Chapter 3

"You made a message just for me," Q said instead of using a greeting on his next message. "Well I had my reservations, but as you have undeniably just given me leave to do as I wish, you're about to get more than you bargained for. You… You recorded a message just to tell me to keep talking? I'm honestly not sure what that says about you, or about me, to be quite fair, since I'm about to take you up on the offer." He paused for a moment.

There was something curling in James' chest, and he couldn't put a name to it. Was this… intrigue? He was curious, as he often got during missions, about what Q might say. What kind of information would this yield? What secrets would it uncover?

Then Q took a sharp breath. "Male. I'm not sure if I expected that or not. I think I expected female, but that's probably because I originally thought I was calling Eve. She doesn't usually make mistakes like giving out the wrong number, but I can't think she meant to give me the wrong number. That would be ridiculous and-…. You recorded a whole message just to- Sorry, I um- I have to go. My boss is calling. I'll call back later. Maybe. Probably."

"End of message."

James leaned on the wall by his answering machine and crossed his arms. That didn't sound like someone whose boss was calling. It sounded like someone who was trying to come up with an excuse to hang up. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips but he refused to let it through. There was no reason to get excited over Q being flustered. Besides, there was a second message to listen to.

"Hello again," Q greeted properly. "Sorry about last time. I- Well forget about excuses. Waste of bloody time, aren't they? I'll just get right into the problem, shall I? Riley's threatening to… Well I guess you need back story a bit, don't you? I work for a man named Riley. He does housing for people in and outside of London. Proper workmanship really, but he charges a lot. He got my parents into a house with the promise of low payments but then raised the prices up and there was nothing they could do because of the contract they signed. And I went to work for Riley in exchange for their payments to stay low. He's a righteous bastard. Treats me like- Barely pays me enough for lunches, but- And this morning he calls and says if I call in sick again he's going to terminate my parent's lease and- But I can't just quit, Eve. Erm. I mean. Sorry. Eve's always telling me to quit and… Look, but I can't okay? I just can't. He's got my parents with the house and stupid Marnie with his stupid son and me with-… I just can't. Sorry, I need a minute."

"End of message."

The speed of Q's words got faster the longer the message went on, with him barely pausing even when he broke off his own sentences. And by the time he hung up, the emotion in his words was making James uncomfortable. It was the kind of emotion he heard when trying to lure women or men away from their lovers to divulge their partners' secrets – or at least the ones who felt really guilty about cheating on their significant others. It was a culpable, hopeless sort of sound.

But why would Q feel guilty? It sounded like he was the one sacrificing his life for his parents' wellbeing. What could he possibly be doing wrong? Was the thought of his own freedom at the loss of his parents' that hard on him? Ridiculous. No one was worth turning yourself into someone else's slave.

There was no third message. The calls were from the day before, when James was in Paris. Based on the time stamp, the second one was left around the same time that James was making arrangements with R. Two calls in one day, just hours before James got on a plane to return to London. If he had boarded a flight before calling R, if he had not gone back to his hotel room, it may have been possible that he'd have been home during the calls.

He tried to imagine Q, too embarrassed and emotional to call back, and found that while he could perfectly understand the reaction, he couldn't see himself experiencing the same issue in the knowable future. It just wasn't in his nature, and thus it made it hard for him to fully empathize with the situation… no matter how much he was trying to.

Why was he trying to? Why was he letting the calls continue? He should erase the machine's message, disconnect the phone, find this kid's number and tell him to cease and desist. He should-

The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

No one called his home number. No one but… James reached for the receiver, but his hand hovered over it instead of picking it up. Only Q called and left messages. Q was the only one with the number. It had to be Q. He should pick it up. But wasn't he just telling himself that he should stop making contact with the kid? Not kid? James didn't even know how old Q was.

-Click-

"Hello. If you have reached this message by accident, hang up," the answering machine said as it caught the call. "If you have important information to relay, continue only if it is life or death. If this is Q, continue as planned. Your messages may or may not be received in a timely manner, if at all."

-Beep!-

"Hello." It was Q, as expected. He sounded much more composed and surprisingly distant than he had the day before. "I promise I'm not usually as emotional as I was yesterday. I don't know what came over me and I wanted to apologize. Riley is always being a bastard. I try not to let it get to me, but yesterday… I was sick two days ago, so I'll blame the coping issue on illness. I'll blame the lowered inhibitions that had me calling you at all on that as well. Only a lunatic calls and leaves personal information on a stranger's phone. I'm certainly being illogical."

He paused and James set his hand down on the phone. He could still pick up. The call was being recorded live, right now. If he picked up, the recording would stop and he could talk to Q personally.

What would he say? The obvious thing to do was to pick up and tell Q to stop talking, to stop calling. But for a moment, James hesitated and wondered what it would be like – having Q talking to him instead of at him. Q wasn't a mission. He wasn't a mark or a target or a victim. He was just a civilian. James hadn't talked to a civilian in a long time. This was someone who had no ulterior motive, no grand scheme with worldly consequences.

What would that be like?

"I don't even know your name. Until yesterday, I didn't even know your gender. And yet I called and ranted about my personal life." Q continued, sounding upset with himself. The call would be over soon. "I'm going to tell Eve she was mistaken. Calling a stranger to vent is not healthy or safe. This was a mistake. I'm sor-"

As Q was saying his apology, James pulled up the receiver and cut off the recording.

