The next day Alec waylaid Bond, luring him off to practice on the firing range, and so it was late evening by the time he wandered his way over to Q-Branch.
The branch was still buzzing with activity despite the late hour, and Bond could see Q practically banging on his keyboard, frustration in every line of his slim body.
Intensely curious as to what could cause such a reaction in the imperturbable Q, Bond ranged closer, listening in.
It seemed as if 003, MacMillan, had reached the Maldives, and was currently making an epic hash of his assignment. At first Q's voice remained calm and precise despite his obvious frustration, but as the situation unravelled his composure seemed to unravel with it.
Bond could only hear Q's half of the conversation, but it was evident that 003 was arguing with Q at every turn, intent on pursuing some personal vendetta instead of focusing on the primary objective.
MacMillan was one of the newest operatives, replacing the previous 003 who had met an untimely death at the wrong end of a machete earlier that year. Bond had only had limited interactions with the man, but his vague impression was of an arrogant prick, too occupied with his overblown sense of self-importance to learn from the other double ohs. Now Bond's impression was solidifying into certainty.
Q's usually perfectly-modulated voice was growing increasingly urgent as his crisp clear instructions devolved into futile arguments.
"Just...003, just listen to me. I can't help you if...no, that is not the primary target. The data is what is important here, not the — he's just a courier."
Silence fell for a few minutes as 003 apparently continued to argue obstreperously. Q was flashing through satellite images and CCTV footage, apparently trying to get a better view of the situation. If Bond wasn't mistaken he was even accessing Instagram and Twitter, looking through tourist photos tagged for the Male fish marketplace.
"We have his face on video, we can track him..." Q said sharply, running one hand through his hair in aggravation while continuing to type one-handed with the other. "The drive is on the move, they are leaving the marketplace. If it gets uploaded there will be no hope of containing...003? 003, report."
One of the many readouts on the screen flatlined, and for a moment Bond thought that MacMillan had been killed. He instinctively moved closer to Q, ready to comfort.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit!" Q expostulated, but his tone was pure anger. "He's pulled his earwig. We'll have to track the drive on CCTV, but the infrastructure is bloody awful down there. R, find us the closest field agent. We have an hour at the most, if it's not MI-6 we may have to call in some favors from the Defence Intelligence Agency, and god knows they are not happy with us right now. Richard and Angela, start identifying data nodes. I'm stopping that data leak if I have to crash the servers on every damned reef and atoll in that time zone..."
Q wheeled around, almost running straight into Bond. Bond reached out to steady him just as Q backstepped abruptly.
"007," Q snapped. "Is there something you needed, or did you stop in as usual just to terrorize me?" His eyes were already darting past Bond. "R, do we have a field agent on site, or not? If I have to go begging to Lakshmi personally..."
Bond felt something sharp and cold twist in his chest. He took a deliberate step backwards. "Terrorize?" he repeated woodenly.
"What?" Q's grey-green eyes focused back on Bond, widening for just a moment before his expression grew shuttered.
"Distract," he said emphatically. "Are you just here to distract me or did you actually need something, because..."
"I have a retired agent on holiday in Thinadhoo," R called out. "Courtenay, former section chief of the Delhi field office, 2003 - 2011. On the line, ready for briefing."
Q closed his eyes briefly, sighing. "Mallory will have my head." He jabbed a button on his laptop. "Patch me through to his bluetooth, I'll guide him through. Maybe he can hide the drive in his bloody spade and bucket..."
Bond turned, coolly and silently, and left the room.
A week later Bond was taking out his frustrations in the form of endless laps in the MI-6 swimming pool. His thigh was completely healed — well, almost completely healed, he acknowledged as a low, dull, throbbing began in the damaged muscle — and yet Medical was still refusing to clear him for active duty.
He hadn't been back to Q-Branch. Alec, however, had seemed determined to supply him with all the gossip, his voice warm with approval as he described Q's handling of the fallout. Nobody would have blamed Q if he had been out for 003's blood, but apparently his report of the whole debacle had been utterly professional in nature. Mallory, on the other hand, had been so incensed about having to call in a retired operative to retrieve the missing drive that he had accessed the audiologs. By the next morning MacMillan had been busted back down to field agent status and re-assigned, and had immediately resigned in a huff to do private security.
It had been hard enough to have to listen to Alec singing Q's praises at every turn, but now Alec was away on a new mission and the silence was even worse. Bond was still at headquarters every day, forced to do nothing but wait for his body to heal, recognizing that this time the healing was slower than the last, and the next time would be even slower still. Exercise and target practice could only occupy so much time per day, and Bond had often found himself wandering in the direction of Q-Branch before he stopped himself with stern self-recrimination. Now it was past midnight, and he was pushing his body to its limit, just to avoid returning to his soulless flat with nothing to do but to ruminate on those unexpected words.
