Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He didn’t mean for it to happen. Of course, he didn’t. Who would willingly do something of this nature to themselves? 

There was an explosion. Not altogether a rare occurrence in Q Division whilst experimental technology is being constructed. Usually, such things are minor. Usually, there’s no lasting damage. The technology was experimental and fantastical, something out of a bad sci-fi. It was stupid to even imagine that it could work, let alone to imagine that Ektoplomatin would make a suitable fuel. 

When Q woke up in medical, R and Moneypenny were standing in the room. That wasn’t the first thing he saw. The first thing he saw was the blurred presence of the colour red. And something dark, large and blob-like at the end of his bed. But he couldn’t see, it was all a blur. 

He groaned slightly as he pulled himself into a sitting position. He heard the voices of R and Moneypenny stop talking to each other as they had been previously. And then the sound of Moneypenny’s voice came, seeming just slightly too loud while his vision was still blurred. 

“Q. You’re awake.”

“Evidently so,” he agreed dryly. “How long was I unconscious? What’s my condition?”

“You’re fine. You were only out for an hour,” R answered him. 

There was a small pause. “Can I have my glasses, please,” Q asked. 

“Oh!” He heard Moneypenny exclaim, suggesting perhaps she had forgotten that he was practically blind without them. The cool frames were pressed into his palm, and he cringed as he tried not to dirty the lenses with his fingers while attempting to put them on from the awkward way they’d been handed to him. 

As soon as he could see clearly again, however, his heart jumped to his throat and his eyes widened. He could feel his pulse quicken and he tried to control his breath. R and Moneypenny weren’t acting as if anything was unusual, but from Q’s point of view…

From Q’s point of view, the first thing he saw was a room coated in blood. Bright smears of congealing crimson were smudged over walls, floor, and ceiling. It was only when he’d taken that in that he began to notice other things. Observers almost forgotten, he yelped slightly at the transparent blobby phantom at the foot of the bed, grey like a shadow with white glowing eyes. 

Moneypenny noticed his fear and his glancing, the way he looked around as if he had never seen this place before. Though he hid the full extent of his horror, and Moneypenny saw a slight panic. Alarm. “Have you not been in medical before?” She asked him. He didn’t answer, still glancing around skittishly at his surroundings. He seemed… twitchy. “Do you not like hospitals?” She asked. It was a reasonable query. His current behaviour was obviously bizarre, and it seemed to be related to his surroundings. Some people didn’t like hospitals. It was possible. 

Q didn’t quite hear her. He was distracted by his surroundings. He outright screamed once he noticed what appeared to be a half-skinned deer corpse with a human skull where its head should be, resting in the corner of the room. He was hit with a wave of lightheadedness all of the sudden, and he felt sick. 

Moneypenny was still trying to talk to him, but he was startled when she moved towards him, the movement coincided with a giant cockroach, about the size of a loaf of bread, fluttering in the corner of his vision. “Oh dear,” the insect said, though it was mostly a flittering noise that Q seemed to somehow understand. “That’s a nasty Kamala. Let me help you with that.” 

The insect began to peel the shadow creature from the foot of the bed, and Q jumped and yelped when he realised that this thing, this ‘kamala’ had started to dig its claws into him. He hadn’t noticed until the insect pulled it off him with a sound like velcro, only wet. He cried out in alarm as he scrambled back from the end of the bed where the kamala had been, as the creature in question, now pulled off by the insect, seemed to melt into the floor and disappear. 

Q’s vision darkened and his head felt like it was full of cotton wool. “Ah!” He jumped and cried out as something touched his shoulder. He blinked up at Moneypenny, with her hand on his shoulder. 

“Are you alright?” She asked. But he heard it like he was underwater. 

He fell back on the bed, breath shallow and shaking slightly. 

“What’s wrong? Q? R, get somebody,” Moneypenny said hurriedly. 

Q was pulled into darkness. 

---

He was only unconscious for a few minutes this time, and when he woke up, R had gone (they had a branch to run) and Moneypenny was in a heated discussion with a nurse. 

“None of the tests showed anything wrong with him!”

“Well, something IS wrong!”

“I’m fine,” Q interrupted, ignoring the blood and viscera everywhere, not without difficulty. 

Every now and again the sight would strike home, and he’d panic for a second before going back to ignoring it. He pulled himself into a sitting position again and stood, testing out keeping himself steadily on two feet. 

It seemed to be working, so he headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do,” he said at the protests coming from both women in the room. “Moneypenny, can I speak to you?”

“Um… sure,” said the woman in question. 

Eve went to follow Q out, but she ran into him rather abruptly when he stopped suddenly, facing the door handle. He hesitantly wrapped his hands around the handle, wincing slightly at the silky feeling of the blood that coated it touching his skin. He opened the door quickly and stepped through. 

He tried to be discreet and casual about wiping the blood off on his trouser leg. 

“Do you have some kind of… germ-phobia?” Moneypenny asked him. “Is that what that was about?” 

“Um…” Q said distractedly, trying to ignore the limbless horse carcass writhing with black worms with skull-like faces. “Yes?” He wasn’t 100% sure what Moneypenny had just asked him, but ‘yes’ seemed like the safest bet for a response. 

“Right…” Moneypenny said. “Q, are you-”

“Moneypenny,” Q interrupted in a high-pitched voice, before schooling it back into his ordinary tone. “Eve. Have you noticed anything strange? Around the building.” He glanced around him and his eyes focused quickly on a blood-red ‘RUN’ dripping down the wall behind the woman. 

