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“Good afternoon, 007.”
Bond nodded to the Q-Branch member who had greeted him, but didn’t break stride on his way to Q’s office. He had a plane to be on in two hours bound for Côte d'Ivoire, and Q owed him a mobile phone that, if Bond understood the technobabble during the past three months of its design, could fire four small proectiles with the firepower of a missile, and receive a Wi-Fi signal a mile underwater.
The friendly hacker fell into step with him, and Bond glanced at her with passing inquiry, the way one might dismiss an insect that buzzed past one’s ear. Bond’s first instinct was that she would try to flirt with him. She was attractive in an intelligent way, all attentive eyes and a confident walk. On any other day Bond might be persuaded to be interested, but the phone-bazooka waiting for him five feet away currently held more sex appeal.
He opened his mouth, but she beat him to it. “My name is Candice Bagley, and I’ll be acting as your quartermaster for this mission.”
Bond stopped so abruptly that Miss Bagley had to retrace her steps to stand beside him again. “I beg your pardon?”
“Q is scheduled for surgery later this evening. Since this mission will require instructions to be given in real time, I’m temporarily filling his position.” Misinterpreting the look on Bond’s face, Miss Bagley’s features took on a sharp frown. “I can assure you, 007, I am perfectly qualified.” Her crisp tone dared Bond to contradict her.
“No, it’s not—I’m sure you are, Miss Bagley.” Charming Smile #8 was employed to underscore the sentiment. When Miss Bagley continued to look unimpressed, Bond grew an inch of respect for her. “This is just the first time I’ve heard this information. Q never told me.”
Miss Bagley raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see why he would,” she said, and Bond’s new affection for her was roundly squashed. “Something about the extraction of a tumor – benign,” she hastened to assure him. “No more than an overnight stay in Barts.” She reached into the pocket of her lab coat (something Q refused to be caught dead in), and pulled out Bond’s new phone. “Now, this device—”
Bond absorbed the information automatically, despite the fact that his attention had long since traveled elsewhere. Technically Bond knew Q’s replacement (R, his mind supplied with a surprising amount of scorn) had a point; there really was no reason for the Quartermaster to go around telling his agents, or anyone, about his health issues. Still betrayal settled heavily in Bond’s stomach, and refused to be moved by logic.
In his peripheral vision, Bond saw Moneypenny enter the room, looking resplendent in a smart olive dress and matching jacket. Whatever she was looking for, it became obvious by the disapproval on her face that she didn’t find it. Her wandering eyes caught Bond’s, and she started in his direction. Bond made no pretense of listening to R now; watching Moneypenny easily weave around scattered techies, desks, and prototype equipment (including what looked to be a canon in the middle of the floor) in stilettos was a much more pleasurable view.
“Bond, Candice, have either of you seen Q?”
“I… thought he was in surgery,” Bond said slowly. He resisted the urge to shoot R an accusing look, as if she’d lied to him.
“He’s scheduled for surgery,” Moneypenny corrected. “He’s supposed to be in Barts now for pre-op, but we’ve just been informed he never showed. I thought he might have chosen to stay here, workaholic that he is, but clearly…”
“No, ma’am, I’ve been here all day,” R replied. “I’d have seen him.”
“I’ll find him.” Bond plucked the phone out of R’s hands and walked away without another word to either of them.
“Bond, you have a plane to be on before five!” R called at his retreating figure.
He gave a lackluster wave without looking back. “I said I’ll find him.”
Only one other person was in the used records shop besides the elderly, portly man behind the counter. He didn’t blink an eye at Bond’s decidedly modern suit in the midst of age-worn jackets and vinyl moons on the wall. In the back of the store, the lone customer was pretending to flip through a selection of jazz records while his real attention remained focused on the mobile in his hand. When he glanced up at the chime of the bell, Bond’s met his widening brown eyes and communicated very clearly what would happen if Q tried to run.
“Unless the shopkeeper has certain hidden talents,” Bond said, sidling up to Q and blocking his path to the door, “I think you’re in the wrong place.”
“Don’t you have a plane to be on?” Q hissed. “How did you even find me?”
“Please. You’d live at MI6 if you could. I knew wherever you were holed up, you’d be keeping tabs on Q-Branch somehow. So I requested one of your underlings to search for any new signals lurking in the mainframe, and had them track it.”
Q shot Bond a dirty look that said he knew very well what Bond’s idea of a ‘request’ was. “Who was it?”
Already envisioning the crippling damage Q would unleash upon the hapless technician, Bond placed his hand on Q’s arm and began to steer him towards the exit. “Be nice. They acted more professionally than you are. By the way, are there any other debilitating health threats I should know about? Only I’d like to know who to address when I pick up my equipment, instead of asking random Q-Branch members if they’re my quartermaster for the day.”