["Did you stop in as usual just to terrorize me?"]
It was utterly ridiculous, how deeply those words had cut. Bloody hell, who was Q to him? A good Quartermaster, but that was all. As long as they worked well together professionally, what did he care what the man thought of him? And yet...for some reason Bond had thought that they were becoming friends.
Bond attacked the water with greater force, cutting through the calm surface, pushing off with a sharp twist at each end that sent a burn through his healing thigh. It was a rookie mistake — confusing the trust of a working relationship, of a shared mission, with true friendship. Q knew nothing of him, and he knew nothing of Q. And yet he had trusted Q, had gone where Q's voice pointed him without a second thought, and Bond was not someone who trusted easily. Q had wormed his way past Bond's defenses without Bond even realizing it, and then...
["Did you stop in as usual just to terrorize me?"]
They weren't becoming friends. Q didn't actually like Bond. In fact, going over everything, Bond could only conclude that Q actively disliked him. It was no surprise — it was probably not even anything about Bond in particular. In all likelihood the young Quartermaster was secretly horrified by all the double ohs. He used them as effective weapons, certainly, but no doubt all he saw when he looked at them was the killing machines they were.
["Did you stop in as usual just to terrorize me?"]
Bond finally pulled himself out of the swimming pool, exhausted and panting, a cramp forming in the torn muscle of his right thigh and underneath his ribs. He stood numbly under a warm shower, letting it wash away the sharp smell of chlorine and ease his aching body. Finally he wrapped a towel around his waist and padded to the locker room to change.
"Bond." Moneypenny was perched on the edge of the bench in the men's changing room, cool as you please, in a vivid orange sheath dress and some spectacularly violent-looking stilettos.
"Moneypenny," Bond returned placidly. He cast the towel away casually, opening his locker and reaching for his clothes.
Moneypenny leaned back on her arms, unashamedly taking in the view, producing an elaborate sigh of disappointment when Bond pulled on his pants. Bond quirked an eyebrow at her as he climbed into his trousers.
"You're needed," she said succinctly.
Bond started to push his belt through the loops. "A mission? I'm not cleared by Medical, but I'm sure Mallory can put in a word..."
"A mission, of a sort," Moneypenny said with a sly smile, and Bond paused, suspicious.
"Of a sort," he repeated skeptically. He pulled out his shirt and started to do up the buttons.
"Q has been here for 72 hours straight keeping 008's fat out of the fire in Hamburg," she finally said, apparently having teased Bond to her satisfaction. "Now the crisis is over and Mallory wants our best boffin transported home and tucked away in his jim-jams, and he says that you're the man for the job."
Bloody hell, Bond thought. "I am almost certain that we have a car service for that sort of thing," he said sourly, shrugging into his shoulder holster.
Moneypenny grinned like a Cheshire cat. "Apparently Quartermaster-wrangling is not their bailiwick. Q is kicking about leaving, and Mallory thought you could make him see sense."
"Wonderful." Send in the big scary double oh to terrorize Q into submission. How appropriate.
"At your convenience," Moneypenny said. "But also now-ish."
Bond stowed his wallet in his pocket, and then after a moment's thought tossed his car keys to Moneypenny.
"Bring my car around. If I have to haul him out of here over my shoulder, you can open the door for me. Or the trunk. Depends on how difficult he's being."
Moneypenny twirled the keys on her finger with a wicked grin. "My pleasure."
Bond snorted. "Just try not to lose any mirrors on the way out of the parking garage."
Q sat in the passenger seat of Bond's car, his initial sulkiness already fading under the force of sheer exhaustion. His eyes were opening and closing owlishly, his body curled limply in the seat.
In the end it hadn't taken any physical coercion to get him in the car. By the time Bond had arrived at Q-Branch, R had already taken the initiative, threatening to revoke Q's network access for 24 hours if he didn't go home.
"I'll hack it back in seconds," Q had snapped in irritation.
R was soft-spoken and implacable. "Any other time, perhaps, but right now you couldn't code your way through Hello World."
Q reared back as if he had been slapped, but under the force of of R's steadfast gaze he began to look chastened. He sighed and turned to pack his bag.
When he saw Bond waiting to escort him home he had grumbled, "Oh, perfect," but meekly followed him to his car. Neither of them had spoken since Q had given Bond his address to input into the GPS.
Q finally broke the silence. "I could have gone home on the Tube," he said somewhat plaintively.
"It's Sunday," Bond said tersely. "You missed the last train at 2330."
"Oh." Q gazed out the window for a few more minutes. Finally he sighed, turning back to face Bond. The streetlights reflected off his glasses, obscuring his eyes.
"I offended you last week. I'm sorry."
"Don't be ridiculous," Bond growled, a little too quickly perhaps.
