A/N: Thank you for all reviews and thoughts! Every review is appreciated. Here is the new chapter of Tessitura.

V

Good Old Friends

"I believe this is yours, it looks important. I found it in the Walther's holster. Which is my property, mind you."

Rachel Whyte directed her eyes to Q, who held out a small silver token-like object toward her as they stood at the docks. It was the ring. After the call with M, and the probable involvement of a supposed dead assassin, the three of them proceeded on with their duties. Moneypenny, who left to try and retrieve what she could about Volkov, found a way to secure the agent a getaway boat. The boat's location humoured her, for it was stationed exactly by the backdoor she accessed when she gave Q his opera ticket the morning before the present. How Moneypenny made this boat happen was beyond her, but what mattered more to Whyte was the fond thought of not having to swim to leave. It may have worked once, but with the state of her body, there were better opportunities ahead to abuse her luck with an injury.

She looked at him for a moment, then back at the object between his fingers before taking it slowly away from his grasp. When she examined it upon her open palm, the menacing blood-coloured octopus insignia greeted her. "Just a keepsake of sorts. Are you sure it's safe for you to linger around? I imagine with that CCTV right behind you, someone in the Q-Branch is watching. This boat is not exactly as inconspicuous as my swimming."

"That would be my worry to handle." Q replied, confidence lingering in his tone. This was, after all, his department. Whyte chose to trust his words. He seemed to like looking straight into her eyes, searching for something she would not let him find, "But are you sure you're telling us everything?"

"What do you mean?" she raised an eyebrow in the instance of his inquiry. She did not expect to be further investigated, but yet she felt more impressed than insulted.

"Iosif Antonov, a young and dead Russian artist." the quartermaster drove straight into his point, as the London breeze swept along softly. He eyed the ring on her palm through his black frames and continued, "When I was investigating Volkov's files while you were asleep, he was one of the victims in the pictures. He wore a ring just like that."

"But where is your connection?"

"Friends By Free Will."

He concluded with those words, his gaze looking beyond her palm and lingered at her clothed forearm. Q gazed intently, as if he saw the mark in the flesh at that very moment. There, Rachel Whyte decided to keep still. She tried to anticipate him, and from his short breath, he too seemed to be expecting a certain reaction from her. There was no reaction, only the sound of water and her suspended arm holding out a ring part of a dark secret.

"I remembered, when we first met, I identified your tattoo as something of the Russian prison kind. Hours earlier, when I tended to your damage, I saw it again. It's not the prison kind, rather, inspired by it - made to look like one in a passing glance, then, as one look at it closely..." Q trailed, raising his hands as he began to fold up the sleeve of her jacket. There was a shred of caution in his movement, and Whyte did not expect him to make the contact that he was doing now. When her tattoo is unveiled into the open, he lowered his hands quickly back to his sides, "...it's exactly styled in Iosif Antonov's form of drawing in his ink sketches. Even when your files make it convincingly so that you were born and raised in Newcastle, your accent has more of London in it and maybe even a little American. In addition, the fluent Russian. You've been around, Rachel Whyte. But what are you hiding?"

She looked at the faded ink marked against her skin, an artistic piece that in itself was a scar she remembered so well. A small smirk tugged against the corner of her lips, while her fingers slowly folded over the ring as she asked him, "Would you have considered last night as a sort of date?"

Q, who was stuck in his inquiry, was visibly taken aback by the random question, "Excuse me?"

Whyte flew away with her own thoughts as she began to think more of what she would like it to mean for her, and how she wished to remember it instead of what it really was, "Yes, I think I'll think of it as a date."

As she nodded to herself, Whyte could make out the quartermaster's appalled expression as she avoided his eyes. He was watching her again, searching for an answer. The truth was still out there, and the truth was with everyone. But the humour dried sooner than imagined, and Q became harder to sway.

"I knew Iosif at one point in my life. 'Friends', I suppose, as far as friends go." she finally admitted after a deep breath. Her words spat out more poison than she cared to. She shrugged her arms as she leaned against the rail, staring at the CCTV camera that watched them carefully, "But the Volkov circumstance was beyond me. My father's job required a lot of... Travelling. I moved to Kiev from Moscow shortly after, and a few years later when I visited, his sister told me he died. A shot to the head."

"Why didn't you tell us about Volkov, knowing that you've a shred of him?" Q asked, his frown bleeding into his words. He didn't seem to feel betrayed, as more of his relaxed yet flat composure flowed as one of his hands found the rail.

Whyte shrugged briefly, treating it like a mundane oversight, "I didn't think it was important. Volkov was more like a myth until today."

"Anything is important - especially if this Volkov might be working with Quantum. He's killed three Double-O agents so easily, and if that's not dangerous then what is?"

"Do you have friends, Q?" Another one of her random questions fluttered from her lips as she folded her arms. She had a fancy for it, these random questions. They were things that crawl into her mind in the most interesting points of conversation, the very kind that earned her Q's brief expressions of feeling taken aback.

"I think 'colleagues' would be the more appropriate term."

