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It was ridiculous, how quickly everyone appeared to fall back into their routines as though nothing had happened. For a while, Q wondered if he was just slow to catch up, if there was something wrong with him that somehow made it impossible for him to just move on like the others had. He had spent many long hours wide awake when he should have been sleeping, thinking everything over, trying to work out what it was that was holding him back. He had always been a very introspective man; it never took him long to get to the route of the problem. Eventually he worked it out, and that was when the bitterness sunk in.
*
He had watched James walk away from him, from Eve, from Tanner and M and the rest of MI6. He was ashamed to say it had been unexpected. After everything, Q had been certain Bond would have shot Blofeld; hell, Q was almost tempted to storm over there and do it himself. What did one more person matter, when he was already a killer because of all this?
There were many things he had wanted to do, standing helplessly on that bridge, but there was only so long he could ignore his injuries for and he was fast approaching that threshold. His pulse was pounding somewhere deep behind his eyes; he could taste blood in the back of his throat. Every part of him ached, bruises already settled into his pale skin and forming thick patterns over his chest, his stomach, his back. Somewhere on the other side of the bridge, Bond blurred into the streaks of light from the streetlamps, bright lines Q was incapable of focusing on, and then they pitched upwards and to the side and he didn’t even realise he was falling until he hit the ground.
Someone had shouted something, sounding panicked, and then everything had gone silent.
*
There was the sound of something rattling, metal on metal, and Q realised that his hand and slipped to the back of his head, close to the top, where a patch of his hair was still far too short and he could feel the ugly raise of stitches in the skin. Q let his hand drop back down beside him, staring ahead of him with the slightest flicker of frustration. He didn’t want to have to deal with anything this early. He just wanted to be left alone.
He hated himself for the flicker of something that he felt when he recognised Bond. Q didn’t know if it were excitement or hope or just plain happiness to see him, but it whatever it was combined itself with the bitterness pooling in the pit of his stomach and twisted into something ugly. Q swallowed it down.
“Bond,” he said, keeping only the slightest hint of curiosity in his voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Good morning, Q,” Bond said, and it was the same bloody tone he always used, laced with something that at one point would have made Q trip over himself to do whatever he asked of him. The bitterness seeped back, stronger than before, and Q stopped in his tracks, all his effort diverted to keeping it back.
“I thought you’d gone,” Q said, barely managing to avoid sounding stiff.
“I have,” Bond said, fixing him with that look again. “There’s just… one thing I need.”
They started at one another for a moment.
“There’s always one cocking thing you need, isn’t there?” Q suddenly spat, and immediately wished he could snatch the words out of the air.
*
They had grabbed him from his hotel room. He had thought he managed to give them the slip on his way down the mountain, but of course with hindsight he knew they had eyes everywhere. First the large windows behind him had shattered, showering him with shards of broken glass, and then the door had started shaking in its frame as someone on the other side threw their weight at it.
Somehow, Q hadn’t panicked. He stood up, picking his laptop up, and as he began to hear someone climbing over the side of his balcony he crossed the room and locked himself in the one remaining secure place he had left – the bathroom. He set his laptop down on the top of the toilet and turned to the shower, turning it on and twisting the temperature up as far as it would go. Then he reached up to the mirror, pressing his finger hard against the glass as he wrote down seven letters, invisible until the steam would fill the room and reveal them.
S-P-E-C-T-R-E.
He heard the room’s door smash inward as he picked up his laptop again, quickly hitting several keys in quick succession and moving methodically through the sabotage protocols. All recent systems ended their processes and terminated themselves; all recently accessed documents purged themselves. Everything else began locking down, either hiding or encrypting itself, and Q was confident no one else would be able to crack it. He would be able to recover most things, if he survived.
The bathroom door wasn’t going to hold much longer. Q turned his back on it and hunched over his laptop, quickly typing, forcing himself to focus right up until he heard the bathroom door get ripped completely off its hinges.
He turned then, wanting to at least see his murderers before they killed him. He caught the briefest glimpse of two men, one hanging back in the doorway, the other heading towards him, and then there was a searing pain in the side of his head that knocked his legs out from under him. The laptop clattered off somewhere and Q hit the damp floor, barely managing a groan before something was pulled over his face and he was dragged to his feet by his hair.
*
The silence had stretched on for longer than Q could tolerate. Bond was still staring at him, his face of course unreadable, and despite his regret at his earlier words Q could feel his anger growing again.
“I’m sorry,” Bond eventually said, sounding not in the least bit sorry. “But I was under the assumption that the car was still mine.”
“Yes, it’s still bloody yours,” Q snapped, turning back to his desk. “You’ve got a fine cheek coming down here and asking for it before you piss off to god knows where. Do us all a bloody favour and don’t come back this time.”
