2002
Cambridge University, England
After Freddie had shown that he'd definitely earned his place at one of the most elite universities in the world despite not even having reached his teen years yet, Kaz suggested to his advisor that adding him to the team would benefit them all. The man didn't need much convincing once he saw what the kid could do.
"They weren't kidding when they said you were a child genius," commented Kaz to Freddie one day over rice balls.
Kaz wasn't much of a cook, but even his nearly nonexistent older brotherly instincts had been triggered by the skinniness of the boy and he made it a point to pack two bento lunches every time he made himself one.
Freddie wrinkled his nose. "I don't like that term, generally. It implies abnormality."
"Means you're smarter than the rest of us mere mortals."
"I know you don't mean it badly, but to others, it's my only defining characteristic."
"I can see that." Kaz chewed, swallowed. "Arseholes, the lot of 'em," he declared.
Freddie laughed.
"How are you liking it here so far?"
The kid immediately deflated a little. "It's…not what I expected."
"No? How so?"
Freddie pushed his glasses back up his nose and was quiet for a moment. "I thought I'd finally fit in." There was a note of yearning in his voice that made Kaz inexplicably want to give him a big hug, despite being far from the cuddly sort of chap.
"Well." He shrugged awkwardly. "If you want to hang out with a bunch of nerds, you'll fit right in with us."
Freddie breathed a frustrated huff through his nose. "But I don't. They resent me. Even the faculty. They don't quite like me. I can tell. They like my work, but not me. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, though."
"It's 'cause you're a little arsehole know-it-all," Kaz said without any animosity. "People don't like being shown up by a pipsqueak like you, especially since you're the opposite of humble about what you can do. Nor should you be, but it gets on people's nerves. Bruises their pride."
"Does it get on your nerves?" The kid honestly looked a little scared at what his answer might be, and maybe a little hurt.
"Nah. I like honesty. You know you're smart, so why should you pretend to be any different? You might wanna learn to tone down the condescension a tad though, ye ken?"
He'd found by accident that falling back into his natural Scottish brogue made harsh suggestions sound softer to the boy for some reason. Whatever worked, right? It wasn't like he was really able to curb his default brashness that much either. Thinking of nicer ways to say what he really thought took too much effort, so this was an easier solution.
Hypocritical? Maybe, but he knew from experience that not being modest about one's brilliance could bring on problems of its own from social peers, and even family, as evidenced by the number of times he'd been told to stop being so boastful by his very Asian parents and his sister, who regularly called him a disagreeable asshole.
"Yes," Freddie sighed despondently, "My dad is always saying that I need to curb my ego."
Kaz gave an approving nod. "Makes sense. Hubris gets the best of us."
"I guess so."
"I know so. Live a little longer and you'll see."
This drew a laugh and rolled eyes from the kid. "Because you're so old."
"Double your age, I am." Kaz speared a bit of teriyaki chicken with his chopsticks for emphasis.
"Speaking like Yoda, why are you?"
"Oi, respect your elders, young man!"
. . . . .
2010
MI6 HQ, London, UK
"Alright, I'll bite."
"Hm?"
Kaz fixed Freddie with a look. "Everyone's calling you 'sir.' What does 'R' really mean?"
"Assistant Quartermaster." The kid's smug expression hadn't changed a bit.
"Because that has so many Rs in it."
R rolled his eyes. "Quartermaster is Q. R, as the next letter in the alphabet, is the Assistant Quartermaster. I'm your direct supervisor, by the way."
"Right," Kaz nodded, sounding unimpressed. "So you're the one who signs off on things when I want days off and shite like that?"
R's eye muscles were getting in a lot of exercise that day. "Yes."
"Good to know." Kaz surveyed the workstation nearest him, hands in his pockets and slouching. "Is there an S, T, so on, Agent R?"
"No."
"So you're twenty and in almost the top position in the department? How'd everyone take it?"
"In the department, very well. Outside the department, it took a couple of years for Q's request to be approved. M finally managed to get it through."
"M's the boss man, right?"
"Woman."
"Cool." He digested that morsel of information and turned to another point. "A couple of years ago, you were still at Cambridge."
"Yes."
"They wanted to make a brand new eighteen-year-old recruit the assistant quartermaster? Don't get me wrong, you're brilliant, but not everyone knows that."
Honestly, Kaz was enjoying seeing his young friend's new confidence and the way his colleagues obviously respected him. No longer was he the tiny bespectacled preteen with the enormous ego everyone secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) hated for being smarter than them.
Reserved green eyes blinked at him from behind glasses that were a tad more stylish than the coke-bottles he used to wear. "It's not that outlandish. The previous quartermaster wanted me as his replacement when I was nine."
Kaz stopped in his tracks, still not yet reacclimated to the super-accelerated pace of the man who was once Freddie Lyon. "Bloody hell. This place is insane."
