yet. Especially the one-time pad. If she didn’t destroy it. There haven’t been any updates on Morris, have there?”
R trotted alongside him, all but running to keep up. “Extraction found the pad and the lipstick next to her body. Her gun was gone. M said to send you upstairs right away if you came down here.”
Q poured some water and fished a tea bag out of the cabinet. “M can wait until I’ve got my tea and been briefed on Morris. I’ve got an agent in bloody Lithuania nobody’s heard from in a week, R, and—”
R put her hand on top of the sugar. “He’s not waiting. You need to go upstairs now.”
Q fixed her with a stare. “R, I respect you more than anyone else in this department and you know I put a great deal of faith in your judgment. But speaking as your superior—”
R dipped her keycard out of her blouse, her expression of mixed fear and reverence Q thought might have been more appropriate when addressing an elder god. She held the badge side out to him.
RAO, MANDEEP, it said. Q Branch. Head Of Operations.
“He gave it to me this morning. I don’t know what’s going on, or I’d tell you.” The fear melted into regret. “As your superior, I have to send you upstairs.”
Q stared at the badge. Then his eyes flicked up to her face.
“My keycard still works. I haven’t been sacked.”
The woman he’d called “R” for the last four years shook her head. “I don’t think so, or they’d have had me wipe your computer already. But that’s all I know.”
“You must know,” Q argued. He was good at that, arguing. “They don’t appoint a new head every day of the week. And I’m hardly under military arrest, am I.”
I would’ve taken you for the Tchaikovsky type, he thought, and repressed a shudder. I’m not. Am I?
Rao—he couldn’t bring himself to call her Q, not now, suddenly acutely aware of his namelessness in his own department—shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Really. But I’m under orders to send you upstairs.” She sighed. “And get back to triangulating that station out of Ukraine.”
Q stood for a moment. When he spoke again, he hardly recognized his own voice. “Am I allowed to take some tea to wash down this swill, then?”
Rao took her hand off the sugar. “Quickly, if you please. I don’t mean to sound rude, but—”
“But you answer directly to M, and he can do far worse than a reprimand.” The words felt like they were coming out on some kind of autopilot.
“Yes.”
Q tipped a spoon of sugar into his cup, and followed it with a dollop of cream, intensely aware of the eyes of a few other agents on his back. At last he picked up the cup and took a sip before raising it ever so slightly in Rao’s direction. “Best of luck, then. If they don’t send me right back down, that is.” He paused. “If they’ve given you an optical scan for my computer it won’t work. When I set it up I did it through my glasses.”
“I’ll let them know if I need it.”
Q gave her a brusque nod and headed back for the lift, suddenly aware of just how silent Q Branch was as he departed—no clacking keyboards, no chatter by the kettle or coffee machine, no radio playing softly in the background.
Everyone knew something, he thought, and most likely what they knew was that they knew more than he did, and what more they knew was only that they knew nothing. It was somehow even more frightening than lying directly to M’s face.
Eve was waiting at the top of the subterranean lift. Q couldn’t help but notice the gun in her pocket. Tiny, but in Q’s line of work, it was good to be able to know when a gun was there.
“Let me guess,” he said, as Eve followed him quietly to the upstairs lift. “You don’t know anything either, but you’re here to be sure I don’t run off.”
“Run off? No,” she said. She sounded genuinely surprised. “But if you’d decided you were going to ignore M altogether I was supposed to bring you upstairs.”
“But you do know nothing.”
“I know something,” she said. “But it’s better if it’s through official channels. I’ll need your keycard. You’re getting a new designation,” she said, when he opened his mouth in protest. “M has your new card.”
“And my designation is…?”
“Classified, pending your discussion with M.”
“Don’t suppose you could just demagnetize that one and let me have it back for the cafe on the third floor,” he commented. “Heads get free biscuits.”
The side of Eve’s mouth quirked in a smile. Q relaxed just an iota.
“I don’t think you’ll need this one for free biscuits.”
The lift opened. Eve stepped out and glanced back. Q thought about Bond’s decision to ambush him sleeping and wondered just how panicked he ought to be. He hadn’t done anything to warrant a sacking or a court martial. Recently. He didn’t think.
Bond was already sat in M’s office, discussing something in low tones, when Q stepped in. M raised his eyebrows in Q’s direction.
“Ah. You choose to grace us with your presence at last.”
“Rao sent me.”
