Author's Notes: A short piece about Q and Silva, set between the second and third acts of the film.
Although this isn't canon to my Less Painfully Caged series, it does use the same alias and implied backstory for Q - namely, that he was a cybercriminal before getting picked up by MI6. If you're curious about my Q but don't want to commit to a lengthy story, I'd suggest "Move Only in Dimly Lit Halls," which is in many ways a companion to this fic.
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
- The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
Q leaves his security detail at the front door, brushes off their concern and ducks alone underneath the police tape strung wall to wall like decrepit party streamers. Fourteen minutes, he tells them, timed from his memories. He won't be alone – the building still has guards like any important ruin – and he won't be long – there's a trap to set, baited with a life worth more than his.
Vauxhall has been unoccupied for less than a month, but it already smells ancient. When Q punches the emergency release on the inner lobby door, his fingers come back coated in dust. Strip lights at the base of walls and bannisters illuminate an unnecessary path. He knows where the files are as keenly as he knows where they should be – digitized and searchable, under the command of his team in the bunkers. Another hole he'll have to patch, if he's still employed and alive when this ends.
Third storey of Archives, far south hallway, fourth door on the left, third filing cabinet from the back, second drawer. He reaches to turn on the light, and in the instant between his fingers closing on the chain and the pull that completes the circuit, a tiny animal part of his brain pulses with a fear that the bulb won't work. It's ridiculous – the building runs on multiple independent generators, and the baseboard lights confirm that everything below the damage is still powered. The light blinks on. The terror dies.
Then a voice that shouldn't be says from the doorway, "You know, when I was last here, the Quartermaster –" and Q spins around so fast that he stumbles because of Silva for the second time today, and this time the man is here to watch.
Silva's eyebrows twitch, amused. He's dressed all in black, turtleneck and heavy coat and high boots for hiking through the mud. Hunting.
Q's brain finally registers the rest of his sentence: "– the Quartermaster was an awful stereotype, the worst kind of old British patriot, in a suit jacket every day." Silva's eyes rake him. "I like this version better."
Q edges a hand around the corner of the filing cabinet, stretches back for the alarm button under a glass cover on the wall.
"Go ahead," Silva says, much too friendly. "They won't come." And he shakes his head, as though he regrets – but he bites his lip to hold back the laughter, the leer.
He takes a few steps into the room, and now there is enough space between him and the doorway that Q could make a run for it, if he were stupid.
"I came here to thank you," Silva says. He takes another step closer, brings his feet together and waits a few seconds before advancing again. He sways a little, steps slightly to the side each time so that he zigzags across the distance between them, and Q thinks of a cobra, hood flared and body rippling.
"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist knowing my secrets." They are an arm's length apart now. Silva's hand comes up, almost of its own accord, and fingers the knot of Q's tie. "Although –" A flicker of fatherly disapproval. "I almost hoped you wouldn't fall for the trick. Then you would have been worthy."
Q tries to swallow and finds that he can't.
"I wondered," Silva says, as he runs his fingers under the fold of Q's collar, smoothing the wrinkles, straightening the places where his tie has twisted, "why they let such a young pup run an entire department – I mean, look at you." He gives Q a confidential look, as though they are close enough friends that Q should know exactly what he means. "But then I saw the way you code. Beautiful, really beautiful. You have a true gift."
And his face darkens, ominous as an oncoming train, and Q realizes that this is personal, somehow, even though he's never met this man before, never heard of him until Bond had radioed from an island off Macau –
"And I would know," Silva murmurs. He slides his hands across Q's shoulders, presses on his collarbone with both thumbs. "I used to do a bit of recreational hacking myself. Mummy didn't like that. But you –" His eyes pass over Q again, up and down, as though he's still trying to puzzle out what makes Q so intriguing. "She likes you."
The realization strikes so completely formed and obvious that for a moment Q can't shape words even in his mind, can only feel understanding flood him and think, Oh.
Silva's face breaks into a parody of a smile. "You see? You understand my confusion." He leans in close, their cheeks side by side, and Q doesn't shiver, because his muscles have locked like a stalled car. "You see why I wanted to meet you."
He smells like metal, like oil underneath some gagging cologne. Like gunpowder. When he steps back his eyes and teeth glimmer.
"There's something you ought to see."
Silva bows Q through the door like a gentleman. In the corridor Q looks back and forth and again considers running, but all the doors are locked and the hallway's straight in both directions for more than ten meters and he doesn't fancy being target practice.
A hand rests on his shoulder in a way that might be friendly if it belonged to anyone else. Silva holds on all the way up two flights of stairs and down another hallway, and then he stops at a door that's been knocked crooked on its hinges by the blast. One nudge from his foot is enough to swing it open.