“I handpicked Bagley myself. She’s—“
“Perfectly qualified, so I heard. Answer my question.”
“It’s not cancerous.” Q tore his arm from Bond’s grip, and began a brisk walk in the opposite direction of MI6 and the hospital. Bond shrugged, and followed, only a little surprised at how he didn’t have to slow his pace to match Q’s long strides. “I have neurofibromatosis.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Do me a favor and pretend I’m not a doctor,” Bond requested flatly. Q huffed.
“It’s a nerve disorder. One of my parents must have been carriers, but considering they were blown up before I was three, I was never told. It means certain chromosomes that are meant to suppress tumors are mutated, and instead causes multiple occurrences of said tumors in my upper body.” Q tilted his head in sudden thought, and chuckled, adding, “You saw the signs of it before I did.”
“I did?”
“’You still have spots’,” Q quoted in an over-the-top imitation of Bond’s accent. He ducked when Bond tried to cuff him on the head. “I have close to a dozen of them across my body, and some unnatural freckle placements. That’s a symptom.”
“I still fail to see the problem. R said you’d be out of the hospital within twenty-four hours.”
Q stared at him. “R?”
“Well, I’m not about to call her Q.”
At that, Q forgot his usual countenance of cool superiority, and actually grinned with surprise and flattery. It wasn’t an expression Bond had ever seen on Q before, and he forgot their conversation for a moment in favor of drinking in the sight. Too quickly Q’s face fell again, and he stared ahead of them.
“The tumors are in my hands, Bond,” he said, so quietly that Bond only caught half of the sentence. Before he could get Q to repeat it, the quartermaster was gesturing, and his voice grew a little higher. “They’re clustered in the nerves of my hands. Someone is going to knock me out and cut open my hands. In any other situation this would be considered a form of torture!”
“Q—” Bond didn’t like the genuine hysteria beginning to creep into Q’s words as they spilled out of him in a stream of anxiety.
“And not even MI6 is doing it, because it’s a specialized surgery! No! I have to go to the hospital for the rest of London, to doctors who have no bloody idea how important my hands are, and they are going to have to remove part the nerve itself to get to the tumor! What if I lose dexterity in my hands, or sensation, or, hell, it might not even work! I may have to have multiple surgeries after this, give them another chance to ruin things beyond repair!”
“Q!” Reaching out, Bond stopped Q’s frenetic speech, and shook him a little. “You’re forgetting to breathe.”
The younger man glared at Bond, but obediently sucked in a shaky breath, and continued as if Bond hadn’t interrupted. “So no, Bond. I am not in the hospital right now, and I will never be in the hospital. I am perfectly within my rights to deny surgical intervention.”
“You’re also a complete idiot to do so.” They’d stopped in the middle of the Millennium Bridge, and Bond steered them closer to the side, away from the cluster of foot traffic. Q was staring at his hands as if he expected them to fall off any second.
“They’re tumors, Q,” Bond said. He forced Q to return his gaze to him. There were speckles on his irises that Bond had never noticed before. “Tumors continue to grow until they’re dealt with. You really think you can type with a cyst the size of a marble growing out of your finger?”
Q shook his head. “You don’t understand. My hands are my life. I panic when I so much as cut them.” Seeing that the agent still wasn’t following, Q sighed, and gripped Bond’s arms.
“Bond, if someone cut off your arms, you’d kill them with your legs.” Q’s touch moved to Bond’s temple. “If someone blinded you, you’d track them by hearing alone.” The fingers traced along the cut of Bond’s shoulders, and the planes of his chest, and fell away. “Your entire body is a weapon; if one part fails, you can keep going.”
Now Q raised his own hands again, so that Bond could see them. They were gloved, no doubt to hide the signs of Q’s tumors. “These are the only weapons I have besides my brain,” he said, “and what good is knowledge of every code in existence if I stop being able to type them? My mind can follow you on a mission with lightning speed, but if my hands can’t keep up on the keyboard, you’re dead. Without my hands, I’m useless, and I refuse to let that happen.” There was a genuine fear there, hidden under stubbornness and pride, and it shook Bond with how much he identified with it. Again Q’s hands dropped to his sides, and he turned his head away.
“I refuse,” he repeated, subdued.
“Idiot.” Without stopping to think, Bond took hold of Q’s hands. “If your hands fell off one day, you’d drive your minions into the ground while using them as surrogate limbs.” He spread out Q’s fingers against his palms. “You’d perfect voice recognition technology overnight. You’d probably even find a way to build yourself robotic replacements, with a different weapon built into each knuckle.”
He laced their digits together, and Q wasn’t breathing again. Bond resolved to mention that nasty trait later, but instead he stepped closer, so that their hands were only a breath away from touching either of their chests. Bond spoke clearly, needing Q to understand.
“You are not just your hands, Q. You’re not just anything.”