“Strange how?” She asked, sounding mildly concerned. 

“Ah, bloody? Any… animal… carcasses?” He said quietly, his voice sounding more and more questioning the further he got into his sentence. 

“What?” Moneypenny asked. “No?”

“Right,” Q said. “Just asking. You know. Just in case.” 

“In case of wh-”

“I’ve got to go… back to the Q Branch. Um, work to do. A lot of work,” Q said, backing away from her. And then he jumped slightly with an “Eep!” He’d tripped over a pile of organs. 

He tried not to focus on how confused (perhaps even worried) she looked as he tried to casually play off jumping over and around objects he now was sure she could not see. His smile and shrug at his own odd behaviour did not ease the curve of her frown. 

Making his way back down to the depths of MI6 to reach his division, he was struck with the panic of the realisation that he might possibly have gone insane. What looked like pieces of flesh slid smoothly down the wall and upon looking up (a mistake) Q found them to be from a human head that was nailed to the ceiling. He swallowed back his insistent gag reflex and marched briskly back into Q division. 

Everything was still covered in blood. He watched the minions work, they touched the blood and their fingers came away clean. He brushed his fingers up against the wall and they came away bloodied. If he wasn’t insane… if this was real… he was the only one who could interact with this layer of reality. The only one who could see it, too. The only one who knew it existed. Dead things littered his view of the branch, dead things nobody else could see. 

He made a beeline for his office. As soon as he was in there, he closed the door behind him and began to shut the curtains between the windows that looked out on the branch and the interior of his office. He used a ruler to push what appeared to be a severed human limb off his chair and sat down with an uncomfortable squelch on the bloodied wheelie seat. 

He didn’t bother avoiding what was either veins or a central nervous system (possibly both) as he leant his elbows down on the desk. He felt the blood wetting the fabric of his sleeves, and absently he noted that he wouldn’t have to worry about staining, because nobody else could see it. 

He placed his head in his shaking hands and let out a jagged breath slowly. Sniffling, he squeezed his eyes closed tight as he felt that tightness in his throat and realised he was about to cry. A shuddering breath left him and he started to hyperventilate jerkily as his eyes sprung open and tears fell, mingling with the blood on the desk. 

“Q, you’re ba- oh, sorry.” It was R’s voice. 

“Well, you already knew I wasn’t dead, didn’t you,” Q said. He’d looked up when he’d heard R and they’d seen his tears. 

“I’ll leave you alone,” R offered. 

“No,” Q said. “No, are there any menial simple tasks that I can switch my brain off for?” 

“Well, there’s a car that needs a good wash, but we can have some of the small-fry employees on that job no problem.”

“I’ll do it,” Q said. “It’ll calm me down. Give me five minutes.”

R walked out and Q wiped tears off his face. He still looked like he’d been crying, or was about to cry, but it was good enough. He ignored the smear of blood across his cheek and the blood on his sleeves as he rolled them up past his elbows, the splash of blood on his collar, the blood on his shoes, the bloody footprints he was leaving as he walked, the blood smeared on his trousers… 

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly before he walked out. R was talking to somebody else, but absently pointed at a car beside a bucket and sponge. 

R set a few of the less important minions to work on the car with him, and he noticed, his pulse so fast it felt he might faint, that his sponge was the only one that cleaned the blood off the car’s surface. When the others washed the car, they got the muck off it well enough, but the blood simply stayed. His sponge was stained red and the water in the bucket was turning pink. Nobody mentioned it, so he deduced that his eyes were the only ones that could see it. 

Why did everything have to be covered in blood? His home would be a mess, he’d have to scrub it clean, how many animal carcasses and shadowy apparitions and severed heads would he find there? Oh, god, how was he going to live like this? Was it forever? The rest of his life? Was any of it real, or was he just crazy?

He picked up the bucket of water to move it to the other side of the car. Crazy, crazy, cra-

“I didn’t know they put the Quartermaster to work on things as simple as this,” a voice sounded behind Q, and he jumped slightly. He managed to catch himself before he let out an embarrassing squeak of surprise.  

“007,” he breathed, hand holding the bucket shifting, and hand holding the sponge almost going to his chest, as if to calm his jumpy heart, before he remembered that he didn't want to get his shirt too wet if he could avoid it. 

Q turned to look at the agent, prepared to ask him what he was doing here. But as he did, all he saw was a looming lumpy shadow with bright white eyes, one of those kamala things that the cockroach had dragged out of Q himself, and he managed to muffle his own shriek only slightly. 

He didn’t manage to avoid the instinct to hurl the bucket in his hand at the creature. The water hit it and it screeched shrilly and dissolved. Q stared at the happenings with wide eyes. Once the creature had dissolved, however, its claws snaking out of James Bond as it disappeared into nothingness, Q suddenly became aware that he had just drenched a double-0 in soapy water. 

“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me today, I’m so jumpy, I didn’t mean-”

Bond, however, just sighed. “I didn’t realise I was that scary.” He seemed amused. “That was actually surprisingly refreshing.”

I would hope that having a seemingly-parasitic shadow monster dragged out of you is refreshing, Q thought to himself. 

“I didn’t mean to,” Q apologised again. “There was an explosion earlier and I panicked in medical and I guess my nerves are just frayed.”

