Author's Notes: Oh, my lovelies, I'm sorry for being gone so long.

5. Tinker

Q woke with the sun beaming at him through the blinds and the startling realization that he had slept for six uninterrupted hours. He put his glasses and trousers on and cast a wary glance at both ends of the hallway before slipping out to the living room, feeling not quite like an intruder, but like an uneasy ally, welcomed by some but merely tolerated by others.

His suit jacket was crumpled on the back of the sofa where he had left it, his mobile still in the pocket. No missed calls, only one missed text message – from Holly, fifteen minutes ago: You're not logged into the server – you must have had a good night.

Q decided not to dignify that with a response and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Audrey joined him a few minutes later, wrapped in a soft green dressing gown that was somehow more enticing than nakedness.

"I have the whole day off today," she announced with mock achievement, folding her long legs into a chair. "What about you?"

Q poured two mugs of tea and joined her at the table. "I have to work from home tonight, but I can put that off until six."

Audrey tore open a packet of biscuits and crumbled one into her tea. "There's a breakfast place two blocks down, and an even better breakfast place in Mayfair if you're not feeling too lazy to take the Tube."

"I have to go back to my flat at some point. Change my clothes and feed my cat."

Something about this sentence made Audrey choke and drip tea down her front. Q considered withholding the napkins until she explained the humor, but when she reached for one, eyes plaintive and watering, he relented and slid the holder closer.

"Sorry." She dabbed unsuccessfully at her dressing gown, eyes flicking back to him over and over as though she regretted the necessity of looking away. "When I first described you to my flatmates, Kit's only comment was, 'I'd bet he has a cat.'"

"I'd hoped I wasn't quite that transparent," Q huffed. He glanced as casually as he could at the clock. "Why don't I meet you in an hour at this better breakfast place?"

Audrey frowned. "Don't you live between here and Mayfair?"

Q couldn't recall everything he had told her about the neighborhood around his flat, which meant he was caught in the truth. "...Yes."

"So why don't we stop at your flat on the way there?"

Over time Q had assembled a handful of excuses for why they could not visit his flat – his bugged, lonely, revealing flat – but in the bright light of day they seemed to shiver and shrink like old Halloween decorations. "I'm not sure you're prepared for my terrible housekeeping."

"I visited both of my brothers at uni," Audrey countered. "I don't scare easily."

For a moment they stared each other down, and then Audrey arched one eyebrow, incredulous and provocative, and Q knew he couldn't win. But a tendril of unease remained wrapped around his throat and he spoke without thinking, unsure which one of them he was addressing: "Don't say I didn't warn you."

They could have walked, but Q insisted that they take the Tube, because it allowed him less time for argument or regret. On a Sunday morning churches swallowed most of the pedestrian traffic, and Q felt conspicuous on the pavement in his half-assembled suit, Audrey beside him in a casual jumper and skirt. In the Tube the cameras crouched closer, their dead staring heads squatting just out of reach, but it was easier to pretend in the confines of the car, to sit in silence for the short ride without seeming rude. Q fiddled with his mobile and Audrey slumped her head back and stared at the map across the aisle, the city's arteries streamlined to a deceptive degree.

Parked cars lined the block up to Q's flat. They were at the door to the building before Q realized that he was following the handbook, keeping himself between Audrey and the street, scanning windows and the bellies of the cars. Usually he was the asset, at the expense of his pride; it made him feel both delicate and dangerous, because he knew their orders were to watch for the danger within as well as without, to handle him as though he might bite.

At the top of the stairs he made a final attempt: "I'll only be a minute. You could wait outside."

Audrey looked at him for a moment, then sighed heavy enough to flutter her fringe. "Robert, you're making me suspicious."

Schrodinger came running at the sound of their entrance and could not backpedal fast enough to avoid being scooped up in Audrey's arms.

"You're a handsome boy," she praised, soothing him with a belly rub. "What's your name?"

"Schrodinger," Q supplied.

Audrey rolled her eyes, but she was grinning. "Of course."