Q’s mouth was open, though he didn’t seem to be aware of it. It was a handsome mouth, small and sharply formed. Without warning Bond felt a compulsion to touch that mouth in some way, perhaps with his thumb or, better yet, his lips. He wondered where Q’s abnormal freckle placements were. He wondered why Q hadn’t pulled his hands away yet.
A group of teenagers passed them, and one laughed at a joke. The shrill, echoing sound cut through the moment like a cold knife, and Bond and Q nearly jumped away from each other at once. Bond coughed, and Q found the buttons of his coat in sudden, dire need of adjustment.
“If it makes you feel better,” Bond added with forced levity, “If they fuck up your mobility, I’ll let you decide how I kill them.”
Q smirked. “Do I get to watch?”
“I’ll give you a front row seat,” Bond promised. He nearly offered his hand again, and caught himself. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride to the hospital.”
It was hard not to grin at the familiar, strict look Q shot him. “No, you need to be at the airport.”
“It can wait.”
Q returned to consciousness slowly. His tongue felt heavy and coated with fuzz, and without his glasses the world came back to him in a soft blur. He felt chilly in his hospital gown, and automatically tried to pull the blankets up higher. When his hand twitched in pain following the movement, Q remembered the surgery, and visibly swallowed in an attempt to stave off his panic.
“Easy. They said the anesthesia would be slow to wear off.”
Were delusions a side effect as well? Q didn’t remember reading anything about that, but that must be what it was, for him to be hearing James Bond so clearly. The man could’ve been at his bedside.
“You want some water?” A cup with a bright blue straw invaded Q’s vision, and he blinked. It bobbed cheerfully in front of him for a few seconds, and Q instead whispered for his glasses. They were settled on his face gently, and Q recognized Bond’s cufflinks.
“You are supposed to be in Côte d'Ivoire right now,” he muttered accusingly before accepting the water. “It must be night already.”
“A little after eight,” Bond clarified. Q turned his head to see the agent in the same suit as earlier, and somehow managing to make the hard hospital chair seem comfortable. His legs were spread out carelessly wide, and in his muggy state Q forgot to pretend he wasn’t looking. A bouquet of gaily colored carnations sat on the side table to Bond’s left, and he pointed to them when he saw Q staring. “Compliments of MI6, for being a good boy and taking your medicine.”
“Fuck you.” Q smiled when he heard Bond laugh, and remembered he was supposed to be cross. “The mission?”
“Flight delays.” Bond shrugged. “An entirely coincidental problem outside my control. Moneypenny had me deliver these on my way to the airport for the new flight; I had a few minutes to spare, decided to see if you woke up.”
“How thoughtful.” Before Q could say more, Bond’s mobile buzzed. Q was too out of it to catch the guilty expression on Bond’s face, and he was standing before he’d answered the phone. “Hello M. Yes. Yes, I’m at the airport right now, don’t worry about it – I have to go,” he whispered to Q, edging for the door. “Try not to insult everybody you see, and get some rest. The lovely nurse assigned to you said you’d be having nerve grafts put in place soon, so you should be—yes, M, I’m on the plane, yes, have to turn my phone off now…”
Bond nearly crashed into the lovely nurse in question on his way out the door; her brush with a concussion was forgiven by Charming Smile #8, and Bond was gone.
“Hello, Mister Whittingham,” she said, using the fake name MI6 had provided Q with. “How are you feeling?”
“Decidedly slow,” Q muttered – not petulantly, mind. He was above such things.
“Well, you must be doing better after your boyfriend visited.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” came the automatic correction.
The nurse looked confused. “Really? Are you related?”
“No, he’s just someone I work with.”
“That’s odd. He asked Marcie what flowers he should buy you and everything.”
Q’s brow furrowed, and he said the only intelligent thing he could think of. “Huh?”
“While you were in surgery,” the nurse explained while writing something on his chart. “Marcie said lilies and carnations were the most popular for get well soon messages, and sure enough, he came back twenty minutes later with this.” She smiled at the bouquet, which was a tasteful display of yellows, purples and reds that Q knew for sure Bond didn’t think of on his own. “We told him to avoid red and white if you were just a friend, but when he came back with it anyway…”
“You mean… he was here the whole time.”
“Aside from when he bought the flowers, yes. Waited in the main room for over three hours, flirting with the staff while you were in surgery, but the minute you were out he went straight to your room. It made Janet very disappointed, let me tell you, but maybe she’ll perk up if he’s really single.”
Half of the carnations were a solid purple – trust, Q’s mind automatically supplied. The others scattered in between were bicolored yellow and red – friendship and love, the start of a new romance.
“Don’t bother,” he interrupted the nurse. Later Bond would get an earful for delaying his mission, but in that moment, Q only smiled. “He’s taken.”