“What?” Bond asked. “Are you alright?”

“Of course,” Q said breathily with a strained false smile that was more like a grimace. “Yes, peachy keen. Everything’s tickety-bloody-boo.” 

“Yes, you seem fine,” Bond said sarcastically, and Q glanced down at his watch. 

“Oh, would you look at that! Time for me to go home now. You know, cat to water—FEED, plants to water, all that. Speak to you at a later date, 007.” 

---

He hadn’t been prepared for walking outside and facing the sheer scale of a world that looked like this . There was blood everywhere . The sky was crimson, dead flesh lay everywhere. There was a giant praying mantis (or an approximation of one cobbled together from metal and meat) marching through the street, its legs simply sliding through cars like it was a ghost, but it gave Q quite a knock when it kicked him by mistake. “Sorry,” it said. “I didn’t think you were in Ultrareality.” 

“That’s alright,” he called up at it, and then winced, glancing around to see disapproving scowls and huffs from the few passers-by. He ignored the way they looked at him. They probably thought he was drunk, or crazy. He looked down, somewhat embarrassed. 

The insect must mean that it thought I was in a different reality to it. Like the other people. Is that what this is? I’m caught between realities? Then this blood-soaked world is called ‘Ultrareality’? 

“Like a mighty shark, the giant mantis has evanesced into the distance,” croaked something behind him. He jumped a twirled around to face what seemed to be a pale jaundiced shrunken head, a substantial length of white hair tangled in one of the small trees along the side of the road. Its eye sockets were empty, gaping and dripping with blood. More blood. Like this world didn’t already have enough. 

At least there seemed to be less blood in the streets. A bit smeared on the walls of buildings here and there, some on the footpath, but it was a lot cleaner. 

“Look, whatever you are, could you tell me what’s going on here?” Q asked the shrunken head. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” the head responded.

“That’s a tree, mate,” a cockney-accented man in polar fleece and jeans told Q.

“Yes, and we’re having a private conversation,” Q said snappily and turned back to the head. “This,” he said to the head and gestures at the world around them. 

“This is Ultrareality. Though I sense you are also connected to Pandora.”

“Pandora?” Q queried.

“The Third Reality,” the head explained.

“How many realities are there?” Q asked. 

“There are five,” the head responded. “And Ultrareality.”

“Can you explain them to me?” Q asked. 

By this point, the random man had walked away.

“The First Reality is Primeve, of light, the Second Reality is Ithersta, of life, the Third Reality is Pandora. And then there’s the Fourth Reality, Senersedee, of death, and the Fifth Reality, Apollo, of darkness.”

“So it’s like a scale?” Q asked. 

“I suppose,” the head said, though it sounded somewhat uninterested, as though it was an adult being asked to explain times tables to a six-year-old. 

“And Ultrareality?” Q asked. 

“Oh, it’s… like a connection between the realities. But it’s also… separate. If I had six lines to draw a comb with five prongs, Ultrareality would be the backbone.”

“Where am I now?” Q asked the head desperately. 

“You’re right in the middle of Pandora and Ultra. We don’t usually see humans in limbo. Usually, that’s just cats.”

“Thank you,” Q said, sounding slightly dazed, and walked away. 

He was probably crazy. Maybe he was in shock. He felt hollowed out like he needed to have a good honest emotional breakdown, but he wasn’t quite able to tip himself over the edge. 

He needed to get back home, write all that reality information down before he forgot it, on the off-chance that he’s not crazy and that that could be important information. 

He hurried across the road, but halfway, a sick, cold feeling made him stop dead still as an all-permeating voice rattled through his ears. “You’re new.”

A car horn beeped, and Q was reminded suddenly that he was in the middle of the road. But he felt frozen. He couldn’t move. Things happened very quickly. 

The world flickered around him. Suddenly, it became clear that if he had been connected to Pandora before, as well as Ultrareality, he had just disconnected from Pandora. It lasted only a few seconds though. But in those few seconds, everything of the world that Q recognised fell away and was replaced by a nightmarish wasteland. Everything that he hadn’t recognised, like the blood, and the shrunken head on its tree, and the insects and carcasses and dead things, stayed. The cars, the buildings, the people, they were all like spirits. They were transparent. 

But in the blink of an eye, he was back. The car that had been on his left side was now on his right. It had passed right through him and he hadn’t even felt it. He was unharmed. 

Well, Q thought. That could come in handy.

Chapter Text

Q’s flat was a very different place when he was connected to Ultrareality. Like everywhere else, it was covered in blood and full of dead things. At least there weren’t any giant sentient nightmare bugs. 

The real shock came when a slender black feline known to him as his pet cat Paul brushed up against his legs with a bored “Hello.”

“Gah!” Q jumped back from Paul. 

“ Now what’s wrong?” Paul asked, though it was evident that he didn't know Q could hear him. 

“What’s wrong ? Well, everything is completely saturated in blood and now my cat can talk, Paul. That’s two things. There are more but I’m too stressed to make a list. If I get locked up in a psychiatric facility it’s not your bloody fault but you certainly won’t be fed, will you? So just, be quiet? I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Well that’s not very nice,” Paul said, though sure enough he slunk off into the laundry where nobody would bother him. 

