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It is raining, and Q is standing on the wall of the Overground tracks, feet braced wide apart on the slightly rounded surface. The water curls down around his ears and nose, collecting in the hollows of his lips and collarbones, standing out against his pale skin.
The binoculars in his hands, pressed to his eyes, tell him that the only movement is the storm in the trees and a fire in East London that’s sending lazy, spitting smoke into the air. The water will dull it, but it will probably still rage out of control and take out a few blocks of flats. That’s fine, Q has no problems with fire when it removes buildings that might otherwise obscure his line of sight.
(He has more of a problem with the people who set the fires.)
There is no one on the streets, not the way he wants to go, so he tucks the binoculars away, hitches his rifle a bit higher up on his back, and swings down to the access ladder bolted into the old brick. It wheezes and shrieks, unattended for too long, but it hold Q’s weight and allows him to drop the last few feet to the wet pavement unharmed.
His motorbike comes alive under his touch, a clever monster that was once sleek but is now rough and uneven in the way the world is, showing ripped skin and broken bones, and he sets off, rain pelting his helmet.
His way is clear, and behind him the City rises in the foggy distance, angry shards of what were once the center of many peoples’ world.
---
He heads out in rain that has given away to rolling fog, traveling roughly west on the M40, droplets of water rolling over the curve of his helmet. Except for a herd of deer that materialize out of the fog and scatter in fear at the sound of the engine, he doesn’t see another living thing.
He sees a few dead things, slumped behind frosted windows in cars where fluids have leaked out of the bottom of the doors, pooled on the roadway. Adipocere stained by blood, twisted by the speed of the fire that ate through the bodies.
They don’t bother him anymore. They’ve haven’t bothered him for a few months, since he’d finally let himself rock into a place of comfort from the word immunity. It’s the word that’s taken hold enough at the base of his hindbrain that he’s felt up to leaving London.
(There are more fires every day, and Q knows that it’s getting dangerous. People go feral when removed from home for too long, just like cats and dogs.)
The fog clears just after midday, leaving a cloudy sky and a small village in front of him, some place tucked into low hills with stone buildings and more pubs than people. It’s the kind of village he could find anywhere on this island, and the only way you could tell it from any other is the site Q finds when he posts himself on a roof with his binoculars.
“Oh,” Q says, staring out over rooftops and an expanse of green, past to the swell of a hill with a rather stately house perched on top. It is weathered, but amazingly intact, and looks like something from a time when royalty meant something. Something from his school days curls at the back of his mind – Churchill. He knows the house, remembers it from the pages of his history texts when he was paying attention. Woodstock, he’s in Woodstock. It clicks into place nicely in his mind, this anonymous village named neatly. He’d had a map, once, of all of Britain (of all of the world), glowing on screens, and he imagines himself as a red dot somewhere roughly in the middle of Oxfordshire.
He spends the rest of the afternoon leaning back on the roof, watching the overcast sky slowly meander past. At one point he hears movement and he rolls over on his side to stare down at the street, where some mangy sheep are ambling along. It makes Q laugh quietly and shake his head, that these rouge sheep have survived hungry predators and hungrier humans for so long.
(Maybe there aren’t that many people left, his brain points out. Maybe it’s just you.)
The hoof beats at sometime in the vicinity of half four (he’s gotten good at telling time by glimpses of the sun through the clouds) are what make him sit straight up, what make him roll his body into a position that he can slip his rifle free of it’s slim case and press his body to the roof, sight and barrel down the high street. There’s a pub sigh swinging lazily in a light breeze and squeaking, but nothing else moves. Still, there is the sound of hooves, and he stays completely still, holding his breathing even, until two riders come around a bend in the road.
Q makes quick work of sizing them up (one woman, one man, the woman tall and lithe, the man of average height and decidedly un-average build, both armed rather heavily), but even so the man has a gun pulled on him in under the few seconds of analyzing he does.
They both stop, and Q stares at the man. His face looks like a storm at sea.
“I’ll shoot you through your sight,” the man says.
“Impossible under normal circumstances, and I’m not at the correct angle for you to do so anyway,” Q says. It’s true, their barrels aren’t on exactly the same angle, and Q has the distinct advantage of having his gun resting even and still on the tile roof.
The woman, interestingly, laughs.
“What’s so funny?” The man asks, not taking his eyes off Q.
“You’re arguing with a boy, Bond,” the woman says, an easy grin on her face. “And he also has a sniper rifle. He does have the advantage.”
“He has no idea how to shoot it.”
In answer Q shoots the pub sign cleanly off its chains, sending it clattering to the floor and making the man’s horse shy a quick step to the right, making him growl and fire off a shot that only misses Q because the horse is moving. Q winces at the noise and the sudden lick of fire in his temple – a shard of tile from the roof hip, probably.
“I’d say he does,” the woman says, dry, and then turns to look up at him. “If I make sure he doesn’t shoot you, will you come down?”
Q weighs his options. It wouldn’t be hard to slip off the roof and through the tightly packed buildings, but he risks them taking his bike and the thing he has stored in the seat. He’s not exactly in a place where he can lose what little food he’s accumulated, and the two don’t seem dangerous. Maybe they were dangerous in what the world was like before (they probably were, he has a gut feeling), but now, they seem like their heads are on right and the brains are still in once piece, and that makes them safe.
“Alright,” Q hedges after a few moments, and sits up to slip his rifle away before lowering himself off the roof and wedging his fingers and toes in the mortar, down the same way he had come up, a ladder made of window sills and drain pipes and crumbling brick and stone.
---
The glass in the pub’s door is long gone, so it’s easy to step through and take up places at one of the long refectory tables, Q hunched over and gingerly prodding at his forehead where blood has started sluggishly rolling down his temple and cheek.
The woman straddles the bench next to him and sticks out a hand to shake. Q takes it with the hand that isn’t bloody (which he’s got pressed to the cut currently).