With Schrodinger cradled against her chest, she mock-waltzed into the living room, one of his front paws cupped in her hand as though she were steering him through the steps. "This isn't as awful as you made it sound. You should probably hoover, but –" She dipped Schrodinger in the direction of his Blu-ray shelf. "– at least your films are alphabetized."

As they walked within the telly's line of sight, it winked awake and introduced itself: "Good morning. What can I do for you today?"

"Weather, please," Q requested, stepping into the kitchen, scooping up Schrodinger's dish, and rinsing it out in the sink.

"Partly cloudy with a high of twenty and a low of thirteen," the telly recited coolly. "Forty percent chance of rain after five p.m."

When Q turned around, Audrey was watching the screen with equal parts wariness and excitement, like a birdwatcher creeping closer to a rare species. Schrodinger took advantage of her distraction to wiggle away.

"Did you make that?" she asked.

"I made some improvements to a Kinect. It communicates wirelessly with a processor running a custom interface."

Audrey swiped a hand in front of the screen, toggling between today's weather and the seven-day forecast. "What else does it do?"

Q said, "News, please," and the screen morphed from a calming blue to an urgent red, stacked top to bottom with the icons of international news outlets: BBC, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, The New York Times.

A teasing smile wriggled one side of her mouth. "Do you have to say please?"

"If I didn't say it to my electronics, I might never remember to say it again."

Audrey cleared her throat, which Q suspected hid a snicker, and said, "The Daily Mail, please."

The telly sat silent and still, save for a shimmer that rippled at intervals across the background.

Now it was Q's turn to smirk. "It only responds to my voice, but you can use the Kinect. What the hell do you want The Daily Mail for, anyway?"

"I have to see if it's marked under your favorites. I can't date a man who reads The Daily Mail."

Exploration of the telly and the contents of his coffee table absorbed her while Q fed Schrodinger and scooped the litter box. Being constantly monitored for most of his twenties had bred a vicious protectiveness of his few private things, and a small but persistent corner of his brain dragged his attention again and again to Audrey, to the things that she opened and touched and looked at, the silent embellishments she must be building on her construct of him. But the honest and indiscriminate nature of her curiosity appeased him. When he had been arrested they had seized anything capable of sending wireless signals but ignored all his other attempts at communication, the Scrabble-tile magnets on the fridge, the moth-eaten afghan he wouldn't bin, the book still open on his kitchen table beside a cup of tea he would never drink.

Q said, "Give me five minutes to change and then we can leave," and she answered, "Perfect, that's five minutes I can spend snooping through your shelves."

In his bedroom Q shut off the stereo – his audiobook of The Scarlet Letter had mercifully run its course overnight – and ferreted through the cupboard for an outfit that wouldn't look like he was going to the office. The door stood ajar so he could track the sound of Audrey's movement through the flat, but all he heard was the slip of plastic cases sliding off the shelf and her voice providing commentary just on the other side of the wall.

"Blade Runner – predictable. Casablanca – pretentious. How many times have you actually watched this?"

Q closed his eyes to summon a scene she might recognize. "'But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people –'"

"All right, then," Audrey conceded with a smile in her voice. "Much Ado About Nothing with Emma Thompson – good boy. Pacific Rim – also predictable." She fell silent just long enough that Q started to wonder, then – "Pirates of Penzance?"

Q whipped round and bashed his elbow on the cupboard door. "That's not mine."

"Mmm." She did not sound convinced.

The reflection in Q's laptop screen wrinkled its nose at his hair but looked otherwise presentable. When he stuck his head into the living room, Audrey was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by uneven mounds of Blu-ray boxes, head bowed over a thick pink-and-white case in her lap.

"You own My Fair Lady," she said without looking up. "On VHS, no less."

Q leaned on the wall, rested his head against the sharp corner and blinked back his feelings. "It was in a box of things I took from my grandmother's house after she died. I don't even own anything that can play it. I'm not sure why I still have it."

"I've seen that before," Audrey murmured. She turned the video-tape box to the back, as though it pained her to meet the eyes of her namesake on the front. "People at St. Thomas's treating broken watches and old stuffed animals like precious stones, because that's all they've got left. A lot of us on the staff have something too, some little trinket or message in our locker to get us through the bad days."

