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Chapter Text

Mallory is dreading it. At the time, it had seemed like a really good plan, admittedly not the best he'd ever come up with but what else are you supposed to do with trained psychopaths and naive technophiles?   

They had reserved two tables on the train for the trip up. Q and Tanner had taken the window seats, Moneypenny and himself seated next to them respectively. Bond had the entire other table to himself and is currently lounging across the double seat that is parallel to M's own.  

"Right," He stares down at the itinerary on the desk in front of him.  It's just like a mission, that's all.  "Before we get there I just need to explain a few house rules." He clasps his hands together, leaning his elbows on the grimy blue of the table.  

Chapter Text

The house is quaint, Bond supposes. It has the grey stones and large, cloud-watching windows of any Scottish, loch-side residence, but is remote enough to avoid this unflattering comparison with equally quaint, lonely, old cottage-houses. A well-kept pebbled driveway and grand, overarching trees add a little character - add a little suggestion that they are not far out of reach of any village, town, or all others manners of civilisation - but they are definitely alone up here, the bitter, relentless northern winds are their only company for miles and miles around.

The house looks nothing like Skyfall - a mere ruin now, although that house had been a ruin long ago - but Bond thinks of Skyfall anyway. It is a passing thought, hardly worth the downward tilt of his lips, but as he squeezes his shoulders in through the narrow cottage corridors behind M's sure, almost satisfied, step, Bond hates this house for a moment, and hates everything that it stands for.

"Pick a room," M says, directing his staff as if they're children, or teenagers incapable of avoiding dispute unless something busies their minds. "Get comfortable."

He says get comfortable in the same manner that anybody else would say, we're going to be here for a while.

Bond chucks his single bag in the first room that doesn't look like a death-trap with its beautiful, landscape views and sunlight-pouring windows. Evidently, the room is the attic-conversion, its impractical, sloping ceiling and single, equally impractical window offering some solace to Bond's nervy paranoia, but he doesn't mind the size - the lack of it - or the somewhat questionable steps that provide the only entrance into the room.

M has assured them that they shouldn't find any trouble up here, but Bond has lived the life of a 00-agent long enough to know what utter bollocks that is.

He may not have his gun, but he isn't taking any chances. (He outfitted Skyfall with traps: he can do the same anywhere). He sweeps the room, checking every corner, nook and cranny, and searching through each piece of fine-oak furniture, and finally tries the window for rust or signs of age. It opens with a key from the mantle-piece - not that a lock would stop anybody from entering - and swings out wide. Air gushes into the room, whipping past Bond's face with the rain and misery of a home long-abandoned, but he perseveres, scanning the surrounding loch and trees.

There seems to be a gap in the roof tiles, just out of reach, and Bond cranes his neck round to locate the cause of the damage - be it wind, rain, animal, or man. From the window, it is difficult to discern, but he catches movement and the sleek, twitchy shape of shadows in his eyes, and makes a note to check from a different angle.

He locks the window; puts the key on the side.

Q's head appears at the hatch leading up into the room.

"This doesn't surprise me, 007," says the Quartermaster, peering around the bedroom from behind the thick, inspecting frames of his glasses. Only the top-half of his body can be described as in the room, and Bond doesn't bother offering his hand to help the techie find his feet on the rickety staircase below. Q wouldn't take it, just as he wouldn't agree to risk life-and-limb ascending the last section of the ladder that he is balancing precariously on.

"James," Bond reminds, allowing himself a smirk at Q's exasperated eye roll. "And what doesn't surprise you, Q? The sheer lack of electrical sockets in here? I believe I spied one, not that it will be of much use to you."

"Yes, thank you, 00 - James. But no, I was referring to your reclusive tendency and your willingness to avoid all communal areas of this house."

"I have good reason," Bond says, uttering it lightly enough to avoid imparting the less socially-acceptable topics onto the discussion. He steps away from the window and tries to make himself comfortable on the sole armchair in the room, aware of the unimpressed gaze and dark, bouncing curls following his movements across the room.

"Yes," Q replies, pushing the edge of his glasses in a ridiculously stereotypical manner. "I cannot admit to being inclined to discovering what M has planned either. I do wish we had some choice in the matter."

"I believe the choice is, play along or don't play at all," Bond says.

Wonderful, the furrow of Q's eyebrows replies.

Bond's smile is a little more sincere this time.

"Anyhow, as for why I'm here," the Quartermaster continues, straightening up slightly. He has to steady himself as the ladder creaks beneath his weight, and for a moment he seems unsure, questioning the logic of whatever has brought him this far up into the house. "Eve and - Bill - are going to attempt a venture for food and other necessities. Is there anything you need?"

