Chapter Text
It’s not that the numbers are everywhere; rather that they could be anywhere.
Since numbers in themselves are hardly unusual for an intelligence agency, it takes Bond a few incidents before piecing it together. However, being a surprisingly long-lived employee of such an agency – surprising for his own number, of course – he does start to see a connection. The graffiti next to his favoured restaurant in London; a memo slipped into his paperwork; the changing face of a digital display in the station.
It’s the last that gives him the clue; allows for the basic paranoia to feel justified.
Bond’s fairly convinced that the latest quartermaster learnt the value of being underestimated a long time ago. Considering the arrogance revealed once you scratch the surface – not a criticism, Bond isn’t a hypocrite, he feels that once you’ve earned it you should keep it – it’s evident that an unassuming appearance doesn’t come naturally.
Given the few certainties in his life, and the consistencies of MI6 in particular, Bond feels he can confess to himself that he misses his original Q; has trouble applying the title to anybody else. He parrots the name but in his mind he still hears ‘R’ or whatever other quip he’s provided for himself. It’s petty and it’s unprofessional and he’s rather proud of both.
He wonders whether this boy – not a boy though, a man counting on such assumptions – whether he realises the significance of Bond’s continuing insistence on addressing him by his letter.
‘007’ means something as well, establishing distance or a continued reminder, Bond isn’t sure yet. It doesn’t sound the same as in the mouths of his predecessors. They never spoke with the echo of a challenge, or the dare in their eyes.
The fact is that Q is a great deal of things, and more than anything he is a lot of things that Bond doesn’t know yet (it is entirely possible that this bottle was full less than half an hour ago). He has the resources, so it’s simply whether he has the motive to weave the numbers into Bond’s life.
Q is, above all else, a little shit. Bond’s made leaps of logic based on less.
He’s also dealt with missile launches and the like more than enough times that the barest hint of descending numbers catches his mind, as the first thought to come to him.
There is nothing he recognises like a countdown.
The instalments are erratic – even if he misses the odd number, even if it constantly slips between game and test but above all else challenge - and whatever they signal, it’s not the regular passage of time. He might find three within as many days, or one in a month. Perhaps it has something to do with Q’s small quirks of smiles, or the assessing glances, or the lazy drift into conversation when the mark refuses to come out to play. Perhaps there is some long game at play. Perhaps Q is just bored.
They’re still a long way from zero.