Her hand went to the cluster of keys around her neck and rolled the miniature TARDIS between her fingers, and Q wondered if she knew its every ridge and angle the way he could navigate Vauxhall in the dark, the number of steps between Holly's door and his, the jump from mouse to keyboard that his hands made hundreds of times a day.

"I've put up a card from my brother," she said. "At a distance it says Audrey over and over again in different scripts, but up close every letter is made of tiny words. Like people in a crowd. It's an ordinary letter, you know, he wrote me about his job and his girlfriend and wished me a happy birthday, but... the little pieces together make something greater."

Together they reordered his shelves and shut off the telly and in less than a minute his flat looked just as it had before she had come. But she would linger, in the faint scent of her hair and the fingerprints on his furniture and her voice recorded in his file for the surveillance algorithm to note, an unexpected event, an aberration in the data.

The Amsterdam debriefings left Bond sore like a prodded bruise. He had little to say, and no one, not even M, pressed him on any point. But the grim camaraderie that suffused their silence worked his anger more effectively than accusations, and a hulking part of him wanted relentless action until they found the rat.

He spent as much time as he could at Vauxhall, swimming laps and testing equipment and listening. Q had warmed to Bond's presence; an extra chair appeared in his office, and within five minutes, no matter where in the Branch Bond was loitering, Teresa would deliver a cup of coffee prepared to his liking. (How she must know this had given Bond pause, and made him consider both Dooley and the sleepy-eyed scientists in Chemicals more carefully.)

But an unbreachable silence sat between him and the Quartermaster, and Bond could not be sure from whose side it originated. A frightening determined energy possessed Q – he caromed from InfoSec to Archives to Telecommunications, consuming code with his fingers drumming distractedly against the desktop, his eyes tense and the hair at the back of his skull constantly standing on end. Even seated he seemed to vibrate at a dangerous frequency, as though he might shake apart at the slightest touch. Holly had concerns about how much he was sleeping.

On Friday Moneypenny found Bond excising his frustration on the firing range.

"Time to get back out in the world," she said, and handed him a familiar manila folder.

"São Paulo," Bond remarked, trying to muster his usual mission zeal. The folder's first pages had nothing to do with Zims.

"You're taking a red eye. Q's expecting you tonight before you leave." Moneypenny nudged him; her smile was sympathetic. "Pack your swimsuit. You might have a chance for some fun for a change."

Most of the boffins had vacated by eleven p.m. on a Friday, but Q-Branch never truly went dark. Blue and red lights gleamed through greyed-out windows like the eyes of caged animals. A deep hum, usually buried by the cacophony of the office, throbbed just on the surface of hearing.

He had been heading for Q's office, but on the storey below, bright lights through an open door and a cluster of familiar voices attracted him. Q had gathered the top InfoSec staff around a standing desk in one of the open-plan mission control rooms: dozens of computer stations arranged in concentric arches, wall-mounted screens feeding them international news and closed-circuit clips and even a loop of the sunset recorded from the Vauxhall roof. At the sight of Bond the little knot broke apart; Holly cleared away the laptop they had been studying, Sullivan retreated to a second-row desk, and Jeffries beelined for Bond.

"Double-oh-seven." Jeffries grasped Bond's hand and clapped him on the shoulder. "I hear Brazil's lovely this time of year. And it's farther afield than they've sent you in a while – they finally letting the old dog off the leash?"

"I've been off the leash. But someone's got to keep an eye on you lot. Horrible tendency to set things on fire."

Jeffries threw up his hands. "One time. One isolated incident –"

"Not the type of damage we pay you to do," Q reminded from the central desk, where he was fitting a Walther and its magazines into the foam shell of an open case.

"Hey," Jeffries protested, waving an emphatic finger from Bond to Holly to Sullivan, whose eyes crinkled over the top of his monitor. "At least that fire exposed a blind spot in our sprinkler system, eh? A little credit would be nice."