Bond doesn't hesitate before deadpanning, "My gun."

At this, Q's I-bid-the-ground-beneath-you-to-swallow-you-up glare makes a reappearance. "I am not a vending machine, 007."

"James," Bond says again, enjoying the banter. Beyond the skylight, the afternoon winds howls on, providing a paradoxical, or perhaps, an appropriate backdrop to their first day in the vacation home. "And do forgive me, Q, for making such an assumption; is Q-branch not designed to outfit their agents with the necessary equipment?"

"Yes, when necessary," Q adds firmly, throwing Bond’s sarcasm back at him.

"Isn't this necessary?"

Q opens his mouth, and then clicks it shut. He glowers, looking somewhat frazzled by the question, as if his brilliant mind cannot compute the code to decipher Bond’s smile.

Bond appreciates the expression for a moment, but eventually takes pity on the Quartermaster's frustration. “No,” he says, just as smoothly, thinking briefly of the bird’s nest constructed somewhere on the roof. “I don’t require anything.”

"Well - good," Q replies, seeming undecided. He blinks at Bond's lazy smile, and then blinks around the barren room as if there is a conversation topic lying around somewhere, waiting for him to find it.

"Thank you, Q," Bond adds, giving the Quartermaster the needed excuse.

Q's frown is thoroughly patronised, but for the slightest of moments, he seems relieved at Bond’s considerate observation – but then the feeling passes, and he ducks back out of the room, footsteps treading carefully back down the stairs.

Bond glances back over to the window and decides that, if he’s going to check the parameters of the house, he might as well ensure that the birds won’t be causing any trouble at any point in the near future.

Or the not-so-near-future, depending on how long M insists that they stay.

Bond doesn’t sigh, but the slouch to his shoulders and the dip in his expression can almost be described as such.

Chapter Text

Supermarkets are a Scottish anomaly, as Eve is dismayed to find out. Tanner takes the wild-goose chase in stride, but Eve, long-since accustomed to the metropolitan labyrinth of London, soon realises that she would prefer the city's polluted smog over the countryside's foggy, northern nothingness any day. M, it seems, has chosen their location well, collating each of his agents' dislikes and then dumping them as far from London as possible given the budget-cuts and post-SPECTRE disarray.

"Do you think we're dealing with smooth or crunchy peanut butter people?" Tanner asks some hours later, enduringly chipper for an MI6 agent whose impending daily excitement now comes in the form of handwritten grocery lists and cross-words cut-out from week old news. Eve tries to appreciate the simpler things in life, but watching the sunrise over the abandoned Scottish moors is not on her bucket-list. The duration of M's scheme is currently unknown to Eve, but she will find out, she is sure, be it through her secretary-means or merely waiting for Bond to blow a fuse.

Bond is not one for sitting idle - especially in the attic room of a house with all of the escape routes of a children's play-pen.

"We should have just ordered online," she says with sighing eyes, leaning her weight a little more into the handle of the trolley as if it is all that prevents her from conceding defeat to the floor.

"Well - yes," Tanner replies, giving the peanut butter jar a little waggle in his hand. "But we'd still be weighing up our co-workers' peanut butter preferences."

He says it so matter-of-factly that Eve just has to blink at him for a second.

"You're a crunchy peanut butter person, aren't you."

Tanner replies with a little laugh. "I'm not going to let that sway this decision, trust me," he says, but he smiles as though the thought has occurred to him. Eve wouldn't be surprised if it had - he may not be an active field agent any more, but there is a reason that he is Chief of Staff.

They are all dangerous people, in their own way.

And now they are sharing a cottage for an unspecified amount of time.

"Well you should," Eve says, swiping the jar from him and tossing it into the trolley. "But for the record, M is most definitely in the 'crunchy' ballpark. Bond probably prefers smooth, but that's a given, isn't it?"

Tanner laughs with the sound of someone wishing they hadn't.

"And you?" he asks breathlessly, trying to redeem himself. Fortunately, the supermarket is just as deserted as every single village they passed trying to locate it, and so there is nobody around to hear the two MI6 agents' inappropriate laughter.

"Can't stand the stuff," Eve says, and she picks up a jar of marmalade in anticipation of his next question. "This isn't how I imagined my life would turn out."

"Can any of us say that we expected things to go this way?" Tanner asks, and though he motions to the trolley and the disorder within, there is a weight in his tone that implies to things far beyond a month's supply of toilet roll and cheese.

Eve sighs.

"I hope M gets what he wants out of this," she says. "I don't like being kept in the dark."

"Who does?" Tanner replies lightly, and with an almost unfathomable spring in his step, he puts the next item into the depths of the trolley.

Marmite.

"We all have to take risks sometimes," he says.