"James," he said when the cool plastic touched his ear.

"Sor-sorry? You're there! I mean, what was that?" Q asked, flustered by the sudden response.

"My name is James," the agent repeated and narrowed his eyes at the wall. Why was he doing this?

"Oh. That's-," Q fumbled to a halt, unsure how to continue now that James was talking back.

"You said we were strangers," James explained. "But now you know my name. And I know yours, Q."

Silence took over the line, and James inwardly cursed at himself. Q thought he was being illogical, but it was James who was being the truly inept decision maker. Q was going to stop calling. That was exactly what James had decided was the best option, the only proper option, and yet he'd picked up the phone in an attempt to stall that decision. It made no sense in any scenario. James' life was too dangerous, too complicated to have something like this going on in his off time. And Q's life was clearly too complicated to be excused as being James' way to relax.

After the long silence, Q finally cleared his throat and said, "You want me to keep calling?" But how could James answer that? Obviously he did, even more than he thought he did, but he didn't because it was nonsensical, it wasn't safe. "Why?"

James pressed his lips tight together. "I'm not sure," he answered honestly.

"You're a wealth of information," Q teased blandly. "Like a magic ball. Perhaps if I ask again later and give you a shake, I'll get a clearer answer."

"Perhaps," James answered, tone lightening slightly. "Magic balls are funny that way."

Once more, silence stretched between them. James was joking with someone and it wasn't for a mission. It felt… surprisingly good. He looked down at his free hand as though the skin there would provide an answer for his actions, but it was just normal, pale skin. The strangely pleasant sensation of speaking to someone outside of business had not affected him outwardly.

"Apparently so are people," Q answered at last. "I'm walking into work. Maybe I'll… call again later?"

"I probably won't be here," James said. "I'm gone more often than I'm home."

"I've noticed," Q responded, and there was a laugh hiding in his words, tiny as it may be. "But I'll try anyway, shall I?"

"You should."

"I will."

"Good." But why was it good? How in the world could it be good?

The line went dead as Q hung up and James slowly lowered the handset back down. Maybe he'd been concussed too many times in his life. Maybe it was time to give medical a real call. What on Earth was he doing encouraging this civilian to call him? Maybe Moneypenny was right. Maybe he needed to get out more, get a little pep in his step. If he was this deprived of human connection…

James moved into his kitchen and pulled out the box with a slice of strawberry cake in it that Moneypenny had given him the day before. He considered his options for the briefest of moments – did eating the cake mean he agreed with her? – and then he took a fork to it and just ate it. Damn the consequences or what it might mean.


"I didn't get through all the files on the watch and memory card," R explained the next afternoon. "We had our best techs working on it but some of the files were too heavily encrypted."

"Are you still working on it?" James asked, leaning against the door while R gave her report directly to M. Mallory shot him a look that clearly asked him to shut up. The old M's stare would have been closer to a 'shut the fuck up' sort of order, but Mallory's was somehow just as effective… in that James would keep asking questions to his heart's content.

R looked more annoyed than M at being questioned. "Of course. We have a man trying to crack it as we speak. But it's a code we've never seen before. Highest form of security. I'm surprised it fit on the memory card, honestly."

"Well what DID you discover from the card?" Mallory asked, focusing the conversation back where it needed to go.

"From the card? Nothing. But before he changed his passwords, we were able to use the watch to access some communications. We extracted two possible targets for items of interest to the group. They're looking to acquire a few pieces of equipment in the next couple of weeks," R explained, handing some papers to Mallory. "I don't know what they're trying to build, but it looks like the parts will be bought legally – at least some of them. I checked the prices listed in the files and it's far too low for how much they plan to purchase."

"So theft?" Mallory asked.

"Or black market dealings," James offered. "They pay for so many of what they need and the rest is under the table, off the books, to keep the government from sniffing around about high quantity purchases."

"Do we know who the buyers are?" Mallory asked, flipping through the files.

Stepping forward again, R pointed at an octopus-like symbol on one of the pages. "As far as we can tell, it's an organization called Spectre. This is their logo. The corporation in Florida. The man in Paris. The woman we tracked in Germany. They all have some link or other that can be tied back into Spectre. I already have a man working on digging up information on the group's movements." She cast a snide look over toward James as she said the last bit, cutting off his need to ask if R&D was doing its job.

Mallory deliberated for a moment, finger pressed to his thin lips, and then he nodded. "Right then. R, keep working on decoding the files. There may be information hidden in those files that could be vital to our success in stopping whatever plans Spectre is up to. 007, you're grounded for the next three days."

"Sir?" James asked, pushing himself off the wall and looking as affronted as a double o agent had any right to look.

"By order of Medical, Bond. Don't test me. Or them. You've been on near constant missions for months. It's only three days. And by then, R and her team will have more information on where we can send you off to." He collected R's papers neatly together and set them on the corner of his desk to be filed or destroyed later. "And don't look at me like that either. I'm not taking you off the case. I'm just saying you need to find a distraction – something outside of work to occupy you. It's only three days."

Sounding the complete opposite of convinced, James replied, "Only three days."

"Now you've got it," Mallory said with a smirk.

What the bloody hell was James going to do for three days?


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