They had a recurring pattern of speechless gaps in-between exchanges. Whyte highly doubt that awkwardness was the root of the cause, and rather, she suspected the gap was merely just the side effect of trying to read each other's minds. But their actions gave them so little to work with, that they both dangled upon whatever they could hold onto. Thinking about it made Whyte burst into a soft chuckle, so uncanny and random that she tilted her head slightly, as the back of her mind played on the idea of them watching her at this very moment. Time ticked by so dangerously, and yet she still found it appropriate to kill more of her borrowed time with the quartermaster.

He arched a brow at her sudden burst.

She shook her head as she met his eyes, grey and green in hard glances. The chuckled faded away from her lips, "Don't have friends, Q. They're poison - liabilities. Just... Do what you have to do. Even if that requires the wrong things."

"Won't that be quite redundant?" he replied, but they both knew that the understanding was there. A moment after, a quiet buzz emerged from his pocket. When he fished out his cellphone, a small white square with text lit up the glass surface, "Shit. There it goes."

"What?" Whyte pressed on, as her eyes tried to peer onto the screen of his cellphone. It required no further effort, however, as the quartermaster flicked his wrist to show her what was on the screen.

"There is a bloody BBC article on the DB10. It seems as though Bond did not leave his 'situation' unscathed." he muttered, followed by an incomprehensible curse as a stream of murmurs began flooding his mouth, "Tanner should call as soon as they get some ground. I've no doubt someone in the MI6 main office has already tipped him an email."

While Q drowned in his seeming downfall, she squinted her eyes on the shaky cellphone screen, examining a perfectly put picture of the DB10 dipping into the waterside. There it was, she mused, millions of British government money burying into the nothingness. Its legacy, true to Bond's stylish ways of damage, were the words 'Street race ends with a splash' in a bold, black header under the world news tab of the website. Journalists - always in good time.

"You must appreciate the perfection of timing here, Q. They've got the photo just right."

"I think I care more about my job than the art of photography right now, Whyte. I'm on the line here."

"So you are." Rachel Whyte nodded, accepting the situation more factually than empathetically. She pulled a cigarette stick from her pocket and pressed it between her lips, lighting the tip with a flick of her lighter. The breeze still existed, but not enough to put out the flame, "But it is, in the end, a consequence of circumstance."

Q stared at her, "Is that really all you have to say? After you and Bond-"

He silenced abruptly as she stepped closer, unfolding her arms as she hid them behind her back with her fingers interlocking. A puff of smoke bloomed from sides of the cigarette that was still held in between her lips, and while she motioned one step closer towards him, he stepped back once in response before subconsciously freezing in place. Whyte smiled watching him, pulling one of her hands free to take the cigarette away from her lips, leaning to the side of his face just by his ear, "As I said, do what you have you have to do. After all, it's only in this part of the world where two wrongs make a right."

She felt her lips smirk at that simple truth, before pressing her lips softly against his cold cheek. He did not move, but he did breathe - softly, jaggedly, and then carefully. Whyte pulled away shortly after, her smirk still solid as she returned her cigarette between her lips. When he did not say anything, she buttoned up her coat and hopped onto the small boat Moneypenny had the bother to arrange for her. She squinted her eyes at the docks opposite from where they stood now, before turning slightly over her shoulder with his figure at the corner of her eye, "I'll definitely remember it as a date. I'll see you when I see you, Q."

There were only so many things she could possibly think that could go on in his mind at that moment.

Blood, again.

Rachel Whyte cursed as she sat on top of a man who lived until seconds ago, before she stuck his own dagger right into his throat. It was bloody, messy, and unrefined in technique. She had not fought in such a barbaric manner for a longer time than she could count, and she could only stare at her stained hands in disgust as she kicked his gun closer with the heel of her shoes before picking it up. The Walther - the very same one that she used last night - was tucked unused within the breast pocket of her coat. She hated the gun for personal reasons, but there was no way she would leave Q's bunker unarmed. Imagining the quartermaster's face once he notices she had stolen something again was an amusing thought, but the lasting humour will have to wait another time. Whyte took a deep breath, her eyes looked left and right the hallway of the dreary apartment floor. No noticeable witnesses so far.

After inspecting the gun on her hands, she examined the dead man she had just killed. From his face, the clothes he wore, and the hostility she was greeted with. Whyte had no doubt it was them, they are here. The blood on her fingers were sticky, personally unpleasant, and she had no doubt that some had splattered on her face - maybe even on the short wavy strands of her bright blonde hair.

Holding the gun with both hands out, Whyte stepped over the corpse of pooling blood and paced silently across the hallway. The man was only one man, and there could always be more like him. Her eyes searched, actively than ever, observing spaced gaps on the walls which shaped itself according to the apartment doors in the complex. The light flickered above her, but only slightly. Her apartment was at the end of the hall, which could only mean that another man hiding in these spaces was more than likely. When she took another step, she found her answer.