It was clear that Paul did not love Q (or at least that’s what Q seemed to believe) and for some reason that was more stressful than all of the events of today. Or maybe he was projecting. Yes, he was definitely projecting. He stumbled into a chair at his dining room table and rested his head on the table itself. 

He started sobbing before he started crying. He needed to cry, but it took him a while to coax his tears out. The gentle catharsis of being a mess of saline, ugly face contortions and messy noises of patheticism was helping slightly, but he could feel the blood on the table getting all over his face and tears weren’t enough. It was too much. 

It was too much. All this reality confusion. And that’s presuming that he’d not just simply gone absolutely crackers. 

It wasn’t until he woke up in the dark that he realised several things. First, that he had fallen asleep at the table. Second that he was hungry, and he hadn’t eaten last night. Also, as he looked out at the deep red sky like wine, and glanced at the clock, that it was about three in the morning. He didn’t think he’d be getting much sleep anytime soon. And as hungry as he was, the acrid smell of blood in the air made him nauseous every time he thought of eating. 

He also realised that the thing that had woken him up was that voice again. That voice that almost had him hit by a car. If he hadn’t rather quickly phased into full Ultrareality as he apparently did to save himself without even making a conscious decision to do so. 

What had the voice said? When it woke him up, what had the voice said? He couldn’t recall. Suddenly, the voice spoke again. 

“What are you doing here, little human?” The voice asked. 

Q felt a cold presence behind him, the hair on the back of his neck raised and he froze, scared to move even to turn around and look at the source of the voice that muttered in his ear with all the power of something evil in it. 

“I don’t know,” Q whispered back, hesitant to even speak to the voice. 

“You’re so small,” the voice grated. “Are you a child?” 

Q shook his head, squeezing his eyes closed, heart hammering. There was something about the presence behind him, muttering in his ear, that made him feel small and afraid, like a little bird caught in the fist of a giant. 

“Look at me when I’m speaking to you,” the voice said. 

Q inhaled deeply in the dark, refreshing his lungs, and it sounded so loud in the silence of the early morning. He turned his head around slightly. In the corners of his vision he saw a towering spindly figure, looking something like a skeleton with dry black leather stretched over it. 

“Look at me,” the thing insisted. 

Q’s breathing sped up and his body shook with a primal sense of terror as he stood and shifted himself around, looking up at the creature that was speaking to him. 

A bloodied goat skull sat atop the skeletal figure, horns grand and sinew-like residue snaking over its surface like veins. Its teeth were human. 

Q’s mouth went dry, and goosebumps ran up and down his skin as he took a step back from this horrific being that seemed to radiate some kind of horrible power. “What… what are you?” he asked the thing. 

“I am Remor,” the creature growled proudly. “Prince of Darkness.”  

Q said nothing. He was frozen again, staring. 

“I will see you again, tiny human,” Remor said, and Q got the impression that this wasn’t good news for him. 

Remor flickered out of Q’s perception. The Quartermaster blinked. His hands were shaking again and he felt graceless and breakable. 

The only cup he could find not covered in blood was a dainty teacup at the back of his cupboard. Fumbling fingers poured a bit too much of an ethanol-rich amber liquid into said teacup, and he drank that bit too much a bit too quickly. A stupid idea, of course, but he frankly didn’t care right now. 

He scrambled madly through his home, picking up scraps of paper and markers wherever he found them. Thumbtacks and pins got dumped onto the table, and he wasn’t quite sure if he’d hurt himself by carrying them in his bare hands, because he couldn't distinguish between real blood and Ultrareality blood, and his mind felt like it had recently been through a blender. 

He scrawled the names of the different realities and their numbers haphazardly on torn scraps of paper and pinned them to the wall, shoving the thumbtacks into the plaster without any care or concern for the damage they caused. 

He scribbled drawings of the different creatures that he’d seen and, if he knew their names, he wrote those too. He pinned them around the papers about the realities and finally drew a large sketch of Remor, putting that above everything else. He gathered all the dead things from around his house and piled them up next to the wall covered in pinned papers. 

On bits of newspaper, old shopping lists, scraps torn from sketchbooks he hadn’t touched in years, he drew Remor over and over again, fingers getting more and more noncompliant as he continued to drink and continued to try and capture the true horror of the creature he had seen, and continued to fail in that endeavour. 

Pictures of nightmare creatures were scattered everywhere, pinned to the walls and on the table and floor. Q hated this feeling, the feeling of being drunk. He hated the vulnerability. The fog over his mind and the lack of prowess to his movements, and how incredibly stupid it always made him feel. 

He was satisfied, however, that his home thoroughly looked like he was in the throes of a paranoid psychotic break. And really, he probably was . 

Perfect. 

The open plan of his apartment combined kitchen and dining, and placed no door between that and the living room, the only seperation the change from wood to carpet. He leaned against the empty doorframe between the living room and the kitchen/dining room, and listened to the sounds of someone else in the block’s hypnotic music, muffled through the walls. He sat there until he fell unconscious. 

His mobile phone ringing woke him up, his head hurt and he felt exhausted in every way, and he was not yet even fully sober. 

He didn’t want to speak, but he answered the phone anyway. Moneypenny’s voice rung uncomfortably against his eardrums. “Where are you?” she demanded. “I’ve stopped M finding out, but you’re three hours late, Q, and you haven’t filled out the paperwork to take a sick day.”

“Right,” Q said, not feeling very linguistically sophisticated. “Could you do that for me?”