They stare out at a wasteland, the wind-whipped shell of what was once a glassed-in office, shards of its prison scattered glittering like sand across burned carpet and the matchsticks of furniture. Q feels a pang at the sight of a blackened computer monitor, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
"There is a poem about this, hmm?" Silva says. He makes a grand gesture, all the pride and showmanship of a circus ringmaster. "'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.'"
He presses a hand against the small of Q's back as if to steer him onto the provisional roof. Q thinks of the structural damage analysis they have not had time to finish, and the blackness at the bottom of the Thames below, and resists. Silva spanks him, once, hard enough to knock him forward a couple of steps, and then his legs are stumbling ahead without his permission.
Every British schoolboy knows the poem Silva quoted, and its meter keeps time for Q's cautious feet:
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed…
Silva follows without touching but close enough to be felt, which is worse. From behind he steers them to the far edge of the roof, away from the shelter of the still-standing shell, where the wind scours them with grit even through Q's cardigan. He licks his stinging lips and his tongue tastes of sandpaper.
A concrete lip roughly forty centimeters tall separates them from the drop. Below, the building slopes away like a giant's staircase, four separate plateaus before they reach the river Q had feared. This might be a better death, a quick splat instead of a watery fade, but the violence of it repels. His department has collected a little too much evidence on how the cavities of the body would explode on impact.
"How does it feel?" Silva murmurs, right at his ear. "To know that you're alive because of the good graces of others?" He ghosts the palm of his hand up the back of Q's neck, stirring hair without brushing skin. There's no room to struggle or flinch, it's Silva or the fall, and Q teeters at an equilibrium, unsure which is worse, or if they're not the same.
"You know," Silva muses, with a smile in his voice, "if I tried to kill you right now, you'd actually die."
"Design flaw of all humans," Q manages.
Laughter racks Silva like a cough. "Hmmm. I wonder what that makes me, then? Or Mr. Bond?" He clicks his tongue, scolding. "And you trust her with him?"
Hands on Q's shoulders again, turning him round and away from the edge. Silva's face is calm but for a slight working of the mouth, as though his teeth and lips are somehow disobedient, threatening to sneer or snarl when all he wants is a smirk. "Tell me your name."
"If you've been in our files you already know it."
"I want to hear you say it."
Q draws a breath, lets it out, remembers. "Robert Shaw, Quartermaster, one-six-zero–"
"No." The shake Silva gives him makes his head wobble. "Say it. Say your name. Your real name."
"Robert Shaw, Quarter–"
At the first syllable Silva lets go as though scalded, but one hand comes back, swings in an arc and bursts stars behind Q's eyes. He throws out his hands to catch himself and feels the skin scrape from his palms on the ruins of the floor.
"Do you know what she'll do to you, boy?" Silva towers. "For all your loyalty, do you know what she'll give you?" Any mirth has stripped like flesh from bone. "Not even a burial –"
There's another thumping behind Q's heartbeat, a bass so low it's felt more than heard, drowning the glass crunching like bones beneath Silva's boots. Q can't find the source – it's close enough that he should be able to see it, but he doesn't dare tear his eyes away for more than a second – he's scrambling backwards, desperate to get his feet underneath him, away from punishment's limping steps and ravenous eyes –
The helicopter crests the building with a wash of wind so stunning that even Silva looks briefly surprised. Detritus pings against Q's glasses like shrapnel. The spotlight finds them and hovers; a rope ladder drops. Silva glances back and forth between the copter and Q with a twinge of regret.
He catches the rope ladder and braces one boot against the bottom rung, gives Q a parting look with that same prickling and predictive familiarity. Just before he starts to climb he raises his voice over the helicopter din:
"Perhaps I'll save you, hm? Perhaps I'll get there first."
Q doesn't run. Adrenaline skitters him across the rooftop like a water spider, as if one wrong step might break the surface. In the dark hallway behind the door his legs almost fail him and he clutches at the wall, leaving bloody handprints in the dust.
The first two taps in the washroom don't work, but the third spits a feeble brownish stream that turns the color of rust as it pools in his palms. He shouldn't stay long – but maybe the trap they're setting is a trap for them – and he won't be alone – for they'll be watching him even closer now – and the water drains but the blood still wells from his hands.
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners, saints
As heads is tails just call me Lucifer
'Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, have some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
- The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
Author's Notes:
The quoted poem is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias."
"Robert Shaw, Quartermaster, one-six-zero–"
The only information captured soldiers should reveal to the enemy is their name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I'm fudging this quite a bit; "Quartermaster" is an appointment, not a rank, and I haven't been able to find any information on if and how MI6 assigns service numbers. I picked "one-six-zero" for the first three digits because I've heard, possibly apocryphally, that those were the start of service numbers for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
...away from punishment's limping steps and ravenous eyes –
"Punishment comes limping," i.e. slowly but surely, is an expression originated by the Roman poet Horace. I'm familiar with it because Dr. Jekyll quotes it in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.