“I’m Eve,” she says, smiling, and then holds up a tube of Germolene and a plaster. “Mind letting me?”
“No, no, have at it,” Q says, surprised at the antiseptic – it’s not like these types of things are easy to come by these days. “Where’d you find that?”
“My office,” Eve says, distractedly as she dabs at Q’s head with a yellowed napkin from the end of the table. Bond reappears from the back and holds a bottle between the two of them.
“Here,” he says. Q looks at the label out of the corner of his eye and nearly winces. It’s vodka, and probably for his head, not his mouth.
“It’s fine,” Eve says. Bond, moving before Q can even raise a concern about it, dumps some over his head anyway.
“Jesus bloody fuck – why-“ Q grits his teeth, fairly sure that Bond had actually driven a staple through his forehead instead.
“Bond,” Eve says, looking up at him and pursing her lips. “I have antiseptic wipes, you know.”
“Don’t need to waste them,” Bond says, and then goes around to sit at the other side of the table, with a beer he’s produced from somewhere. When Q glares at him, Bond only smirks. Eve rolls her eyes and finishes patching Q up, patting the plaster when she’s done as if he’s a child.
“All good?” She asks.
“Except for the vodka,” Q says. Bond takes another sip of beer, still watching Q.
“He likes to be a little shit,” Eve says, and goes to repack her bag where she’d left it on the bar.
“We never got your name,” she says when she sits back down, this time with two more bottles of beer. It’s warm, but otherwise fine, and it’s not as if there’s an overabundance of alcohol these days.
“Q,” he answers. He’d had more of that name once, but no one has called him anything but Q for a long time. Not even his mother – although she’d been the one to shorten his name in the first place, shorten it from the somewhat cumbersome moniker his father had dumped on his only son.
When there’s no answer Q looks up and finds himself confronted with two pairs of cold, calculating eyes.
“Just a nickname?” Bond asks finally, never dropping Q’s gaze.
“Yes,” Q says, looking between the two of them. “Something wrong?”
“Nothing,” Eve says, as much to Bond as to Q, and Bond suddenly slumps back to relaxed, circling one finger around the mouth of his bottle.
In the evening they share food, Bond liberates more alcohol from the storeroom, and Q falls asleep in one of the guest rooms upstairs, only after checking the doors and windows and leaving a knife within easy reach on the bedside table.
It’s first light when he wakes up, and he takes the advantage of the silent town to slip down to a tiny trickle of a creek he’d seen the day before, crouching down and splashing water across his face, his neck, his head, not sparing his cut much thought. Infection means less now.
His hair is dripping down his forehead and shoulders when he gets back to the pub, using his shirt to ruffle some of the water out of his hair. Eve is nowhere to be found, but Bond is sitting outside, a cigarette hanging loosely from his lips. Q is honestly surprised at the sheer amount of normal possessions the two seem to have – simple first aid supplies, handguns, cigarettes, it’s impressive. Enviable. Q hasn’t had any semblance of normalcy in a long time, stranded in London without clues or plans.
There is light peeking over the buildings, and it shatters over Bond, making it apparent to Q that his hair is blonde in a way it hadn’t looked under the overcast skies yesterday. He’s got his head tipped back against the building, his legs stretched out in front of him.
He cracks open an eye to look up at Q when he steps into the sunlight.
“I was enjoying that,” Bond mumbles around the cigarette before pulling it away and exhaling smoke. “Although not that I mind what you’ve replaced it with.”
“There is absolutely no way in hell that I could be attractive at this moment,” Q says, narrowing his eyes. He’s always been skinny, but current situations have made it so that he’s tiny and bony and his scars stand out, in particular the one where a flying bit of helicopter blade had smashed into his shoulder.
(Croatia. Q’s got a few scars from there.)
“Well considering you’re only the third person I’ve seen since everything went to shit, and the other two have said in as many words that they won’t touch me, I’ll take what I can get.”
“Brilliant,” Q says. “I am officially the least attractive person left on earth.”
Bond’s laughter follows him inside, where he finds Eve at the table from last night, an apple held in her teeth as she writes something out longhand on a pad of paper. She holds up a second apple, which he takes and sits down next to her, sneaking a quick at the paper.
M-
Don’t kill him, we’ll be by shortly.
Love,
Eve
“What?” Q asks, looking up at her. She takes the apple in her hand and smiles at him as she crunches.
“We’re going to see a friend today, and you’ll get there faster on a bike than we will on the horses. Take this and he won’t shoot first and ask questions later,” she says after she swallows. “Or, hopefully he won’t.”
She is still smiling. This doesn’t relax Q in the slightest, but it’s less unnerving than the fact that she’s evidently decided that he’s coming with them.
“I can head out on my own,” Q says, and Eve shakes her head, waving a hand around.
“Absolutely not, you look like a stiff breeze could blow you over,” Eve says. “Crack shot or not, what happens when you can’t get to your rifle in time?”
“Find something sharp, stabby, or otherwise lethal,” Q says with a shrug. “I’m able to look after myself.”
“At least come to M’s with us,” Eve says.
Q pockets the scribbled letter. Eve kisses him on the cheek, startling him with the sudden familiarity, and stops when she’s halfway to the stairs.
“Oh, and put a shirt on, or Bond will try to chat you up and make everything very awkward.”
“Already been there,” Q mutters.
“It is amazing, the speed at which he works.”
Q would make a quip about thinking about sex at a time like this (ie – the end of the world and all) but the hardness he keeps seeing in Bond’s eyes makes him think that Bond’s levity and flirting is hiding something angry and broken.
---
The friend lives on the palace’s farm (or, what’s left of it), and Q scares a flock of sheep on the roads across the grounds. The amble a bit faster than usual, moving to take shelter around what was probably a great column monument at one point, but it’s fallen on the hillside, and grass is growing up around the pillar.
By the time he pulls up in front of the farmhouse there’s a man leaning in the open door, a shotgun resting on his shoulder.