He found the keys and snatched them up, marching back over to Bond and surprising himself by literally throwing them at the man. Bond of course caught the keys with no problem, and to Q’s frustration, there seemed to be a glimmer of amusement in his eye.
“Is that everything?” Q asked, barely able to keep his voice steady.
“I think so,” Bond said. “Thank you, Q.”
Q should have let him walk away. He should have let him turn around and walk out and go off to wherever he was going, and leave Q to get back to his job and his mortgage and his cats. Maybe Q would have let him, if that was a life he could still easily envision himself returning to.
“So that’s it, then?” Q asked, and he shocked himself with how level his voice was now. He found himself suddenly eerily calm, his anger condensed and aiming itself right at Bond with every word he said. “After everything you asked me to do, after everything you made me risk, you’re just going to drive off into the sunset? Retire? Without as much as a word of thanks or even a sliver of remorse?”
Bond turned back to him, spinning the keys around on one of his fingers.
“I appreciate your help, Q,” he told him. “But I don’t believe for a moment that you weren’t aware of the risks when you agreed to help.”
“Did I agree to help?” Q asked. “Or did I just know you’d do it anyway? At least if I was directly involved I would be privy to your ridiculous plans and might have a chance at saving my own neck in the inevitable enquiries.”
“Well,” Bond said, giving another one of those half-smiles. “Isn’t that what happened?”
“I agreed to let you disappear for two days,” Q said coldly. “I did not agree to you causing yet another international incident. I did not agree to you nearly getting me fired and making all my hard work look worthless. I did not agree to you forcing my hand and giving me no choice but to go out there after you. And I especially did not agree to be dragged off and tortured because of you!”
Bond stared at him for a long moment, and Q forced himself to hold his gaze. Usually the intensity of the man’s looks would make Q falter after only a few seconds; this time, there was no chance of that.
“It’s a risk of the job, Q,” Bond eventually said. “I appreciate what you did, but I don’t think you can hold me fully responsible.”
“It was all about you,” Q practically spat. “It’s always about you.”
*
There were four of them. Three of them were in charge of beating him, constantly, incessantly, every time he refused the demands. The fourth – shorter, smart yet oddly dressed – was in charge of making the demands. It was a surreal situation, if Q were honest with himself, made all the more surreal by the presence of a handsome white cat that lounged nearby, apparently completely undisturbed by all the noise.
The fourth man had told Q his name was Blofeld, but he didn’t have a clue as to who any of the others were. Not that it mattered, really. He doubted knowing their identities was going to help him. He didn’t think he would be alive after all this was said and done.
“So brave,” Blofeld told him, tutting. “Do you think he would do the same for you, Quartermaster?”
Q hated himself for mentally answering the question with a resounding ‘no’. No, Bond always had some bloody plan, didn’t he? He wouldn’t be caught dead getting ambushed and kidnapped in a hotel room, mainly because he was a fully trained agent and Q was a bloody administrator.
“I know it must be a difficult choice to make,” Blofeld continued pleasantly. “But really, there isn’t that much to it. You’re not doing anything wrong. You know as well as I do that James is a very capable man, if a little… boisterous, at times. If you just help us track him, let us know where he is, we can resolve this so much faster, and I’m sure with much fewer casualties. Maybe even yourself included.”
It was tempting, with blood pouring from his nose and clogging his throat, with his ribs cracked and broken, with his ears ringing and the nausea hitting him in waves. Really, it wasn’t all that much to ask, but Q knew it was never that simple. Give these people an inch and they would take a mile.
He spat out a mouthful of blood. “I can’t.”
“Unfortunate,” Blofeld sighed, and then he nodded to the others and the pain began again.
*
“I nearly died,” Q continued, when Bond didn’t appear to have anything to say. “Broken ribs, internal bleeding, a bloody fractured skull that almost finished me off when you were busy letting that bastard live. All of it, and not a word of thanks.” He paused, taking a shuddering breath. “I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’m not a bloody agent.”
“No,” James agreed. “You’re not.”
“But you still expected me to be one,” Q said, hearing his voice beginning to steadily rise again. “You wanted me to be everything for you out there, didn’t you? Oh, that’s what you do, though. He told me everything.”
Finally, Bond seemed to react. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly, his tone lower when he spoke.
“What do you mean?”
Q couldn’t help the flash of satisfaction he felt at James’s question. It felt nice to have the upper hand for once; to finally know something James didn’t.
“Your friend Blofeld,” he said, finally managing a thin smile. “He told me all about where your charm leads people. If he hadn’t been such a nutter, I would have thought he genuinely felt sorry for me. It was clear I was being played, just like how all the others were played. It’s always to get to you, isn’t it?”
Bond had stopped swinging the keys around. They were clenched tightly in his fist now, his gaze like ice as it searched Q’s features for any hint of a lie.
“I feel the two of you were vastly misinformed,” he said.