It would be so much simpler if he didn't have to be at work today. 

“Fine,” Moneypenny said. “But this is a serious favour, alright? You’ll owe me one.”

 “Thank you,” Q muttered and pulled himself to his feet. 

His house was a mess. There were drawings everywhere , and he seemed to have ransacked his own drawers and shelves for whatever reason. Possibly in search of pens. 

Of course everything was still soaked in blood, including him. The daytime sky was a burnt orange, the clouds were dark and the sun glowed red and too bright in the sky. 

“Wow, aren’t you taking this well,” said a voice behind Q. He jumped, but quickly realised it was only Paul. “Did you gather up all the hollows and put them in a pile?” 

Q looked to a pile of the nightmare carcass-y dead things in the corner of the room. “I guess so,” he said to Paul, and walked into the living room, sitting down on the couch. “Can I pat you?” 

Paul sighed and looked at Q. After a moment, he relented. “Fine,” the cat muttered, and crawled up onto Q’s lap, curling up and allowing the man to stroke him for comfort. 

In the quiet of his own home, Q thought about yesterday, when he had almost died on the road. He thought about how he had phased into full Ultrareality, avoiding being run over by becoming non-corporeal in Pandora for a split-second. 

He closed his eyes and focused on that feeling, trying, trying, trying, and-- Ah. What had been his living room floor was red mud, and a tree branch now lay where his couch had. Paul looked up at him spoke. “Well what did you do that for?”

That broke Q’s concentration, and he fell back into his Pandora-Ultra limbo. His surroundings were once more the way they had been before. 

He tried, he really tried to make it go the other way. But when he attempted to exist only in Pandora, he got only a flicker of normality before everything snapped back to a blood-soaked hell. 

Closing his eyes, he attempted to will himself to pass out again. Sadly, he soon found himself in an argument with a three-foot shelless, bleeding centipede about privacy and the fact that this was Q’s house and he would appreciate it if he had it to himself (and Paul). 

---

Bond had nothing to do, was bored, was quite fond of the Quartermaster and had noticed that the Quartermaster hadn’t come in to work today. 

This particular combination of things was not spectacular. Reason: they meant that 007 was about to break into Q’s flat to check up on him. 

As Bond entered the flat, he heard shouting from another room. 

“I don’t care what the situation was yesterday , Mr Deadlee, because yesterday I couldn’t see you.” A pause. “No, absolutely not.” Another pause. Bond couldn’t hear a second voice. Who was Q talking to? “Oh, for God’s sake!” Suddenly, there was a smashing noise. 

Abruptly Bond ran to the room the noise was coming from and burst in. It took him only seconds to notice that Q was alone barring the cat curled around his ankle, and appeared to have thrown a bottle of whiskey at a wall. A few more seconds had him taking in the state of the room, little drawings on little scraps of paper everywhere, some thrown about on the table and floor, and some stuck to the wall underneath what appeared to be a rendition of Satan. 

“Q?” Bond called out softly. 

The Quartermaster jumped and turned around, eyes wide and flitting about his surroundings warily. The cat skittered into the corner. Blood was dribbling from his nose and it looked like it had been for a long time, spreading down his front. His hair was messy, his glasses were askew, his face was pale and he was wearing yesterday’s clothing, crumpled. 

“Bond?” Q asked, as if he wasn’t quite sure if 007 was really there or not. 

“Who were you talking to?” Bond asked, confused and, though he wouldn't admit it, worried. 

“Oh, you know,” Q said, in a ridiculous false-casual tone. “A spider.”

“A… spider,” Bond repeated dubiously. 

“Yes,” Q said, though he almost sounded as if he were trying to convince himself, not Bond. “I found… a spider… on the… wall?” 

They stared at each other in silence for a few moments, and then Bond spoke again. “Q, are you feeling alright?” 

“What? Me? Yes, I’m fine. 100%. I’m also feeling very sane today, thank you.”  

The way Q usually moved was clipped and even. Like a fountain stream, a straight sheet of water flowing down neatly. The way he was moving now was like the languid, pooling drip of syrup. 

“How much have you had to drink?” Bond asked. 

“A bit,” Q answered. “But that was hours ago. Look, I need to--” Q seemed to trip over his own feet, muttering a quiet “I knew I shouldn’t have left that there” (Bond could see nothing on the floor). “I need to, uh, grab these.” 

Q knelt down and started gathering up the little drawings that were scattered everywhere, clutching them to his chest as if they meant the world to him. 

“Q,” Bond said. “Q, you’re getting blood on them.”

“You can see it too?” Q breathed, looking up at Bond as if seeing him for the first time. 

“What?” Bond asked. “Yes, Q. You’re having a nosebleed.”

“Oh!” Q said, and laughed, sounding slightly deranged. “Of course, yes.” The Quartermaster picked up a washcloth of dubious hygiene and began to dab at the wrong side of his nose. 

“Q,” Bond said, and Q looked up. “Other side.”

“Oh, right, yes, naturally,” Q muttered, and wiped at the other side, cleaning the blood mostly off his face, but not his neck or his shirt. “Is that better?” He asked, turning to Bond. 

“No, Q,” Bond said. “Maybe you should look in the mirror. I’m afraid your shirt is ruined.” Couldn’t Q see the blood?

“Oh, that’s alright,” Q said. “It was already covered in blood.”

“…From the nosebleed,” Bond said. 

