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Q had been at this so long he’d lost some of his humanity. He could be empathetic, compassionate even, when he desired it so. But it was all selective. And as he pinned the struggling woman to the opposing wall, hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her shrieks, he felt the burning tingle of guilt, of sadness. But it wasn’t powerful enough to stop him.
Truth be told, he’d puzzled over this again and again, always thinking on it and why it was necessary to do what he did. He didn’t enjoy this. He didn’t enjoy doing it. Not in his conscious mind at least. His instincts and their primal satisfactions were a different matter, a matter he didn’t allow himself to fall prey to. A matter he called ‘the monster’.
He lowered his face down, soft lips brushing against her neck. Inhaling, he tried to ignore the tingle of the monster beneath his skin. He wouldn’t enjoy it. He wouldn’t. The length of his loose dark hair tickled the woman’s skin as a rare flush, born more of anticipation than anything, presented in Q’s pale cheeks. He pressed a gentle kiss to her neck, steadying himself and swallowing the lump in his throat.
He needed to. It wasn’t fair, but he really did need to. There was no other way; he’d tried everything. If the consequence of abstaining from this need had been something as simple and easy as his own death, he would have done it over a century ago. But as it stood, the consequence was insanity. The variety of insanity that meant losing the last remnants of his humanity and succumbing fully to that monster that whispered in his ear; hungry, hungry, hungry.
The lives he took prevented the slaughter of hundreds, even thousands more, by his own hand. He didn’t ever want to experience that kind of insanity. It was the insanity that resulted in the death of someone close to him and the fall of someone closer. He wouldn’t let himself be that kind of monster.
He smelled the bitter scent of fear radiating from the woman before he sunk what could only be called fangs into her flesh, into her neck and through the carotid artery.
Her prey-heart pumped like a piston, pushing the blood into his mouth as he allowed the monster a growl. The taste was a harsh, metallic assault to his senses. He didn’t like it. The monster did. The texture was like hot, liquid silk, flowing through his mouth and down his throat it felt right- right- right- wrong, wrong.
Her eyes met Q’s sharp green ones moments before her body failed, the carefully constructed machine falling victim to loss of the liquid that seemed almost to fuel it. As Q lowered her down, a tear dripped off her dead face. His or hers?
He hadn’t meant to kill her. He never means to kill them. It’s only that he tastes the coppery liquid, bitter and sweet and smooth, and the monster claws for control. By the time Q manages to win the battle, the victim is dead. Always dead.
She hadn’t been a nice person. He’d picked her up in a night club, knowing she’d left her infant children home alone and that she had a history of drug use. He’d called the neighbours anonymously about the babies. Hopefully helping the kids would help him feel less… evil.
Sometimes he wished he could die. As he buried another corpse in his back garden, he wished he was able to die. Sweat on his skin and dirt on his hands as he poured the limp frame of gentle flesh into the grave he’d dug. Blood under his nails and iron oxide on his tongue.
And once finished with his task of hiding that thing which had once been human, with fearful eyes and a beating heart, warm skin and delicate screams… he would cleanse himself. Clean off every remnant of what he had done, scrub himself down under a torrent of scalding water.
And perhaps it would never feel like enough. But it was better than when there had been no showers at all. Being clean and feeling clean where two different things, and he had accepted that a long time ago. There wasn’t time to cry about it anymore.
Skin clean, mouth clean, hair wet, he lay down on cold, stiff sheets in the middle of the night. The silence felt unnatural after all that noise. It pressed down from every angle, and he tried to feel less alive in the dark. He tried to drift into sleep.
He almost never did, and even if he lay still, breathing slowly with his eyes closed in a dark room on an average bed, he never quite found the rest he craved. And in the morning, he would be quite tired, he would not want to leave the bed and go to work to live his life.
But he had to. He needed purpose and direction. Quartermaster was as good a job as any.
---
Q was tired. He was so tired, every day, all the time. He wondered what it felt like to die. As vast as the gardens on his property were, at some point he would run out of places for plots for the dead. The man he’d had last night had bitter blood, hardly sweet like usual.
He was a bad person too, but he had friends. People who thought he was a good person, and when he was dead and buried, his murderer, Q, had to watch those people mourn the illusion of a good man.
Well, he didn’t have to. But he did anyway. He’d been to too many funerals.
Wouldn’t it help to be dead? Probably not, because every time he tried, he woke back up again perfectly fine. What did it mean to be invulnerable, to be immortal, and a being of monstrous nature whose lust for the crimson blood of a fickle human’s beating heart seemed to know no limits? What did it mean, that defying this nature would bring him into a merciless insanity, reaping chaos and death and being unstoppable?