"Alan's quite good at the unintended consequences," Holly explained to Bond. "He'll call you into a board room and persuade you how it all really fell out in his favor. Slides, graphs, reports, everything."

Q took an earpiece kit from his desk drawer and examined some minute detail on the underside of the battery pack. "You're traveling light, 007. I've made arrangements for the rest of your equipment to be delivered to your hotel via our friends in the CIA."

"I wasn't sure we still had those," Bond remarked, sidling up to the desk. This was the first time Q had spoken to him in almost a week, so he kept his tone light, listening for his cues.

"Mr. Leiter's always keen to see you. And I expect a team-up with him will do good. He's got your knack for survival."

Something about the emphasis and the little flash of Q's eyes drew a smirk to Bond's face. This was what he was accustomed to, the aggrieved attitude that bled through every Quartermaster's countenance, the disdain masking fondness for the one agent that always came back.

"Don't tell me you're actually upset about my escape from Amsterdam."

Q wasn't tall enough to look down his nose at Bond, but he achieved a similar effect by tipping his head down and looking Bond in the eye over the top of his glasses. "The laundry chute."

"Are you offended because you didn't think of it?"

"I'm offended because it's a cliché." Q's contempt only made Bond's grin wider. "And because you just so happened to land in a room full of convenient hotel uniforms that disguised you long enough to effect your getaway."

"Would that we all had 007's luck," Jeffries sighed, flopping down at his desk and prodding the computer – and just as the last word left his lips, the wall-mounted monitors went dark as one.

No one had been watching them, but their sudden absence startled, as if all the birds in a forest had gone silent. Bond couldn't know if this was a regular occurrence, a scheduled reboot or a timed evening shutdown perhaps, but his intuition registered the way Holly's head snapped up from her tablet and he stepped closer to Q's table, putting both the highest officer and the weapon Bond needed to protect him within arm's reach.

Jeffries scampered to the closest wall and flicked a switch on one of the screens, waited several seconds, and flicked it again; when nothing happened, he wormed a hand behind the monitor, the side of his face pressed to the wall and the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration. Sullivan opened a new program on his desktop and ran through diagnostics Bond couldn't decipher. Q and Holly exchanged a glance encoded with several layers of communication.

"Sir." Sullivan had a field agent's poker face. "We're detecting multiple simultaneous attempts to breach Omega security. Tracing the source now."

"Twenty pounds says it's us," Holly muttered.

"A little optimism, please," Jeffries chided as he ducked back to his desk, his smile bent. "Maybe it's just the Russians."

Then a cursor blipped into life on the central screen.

For a moment they all blinked back at it, faces upturned and uncomprehending like children gazing into space – and then it began to march, left to right, unwinding white words across the dark screen.

Good evening, Q-Branch.

Q sighed. "Well." His tongue flicked across his lower lip. "I suppose this is the part where he makes his demands."

And the computer answered: If you insist.

A surge of understanding jolted everyone simultaneously. Holly's head jerked towards Q, then course-corrected back to the screen. Bond saw Jeffries mouth the word "shit."

The mole was still typing: Unlock the Omega files for five minutes, and I'll disappear. You'll never hear from me again. A pause. You might hear from some of my clients, though – I don't accept responsibility for their actions.

Q's eyebrows disappeared into his fringe. "You must be joking."

Oh well. Couldn't hurt to ask.

Another pause and then the words came faster, in excitement or anger:

No matter how this evening plays out, Quartermaster, remember that I gave you the choice to avoid all this.

The room felt airless; Sullivan did not have to raise his voice above a murmur. "Attack seems to originate from within our network."

Q nodded, unsurprised, his mouth set in a resigned line. "Who's still on the property?"

Sullivan had already called up the camera feed. "Six security guards, sir: two in the lobby, one in the car park, one on the roof, two making rounds within the building. M's office is dark. Movement in the garage –" His brow clouded for a moment, then cleared. "– Looks like Mr. Tanner going home for the night."

At his own monitor, Jeffries zoomed in on footage from the opposite end of the building. "Goldberg's in the Animal Research lab." He leaned sideways round the screen so they could all see the suggestion in his face. "He's Alpha-level."