“…Yes,” Q agreed peculiarly. “From the nosebleed . Of course.” 

Q went back to gathering up the drawings, dropping them in a pile on the desk. 

“You’re definitely feeling alright, then?” Bond asked, raising his eyebrows. “Moneypenny said you were sick.”

“Do I look like I’m doing spectacularly, Bond?” Q said, though he seemed to be distracted, glancing in annoyance at the wall he seemed to have thrown the bottle at. 

Bond noticed Q ‘discreetly’ stick his tongue out at the wall and frowned. 

“Maybe I should stay here,” Bond said. “Keep an eye on you.”

“He’s going to think you’re insane after about five minutes,” Paul chuckled, though Bond heard nothing. 

“Nobody asked your fucking opinion, Paul,” Q snapped suddenly, angrily. 

“Who are you talking to?” Bond asked, and Q gestured in exasperation to the cat in the corner. 

“Look, Bond, I know this doesn’t look… great…” Q trailed off. 

“Do you have an explanation for your behaviour, Q?” Bond asked. “Because you’re right in thinking that it doesn't exactly look ‘great’. Have you taken anything?” 

“What?” Q asked. “No, no I haven’t. I just… I’m not… psychologically… stable… today.”

“That much,” Bond said flatly, “is evident.”

To the agent’s surprise, Q abruptly started crying. The Quartermaster looked equally surprised at his own sudden tears, apologising through them as if he was being a bother by crying. “Sorry. I’m sorry, sorry.”

“Did something… happen?” Bond asked. 

“I’m going mad,” Q sobbed hysterically. “I’m going mad.”

Q fell to the floor and continued crying. Bond winced. He wasn’t a good sympathiser. Well, he’d walked right into this, hadn’t he. He knelt down at patted Q awkwardly on the shoulder. 

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Bond said. 

“It’s not fine , 007. It’s very not fine. Do you want to know just how not fine it is?” 

“Q, maybe you should rest. Where’s the bedroom?” Bond asked quickly. 

“I don’t know where my blood is. Where is my blood?” Q asked. 

“On your shirt?” Bond asked. 

“Yes, but where on my shirt?” Q asked. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you can see it, can’t you?” Bond asked, trying to sound reassuring. 

“ No ,” Q said. “I can see you . I can’t tell where the blood is. I can't tell .” 

“I don’t understand,” Bond said. 

“My hand,” Q said, holding it up. “It’s covered in blood, yes?”

“No,” Bond said. 

“Oh well. Couldn’t tell,” Q said. 

“I really think you should lie down, Quartermaster.” 

---

When Q was asleep, Bond left. He felt… awkward. Hanging around in the Quartermaster’s home. It didn’t feel correct. Or professional. Not that he had necessarily visited in the first place for professional reasons. Just that he’d rather been caught off guard by what he’d found. 

He hoped Q was going to be alright.

Chapter Text

He slept through until the next morning. There were too many body parts in his fridge for him to feel comfortable eating anything from there. He did try: he cracked an egg. He found a red chicken fetus (skin transparent, veins visible and very dead) inside. He ate biscuits for breakfast. 

If he hadn’t otherwise eaten in over 24 hours and he was still hungry that didn’t matter. He could deal with that later. Top priority was to go to work and act normal. 

He could do this. He just had to prove his sanity. He’d just have to go to work and prove his sanity, every day, for the rest of his life… 

God. 

Ok. It would be ok. It would be fine . 

He walked outside and hurriedly scurried down the sidewalk like he always did, ignoring the mustard sky and the red sun as he went. He tripped over once , on a dead fox. He wasn’t sure which reality it was in, but nobody saw him, so it was fine. And he felt godawful, but he needed to try his best. 

He walked into work and began checking up on the early arrivals, looking over their work and giving feedback, simply ignoring all the gore that nobody else could see. 

He also ignored, as he moved on to sorting through paperwork, the fact that 007, on call and this in the building but otherwise with nothing to do, was haunting Q Branch and keeping a very close eye on Q himself. 

It was a fairly uneventful day. He got home, spoke briefly to Paul before he fed him, he went and got take-out for dinner. 

Things were fairly uneventful, even in MI6, as the days passed and Q acted normal at work, cried at home, and everything began to be normal again. 

Of course they weren’t, not really. Remor visited him every night. Threatened him. Politely suggested a killing spree. Politeness became insistence, but Q would simply pretend he wasn’t listening. And Remor would leave, whispering threats, but so far Q was still alive and so was everyone else. 

---

It was about a week later when Bond, who had been following Q around in silence all this time, approached the Quartermaster. 

“Your nose is bleeding,” he pointed out. 

Q, who had in the past week become consistently coated in Ultrareality blood, couldn’t see it, and he’d never really been able to feel his nosebleeds. 

“Thanks,” Q said, and grabbed a tissue, pressing it to his nose. 

When he pulled it away it looked bloody, but it was impossible to distinguish between his own blood and the blood of the Ultrareality which nobody else could see. 

He pressed the tissue back to his nose, and looked up to see Bond frowning. 

“You really can’t see it, can you?” Bond asked.

“What?” Q squeaked. He’d been doing so well at being sane . If only Bond hadn’t broken into his house that one time and witnessed his stress and alcohol induced panic. 

“Blood,” Bond clarified. “I know you can see me, so why can’t you see blood. I can’t think of anything that would stop you seeing just blood.”