“You’re brave,” the man says as Q pulls off his helmet, shaking out his hair. He digs around in his pocket, and comes up holding the piece of paper.
“Eve sent me,” he says. “She’s bringing up the rear.”
“Bond?”
“Is with her.”
The man beckons him over, and he leaves the bike in the yard, helmet perched on the seat, to go hand the paper over. He gives it a quick read, and then nods and steps aside, letting Q past.
There is hazy, dusty light coming in through the windows, falling across the worn wood floor and the yellow walls. It’s a strange mash of old and new, antiques and electronics, and Q takes in as much as he can as he’s lead to the back of the house and takes a seat at the kitchen table. It’s the same in here – a farm kitchen and old style icebox along side a microwave and a coffee maker. It’s strange, seeing these little bits of normal life that haven’t worked since the power went out. There are no lights on in the house, no hum of electric workings, but there’s a bit of coffee in the bottom of the pot and a pan on the stove that makes Q wonder if life is getting back to being a bit normal here.
“Tea?” the man asks, and Q looks over his shoulder at him, confused.
“You have tea?” Q hasn’t seen tea in a very, very long time. Trust the British to snap it up in the same emergency supply runs they bought bread and batteries on.
“I do,” the man says, pulling a few boxes down from a shelf over the sink. “Not much of a selection, I’m afraid. Will Earl Grey or Darjeeling do?”
Q nearly trips over his mouth asking for a cup of Earl Grey. The man smiles at him, knowing, and vanishes for a moment out back and comes back with a loud humming sound following him. There must be a generator out in the yard.
He switches on the kettle and while the water boils the man finally introduces himself.
“I’m Mallory,” he says.
“Q.”
He stops still where he’s moved to pull a mug out of the cabinet, just for the briefest moment, and Q logs it away – it seems his name is getting an interesting response.
Bond and Eve come in as tea is being poured, and the minute Mallory hears the door open he pulls out two more mugs, filling those as well. Q gets up to help him spread them around the table as the other two come in, sitting down at the table.
Q lets his tea steep for maybe just a bit too long, but he’s more than happy to just hover over it, palms pressed to the mug, and breath it in. He hasn’t tea in a very, very long time. Bond and Eve chat with Mallory and Q says silent, choosing instead to listen to the news they trade lazily, like cards. Little things, about roving bands of those half feral people, vicious and only out for blood and armed with fire, flooding in the Midlands, rumors of a castle stronghold somewhere up north populated with people who had survived the pandemic. The taste of tea brings him back home somehow, grounds him in a green part of North London that has been dead for as long as everything else.
“Are you going north with them?” Mallory says eventually, startling Q out of his tea-induced daze.
“Sorry?” Q asks, and turns to look at Bond and Eve.
“We hadn’t told him where we were going yet,” Eve says.
“And I don’t have plans,” Q says. “I was just going to… wander.”
“Wandering isn’t the safest thing these days,” Mallory says.
“I know.” Q shrugs, takes another sip of perfect tea.
“You’re welcome to come with us,” Eve says.
“How far north?” Q asks.
“North,” Bond answers, and Eve sighs.
“What, like Birmingham-north, or Leeds-north?” Q asks. Mallory coughs.
“Uh, keep going,” Eve says. “The Highlands.”
“Are you completely and utterly insane?” Q asks. “How do you expect to survive the winter in Scotland? Northern Scotland? Actually, no, you’d never even last through Autumn. You’ll die of human popsicle syndrome.”
“Southerner,” Bond smirks over his tea, although he’s looking off in the distance, somewhere in the direction of the far well.
Eve just pulls off an amazingly impressive eye roll. Q is rethinking his decision that Bond and Eve are not total mad. Scotland without heating is actually the most idiotic thing he has ever heard in his life, and he used to work in the government, so he has been privy to some endlessly stupid things.
“It’s safer up there,” Mallory says. “And it’ll be easier to defend. People are becoming…”
“People are going sideways,” Q supplies darkly.
“Somewhat,” Mallory says. “The world isn’t safe anymore.”
“Die by cold instead of fire or bullets,” Q says. “I’m glad I have a plethora of choices as how to spend the rest of my life.”
“You’re not going to die of cold, the estate’s never had heating,” Bond says. “There’s this excellent new invention, it’s called a fireplace and-“
“You’re obnoxious,” Q says, and Bond raises an eyebrow at him. “How are you getting there?”
“Horses,” Eve says. “M would probably let you stash your bike in the barn.”
“That would be fine,” Mallory says. “Can you ride?”
“Unfortunately,” Q says.
He’s been wandering for months and months, his fingers burning and itching because he needs something to do with them again, because he misses his code and maps and screens and programs, and you can only wander for so long. He’s not sure if he trusts Bond, there’s something dark there, but Eve, he thinks he can trust Eve.
The other three leave to take a walk and discuss logistics, leaving Q at the table, slowly spinning his empty cup in circles with a finger on the handle. There’s a circle of tea stain near the top, and he watches it as the sun heads for solar noon and the shadows in the kitchen shrink back into brilliant ambient light.
He knows that right now the days are long and the nights are brief in Scotland, but come a few months, that’ll change. He knows that right now it’s probably green and foggy, but it’ll be grey and snowy soon.
He also knows that he has nowhere else to go and he can’t be alone forever.
He gets up, washes out his mug with the sun in his eyes, and goes to find where everyone has gotten to.
---
They stay with Mallory for a few days. Eve shows him the big house, tells him to stay away from the collapsed wing, and then leaves him to go wind winder circles around the village with Bond, looking for anything useful.
(Q’s willing to bet that they’re still too close to London to find anything.)
Mallory tends to the animals left and a small garden between the barn and the house. When he’s not up in the house Q helps, reminded of a different small garden they’d had when he was a child. His mother had grown carrots in a large planter on the patio, he remembers that the most because the carrots were the same dusty orange as the pot they grew in.