The new attacker, who slipped out from the space third from the right of her doorway, erupted with his gun out. When he fired, Whyte rushed to the nearest left, rolling against the wall as she breathed heavily. She rolled her back closer to the edge of the wall and peeked into the line of fire, holding the her gun out and fired as soon as she spotted a wisp of his hair. When she saw his shadow flinch, she moved away completely from the wall and walked further to his direction as she fired three more times to keep him in place. As soon as the man dared to aim his fire at her, Whyte moved to a quick sidestep as a bullet flew out before kicking his gun to the ceiling - shattering the glass lights above them before raining along with the shards onto the ground. Unarmed, the man threw himself at her with a swipe of his fist as she ducked, kicking him straight on the chest as he fell against the wall where she shot him clean on his head.

"I really should have bothered with those martial arts lessons." Whyte murmured to herself as she cracked her neck, eyeing the deep scratch on her shoulder which she earned from the rather tedious knife fight from earlier. She was bleeding, again.

She held up the gun once more, keeping herself alert with all possibilities. Two may be dead, but two more could be alive and lingering. But as she reached her door through a carefully-paced scan, there was no one else to be seen. Whyte looked behind her and stared down the hallway, and then looked back at the door of her apartment. Quietly taking out her key, she pushed the metal piece into the lock as she rested a shoulder on the wall just by the door frame. The two dead men that laid at the hallway may have been more convenient kills, but what laid beyond her door was could be something else. Holding her breath, she turned the knob and pushed the door open as quietly as possible. She aimed the gun in full awareness, fanning her sights from the gloomy panoramic window in the distance, to the small kitchen at the nearest corner. Nothing - not even a breath was heard.

It was until she was about to relax her shoulders that she heard the click of a gun behind her back, and the faint shadow of a larger figure looming over her. When the stranger's footsteps padded closer, she felt the gun's muzzle press at the centre of her back. Whyte hissed at her defeat, pulling her hands apart as she raised her them up high. The muzzle dug deeper into her back in response, urging her to motion further into her apartment.

"Walk." a deep voice croaked. She did not know this voice, but she did as she was told.

They walked slowly first passing the kitchen, then the small alternate living area, until they began to walks closer to the open space where the panoramic window bragged a view of a gloomy London morning. She tried plotting her escape, but she knew she stood no chance against a larger man in a more physical combat. There had to be another way. "If you're going to kill me, make up your mind."

The man did not reply, and instead, pressed the muzzle further into her back where it began moving areas that slightly disturbed her rib injury. Whyte bit her lip as it happened, for she dared not let him know she was already vulnerable. The man did not seem threatened with her still holding the gun with one of her raised hands, and probably because he knew he had the better odds if she tried anything. When they reached the open space that had the panoramic window, Whyte felt her face harden at what she saw. A man with greying blonde hair was seated between the cushions of her sofa, seemingly aloof of her arrival which could also translate as his assured confidence that he had the upper hand. He held himself in proper presence, his arms folded across his navy Nehru jacket, and the lasting impression of his quiet sophistication. The man looked at her as she looked at him, like two predators without prey.

"Ah, Rachel Whyte. Unless of course, you do like that '009' moniker of yours."

Whyte felt her lips purse as he slowly pronounced her agent number, but she only responded by waving her free hand - still red with someone else's blood for him to see, "What are we doing here, Franz?"

Franz Oberhauser broke away their gaze and briefly examined her hand, then gestured to the side of the sofa diagonal to him, treating the space like it was his own home and not her own, "As you have experienced, I have prepared you a very particular homecoming. This is a personal meeting of a kind, and also an underlying warning about killing off my agents. Shall I remind you again that it's 'Ernst Stavro Blofeld'? But please, have a seat."

He will always be Franz Oberhauser to her.

The gunman behind her pressured the muzzle onto her back again, pushing her to the side of the sofa Oberhauser wished for her be seated on. Whyte looked over her shoulder with another low hiss, shrugging the muzzle from her back as she seated herself in her own accord. She settled the gun upon the glass table, a clear sign of surrender, "If your little Quantum agents tailing me around will ease you, it does not ease me the slightest. Insurance is built on grounds of distrust - will you please tell your insufferable brute to lower his gun?"

"I suppose your little MI6 adventure has shaped you a bit, or perhaps, you have become smarter than your mouth?" Oberhauser did not blink an eye, but turned to his gunman with a slightly raised hand, "At peace, Mr. Hinx."

The gunman, Mr. Hinx, grunted as he obeyed. He motioned a few steps away from Whyte, but kept a suspicious look directed at her and every move she may think to make. Mr. Hinx was nonetheless his own kind of intimidating, and she felt irritated by the mere fact that his large size proved him to be a harder fight. It was almost laughable to think of everyone who searched far and wide just to hunt down Franz Oberhauser, only to have him sitting on her couch in an apartment at the heart of London itself. The irony was not to be missed, and she thought to feel pity for Bond. If what happened in Rome happened the way it should, there was no doubt that 007 already saw this very face.

She knew about him - about them.

"Now," he resumed as his tongue rolled his accent, folding his arms once more. Oberhauser met his unreadable gaze with her piercing one, "I hope you are familiar with a rabbit box?"

A/N: Thank you for reading. Don't forget to review/comment!