“How did you know?” Q asked. 

“Because I lied,” Bond said. “Your nose isn’t bleeding.”

Q dropped the tissue as if it had burned him.

“You want to explain?” Bond pressed.

“No. No I will not. And if you tell anyone… I’ll…”

Bond raised an eyebrow. He had a smug look on his face as if he had been threatened by a puppy. Suddenly, Q wished he had some kind of ability he could use to get at Bond somehow. Shock him. Teach him a lesson. 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Bond assured. “I don’t see why anyone has to know. It’s just a very… strange secret.” 

Q was about to respond when he felt the chilling presence of Remor behind him. “I could give you gifts, small human,” Remor growled. 

Q didn’t answer. He knew Bond had seen his expression change. 

“I’ve got to go,” Q said to Bond, running to his office and avoiding looking at the Prince of Darkness. 

As soon as he’d closed the door behind himself, Remor appeared inside the room. 

“Please,” Q said, eyes closed. “What do you want?” 

“I want to see blood,” Remor said. At Q’s glance around, Remor continued. “You know what I want.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone for you,” Q said. 

“A pity. That… ‘Bond’ man. You wish you could beat him in a duel, do you not?” 

“No… no I don’t. Not really . Sometimes… I just want to be his equal.” Q had closed his eyes again, tightly. He knew if he opened them, he’d freeze in place, not able to speak. 

“And if you do what I want,” Remor said, and Q flinched, “then I could give you gifts.” 

Q didn’t speak. 

Remor went on. “There are things in Apollo. There is magic there. If you do what I want, I can give you magic. Nothing would fell you. No battle you fought would be lost by you.” His voice was like gravel, but it was gentle. There was something soothing, hypnotic about it which grabbed Q and made him want to agree. 

He wouldn’t agree. He wouldn’t do what Remor wanted. 

“I’m not interested in your gifts, my lord,” Q spat in a foolish moment of confidence.

The Prince of Darkness growled in frustration, and he disappeared in a red flash, dozens of what looked like human hearts raining from the ceiling for that second that he disappeared. And when he was gone, Q’s office was even bloodier, and Q felt his heart in his throat.

Remor’s anger had ignited a pure terror in Q, throwing him halfway into shock. He shook himself quietly. 

Without warning, R burst into his office, looking concerned. “Are you alright, Quartermaster?” They asked. 

“What?” Q said, confused. And then he realised that the silence after Remor’s departure had seemed too substantial. It had rung . “Did I scream?” Q asked.

“Yes,” R said. “You’re alright?”

“I’m fine,” Q said. “I tripped over. It startled me.” 

“Alright,” said R, and warily left. R’s foot went straight through one of the hearts as they walked, while Q’s feet knocked them and made them skid wetly across the floor as he walked.

If only there was somebody who understood. If only there was somebody who shared this perception. But there wasn’t. Even the shrunken head, which he’d since learned to be a Lucifern, said that it didn’t think there was another human in the world like him. 

And he felt so terribly alone. 

Walking home alone at dusk, he contemplates loneliness. It’s entirely possible that he will live the rest of his life (however long that may be) having to pretend that he was normal. Experiencing a unique perception of the world that nobody would ever understand. That's a lonely existence. 

“Hey, you.” The sun had since set and a stranger approached Q in his alleyway shortcut. “Turn out your pockets.”

---

He knocked frantically, breathing disordered and vision slightly blurred in panic. Bond answered the door with a gun, but he lowered it when he saw who it was. 

“Bond,” Q said. “Let me in.”

“You’re covered in blood,” Bond said. 

“A man attacked me,” Q explained. “I got scared, and his body just… broke.” 

Ushering Q inside, Bond asked a question. “What do you mean?”

“I felt terrified,” Q said. “Really, really scared. Like it was rolling through me in waves.”

Bond nodded. 

“He came at me with a knife,” Q said. “So I grabbed his wrist. And I twisted it. And he dropped the knife. But then he knocked me down.”

“What happened,” Bond asked urgently, guiding Q to sit down. 

“His flesh split,” Q said. “All over, in neat lines. Like it was being sliced from the inside out. I felt scared, he knocked me down, and the fear just… burst. And so did he.”

“Q, you’re scared. What really happened?” Bond asked. 

“I gave you power, and you used it for death, just like I wanted, little human,” Remor growled softly in Q’s ear from behind. 

“No!” Q shouted suddenly. 

“Q? Q, tell me what happened,” Bond said. 

“The power doesn’t work on its own, Q. It needs imagination, and I must say, that was a very creative death you gave that man. Curling flesh, sliced from the inside out by knives of energy. Beautiful,” Remor whispered. 

“Fuck off!” Q said loudly, standing and marching over to the corner of the room. 

“Q, you’re getting blood on the walls,” Bond said. 

Q barked in bitter laughter. “There’s already blood on the walls, 007! There’s always been blood on these walls, on every wall, blood, blood blood. Everywhere. It bleeds from every surface, every object in the world. It drips from the ceiling, from severed heads on pikes and peeled carcases and delicate rotting fetuses splayed over the fucking lino, Bond, but nobody else can see it. I’m sick of it, I’m sick of all the blood, Bond. Why can nobody else see it?” He sobbed loudly. 

Bond blinked. “Q, you need to lie down.”