Every time the barrel of a gun sat cold under his chin or the needle pinched into his vein, it always felt like he was brushing up all too close to something incredibly, horribly tainted. A knife on his wrist or a blade in his heart left him feeling sick, like he’d done something wrong. But so did somebody else’s blood on his tongue.
Which did he prefer? The skull-splitting pain of a bullet in his head, the disgusting lull of blood loss? The sting of poison? The great tearing of a stab?
None of them. He didn’t want any of them. Because they never worked.
---
“007,” Q said, not looking up. He could tell the agent by the smell of the blood under his skin. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve nothing better to do,” Bond answered with an infuriating smirk.
Q sighed and finished typing, tapping the keys a bit too hard and sending the memo off with an aggressive jab to the enter key. He met Bond’s eyes with his weary own as he slammed the lid of his laptop down.
“I’m not a babysitter,” Q reminded him. “Go find somewhere else to play.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” Bond said, sitting down on a chair on the other side of Q’s desk.
Q sighed. He’d had plans. There was CCTV footage of him with the woman he’d killed last night, and he needed to wipe it. Bond being there was not ideal, but it wasn’t as if Bond could see his screen from there.
He pulled it up, and began to rearrange clips, freeze-framing and looping and rerouting the footage so there was no point where he could be seen with her on his arm, whispering in her ear false promises of a good night.
“That’s CCTV footage of you,” Bond said.
“How--”
“The reflection on your glasses. I hope you’re not doing anything illegal. Naughty boys can’t work for MI6.” Bond sat up straighter, levelling Q’s gaze with condescending amusement.
Q tensed defensively. He was… almost scared. He didn’t want a new life, a new alias just yet. He’d only just gotten settled into this one. He could hear Bond’s heart beating steadily, evenly. “Really?” he asked. “I’ll have to tell M to fire you at once.”
---
He was hungry. Incredibly hungry. It had been five days. Too long. Too long. He couldn’t breathe, his throat was too dry, his head felt heavy and his eyes didn’t want to stay open. He could feel himself balancing carefully on a knife’s edge. He didn’t want to go insane. But he was hungry, and that left him far too close to a merciless homicidal rampage.
He didn’t care who he killed. He just wanted to make it stop, calm the hunger.
“Q?”
Oh, a voice. Was it real?
He pulled himself to his feet. He was shaking. God, how did it come to this? He’d only skipped one feed. One . And now he was just about ready to stop caring about human lives at all and kill and feed to his heart’s content.
“Q? It’s Bond.”
Q was at home. What was Bond doing in his house. He followed the voice, and stumbled into the room it was coming from.
“What are you doing here?” He mumbled, questioning.
“Q,” Bond said. Was that… he couldn’t sound relieved? Did he?
Q fell to the ground, scrambling for something to hold onto. All he could hear was Bond’s heart beating like a drum in his ears, the gentle swishing hum of Bond’s blood through his veins. All he could see was a too-accessible neck and all he could smell was blood, blood, blood—
Stop. Don’t do that. You value Bond. He’s important to you, isn’t he? Why is he important? What?
“Are you drunk?” Bond asked as Q struggled to find balance and pull himself to his feet.
Would he die? Is this death? No, he wouldn’t die. It would be like all the other times. He’d black out, and he’d wake up surrounded by the dead of his own making.
Q shook his head no to Bond’s question.
“Sick?” Bond asked.
Sure, yes, Q was sick. Afraid to open his mouth for the sharp little fangs that hid behind his lips, he nodded.
He tried to fight the instinct which wanted him to draw closer, nearer to Bond so he could bite, so he could feed.
But he found himself crawling closer anyway, drawing nearer to Bond and closer to the coppery tang of blood that he could smell in the air even under the human’s skin.
Bond was an idiot . Bond actually helped Q, pulling Q to his feet and towards him. But that was a mistake.
Because he was weary, he was weakened, he was hungry and he could barely stand up straight.
But in amongst all of that, he still wasn’t as breakable as a human, and he could still pin Bond down like a rabbit, and it was fun . No, no, it wasn’t fun. It was fun to the monster inside him, fun only to that evil being which enjoys hunting.
“Q, what--” Bond said.
Holding Bond down, pressed against the floor, Q felt the monster smile in glee as it sensed Bond’s confusion and bafflement, when the trained agent was unable to escape the clutches of the smaller man, and the slightest hint of fear, fear he could smell that sent a thrill of primal predatory pleasure up his spine.