The palace is in an impressive state of disrepair, and with its tapestries and curtains torn down and flapping in the breeze through the open (broken) windows and doors, it’s like something out of a story about exiled princes. There’s an absolutely massive library with an incredibly gaudy organ at one end, and the books are all the bland, scholarly things that you’d expect to find in a library that was more for sitting around in than reading.
The beds and chairs are going moldy, and there’s a damp smell in every room he wanders in to. There’s a security room in the basement that makes his breath stop for a moment, and his fingers twitch, but he knows it’s dead to the world. Still, he runs his fingers across the dusty screens and sits in the chair in front of them, spinning around slowly, the light of his torch a spot on the wall that moves with him.
He finds more interesting reading material in what were probably private bedrooms, just a little less grand than the rest of the house and halls, something with the slightest edge of reality. He nicks some volumes of Evelyn Waugh and the last two parts of the Millennium trilogy, and then moves on from the heavy drapery and oppressive decoration to root through the stores at the east corner of the house.
When he finds the one room that hasn’t been looted he nearly breaks down somewhere between laughing and crying – it’s all dry goods, and there’s a whole collection of tea tins. He takes probably too many with him, but if he’s going to survive winter in the bloody Highlands he’s going to bring some goddamn tea.
---
They start off on a crisp morning, when there’s fog between the rolls of the hills that the sheep amble through, vanishing into the mist. Mallory has promised to watch his bike, but Q wishes he were riding it instead of a horse. It’s not that he minds horses, he’s just not overly fond of them either. The one he’s been given is black and brown and seemingly totally devoid of personality, choosing instead to plod along like he finds the whole ordeal exceedingly boring.
In the interest of the horses not dropping dead, they keep the pace down to a speed that means it’ll take a week or more to get where they’re going. Eve had rolled out a map on the kitchen table the night before, weighting the corners down with half full mugs, and showed him a highlighted dot next to the name Glencoe.
(Q’s never been north of Manchester.)
Their first day is one where the sun rises but never quite shines, hidden behind anemic clouds. The second day the sun peeks out from time to time, and on the third day it is brilliantly sunny and they have to stop, Eve and Q laughing at the silliness, to ransack the broken sunglasses rack at a petrol station. Someone had dumped it out front of the service building, and most of the pairs are broken, but Eve finds a big pair of cat eye glasses and Q finds a ridiculous pair of red wayfarers that remind him of the markets in Camden, the little shops packed along the canal. Bond mysteriously produces a pair of aviators from a pocket somewhere and watches them go through broken sunglasses with an expression Q can’t read, something almost fond.
When there’s even ground along side the motorway they let the horses have their heads, let them take long, loping strides. Q can feel his knees and the inside of his legs starting to hurt somewhere past noon, and he knows that tomorrow he’ll be a tangle of soreness and cramped muscles. It’s an odd position to force your legs into for long periods of time, and he hasn’t been on a horse since he was a boy.
No one talks much, although when they slow the horses to a walk and put the pavement back under them Eve will chat with him. It’s always little things, nothing deep, but Q’s fine with it. He likes the melody in Eve’s voice, and it takes his mind off of the ache in his legs.
There are cars on the motorway, and they don’t seem to thin out much as they travel further and further away. The cities are packed too close together, and everyone went every direction, having no idea where they should run to.
(Q had seen a woman, when it first all started, running in circles as skin sloughed off her back. She had grabbed him, sobbing and coughing, her teeth red with blood, and as he’d tried to get away, afraid of touching her, she’d spit into his face. He’d put her down for that, an elbow to the side of the head. She’d been left sprawling in the street and he’d scrubbed his face so hard that he was sure he was going to take his own skin off, the whole time convinced that the virus was settling into his cells, kindling and waiting for ignition.)
They stop at stables when they can find them, somewhere to put the horses up for the night. The first three nights they sleep in barn lofts, curled together under horse blankets or old camping equipment (one night, it’s stacked in a far stall). On the fourth night they find a house with a barn, and Q sinks into a real bed, muscles on fire and a headache brewing behind his eyes. He lands face first on top of the musty duvet, letting out a long, pleased sigh.
“You’re not dead, are you?” Bond asks from somewhere behind him, and Q props himself up on his arms, looking over his shoulder. Bond is leaning on the doorframe, arms crossed. He looks somewhere between windblown and sun kissed and it makes Q think of weekend holidays to Eastbourne, when his father had been alive.
(When both of his parents had been alive.)
“If I smother myself in this duvet, it’s out of happiness, don’t worry,” Q says. Bond cracks a bit of a grin at that, and he comes to sit down on the bed next to Q, sitting still for a moment before falling back, making Q bounce a bit and startling a laugh out of him.
“You smell like something bloody awful,” Q says after a moment, staring at the way Bond’s jaw meets his ear, at what Q thinks is probably a scar across the curve there.
“So do you,” Bond says, and brings a hand up to scrub at his face.
“I miss showers,” Q says.
“I miss modern comforts in general. Except for music.”
“Good music, or crap top 40 music?”
“The second.”
“That’s not a comfort, that’s horrible noise.”
Bond turns to look at him, and his face is softer than Q’s ever seen it. There are still the millions of lines etched across it that make it look like a Tube map, canyons and crevices, but his lips are looser and his eyes are unguarded for a few moments.
“How old are you?” Q asks, because he’s honestly wondering. He has a feeling Bond wears more years on his face than he’s actually lived.
“44,” Bond says. “I assume you’re not 20.”
“I’m not 20,” Q says with an easy smile. Bond just stares at him after that, until Q drops back down, face pressed to the rough fabric under his body. They stay there like that for long enough that Q is aware in the peripheral that the light and color in the room are shifting, and he pays attention to them through a tired haze. He’s almost drifted off when something snags at a curl of his hair, and he turns his face to see Bond’s hand, one finger twisted up in a bit of his fringe. The room is lit by moonlight, and Bond’s face looks pale and washed out.
“You have messy hair,” Bond says by way of explanation before pulling his hand back and getting up, making the bead creak.