“I don’t need a nap, Bond, this isn’t fucking preschool. Give me your computer,” Q said. 

“What?”

“Your computer, Bond. I’m going to pull up the CCTV and show you what happened.”

“No, talk to me about the blood,” Bond insisted. “You see blood that nobody else can. That’s why you can’t tell when you’re bleeding, right? You assume it’s not real.”

“Your computer. Now,” Q said. 

“First tell me about the blood,” Bond said. 

“I don’t know much,” Q said. “It’s from the ultrareality. I don’t know how it got there or why. I don’t know whose it is or why it's there. But Bond, I’m not crazy. This reality is Pandora, and there are five realities. Even Remor said. Five realities. There’s blood and gore in the sixth one, that isn’t a proper reality, it’s a portal between them. And I’m stuck in it, and there’s blood. Was that good enough for you? Is that what you wanted to bloody hear? Laptop. Now.” 

As Bond retrieved his laptop, he sent a quick text to M. He passed the computer to Q, who opened it and quickly began typing. 

“Here,” Q said after about twenty minutes of silent typing, all the while Bond watching him warily. 

The younger man passed over the laptop and Bond watched it. A man approached Q, and shortly pulled out a knife. Q managed to disarm him, but then the man kicked Q down. As the man advanced on a floored Q, Q reached for the knife which lay on the ground a while away. 

Suddenly, the recording was overtaken by static. “No,” Q shouted in frustration, making a grab for the computer, but Bond pulled it out of reach and continued to watch. 

The static persisted, and when it stopped, Q was standing over a horrifically mutilated corpse, covered in blood and knife in hand. 

“Christ,” he mumbled, and turned to address Q. 

But the younger man had gone. 

---

Bond was turning over his choices in his mind. It was all about Q. At the end of the night, Bond hadn’t ratted Q out on the murder. But he had no idea if that was a mistake or the right thing to do. 

It was confusing because aside from slight oddities around the blood, at work Q behaved thoroughly sane. At least if he wasn’t, he seemed to regret that. But Q was totally self-aware: that was the point of this observation. And yet the two times Q had run into Bond off work, Q had been totally insane. 

It was almost as though there were two of them, but why would both of them be confused about blood? There was only one Q, but there were clearly some suspicious things going on. Q could be crazy, but he seemed to… to know that already. Q could be sane, and there could be something going on. Something real. 

But according to all Q had said, that something involved a lot of blood that wasn’t really there, and that seemed like the exact sort of hallucination a man who’d just brutally stabbed a stranger in an alleyway and was convinced it had happened somehow of its own accord would have. 

Whatever the right thing to do was, he came in to work like usual. Well, no, it wasn’t usual . But it was becoming usual, because he quite enjoyed hanging around the Quartermaster. 

It was very early in the morning, and the Q-branch was relatively empty. There was blood on the floor, though, and three dead bodies. R stood in the corner, shaking a little.

“What happened?” Bond asked. 

“They broke in or something? They weren’t equipped for it. We expect they were hired but that the man behind it didn’t tell them what they’d be walking into. So, uh, of course they got killed pretty quickly. It’s a shock they made it this far. We don’t even know what they were after,” R said. 

“Where’s Q,” Bond asked instantly after R had finished. 

“Oh, he’s around here somewhere. That’s why I’m so shaken up, though. It’s like he hasn’t even noticed. He doesn’t care or something? He stepped over one of them just like… like it was dog shit or something, and he got his shoe in the blood and he just sort of wiped it off on the ground and kept going.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he did,” Bond said. He looked around and spotted the boffin at one of the workbenches closer to the end he kept his office. 

There was a slight red footprint trail leading in his direction, and he was humming quietly at his desk. When Bond approached him and cleared his throat, he startled. 

“Quite the scenery for morning tea, I must say,” Bond said. 

“What?” Q asked, and glanced around as if looking for anything out of the ordinary. He seemed bothered slightly when he looked around the room, but he also didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. Until a troupe of men in white trade overalls started hefting the bodies on the floor into big black bags. “Oh!” he said then. “Oh, God.” Horror seemed to dawn freshly on his face. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“About last night…” Bond began. 

“Oh, Jesus. Um… self-defence, and I… I was in shock and my mind… sort of…”

“Look, I hate to ask you this,” Bond interrupted. “But is there something that blocks you from seeing stuff like this?” he gestured to the bodies. “Some sort of trauma or something, and maybe your mind just blocks out things that remind you, and—”

“God. Um. That’s one way of looking at it. I can’t… see gore? I guess?”

“And does that fact about you have anything to do with the fact you couldn’t remember killing the man who tried to stab you?” Bond asked. 

“Yeah. In a way. But I know… I know that I did. I’m not crazy, please don’t tell them I’m crazy, I’m…” his eyes were wet suddenly, and he didn’t know what to say. 

Suddenly, there was a scream from across the room. “I HAD TO, I HAD TO LET THEM IN. IT WAS THAT THING, IT MADE ME.”

Q heard Remor chuckle behind him, but the being didn’t appear. 

The screaming Q-worker was being restrained by security. Tim Brown, who Q vaguely knew. “REMOR, REMOR, REMOR!” Brown yelled, and his wild eyes looked at Q. “HE KNOWS.”

“What do you know?” Bond asked. Had he gotten this wrong, was Q volatile? What was happening?

“I know Remor.”

“Who’s Remor?”

“The Devil.”