Chapter Text
“I’m in,” Bond whispered as he slipped into the room like a ghost. Only ghosts didn’t need to use windows.
“Nice decor,” he continued as he saw the freshly stuffed Bengal Tiger in front of the fireplace. The opulent room stank of old leather and wet fur.
“Mr. Jacobs is still at the opera,” said the quiet voice in his ear. “You have plenty of time. However you are expected to proceed with caution. The subject is a natural with home-made explosives in addition to being an illegal taxidermist. You may find an unanticipated booby trap that you may very well avoid by not resorting to your usual ham-fisted shenanigans.”
“Oh Q, where would I be if I didn’t have you bringing me down to earth?” Bond murmured, eyes scanning the room slowly as he slipped on a pair of gloves. “I assume you’re getting this.”
“Stop,” the command was clinical. “Three inches to the left.”
Bond turned so that his tie-pin pointed to the area requested. “What is it?”
There was a sharp exhale in his ear. “There you are my beauty”
Bond stared at his full-length reflection in the huge mirror. “Why, thank you Quartermaster. Though I confess that I would have preferred ‘rugged’ or ‘handsome’ as a compliment.”
“007,” Bond couldn’t tell if the voice was at all embarrassed. “If you would care to look beyond your own perfection for a minute, you would be able to retrieve the canister from the hiding place that’s just to the left of the mirror.”
Bond looked at the suggested site to find five inch teeth jutting in his direction.
“It’s a stuffed bear.”
There was a soft sigh in his ear, “Yes, thank you for pointing out the obvious. However, more to the point, the bear head is that of an Ursus americanus or the common black bear, but the body is that of Selenarctos thibetanus, more commonly known as the Asiatic black bear. Ergo, the ‘stuffed bear’ head is definitely detachable. This was something I had suspected with the initial surveillance photographs, but I needed a closer look for visual confirmation. Go on, get it off. I couldn’t possibly make it any easier for you.”
Bond used an ornate footstool to stand on and reach the head. Only a slight push had it unscrewed in his hands. He overturned the head to find a hollowed cavity with a small canister the size of a Pepsi can with a green blinking light on.
“Well, that’s that. Congratulations, 007. I’ll see you when you return the bomb to Q Branch.”
Then there was nothing but silence as Bond stood staring at the blinking merry green light.
***
Q hadn’t gone home for the last three days. He was simultaneously supervising a hacking in Turkey, countdown to a bombing in Syria and an extraction in Lebanon. The extraction was top priority. It was 48 hours in and every passing hour was reducing Agent 004’s chances for survival drastically.
So the last thing he needed was an angry agent charging through the door to slam a decidedly delicate bomb on his desk. Q blinked tiredly and found himself battling an icy-blue gaze. Bond didn’t bother lowering his voice, “I’ve had enough of this shit.”
Q’s answering smile was lopsided, “I concur.”
Bond looked like he was an inch from smashing his face in. Q wondered if he would be allowed to take off his glasses if the threat became real.
“I’ve had enough of being treated like a bloody invalid. THIS was a disgraceful excuse for a ‘mission’. I should be out there looking for 004. You need me out there.”
“The suspect was a known bomber…”
“Cut the bullshit, Q. You knew exactly where the bomb was. And I’m not a dog with whom you can play fetch.”
Q felt an overwhelming desire to let his shoulders slump for a minute, to simply rest his forehead against the cool desktop to organize his thoughts. He held his back up straight through conscious effort. As far as Bond was concerned, he was a spotty kid playing with cool toys with no regards to the consequences. As he told himself repeatedly, the man’s opinion didn’t matter. But there was no point giving the agent added ammunition by displaying any physical weakness in his presence.
“You have recently suffered a deep personal loss. You have failed both the subsequent psych exam and medicals. Your shooting score is 23. The probability that you would be successful in a level red mission without having regained your ability to shoot straight is 0.004%. Sending you to retrieve 004 would only double the body count. And if you could simply put aside your massive ego, you would see that I’m trying to help you. I had to beg them to send you on this ‘pathetic excuse for a mission’. But if you think your word is better than mine,” he gestured towards the door, “Feel free to go over my head. But kindly spare me for now. I have no time to deal with your tantrums.”
Bond gaze was like a razor. “If these were the old days-”
“Well, these aren’t. You’ll find that the new order prefers to do things by the book.”
Q stopped there. There were a lot of things he wanted to say. He wanted to say that however they may look at it, that to an extent Bond was to blame for M’s death, that Q’s hands were stained with her blood because he had blindly trusted Bond to do the right thing and he had fucked up royally. That Bond was responsible for the vacuum of trust that existed around Q’s position as a Quartermaster, because he would be forever remembered in the annals of M16 history as the Q who had stood by and let M die in the first month of his appointment.
But he stopped himself because despite all the rational logic and the probability figures, he knew that they needed Bond out there. Because out in the field, outcomes were determined by split second decisions and gut instincts, probabilities be damned. The rule of thumb was ‘survival of the fittest’. And no one knew how to survive better than the man in front of him.
Bond should have been out there to extract Agent Swenson.
He simply turned back to his console and continued typing. There were only ten minutes left before the bomb in Syria went off. He barely stopped himself from flinching as the door slammed behind the retreating man.
***
“Go home.”
“Sir,” Q started as though from a daze. “I was just-”
M’s eyes raked over his stubble “You haven’t taken a break for over forty hours. Agent 004’s retrieval has been completed successfully. Nothing else is so pressing that it requires your physical presence here.”
Q had spoken with the head of the medical team bringing Swenson home. ‘Successful’ was a matter of opinion. Someone who had lost one eye and had bilateral fractured kneecaps may not agree with him. He pressed his fingers firmly against the desk to stop the tremor running through them. “We were too slow. I…was too- We need 007 back in the field, M. He would have found her sooner.”
Mallory’s eyes were implacable. “You know what your own projections say. We would have lost them both. We cannot lose Bond. He is too valuable.”
“What you cannot do is treat a racehorse like a pack mule. He needs missions worthy of his level of insanity.”
“After what happened at Skyfall-”
Q was at the end of his tether and at the mention of his worst failure, something in him just snapped. “Silva had held an entire island ransom and you hadn’t even known he was still alive. If 007’s plan had been successful, which it nearly was, you would have been singing a different tune. Or rather, the old M would’ve been. She knew betting on Bond would pay off. As far as she was concerned, stopping Silva was the parameter that determined the failure or success of the mission. She would never have agreed to be the bait otherwise.”
“I have never implied that either you or 007 were responsible for the outcome at Skyfall.”
“By grounding him, you might as well be screaming it from the rooftops. Give him the mission in Israel or you’ll have a mutiny on your hands. And I’m not just speaking for 007 here.”
M simply looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Your faith in Bond is gratifying. I would’ve assumed that after your last association, you would have had a harder time trusting him.”
Q swallowed. “Your assumption is correct. I was just coming to the second part of my request. I don’t think me handling 007 in the field is a good idea. I want permission to have someone else assigned to handle 007 out in the field, anyone but me.”