Hello! Okay,
This is my first James Bond fanfic, so please be ultra nice. And give feedback. LOTS AND LOTS of feedback please. (It makes me write faster... just sayin'...)
I just saw Skyfall yesterday and...00Q sort of filled a hole in my heart, and bumped out the plot and the prologue to THIS overnight. But this story is strictly NO SLASH, I REPEAT:NO BEEP: NO WAY, DON'T GO THERE. BACK UP. Good. I stink at writing slash anyway. For now just think of a partner/friendship relationship, maybe some bromance... for now.
Sorry the prologue is kind of boring, but I plan on it getting better I swear. I hope to have a long story going here in no time! *thumbs up*
Enough chatter! Thanking you for clicking on this and I really hope you like it! (By the way, please review! (as if I didn't stress that enough before...))
1:23:55 AM
Or so the small neon-red digital clock in the wall said.
Q sighed as he glanced at it out of habit, and then turned away, remembering the whole point of why he was here. His long fingers, no longer preoccupied with the empty mug beside him which had, two hours earlier, held hot earl grey tea, were posed over the keys of his laptop, his eyes gazing blankly into the bright, burning light of the screen which, in comparison to the darkness of the room around him, had grown difficult to look at. Blinking a few times, the young Quartermaster took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He had turned off the lights of the entire system- and therefore the whole facility- in order to do his work, and he had programmed them not to come back on until morning.
Q regretted that now.
He had been standing, staring at the screen for nearly -no, exactly- 4 hours now. He functioned better whilst standing, but that didn't stop his legs from eventually cramping up. He was happy, at least, that he had worn comfortable shoes, his second-favorite pair of loafers.
The work gave him no real interest and was not at all difficult- only tedious. He was hardly thinking about what he was doing, his fingers simply typing in the patterns and codes he needed for the task without much care. He had involuntarily muttered, "Boring….boring…boring..." under his breath for an hour or so, but this eventually died down and out as even his brain seemed to become numbed by the dull task.
Replacing his glasses, brushing a lock of his dark hair from his eyes, and rubbing his temple for a moment, Q set back to work. His tired, but still quick, eyes darted back to the screen, observing the 72 boxes the screen was divided into. After finishing his previous bit of work, about 80% of these boxes showed clear pictures of various locations around the MI6 facility- footage from security cameras. Each one of these boxes shared the same minuscule time and date. The other 20% still had a dull red glow to them, as the former portion had been doing 4 hours previous.
Q clicked on the next red box in line, tapping his foot slightly on the tile while he did so in an attempt to wake it up. The small noise echoed, bouncing off the tiled walls of the underground facility and jumping back to where he stood at the small table. Q glanced up.
His eyes could not see the room around him very well after growing accustomed to the laptop's glow, but he could see the dim outlines of the parts of the room. The arches which held the room together; many of the stations where other agents (most of them like him) usually sat and worked during the day were present.
The chairs sat, empty. Some desks still had assignments carelessly left on them. But the agents had gone home. Home to families and friends and dinner. Leaving Q on his own.
Q smirked at the darkness. That's just the way I like it, he thought. Soon he'd be done. Soon he'd finish with mediocre task of fixing cameras and clocks. Soon, he'd be home at his flat, laptop in hand, with a thick sweater and a nice cup of earl grey…
The comforting thought still in his head, the Quartermaster's eyes drifted back to the screen.
"…What?"
As his lips parted slightly to whisper in surprise and confusion and his brow furrowed, Q's face was illuminated by a bright red glow from the laptop before him. Every single box displaying different MI6 corridors and offices was now flashing a sickly, bright red back at Q. The miniscule times and dates seemed to running on fast-forward, some jumping ahead days and weeks, others running ahead a few minutes then rewinding back to few hours ago. No clear, fixed boxes remained.
"Dammit!" Q snarled through gritted teeth. He tried typing in a string of code to the first box to make it stabilize.
No good.
He crouched low, dark hair hanging in his face, long fingers flying over the keys expertly, only stopping once to push his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, and then continue. It wasn't supposed to do this. Glitches in security cameras were easy. Mediocre. They didn't repeat after you fixed them!
"What the hell are you doing…?" Q muttered whilst breathing out, speaking supposedly to the boxes. All of the sleepiness he had felt a few moments before seemed to have leaked out of him. His mind worked furiously, but nothing he typed in, no algorithms or lines of code he pulled from the farthest corners of his mind seemed to help. The digital times still rewound and ran forward as if a child had gotten hold of a universal remote control. Q glanced back at the digital clock worked into the wall.
It was 5:54:54 PM.
No, it was 12:08:36 PM.
And again, 1:23:55 AM.
Looking back at the screen of his laptop, Q could now see that the small pictures, still flashing that sickening red, seemed to be rearranging themselves, flickering out in a moment of static and then popping up in the other corner of the screen, only to then repeat the action again and again.
Over and over. They wouldn't stop. There was no noise but Q felt like his head would burst from all of the flickering, chaotic images which his eyes were locked upon.