“I know,” Q tells his back, and Bond stops in the door for just a moment –
“Goodnight, Q”
- and then shuts the door. Q watches the door for a few moments, confusion and something else swirling around his brain, before he sighs, rears up just far enough to pull his boots off, and then crawls under the covers, very happy to welcome sleep.
---
Gentle rolling swells give way to hills, and then finally, to rocky peaks breaking from the earth, not tall enough to be mountains, but certainly not hills either. Not hills like Q is used to them.
Each night the temperature drops a little bit more. Q didn’t know it could get this cold in August. Still, even with the cold and rocks, there is something beautiful about the land up here. It’s stark and craggy and solid.
(A bit like Bond, actually.)
They’re on their last leg, their last day, when the ambush happens. They’ve stopped at noon to give the horses some time to wander and graze, their reins tied up in their bridles to keep them from stepping on the leather and snapping it. The road they’re on is little more than a lane and a half through a valley with angry terrain on both sides, and although there’s no tree cover, the four men still materialize out of the scrub brush and ruins of what was probably a tractor at one point.
Q hears movement before he sees it, and in one moment he swears he sees millions of possibilities play out behind Bond’s eyes in such rapid succession that Q wants to reach out and touch him, like he itches to get his hands on a computer. In a single moment he’s a machine, guns in his hands and two of the men down before they can pull their own weapons. His aim is true to the point of horror show, clean circles in their forehead and brains spewed along the pavement behind them.
Somewhere, in some other time, Q had been trained for this, and so he doesn’t do much thinking, goes for the path of least resistance. He’s holding a metal water bottle in one hand, mostly full of mountain creek water, and as he turns around he pulls his own gun from its holster inside his jacket and slams the bottle into another man’s head. The man swears, clutching at his head with his gun hand, temple bloody, and Q’s got his gun pressed into the man’s forehead in that moment. He hears another body hit the pavement somewhere, sees Eve out of the corner of his eye as she moves away from the slumping, dead weight.
“Drop it,” Q says, voice leaving no room for argument. The man’s eyes are wide, and Q watches as he tries to check on his comrades, gauge how to act. “Do it.”
The gun hits the ground with a clatter, and Eve scoops it up with almost alarming speed.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it,” the man says, voice hostile and afraid. An animal backed into a corner with no defenses left.
“You’re unarmed,” Q says, and tips the gun back, pointing it skyward. “But move fast. I don’t want to change my mind.”
The man does as he’s told, turning and fleeing down the road, tripping over his own feet and the broken pavement. Q follows him with his gun until he’s turned off into the underbrush, struggling away into the plants and boulders. When Q can’t see or hear him anymore, he puts his gun away.
(He notes, detached, that his water bottle now has a rather profound dent.)
When he turns around Bond and Eve are watching him, both with interesting expressions.
“I think it’s time we had a chat,” Eve says.
“Tonight, when we stop,” Bond agrees. Q can tell he wants to leave the area, no longer trusts it. If nothing else, three dead bodies will attack scavengers they don’t want to deal with.
Q just nods, unsure of what he’s going to tell them, and he only realizes his hands are shaking with adrenaline when he fumbles with his bridle and reins. His fingers and lips buzz, and he presses his lips together as he mounts up.
The sun is setting by the time they turn off into another long valley, the road even narrower here. It’s one single lane of broken pavement, leading in between the mountains, and Q’s surprised when the valley suddenly widens, instead of narrowing to a point, and reveals a wide flat area, the grasses slowly swaying in the wind. Near the foothills, tucked into one side of the valley, is a quiet, dark stone estate. Besides a church some ways away, it’s the only building in this cradle of earth.
The gravel drive to the house is marked by leaping stags guarding pillars that say Skyfall, and Q reaches out to touching one of the stags as they ride by, snagging his fingers briefly around a reared forelimb. The metal is cold under his palm, and the stag’s eyes are empty when he looks up at them.
The horses are put away in a small barn behind the house, and Bond produces a key to open the front door, which creaks and groans as it swings on unhappily old hinges.
“Hello?” He calls, but all they hear in answer is the wind through a window somewhere, probably broken.
The house is dark and grey and dusty, and Q feels it’s almost oppressively cold in its lack of color. While Eve and Bond go from room to room, occasionally calling “clear!” to each other, Q starts dragging wood from the kitchen to the main sitting room, stacking it in the large fireplace there. He takes a while to track down an old, yellowing newspaper in an office (the date is from three years prior) to rip apart, stuffing the shreds into the logs so that he can light in with matches from his back pocket.
He sits there for a while, crouched down and watching the fire as he flips the book of matches over and over in his hands. He’s been alone for so long – longer than even these slow months since everything happened – that he’s not sure what to tell Eve and Bond. They’re clearly not civilians either, not with the way they react and kill, but there’s a difference between military and what Q does.
(Did, his brain reminds him, and his fingers itch for even just a keyboard.)
Bond and Eve find him in the same position, and Eve is carrying blankets, one of which he readily accepts before scooting back a few feet and leaning back against the front of an old armchair with the blanket around his shoulders. He takes his boots off and cracks his ankles in circular motions, stretching his toes towards the fire. He’s getting a hole in his socks over his right big toe.
The other two take up places on the leather sofa in the room, Eve’s feet in Bond’s lap and a few blankets thrown over them. For a while everyone is quiet before Eve is finally the one to speak.
“You’re not a civilian,” she says, and it’s not a question. She knows.
“I’m not,” Q agrees. “Or, I wasn’t. And you know because you weren’t either.”
Q turns to look at them, dragging his eyes away from the fire, but he can’t read their expressions.
“MI5?” Bond guesses.
“Most people would assume I’m some sort of SIS operative or –“
Things click into place, puzzle pieces fitting together seamlessly. MI6 not being Bond’s first guess, Bond and Eve working together as a team that’s clearly made up of two individuals instead of a unit of soldiers, the reaction to his name.