R chuckled and moved on with his tour, shrugging. "You'll get used to it. Oh yes, by the way, a word of warning: Most people from outside the branch are assholes, the agents especially. They like to come in and terrorize the techs when they're bored. Don't mind them; they're harmless."
Behind him, a woman looked up and shook her head in an amused, fond sort of way. "Only to you, R. They know better than to bully you, but the rest of us are fair game when you're not around."
The young man looked positively displeased. "I'll have a word with them."
"Sounds like fun," Kaz grinned.
The woman looked at him as though 1) he had only half his wits, and 2) as though she already pitied him. "They're trained assassins licensed to kill," she explained slowly.
R laughed, and god, had Kaz missed that impish, mischievous expression. "On a scale of one to ten, one being an earthworm and ten being a venomous snake, how dangerous does Dr. Ishida look, Dr. Saunders?"
She eyed him: Tall and weedy like a stretched-out piece of taffy and slightly stoop-shouldered due to his height. Meek expression behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Unstyled, spiky hair – spiky not out of fashion but because that was how it grew when it was that length. The very epitome of stereotypical nerdiness.
"Something tells me that three is on the wrong end of the scale."
The two men shared a smile.
. . . . .
2002
Cambridge University, England
Kaz groaned and carefully removed his glasses. He prodded at his sore eye and gingerly fingered the bridge of his swollen nose.
"Owowow."
"What happened to you? Bar fight?"
He'd long become accustomed to the little shrimp of a boy sneaking up on him unnoticed.
"Mixed martial arts tournament," Kaz muttered, slowly sliding his glasses back on so they wouldn't bump against his sore face.
The kid eyed his bruises skeptically. "Did you accidentally walk in on them and insult them or something? You're good at insulting people without meaning to, you know."
Kaz glared at him. "Ha ha. I won my section, thank you vurry much." He huffed. "And I don't need to be accused of accidental insults from you of all people, little boy."
"See? There you go again."
"That was very intentional, midget."
"Where do you practice?" the boy asked next.
"Why? So you can critique my technique like you critique everything else?"
"You're very ill-tempered today, did you know? I mean, you're usually surly, bored, or concentrating, but you're especially irate today."
Kaz wanted to knock the kid's coke-bottle glasses right through his face and out the back of his skull. The only reason he desisted was that his knuckles were already sore.
"Who do you practice with? The same people all the time, or do you like to mix it up?"
"Why the hell do you want to know?!" The volume of his own voice made his head ache and he groaned again.
"Goodness. You don't have to yell." The kid made that face again, that thing he did when he wanted to fidget nervously but was too stubborn and prideful to do it. "I only…I only thought maybe I could spar with you?" It wasn't a statement, but a question.
"You?" Kaz couldn't help it. He laughed, sore head and bruised ribs and all. "I don't want to be arrested for beating up a minor or some bloody shite."
The kid's face turned to stone.
"Sorry, sorry, that was mean," Kaz apologized. Damn. He hadn't meant to make fun of him. It had just come out. "I could teach you some time."
"That won't be necessary." The kid's eyes were flinty chips of sharp jade.
"Freddie," Kaz said, "I really am sorry for laughing. I'm an arse. You know that. I shouldn't have laughed. I'm sorry."
Freddie pursed his lips, deliberating. "When?" he asked at last.
"How about tonight?" Kaz was relieved that he hadn't lost the kid's…what, respect? Friendship? Whatever.
"You're still hurt," Freddie stated the obvious. "How about next week? Your ribs should be better by then."
Kaz hadn't mentioned his ribs, but the kid had probably guessed by the way he'd held his torso while laughing.
"Sure."
. . . . .
2010
MI6 HQ, London, UK
Kaz really should've known that something was up when R gave him a sly sideways glance before he tapped his ID card on a panel, pressed his hand on the flat surface of a scanner that slid out of the wall with a metallic shct sound, and stood in front of a retina reader.
The door slid open, and–
Kaz gasped, staring at the very expensive, very rare, very state-of-the-art one-of-a-kind equipment in the very secure room in front of him.
"Is that a —?"
"It is. Tweaked it a bit from my last design."
Kaz's awed "Bloody hell!" was breathless and slightly squeaky. "You could've told me you had this and I would've been knocking on your door."
The kid sounded smug, and rightfully so. "Exactly what I told them, but it's top-secret, so they said we can't tell people left and right, which is bollocks because it's my invention."
Kaz crept closer to the machine, practically tiptoeing in his reverence. He'd seen the articles, but he'd thought that it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything in reality.
"People left and right would sign up in a minute if they knew what this was and that MI6 had it, and that they could work with the man who thought it up."
"Exactly what I said!" Kaz wasn't looking, but he knew that the kid was definitely rolling his eyes in exasperation. "Instead," he continued, "they keep going with their tried and true method of scaring the living daylights out of poor scientists who are generally already anxiety-prone and neurotic to begin with, even when they're not overly-caffeinated."