Q shook his head stubbornly. "I was under stress and I spoke without thinking. I didn't...I didn't mean to stop you visiting Q-Branch."
Bond remained silent, telling himself he was not being at all petulant. He simply had nothing to say.
"I rather enjoyed your visits," Q finally said softly. "I don't know how to fix this."
"There's nothing to fix," Bond said firmly, and he hoped convincingly. "Everything is fine, Q."
Q made a skeptical noise, looking back out the window. The car filled oppressively with awkward silence once again .
"It's the camera on my laptop," Q said abruptly.
"What?" Bond flicked Q a puzzled glance, but he was still looking out the window.
"I modified the camera on my laptop with a fisheye lens, and wrote a facial recognition algorithm to account for the distortion. It's mapped onto MI-6's directory. When someone approaches anywhere behind me, it displays their name in the title bar of the active window of the monitor bank, in a code of my own devising. If the person is not cleared by MI-6, it flashes an alert. No one has noticed so far. Nobody ever pays attention to title bars, and if anyone did notice the change it would still look like gibberish."
"Oh." Bond thought about it for a moment, and chuckled despite himself. "That's...clever."
Q's forehead was pressed against the window, his eyes closed. His voice was slow and meditative when he spoke, as if he were thinking aloud. "I learned early in life to watch my own back, rather than trusting others to do it for me."
Bond shot him a sharp glance and Q suddenly seemed to rouse himself, straightening in the seat and running a hand through his hair self-consciously.
"I was developing it for use in the field," he said in a bit of a rush. "To allow an agent to surveil a room inconspicuously, but there are too many variables in real life to make it effective. Too many unknown faces. It would only be useful in seeking out a particular face, and in that case a small mirror would probably do just as well."
Bond smiled. "Is Q-Branch issuing stealth mirrors now? I might look a bit silly trying to powder my nose."
Q's laugh was rich and uninhibited, as delightful as it was unexpected. "You haven't read the Q-branch update emails. We pushed through an app that turns your mobile screen into a mirror. Much less obtrusive than having you touch up your lipstick mid-stakeout," he said dryly. Bond snickered in return.
The silence fell again, but it was easy this time, companionable. Q seemed to fall into a doze, only waking as Bond's car began rattling on the paving stones.
"What is this place?" Bond asked, pulling up in front of a huge wrought-iron gate. He could barely make out a squat brick building at the back of a cobblestone courtyard.
"It used to be a stables, and then a motor repair workshop," Q said, as they got out of the car. "It was abandoned for a few years — an excellent location, but it's registered as a historic landmark, so you can't change the visible exterior. No one wanted a building with no windows, full of heavy abandoned machining equipment." He smiled wryly. "Except me."
The gate had a complicated-looking digital lock. To Bond's surprise Q pulled a digital lockpick out of the pocket of his messenger bag, and applied it to the lock.
Q caught Bond's inquiring glance and shrugged self-consciously. "The code is a shifting algorithm based on the date and time, and honestly I can't be arsed to calculate it right now." He yawned heavily, waiting for the lockpick to finish. "R was right, my thinking is compromised," he acknowledged sheepishly.
The light on the lockpick turned green, and the gate started to roll back.
Q stepped to the other side. "Thank you, 007, for the ride home. I do appreciate it, for all my complaining."
"Any time, Q," Bond said surprised to find he meant it.
Q fiddled with something on the other side. The heavy gate began to scrape closed as Q started toward the building.
"Q?"
Q turned again, facing Bond through the wrought-iron spikes as the gate clanged shut. His pale skin and dark hair were thrown into chiaroscuro by the headlamps of Bond's car, the shadow of the spikes playing across the elegant planes of his face.
"Yes, 007?"
"We have your back now. All of us at MI-6. You do know that, don't you?"
"I..." Q looked flustered for a moment. "I suppose you do." His wide grey-green eyes grew earnest. "It is an adjustment, but...I am trying." He suddenly looked painfully young and vulnerable in the harsh halogen lights.
Bond found himself smiling. "Go to sleep. Q-Branch has strict instructions not to let you in the door until at least noon tomorrow." He hesitated for just a moment before adding, "I'll see you then."
Q's answering smile was warm and wide and genuine. Bond had never seen it before, and it made something deep in his chest tighten uncomfortably.
"Good night, 007," Q said, his voice light now with simple happiness. He turned back around and headed inside.
Bond watched until the large door closed behind Q before getting back in his car. I may be in trouble here, he thought fleetingly, and yet somehow the idea of it was not as concerning as he might have expected.
[Author's Note: For anyone who wants a visual, this is how I imagine Q's house looking, although smaller, less posh, and with much more computer equipment. And a workroom filled with industrial lathes and whatnot for his little engineering side-projects. Urgh, I forgot FFN censors web addresses, but it should be the first hit if you google the terms: remodelista converted stable London.
Please review! :-D]