(It’s just a nickname, an unrelated one, and he now knows that they were seeing an older man with clever fingers and wicked gadgets when they heard his name.)
“-but you are.”
There’s finally a flicker of reaction on Eve’s face, her mouth hard at the corners. Bond licks his lips, and they look slick in the firelight.
“You’re both SIS,” Q says.
“Yes,” Eve says after a pause. “We were.”
“Field agents?” Q guesses.
“I was,” Eve hedges, and turns to look at Bond. This is obviously his question to answer, and he sighs, clearing his throat.
“I was a 00 agent,” he finally says, like someone’s dragging it out of him. One little tick of information he’s never been free with and he’ll never grow to be free with. Q stares at him, lips parted, and wonders what he’s seen, who he was. Q’s only ever meet run of the mill field agents, never these human weapons with killer hands and trickster eyes. For a moment, he has the good sense to be afraid of Bond.
“We’d have known if you were working with us,” Eve says. “So, the original question – MI5?”
Q shakes his head.
“I didn’t really report to anyone except directly to the Cabinet Office. I was eyes and ears.”
Q wonders if they know what that meant. Q wonders if they know that Q operated as two senses not for one person, or one group, or even one department, but the whole of the country. Q wonders if they know that sometimes he had to work out of dark apartments in far flung corners of the world, because there were Interests everywhere. Q wonders if they know he spent his days in a cocoon of information, surrounded by computers and knowledge and everything about everyone at his fingertips. The small handful of people he worked with, who were cleared to know what he did, had often wondered out loud how he dealt with seeing and hearing so much.
(By compartmentalization, by turning off, by being alone.)
“I’ve never heard of that,” Bond says, and Eve is watching him. They both are.
“No one was ever supposed to. If something went on, I was expected to know of it and report on it. You both have probably received intel from my department at one point or another.”
“Something?” Bond asks.
“Anything,” Q answers.
Eve and Bond are watching him like he’d watch a computer that was slightly buggy. There is more, of course, there is more written in the scars on his body, but he likes to keep his story at home, away from helicopter crashes and nighttime raids and computers in bases in the cracks of the earth.
---
Q doesn’t see either Eve or Bond the next morning, and he goes exploring instead. He’d poked around the room he’d chosen last night, but there was nothing of particular interest – a bed (a very nice bed, all the furniture was heavy and elegant and clearly meant wealth), a chest of draws, writing table, and gorgeous window box with a seat that gave Q a view of the valley.
There were other bedrooms upstairs, dusty affairs with sheets covering everything (half the house was closed up like that), an even dustier attic that had no shortage of heavy trunks and boxes, and strange side rooms that had no real purpose. The study at the back of the ground floor was what really held his attention, thanks to the floor to ceiling bookcases that were crammed with as many books as the shelves could accept. Q already knows he’ll spend time here.
Behind a sliding panel in the dining room is where he finds what can only be described as an armory. Q knows guns, to a certain extent, and he spends a long while ghosting the pads of his fingers over the rifles in the racks, gorgeous old pieces and lethal new ones.
“I see you’ve found the guns,” Bond says, having materialized out of nowhere, and Q jumps, turning to face him with heat under his collar at being caught unaware.
“I see you have no problem unleashing your ninja ways on me now that I know you have them,” Q says back, pursing his lips and breathing out through his nose. Bond cracks a smirk.
“Eve and I are going hunting,” Bond says, and Q realizes he wants to get in and pick rifles. Q does it for him instead, taps his fingers along wood and metal and waffles for a bit before choosing one very old and one much newer rifle, a lightweight Kimber for Eve and a Gewehr 98 that looks much too pristine to be as ancient as it should be, and makes Q think it might be a reproduction.
Q goes to hand them to Bond, but before he can get all the way there Bond asks a question that Q realizes he never answered.
“How do you know your way around guns?”
“I, uh, went through a bit of training. Some unholy hybrid of MI5 and MI6, they wanted to make sure that if I was ever taken I’d last a bit.” A bit of truth, a bit of a lie.
“Could you?”
“I’m miserable at most forms of combat,” Q answers, finally handing over the rifles and going to poke around cabinets for the corresponding ammunition.
“Except for?”
“I’m alright with a rifle and I know my way around computers.”
“Computers aren’t weapons.”
“You’re wrong,” Q says, straightening up and handing over a few boxes that rattle a bit in the hand over. Bond stares at the boxes for a moment before looking up at Q with an expression that’s rough and uneven.
“Thank you, Q,” he says finally.
“Just bring them back in one piece,” Q says, and Bond smiles, a real smile, one that looks like a breeze across the valley. Q can’t help it, he smiles back, and it feels like home, just a little bit.
---
Q is useless at butchering (not surprise there, he may be good with his hands, but usually there are electronics under his fingers and not dead animals) and doesn’t even feel the need to attempt to hunt, so instead he spends his days in the study. He starts at one end of one bookcase and goes from there, reading whatever the next book in line is. They’re organized by author, so although he’ll get a few of a similar subject in a row sometimes, or a series, mostly it’s a bit of that and some of this.
He reads about law, physics, anthropology, even cooking, sneaking in pieces of fiction from time to time. He’ll jot down notes from especially interesting books, and there’s a pile of pages, written out longhand, stacking up on one corner of the heavy old desk under the windows.
At night he curls up under the covers (more and more every night, it feels like, but at least the house has no shortage of blankets or duvets) and stares up at the ceiling, sketching out code in his head that will never get anywhere near a computer.
Bond intercepts him one night, halfway up the grand staircase at the front of the house, a stack of books in his arms.
“I know you’ve been reading,” Bond says. “And these have been in my room. Do you want them?”
(Q had figured out a few weeks prior that Bond’s old room, a child’s room, is untouched, and he instead sleeps in a plain guestroom like Q and Eve.)