He lowered his lips to Bond’s neck, feeling Bond tense at the brush of Q’s breath on his skin.
“How…” Bond said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” Q breathed. “I’m sorry.”
Q himself inhaled shudderingly, his lips a hair’s breadth away from Bond’s neck, and his monster was at the forefront of every fibre of his being, his tongue trailing gently over the salty skin on over the other’s veins and arteries.
He could feel Bond’s carefully controlled breathing, warmth against his cheeks, and he could still smell the slight fear. He could smell something else too, a sweet spice that wasn’t unfamiliar, but neither was it particularly recognisable.
Bond jerked suddenly, trying to get free. He couldn’t escape from Q’s grasp, and Q laughed, like a deranged man. No, not Q. The monster laughed, but it was Q’s lungs who fuelled it, Q’s chest it tumbled from and Q’s mouth it spilled from shrilly, terrifyingly.
Bond’s fear was stronger, bitter now in the air, and Q bit with sharp teeth into his skin that parted under his teeth with thrilling ease.
It flowed into his mouth feeling like velvet, texture smooth and gentle which contrasted starkly with the sharp tang of its taste, sweet and coppery with underlying bitterness, like terror.
Bond struggled harder, made noises of disquiet as he tried to escape from Q, but after a time he began to go limp, movements decreasing in strength and finally he stopped moving.
Q bit harder, willing Bond’s beating heart to push more blood into his mouth, more, more— no. No, Q was killing him, he was going to die.
Wait, stop. He didn’t want Bond to die. Dragging the monster back was like dragging back a moving car with his bare hands and no point of purchase, but he managed to drag his mouth away from the other man’s neck and pull himself away.
“Oh God,” he murmured, Bond was bleeding everywhere. That was good, his heart was still beating! No, not good, he was losing even more blood than Q had already taken from him.
He scrambled off of the man and fumbled through drawers in the next room over, looking for— ah, a knife. He dragged it swiftly across his palm, and his blood, dark like wine unlike a human’s, dropped slowly off his fingertips as he approached Bond, listening to the man’s weakening heartbeat.
He knelt down and pressed his bleeding wound firmly to the wound on Bond’s neck. Their blood slipped together and when Q pulled away, the wound was gone, it was gone, but Bond was still unconscious and still quite possibly dying.
What do humans need? Milk? Orange juice? He has those things.
He ran to the kitchen and ran back with a glass of juice. “Bond?” Q asked, panicked, having propped the man up, holding the glass to his lips.
Bond groaned, and Q winced when the sound reminded him of the growl he had let out with his teeth in the other’s neck.
He managed to get Bond to drink the juice.
Q wanted to sit by and watch over Bond as he slept; but his eyes drifted towards Bond’s neck one too many times, and it was getting concerning.
He left the house. He went into the city. He had three bodies to bury at the end of the night yet still he was hungry.
He ripped into their flesh. He tore out their hearts. He ate them with animalistic vigour, and lying amongst mutilated corpses, dripping with blood, he still felt as if there would never be enough of it in the world to ease his bloodlust.
Dazed and feeling both full and empty, he pulled himself up and threw the bloodied corpses into a pre-prepared grave, pushing the soil over the top without the help of a shovel.
He wandered back into his home. Washing briefly forgotten, he walked into a kitchen full of the human food that he ate when he wasn’t… eating humans. He sipped thoughtfully at some milk, feeling like a monster, yet also like a child.
He didn’t remember being a child. He remembered… his mother’s voice. And grief. And the realisation of the inevitability of the death of his loved ones. But he didn’t remember being a child.
“Q,” came a voice from behind.
Q had been so lost in his own thoughts, mind swimming comfortably around a lake of vaguely suicidal self-hatred, that he hadn’t anticipated the approach of this person, and he yelped in surprise, spraying himself and the tiles beneath him in the milk he had been about to take a sip of.
“Bond!” Q said. “You- you should be lying down.”
“I don’t need to lie down,” Bond protested, but as he spoke, he lurched to the side and had to catch himself on the kitchen counter.
Q rushed to his side to help him into a chair.
---
They talked. Q tried to block himself off from his guilt. It was an interesting conversation. Especially because a half-dead Bond seemed more at ease than a fully lucid Bond.
But Q could barely hear Bond’s words for how focussed he was on the other man’s heartbeat. He needed to listen to it, scared that Bond might simply slip away into death, or worse yet, become a vampire.
Q had never actually turned anyone before, and he didn’t know how, but he knew that as long as Bond’s heart was beating, the man was human. And he didn’t want to subject Bond to the kind of hell that is
this
.