Holly shook her head. "Max doesn't know enough about our system to do..." She swept one hand across the expanse of compromised screens. "...this."

"The whole point of this –" Jeffries mimicked the gesture. "– is that the prick can't crack your Omega-level encryption."

Q shot him a sharp look. "Keep an eye on it. Anyone enters or leaves, any suspicious movement, I want to know." He turned to Bond and slid the Walther's case across the desktop, an offering and an order. "Escort Mr. Goldberg from the building. Gently, if possible."

"If possible," Bond warned.

Bond retraced his steps to the lifts and veered left down the service stairs, one shoulder skimming the wall and a hand resting on his gun. Chemicals had a smell that coated the back of the throat, an antiseptic tang much like Medical, and he didn't know if it was the association or a professional instinct that stiffened his spine when he opened the door. For a moment he stilled, sifting through the signals of his senses for anything awry. Nothing. Bond scanned each corner before he rounded it anyway.

That action saved him – mere steps from Animal Research, the corner of his eye caught movement and his body pulled back before his mind could react. Something the size of a person, black with a broad midsection – one of Vauxhall's security guards, in the usual flak-jacket uniform. He was close enough that Bond could hear the rustle of his trousers.

Ten steps nearer, then a pause, a quiet click. Bond drew the Walther and edged up to the angle of the wall, peered out with the barest sliver of blue eye, and saw the guard in profile, stepping through the door of Goldberg's lab with his gun in his hands. His cocked, steadied gun, aiming –

Bond sprang forward and reached the door just in time to see Maxwell Goldberg's final act: straightening his shoulders as though he were about to stand up. The guard's bullet hit him along the back seam of his lab coat, just below the collar; the impact threw him against the desk, head snapping back and then forward like a bobble toy, crashing down on a metal tray and dashing dishes of tissue samples against the wall.

The guard had not been expecting Bond. Fear had a distinctive feeling in Bond's hands, a sudden rigidity just before adrenaline kicked in and they fought. From behind he locked an arm around the killer's throat and the man flailed, unable to shoot what he could not see. They crashed together into a lab table, jarring more delicate equipment – a lamp on a loose pivot clipped Bond's shoulder, the bad shoulder, and the guard rammed him against a metal cabinet hard enough to knock away both breath and the Walther.

Bond dropped to his knees, and the man fell for it. He leaned in, a half-step closer, and Bond's tackle swept his legs out from under him. One more gunshot, wild, the bullet cratering the concrete wall a full meter above Bond's head – and then the table cracked the killer as he fell, sharp corner catching him right in the soft joint at the base of the skull. There would be no questioning him now.

The lab rats chittered in their cages. They shied away when Bond limped over to retrieve the Walther, claws clacking uselessly against the back bars, and he thought of the windowless room upstairs, the four people boxed in by walls built to protect them, snuffed out by the self-designed efficiency of their system.

At the door to the mission control room he almost collided with Holly. They both reacted on instinct; her hands flew up to halt him and he seized her by the wrists. Normally when a friend triggered his defenses he would immediately stand down and apologize, but this time he held on, the strength of his grip impressing her with urgency.

"Security's been compromised –"

"We know."

"Goldberg's dead –"

"We saw."

Over her shoulder the others were rooted to their stations, keyboards clacking, Sullivan glowering, Jeffries muttering to himself as his eyes hunted through a haze of code. Q was standing over a laptop at the commanding desk, its light tingeing his face an ethereal white-blue, a ghost marshaling his machines.

Bond raised his voice: "I'm going to escort you out two at a time –"

"No, you're not," Q countermanded without even looking up. "I won't abandon our system, there's too many agents relying on our technology –"

"You can't help them like this." Bond stalked to the desk and planted himself directly across from Q, trying to force the kid to meet his eyes. "He has you right where he wants you, and he can lead you anywhere he wants you to go. You can't win on those terms."

"There's got to be some reason he's come into the open, and even if it's just to toy with us I'm not going to waste this opportunity –"

"An opportunity to be a smear on the wall when he blows up the building."