“Sure,” Q says, and takes the stack, turning it to stare at the spines. They’re mostly fiction, they’ll be nice to break up his unstructured study of what seems to be most of the arts and humanities and a few sciences for good measure.
They walk back up the stairs together, Bond opening his door for him, and as Q lights the lantern on his bedside table Bond hovers in the door. Q’s reminded of a similar moment from when they were on the road. Q looks up at him as he flicks out the match, snapping his wrist and then setting the still smoking match down in a saucer left from tea some days earlier.
Q wonders if Bond’s trying to decide what to do, but Bond answers Q’s question when he shuts the door softly and sits down on the bed.
“Need something?” Q asks, eyebrow raised. He still sits down next to Bond though, pulling his legs up to cross them so that he can tug off his boots. He lets each one hit the ground with a nice, solid thump, the laces splayed across the worn wood floor.
“Eve and I were discussing this earlier – you don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. We kind of assumed you’d want to come along for the ride and dragged you along.”
“And now you’re feeling guilty?”
“Eve is.”
A corner of Q’s mouth quirks up at that, but he doesn’t call Bond on what’s probably a lie.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Q says. “I don’t know anyone else who survived, and it’s not like I would have lasted too long in London. It’s a nightmare there – everything’s been taken or looted, and the whole city will be burning by the end of the year.”
“We thought about staying locked up the SIS building,” Bond says, and his voice is quiet. “Eve, M and I.”
“What stopped you?”
“It seemed like a bleak existence, to waste away in the same place you worked.”
Q is quiet after that, unsure what to say, and instead moves to scoot under the covers, pulling the neck of his heavy jumper up a bit higher. His toes and fingers are starting to get cold. Bond watches the movement out of the corner of his eye, and it’s only when Q’s settled, sitting against the headboard, that Bond stretches out on the bed like a cat, on his stomach next to Q.
“I’m fine staying here,” Q says after a while, watching as Bond runs a hand over the duvet in a rhythmic circle.
“You’re the second Q I’ve known,” Bond says instead of answering. “We had a quartermaster, one just for the 00s. I can only assume he saw a number of them through the years. It’s the professional equivalent of a revolving door.”
“Revolving doors don’t usually kill you,” Q points out, and Bond’s answering smile is sharp and dangerous and maybe just a little desperate.
“I actually had a rather long life for a 00. Not sure if it was the longest tenure, but it certainly wasn’t the shortest. We had a 004 once who lasted half a mission. Got the back of his head blown off, wrecked his skull. His widow couldn’t identify his body by the face because the interior architecture had come all apart.”
“God,” Q breathes, and he doesn’t want to have that image in his head but there it is. “Who even allowed marriage in your lot?”
“The shorter leash you put a dog on, the more it bites.”
“Yes, but you can direct the bite.”
“Only to a certain degree, especially if the dog is halfway to being rabid.”
“Were you married?”
Bond shakes his head, and cracks the knuckles of his right hand. They crack with so little force, just a simple curl of his fingers, that Q has a feeling he’s broken those fingers more than once in his life.
“Girlfriend?” Bond asks, and it’s Q’s turn to shake his head.
“No cover would have explained away all the idiosyncrasies of my life. I was… discouraged from any partnership. I never pushed at it much, I was fine the way things were.”
“That’s bleak,” Bond says, and looks up at him. The candlelight casts long shadows across his face, some of which Q realizes are from the folds of his shirt, the messy curl of his hair.
“I never saw it that way,” Q says. “Just doing my job.”
“Queen and country.”
“Exactly.”
They’re silent for the stretch of another few heartbeats before Bond moves to get up, but stalls halfway off the bed, legs almost to the ground. He turns back to Q, and Q can tell that he’s running all those infinite points of possibility through his mind, like with the men on the road, before he reaches out, running a rough thumb down Q’s cheek, hand curling at the side of his head. Q is aware that he stops breathing, is aware of the heat of Bond’s skin and the chill of the room. His eyes flutter and he turns into the hand without thinking, lips to Bond’s thumb only to have Bond pull his hand away.
“Goodnight, Q,” Bond says, and as he moves once again Q’s hand snaps out, closes around Bond’s wrist. Bond looks at him, almost startled, then down at where Q’s hand is anchoring them together.
“Stay,” Q says, and there’s heat in his gut. Bond’s eyebrows go up. “Just to sleep. Stay here.”
Bond is still for a moment before he strips his shirt off, leaving it on the floor next to Q’s boots, and then crawls up next to him, bundles them under the covers. Bond’s arms are warm around Q, and Q stretches out long fingers to trace Bond’s scars, to stall over the most recent one, a knot, a broken star, tucked into the juncture of his chest and shoulder. It looks like a badly patched up bullet wound. Q presses a palm over it, and Bond presses a fierce kiss into Q’s hair.
Bond is the one who snuffs out the lantern, reaching across Q, and Q falls asleep faster than he has in months, no code crashing around his brain, just calm and warm in the dark.
---
It’s late October when the first snow starts to fall. Eve and he are out in the expanse between the church and the house, taking potshots at a few rusted cans from the barn that they’ve set on a stump. Q has good aim, but he’s not a good with a handgun, and Eve’s not as good with a rifle, so they’ve swapped to try to steady their hands and eyes. Q feel like he doesn’t have enough gun, and he assumes Eve must feel like she has too much.
The kickback is less but it’s awkward, and every time he pulls the trigger he knows he’s going to get the reverb all the way up to his elbows. If nothing else, one of the cans does go spinning off the stump, coming to rest about a meter away. Eve takes the middle one out, and it arcs into the air before landing a good distance from the one Q had wasted.
“Here,” Eve says, handing the rifle back. Q gladly hands the pistol back, and in the next moment they’ve both lined up and the last two cans go sailing away into the air almost at the same moment, both hit dead center. Eve looks pleased, Q feels pleased, and he’s more than happy to dig his gloves out of his back pocket and put them back on, now that the cans have been taken care of. Eve tugs her hat a bit further down, ducking into her scarf.