“Oh?” Q asked. He knew he should stop, some primal part of him recognising the look on Bond’s face and filing it away as dangerous, but something far more powerful had gripped him and he couldn’t help the words from pouring out of him. “So it’s not always about you? That isn’t why Vesper Lynd and Strawberry Fields both died, is it? Oh, because you’re perfectly safe to be around, aren’t you? Solange and Séverine, I’m sure they would agree. They knew you for what? An evening, at the most? And they ended up dead. Sure it was just a wonderful coincidence. Or, maybe, they were useful to you and you used them and tossed them aside like they didn’t matter, because they didn’t, did they? All the usefulness was gone, or whoever was pulling the strings got to you, and they were no longer needed. Just pawns in a game. I was an idiot for not seeing it, but no—I can’t be too hard on myself, because it wasn’t exactly common knowledge, was it? If I’d known beforehand, maybe I would have said something different. But how was I to know? That’s your charm, isn’t it? You’re just not used to people living long enough to see it for what it really is.”
Q was surprised with how quickly Bond crossed the room – he had thought there had been a safe distance between the two of them but evidently he had been mistaken. Bond had crossed the space in a few strides, and before Q had the chance to even take one step backwards the agent had grabbed him by a fistful of his shirt, practically hauling him off his feet as he pushed him back into the desk. Despite the weight of the furniture Q heard it skid backwards several inches, feeling the impact in the back of his legs.
At first, Bond appeared lost for words. The silence was brief, but long enough for most of the anger to drain out of Q, replaced with blinding fear as he realised what he had said. He thought about apologising, before realising that it would do no good – he had meant it, and Bond undoubtedly knew. Better to die with some of his dignity intact.
“You don’t know anything,” Bond eventually said, and Q could hear his voice trembling slightly.
“I would have done anything for you.” The words were slightly strangled, given Bond’s grip on his shirt. “I did do anything for you.”
*
The explosion had ripped the heavy steel doors right off their hinges, one of them making short work of the nearest guard. Q’s could hear a loud ringing noise, his head heavy and throbbing, and he hunched down and clasped his hands over his ears. Something skittered across the floor and bumped against him and Q opened an eye, moving slightly as he saw the gun that was laying right next to his elbow. Q glanced up in the direction it had come from, seeing Bond was already on his feet, heading towards a surviving guard who was unarmed but rolling out of his way, grabbing the dead guard’s gun, turning back to Bond–
Q reached for the gun before he fully realised what he was doing. Bond was still a good several seconds away from being close enough to disarm the guard. Q rolled over slightly, ignoring the pain stabbing through his chest, and propped himself up on an elbow, the gun held out in front of him, his finger on the trigger.
Everything happened in slow motion. The guard levelled the gun at Bond’s head and he froze, the beat of silence shattered as Q fired his own weapon, awkwardly positioned and one-handed. The gun was wrenched backwards, the recoil cutting a slice between his thumb and forefinger, and in the same second as the pain hit him, the guard jerked and a spray of red appeared on the wall behind him.
Somehow, Q was still holding on to the gun. It shook violently in his hands. Bond seemed stunned for a moment, staring at the guard, and then he turned slowly to stare at Q. They locked eyes.
“Sometimes a trigger has to be pulled,” Bond said.
Q let the gun clatter to the floor.
*
Bond’s face was inches from his own, and there had been a time where Q would have dreamt of something like this, to be this close to him, to have his fist clenched in his clothing like this. It seemed silly to think about now, and Q could have kicked himself for wasting so much time on the daydreams. He had always known they were fantasies, nothing more, but there was danger in allowing himself those. He had always known that. Perhaps that was why he was so angry that he had been proven right.
“Come on, then,” he eventually said, when Bond only continued to pin him there. “Whatever you want to do, do it.”
“You say that very boldly for someone who has no idea what I want to do.”
“Well you’re not going to kiss me, are you?” Q asked, his tone mocking, though there was still an idiotic part of him that hoped Bond would prove him wrong. The cold sting of disappointment he felt when James let go of him and stepped away was infuriating.
“And what would you do, in this situation?” Bond asked, and Q fought to regain his composure, standing up straighter and adjusting his clothing.
“If it were up to me, I’d paint the streets with your entrails,” he said bluntly. “But that might be a little overdramatic. Maybe I’ll just settle for telling you to fuck off.”
“I think that might be for the best,” Bond said.
Q waited until he was almost about to step out of the lab before he called to him again.
“That lady with you,” he said, seeing Bond tense slightly. “Madeleine. She seems nice. I hope you’ve learned something from all this.”
“Don’t push your luck, Q,” Bond told him, without turning around, and then he had pulled the door open and vanished from view.
Q waited until he heard the metal clanking of the lift stop, and then he let his shaking legs give out from under him. He slid down to the floor, his back against the desk and his thoughts racing. Finally, he let the tears come.