This isn't a glitch, he thought somewhat frantically. Something of this proportion couldn't be caused by a glitch in software—But if not a stupid, STUPID glitch, then what?
As if in answer to this question, the small pictures stopped glowing red, remaining stationary. The time and date in each box seemed to pause, each one matching and correlating with the next. Q's fingers stopped. He leaned forward so that his nose was almost touching the illuminated screen. The Quartermaster's eyes flicked from box to box, checking each and every time.
And then the screen went dark. Just like that. Blink.
Gone.
Q was plunged into complete darkness. He froze, breath caught in his throat, head whipping around, arms outstretched like a blind man. The whole room was now pitch black without the single, bright light of his laptop. No lights. Except for…
Whipping his head so fast that he cricked his neck, Q turned to face the digital clock in the wall for a third time. The moment his eyes fell upon it, the numbers started to change again. But as the young man watched them stop, there were not numbers displayed there any longer.
LI:TT:LE Q
Q's heart was beating in his throat. He knew this wasn't a glitch—it was a hack. Someone was hacking his systems, his laptop. They were inside of the mainframe.
And Q was alone in the entire MI6 facility. Bloody brilliant.
The letters went back to their random jumping about, Q's eyes still glued to the clock's screen, it being the only small source of light in the entire room for his eyes to latch onto. Then, letters unscrambled once more.
SM:AR:TB OY
No sooner had Q read this than he heard a noise. A long, drawn * HISS*, following by several mechanical *Click*'s. He recognized that sound. All of the doors, worked into the floor of room he stood in, were opening.
The Quartermaster's mind began to race. He was unarmed- he hadn't felt the need to keep a gun with him for clock repairs. It was dark- even as he turned his head, he could see that the digital letters had disappeared from the wall. For once, for the first time, he was frightened-frightened of something he could not see, something that could come out of the dark-someone…
He was alone. Utterly alone as someone was hacking into MI6. And they knew he was here! But he needed to remain calm. Yes, that was it. He needed to keep calm…calm…
He heard footsteps. Calm, collected footsteps, coming from ahead of him, where the doors were. The unlocked doors. His eyes strained to see something, but he himself had made sure to cut off all the lights- every single one. And they wouldn't be on again for another three or four hours.
Dammit…dammit dammit DAMN IT.
The footsteps seemed to get louder in Q's ears, and he could suddenly feel a presence in the room with him- no noises, but just… a chill on the back of his neck; goose flesh on his arms. The footsteps stopped.
Q knew quite well that he wouldn't get away- that he could never get away- but that didn't stop his mind from trying to think of a way out. He needed something to use as a weapon. Something…
Q reached out his hand, suddenly aware that he had lost his sense of proprioception. He had stepped away from the desk- from his laptop, and he didn't know where he was anymore- where he stood in relativity to them. He stuck his arms out, hardly breathing, quietly groping for something- anything.
And his fingers brushed something. Fabric? He explored it. No, he thought, a shirt. And behind it was a person.
Q snapped his wrist back, stepping away in surprise. Only, before he could get that far, a strong hand had grabbed his wrist. Shocked, Q tried to jerk away from the enemy, but whoever they were had meatier, tougher hands than Q's younger, skilled ones. His hip bumped into something—the table.
Without thinking, Q reached out his other hand, desperate for something he could use as a weapon, despite his head screaming that it was useless. He felt the handle of his mug, his favorite mug, sitting on the table. He tried to grasp it, but at that moment, another hand reached from the darkness and grabbed the collar of Q's shirt, jerking his whole front foreword. The mug went slipping from his fingers. In a loud *CRASH* he heard in shatter against the tiled floor.
He struggled to move back, to release himself from whoever was holding him, but Q knew it was no good. He had barely passed the basic training and physical tests needed to enter MI6—Q's strengths lay in his brain, not his body. But if he could just release their grip for a second—
The hand pulled Q's collar further forward. He could hear someone breathing only about a foot away from his own face.
"He said you weren't such a clever boy…" He heard a deep voice whisper. "But I don't know…"
Before Q could think, before he could even comprehend what this meant, he felt another pair own hands appeared from absolutely nowhere. One grabbed the back of his hair and gripped it causing him to cry out slightly in surprise and pain. The other clamped something over his mouth.
Q smelled something sweet, and sickly, and before he could even stop his breathing, his body seemed to be relaxing. Chloroform… He felt his mind slowly go blank, his legs falling out from under him. The hands seemed to release their hold, letting him fall.
And Q's mind, so brilliant, able to calculate any number of equations, codes, or fields of data in several seconds- able to hack into the most complicated of networks in his sleep- gave up only one last thought has he hit the ground.
Brilliant.
So was it okay? Was Q a bit OOC? Should I rewrite? Is it boring? You can answer all these questions and more by leaving a review!
Sorry if this chapter was a bit vague, it's supposed to be like that in suspense for later.
Thank you so much for reading my work!
And don't worry, Bond's coming...