She looks skyward as Q is popping the spent shells out of the barrel, and he looks over at her, confused, before he sees the first flake land on butt of the rifle, melting into a drop of water a moment later. He looks up with her, and watches as the snow starts slowly, picking up speed at a rather serious rate.
“I suppose I should go make sure we’re fit to be snowed in,” Eve sighs, and holds out a hand for the rifle. Q hands it over, and watches her go before heading off to gather up the cans.
He’s stacking them back on the stump when he hears someone crunching through the dead, frozen grass, and he looks up, expecting to see Eve back for something. Instead he finds Bond standing a bit from him, snow already gathering on the shoulders of his dark jacket.
“You have snow in your hair,” he says, and Q laughs.
“It happens,” Q says, setting the last can down and then moving into Bond’s personal space, tucking his scarf into his jacket a bit more. Bond catches his hands and brings them to his lips, placing kisses on Q’s gloved fingers. Q can only assume his hands smell like gun oil and cordite, he’s spent the morning in the armory.
Q frees his arms and presses his palms to Bond’s sides instead before he leans forward and kisses him properly, Bond’s lips dry under his. Bond brings his hands up to pull Q closer in, until they’re pressed together and Bond is working his lips open, the inside of his mouth hot, branding Q’s lips under the heat. Q swears that Bond’s pulled a trigger somewhere in his body, because suddenly there’s ache and need and want and god knows what else churning under his surface. They’ve done nothing but sleep together, curled up with each other, and now suddenly Q needs something else. The way Bond is working at his seams suggests that he feels similarly.
“We should go inside,” Q gets out in a rush when Bond pulls back for a beat, a breath. Bond just nods, licking his lips, like he’s trying to get more of Q. They walk together, Q going backwards, and when he gets his foot caught and almost falls, Bond catches him.
“Try not to die,” Bond says, voice wrecked and shattered, and before Q can quip back Bond’s picked him up.
“What are you-“ Q wraps his legs around Bond’s waist almost instinctually, clinging to Bond’s brick wall of a chest so that he doesn’t end up on the frozen ground. “I have got to gain weight.”
“This is fine,” Bond says, before he kisses Q again. Q’s not arguing.
They go crashing through the door, Q pulling of Bond’s scarf and working at his jacket, and Bond drops him back onto his own feet so that they can scramble up the stairs. They end up on the top step, Q straddling Bond, tearing at zippers and buttons.
“Where’s Eve?” Bond asks, gasps, arching up to meet Q as he struggles out of his jumper.
“No idea,” Q says, and anchors himself with a hand on either side of Bond’s head, fingers splayed, before meeting him halfway, crashing together with teeth and noses and Bond’s three-day stubble. He feels like his skin is catching fire, curling back like the pages of a burnt book, until everywhere Bond touches is raw. Bond slips his hands under Q’s shirt and nudges him up enough to slip it off, revealing scars that Bond had seen once before, on that sunny morning in Oxfordshire.
“Fuck,” Bond breathes, kisses him, kisses his jaw, his neck, his shoulder, “fuck, I need-“
“I know,” Q says, and does, somehow, and they managed to pick themselves up, managed to get into Q’s room (it’s closest) and onto Q’s bed and Q is the one who closes the door this time, hands on the rough wood and then on Bond’s rough skin.
It’s cold, and there’s frost on the window, and Q kisses heat into Bond’s scars and Bond’s hands roam and burn Q’s skin.
Q’s hands don’t miss his machines in that moment, because the body under his palms is more than enough.
---
It is snowing, and Q is standing on the roof of the house, rifle on his back on binoculars raised. The trees and the mountains are stripped bare, February has not been kind to the world, and everything is white and grey and black. There are people moving at the edge of the valley, some on horses and some on motorbikes that make too much noise. They’d noticed them this morning, and so they’d taken up place on the roof to watch and wait and, eventually, act.
The first one of them, someone on horseback, starts to pick their way down the embankment to the flats, and Q can see that his hair is long and done up, and there are scars on his face that look too symmetrical to be accidental. There is fire in his eyes, and it’s the kind that rages out of control, not the kind you can contain in a flame.
There is something on his back, and Q recognizes it from warnings he’s seen carved into the walls of buildings in Glencoe.
“Firemen,” Q says.
“I have an excellent pun for this situation,” Eve says lightly.
“I’m going to guess it’s ‘let’s light them up’,” Bond says, and Q smiles when he hears a thump that is probably Eve hitting Bond and Bond’s answering laugh.
“Pun stealer,” Eve says.
Q watches as the man pulls a hose from the pack on his back, determination on his face. When the flame leaps from the nozzle it makes his scars dance.
Bond puts him down with a bullet to the head. In another life, Bond would have made an excellent sniper, if he weren’t so good with his hands. The man’s face goes slack, and he slips off the horses as the animal spooks and goes sideways, sending his body to the ground. There is red on the snow, and the remainder of the group send up a cry, screaming down into the valley, some of them similarly armed with flamethrowers.
“Alright,” Q says, “now you can light them up.”
Someone laughs at that, and Q slips his rifle from his back, puts his body between Bond and Eve, and rests the barrel along the hip of the roof like he’d done in another lifetime.
(Or maybe it was the beginning of this life.)
Bond is warm next to him, his hands moving elegantly, bluntly and with as little movement as possible. He is utilitarian in his method, and Q lines up the first of his targets in his sight.
“Try not to miss,” Bond says, bumping Q’s hip with his own, and Q smiles, the corner of his lips pressed to the wood of the rifle.
“I don’t miss,” Q says, and another Fireman goes down as a dark heap in the pale, bright snow.
Bond breathes out next to him, exhales on the trigger pull as Q breathes in. There is snow in his hair and on his shoulders and the roof is cold under his body, and around him, dim through the snow, there are mountains. His world comes down to this point, in this valley, centered on the two people flaking him, one point in an infinite number that started on a road on a rainy day in London.