That finally knocked Q's head back as if he'd been punched, and the eyes that met Bond's were flashing, furious, wounded, because this was one of the terms of their friendship, that they did not use the most obvious weapon that lay between them. For an instant Bond feared that he'd misjudged the way the scales would tip – and then Q's gaze traveled across his staff, and the calculations fell out behind his eyes, and Bond knew that his dirty trick had won.

Q looked down at his laptop, masked in dispassion. "This assignment will be voluntary. Anyone who wishes to take advantage of 007's protection may do so."

No one moved. Sullivan's attention had never once wavered from his computer screen. Jeffries gave Bond an exaggerated, helpless shrug – duty calls, eh? Behind him Bond heard Holly take two steps in the wrong direction, and then the electronic lock beeped, and tumblers clacked in stereo as the room's three doors sealed them in.

Let them be brave, 007, the mole advised from the screen. It's a comforting lie, and we like those here in Q-Branch.

"Oooh, I can just tell how much I'm going to love him," Holly grumbled, joining Q at the desk and snapping her tablet into a keyboard dock. "I hope I'm not the one who hired his arse."

Oh, Mrs. Mason, the best is yet to come, said the screen, and a tiny frown troubled Q's face. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Then a mobile erupted like a siren, making four sets of hands jump for pockets and desk drawers – it was Q's, lying on the desk beside his keyboard, screen lit up with an unnamed number. Bond saw Q's hand reach for it automatically, then curl into a fist and drop to his side. He and Holly both stared at it as though it were a viper under glass. The ringtone looped once, twice –

Q stabbed the button for speaker and said, neutrally, "Hello?"

A man's voice, distorted by distance: "Robert? It's Will."

Bond had already started assembling evidence of identity (no older than Q, well-spoken but not quite as posh, outdoors, along a street, traffic and pedestrian chatter in the background), but Q's shoulders slumped in relief and recognition, tension melting into irritation.

"Will –" He pinched the bridge of his nose as though fighting a headache. "Listen, I'm in the middle of something –"

"Is Audrey with you?"

Q's eyes sprang open and he froze with his hand still raised to his face. "No."

"Her shift ended three hours ago and I haven't seen or heard from her. She's not answering her mobile." An uncomfortable, expectant pause. "She told you about Satan, right?"

"Sorry?"

"That bloke she used to date."

"Oh. Yes."

"Well, as far as we know he still lives near St. Thomas's, so she usually tells us when she expects to be home." His voice shrunk, almost too small to be heard. "Just – you know, just in case."

Q gave himself a little shake, like a bird rolling water off its back. His tone flattened into professionalism, affirming but unrevealing, the voice they all armored themselves with eventually. "I haven't spoken to her. I've been at work all day."

A sigh. "…All right."

"Will."

"Yeah?"

"If you do hear from her –" A wince at his wording. "– send me a text."

"Right."

Another moment of static, a last desperate hope for reassurance, and then the call died. Only the hum of computers interrupted the silence; even Sullivan had stopped typing. Q's spine had stiffened in a way that Bond recognized, his breathing shallow and his blinking rapid. Holly scanned him as though she could read some code written in the lines of his body.

No one else seemed willing to ask the question. Bond stepped around the desk and leaned too near to avoid. "Who's Audrey?"

Up close Q was trembling. "Apparently," he said, "leverage."

Author's Notes:

"Partly cloudy with a high of twenty and a low of thirteen," the telly recited coolly.

That's for "a high of sixty-eight and a low of fifty-five" for us Fahrenheit people.

"I can't date a man who reads The Daily Mail."

The Daily Mail is a conservative tabloid and the favorite newspaper of Harry Potter's Uncle Vernon, which should give you a sense of its target demographic.

She fell silent just long enough that Q started to wonder, then – "Pirates of Penzance?"

Pirates of Penzance is a very silly 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan opera about a crew of orphaned pirates who meddle in the love life of the captain's apprentice. I thought to myself, "What would embarrass Q more than Audrey finding his porn," and this is what I came up with. I'm not sure what that says about me.