Kaz pulled his gaze off of the beauty in front of him with a bit of effort to see that his friend looked exactly as he'd expected: indignant and disgusted and stroppy all in one. "That's bureaucracy for you, mate."
R made a disgruntled noise. "Things around here are going to change. Starting with the rate of return on equipment sent into the field."
"What, like guns and such? Low return rate?"
R's sniff eloquently conveyed his thoughts on the matter. "More like nonexistent when it comes to some agents. And they're the ones assigned the good stuff. The custom-designed vehicles, guns tailored specifically to them, weapons that have never seen the light of day. And they lose them! And when they don't lose them, they come back in pieces!"
Kaz might have backed away if he had a more timid nature. "You sound a little…tense. Things tend to explode when you're tense. You alright?" He recalled very vividly The Incident back in '02.
"I've grown out of that tendency. Mostly."
"Huh. Have you got a plan in mind for improving the equipment return rate?"
Obviously, the kid did – he always had a plan for everything – but Kaz was curious. He wanted to know if the kid had lost any of that over-dramatic flair he'd had back then, or if it had been a symptom of adolescence.
He wasn't disappointed.
Green eyes sparkled. "Tracking on all equipment to facilitate retrieval, especially on tech that we don't want in enemy hands. The number of brand new designs we've had stolen just because some dumbarse decided to throw his gun after he was out of bullets!" he moaned. "And of course, the higher-ups are too stupid to see that it would be more cost-efficient to send someone to retrieve discarded tech—so we can see what went wrong, for one thing!—instead of sending the agents back out with tech that might not work right in the field!"
Kaz hid his smile. Ah. Freddie was just the same, and that's how Kaz liked it. "How's your blood pressure, mate?"
"My blood pressure is fine, thank you."
"Alright," Kaz chuckled. "Let me know if you want to spar and let loose some steam. I'll feel better about getting my arse kicked now that you're my size. I want to try out that gym the HR lady was telling me about."
R put his scowl away and replaced it with a wide smile. "Thanks. The exercise facilities here are actually very nice. Remind me to show you."
. . . . .
2002
Cambridge University, England
Kaz prided himself on keeping himself in good shape. He prided himself on his skills in boxing and aikido, despite his tall and slim build, which had earned him the nickname gobō from his sister. Gobō was Japanese for burdock, an extraordinarily long and thin root vegetable that, in Kaz's opinion, tasted fabulous shredded and doused with mountains of sesame seeds and red chili pepper – enough to make him gasp and his eyes water.
Speaking of gasping for breath and watering eyes, Kaz really, truly did not know how he'd ended up flat on his back on the mat with the wind knocked out of him in less than two seconds.
"Whit th' bloody feck wis that?!" he demanded when he'd gotten his breath back, not willing to move his sore body just yet.
He gingerly turned his head to look at the kid, whose green eyes were dancing with suppressed glee and triumph—and quite a lot of unsuppressed smugness.
"What the hell, kid!"
"Don't judge a book by its cover," Freddie said primly. "My dad taught me how to defend myself."
Kaz rolled to his side and slowly got to his knees, then his feet. "What is he, a black belt in everything or something?" he wheezed.
"Or something."
Come to think of it, Freddie's father, who visited every weekend at the very least, did look a bit military. Definitely athletic and kept himself fit.
"Do you compete?" Kaz asked. Trust the kid to be some kind of world champion or some shite. Would be just the sort of thing he'd do.
Freddie shook his head. "Nah. I'm not really into competitions and such. Publicity isn't my style. I lost my taste for them after a couple of incidents back home."
Kaz raised an eyebrow at him, seeing that details were not forthcoming. "That's not mysterious and vague at all."
Freddie grinned. "I'm a man of mystery."
"You're a mere bairn, not a man."
The kid made a face at him, proving Kaz's point.
"Alright, seriously this time," Kaz said, getting back into position. "Go easy on an old man, eh?"
"Oh my god, my dad's old. You're twenty-four, for goodness' sake!...Gah! Put me down, Kaz!"
"Say uncle!"
"Never give up! Never surrender!"
. . . . .
Notes:
"Never give up! Never surrender!" - Quote from Galaxy Quest, which is a delightfully nerdy parody of Star Trek and fandom.
The fancy shmancy piece of equipment Kaz was drooling over: I have no idea. I'm not a scientist, and I have no idea what would make a real scientist drool. I made up something in a fic once and comments were generally something along the lines of "Just say that it was a mass spectrometer and don't make up nonsense science names!'" so I'm a little leary of doing so. It would have to be something that applies to multiple fields so it would be a draw for a lot of different kinds of scientists…if the government would only let on that they had one. I don't know if such a thing exists, but it does in this 'verse. Feel free to insert a fabulous magical mystery instrument of your choice.