“Yes.” M nodded toward one of the chairs in front of the desk. “Sit.”
Q perched on the edge of the chair. They were excellent chairs, the kind he might have been tempted to flop in with a slovenly sigh if he were at home, but he couldn’t help feeling M’s chairs might have some kind of spring-loaded trap inside.
“I’ve been catching up Bond on some of the events while he’s been away,” M said. “I would love to tell you the situation is under control, but quite frankly, it is not. Of nine 00 agents we have two on indefinite and perhaps permanent leave, two missing, one dead, that’s to say nothing of the issues in Q Branch—”
“Two dead,” Q said, and closed his eyes. “R told me this morning. They found 002.”
“Ah.” There was a pause. “And four deaths in Q Branch. To say nothing of standard turnover in the counterintelligence unit.”
“Four?” Perhaps he was under arrest, he thought, as his eyes flew open. “I thought—”
M shook his head. “Deepneau, last night. Not suicide this time, at least, for what cold good news that might be. He went in for a bypass surgery and had a heart attack on the table. Fatal.”
Q sighed. “Well, that’s bloody fantastic.”
“Indeed.” M folded his hands on the desk. “That makes you the seniormost member of Q Branch, in terms of knowledge and operations worked when taken cumulatively.”
“And yet I got in today and immediately found out my assistant was given my role and I seem to have been dismissed from Q Branch.” Q’s fingers tightened around his cup.
“I have gaps to fill,” M said. “In whatever way I can. Rather desperately, I’m afraid.” He sat back in his chair. “So I’ve been scanning internal files for reassignments. Your file came up on several different criteria.”
“Am I being sent to analysis, then?” Christ, he hoped not. Analysis were his least favorite people in the job. Geniuses, everyone said, the best and brightest in their field. Geniuses at being bloody morons, more like, in Q’s opinion.
“No.” M pushed a badge across the desk. “This is yours.”
Q took a look at the front of the badge and tried to push it back. “Absolutely not, M, I’ll be dead in a week. All due respect, I’d be rubbish.”
“I have an operation that needs someone with a technical touch, and neither of my agents with a computer background are available. They’ve both been killed in action, you see.”
Q winced. “Yes, but I don’t have any kind of training for this. I failed the field psychological exam this summer, M, it’s a terrible idea.”
“You failed a simulation exam. I have very little reason to believe you’ll be put in any position that requires aptitude in that area.”
“I’d also fail literally any physical in the world that required me to take my glasses off.”
“And I fail to see why wearing glasses should disqualify you. Q Branch can arrange for stronger frames if you feel yours are inadequate, surely.”
“I haven’t got any training outside Q Branch!”
“I suppose I’ve been called in today to demonstrate how well I can feed myself,” Bond said, and if sarcasm could have been measured in Troy ounces Q would have been crushed to death on the spot.
“Oh, no. No, no. Absolutely not. Forget a week, I think my life expectancy’s just dropped to two days. You’re putting me in the hands of someone who enjoys driving cars off ledges?”
“He’s been a competent agent for years, and there’s a great deal you can learn from him even under the present circumstances.”
“I don’t enjoy it,” Bond protested. “I’m just aware sometimes it’s necessary.”
“And I can’t go abroad because Yom Kippur is tomorrow.”
Bond’s brow furrowed. “Aren’t you an atheist?”
“I changed my mind.”
“When was this?”
“When I realized I need to seek atonement for whatever godless thing I’ve done that caused this. This is because I’ve eaten calamari, isn’t it?”
“It’s because of your range scores. And you’ll be quite happy to know your departure date is the day after tomorrow. So you can make your newfound religious observance unimpeded.” M raised an eyebrow. Q decided to make one last attempt.
“And I haven’t got anyone to look after my cats.”
“Moneypenny can make arrangements.” M pushed the badge back across the desk. “I suggest you pack warmly. You’re going to Russia.”
“Oh, right, let’s just send me to Russia, lovely idea,” Q grumbled. M looked entirely unmoved. “I won’t end up dead, just in a gulag somewhere.”
“Most assuredly not.” M turned back to the paperwork on his desk. “Expect a preliminary briefing this evening.”
Q did his best to look intimidating, which admittedly wasn’t much in a jumper he should have thrown out three years ago. M ignored him. Finally he sighed and swiped the badge off the desk as he stood up and headed for the door.
BOND, JAMES, it said, under a headshot of himself he didn’t remember taking. Special Service Agent.