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Q wakes up.
There is no slow slide into consciousness. He is abruptly very awake, very aware of what is going on, and not entirely happy about either point. Memory is immediate; clarity sharpens to a thin, lethal point.
The camera watches him judgmentally, a consistent red light indicating that it is recording. It is blurred, of course, but the halo of red is something stable; his gaze lingers on it a fraction longer than is strictly necessary before darting off again.
Chlorine hangs heavily in the air, everything tiled, minimal space, shower heads spaced in precisely even intervals; information is catalogued, observed, recorded. Q stretches out towards the camera, hampered by his bound wrists; a line of cord winds upwards, hooks over a protrusion near the ceiling. Q’s eyes trace it down to a fixed point by the door, out of reach. An experimental tug; it doesn’t move in the slightest, which isn’t a tremendous surprise.
Each aspect of this has been carefully, neurotically planned. The distances and angles; everything from his hands to the camera to the position of the door. It is precise and accurate, the actions of someone who has waited a long while, who already knows the ending.
Fear shivers along Q’s skin, anger clenching his fists for a sporadic second.
Chris is a subordinate, a colleague. Chris is six foot one, and blonde, and has very deeply brown eyes, and a voice that is relatively soft. Chris is intelligent, and easily underestimated, and has been underestimated. Chris focused his attention on one point, and that point is Q, and has been for months. Chris took footage of Q everywhere he could, tracing his steps in obsessive detail, buying into his own fantasies.
The presence of James Bond altered perceptions, turned the world to right angles. The fantasies fell apart in Chris’ hands, and Q is the collateral damage, and realised a very long time too late; he does not belong to Chris. Rather, James Bond filled a void in Q’s life that Chris never could. Eventually, of course, Chris worked it out.
Q knows that the camera is documenting everything. Voyeurism, a chance for revenge, Chris managing to prove that he can have what he wants and nothing will interfere. Q watches the camera for a long time, examining the various cables trailing away from it, suspects, knows. Even from a distance, even blurred, he knows that this is transmitting out somewhere; the connection is hardwired, will link into a computer into a modem into a network into MI6, and Chris knows how to make it near enough untraceable.
Q’s breath hitches slightly at the memory of anger, fingers lightly tracking the fingerprint bruising to his upper arm, aware that the point is moot given his current circumstances. Chris had found him, furious and desperate and pathetic and clever. He pleaded with possessives, Q’s confusion rising, building, falling to alarm, to terror, to induced unconsciousness.
Bond was the catalyst, the inadvertent cause. The act of being with James Bond is, apparently, more dangerous than anybody could have imagined; he’s lethal by proxy.
There is no point at all in speaking, so Q refuses to waste his breath. If MI6 can see – as Q suspects they can, as Chris informed him they would – then he can say nothing of use either way. Cannibalised Q-branch tech will keep him hidden for a few hours, a few days. Q’s fists clench, relax. He hopes it will not be longer.
Q’s head turns to the door when there is noise, the tension in his body cranking up another notch, two, three. An obvious reaction, an instinctive reaction. This is not about MI6 or information or anything so important; really, this is inconsequential.
A slight quickening of breath.
-
A long while later, Chris leaves.
Q doesn’t look up. He doesn’t look anywhere. He remains precisely where he was discarded, body utterly still, not so much as a twitch to suggest there’s any life left in him. His wrists are still bound together, but the rope has been slackened, letting him slump bonelessly against the floor.
There is blood between his thighs, and little elsewhere. He tucks his body in such a way that the blood is almost invisible. It is almost possible to pretend nothing has happened.
He stays that way for a very, very long time.
When the door opens, his body contracts very slightly, only a very little. The clink of the thermos on the ground is confusing, the wrong sound, unexpected.
Q closes his eyes for a moment.
-
Chris leaves.
Q sits in the far corner, eyes blank, slightly flushed, hair damp, skin clean and white and only marred slightly where bruises are rising. There is a dizzying duality, the art of the unexpected, that Chris somehow manages to capture; already, a sense of dealing with more than one person. It doesn’t make sense. The erraticism is instinctively frightening.
Q’s fingers trace subconsciously over where Chris stroked and caressed and kissed and smelt, breathing him in like he could consume essence, and Q doesn’t shake. There is something, under his skin, in his expression, but it’s impossible to tell what.
He looks to the thermos, and to the camera briefly, and back to the thermos.
There is a sharp laugh, an oddly throttled sound, brief and too high-pitched to seem wholly normal.
The thermos remains untouched. It is replaced with a new one when Chris comes back.
-
Chris leaves.
Q has been rendered foetal once again.
He doesn’t look at the camera; keeps his back to it.
Two hours pass, and he starts screaming, a throttled sound. He doesn’t change position, doesn’t move. Without warning, his body is all tension, and the sound he makes is horrific, inhuman. A need to hear sound, to try and make somebody listen, high and pain-ridden and choked off by sobs once in awhile, the open-mouthed cries of somebody who cannot find words.
He stops after several excruciating minutes, body falling slack. There is red smeared on the white, lurid; comic book in obviousness, horror film in morbidity.
Nothing more.
-
Chris leaves.
Q rests his head against the tiles. Very tired, horribly tired. The thermos is still there, within reach, even with his hands bound. He looks at the camera, knows it is his lifeline. They can see. Chris told him so. This is a display of ownership and intellect; a game. MI6 will get through the scramblers eventually, and Chris will let them kill him, and will not care because he has, at least, had Q.
There is somebody there, somewhere. That matters.
His voice is a thin rasp. “I don’t know if you can hear this, but I think you probably can,” he muses softly. His throat hurts. “If it’s just going back to Chris then fine, but if you’re there, then hi.”
Q manages a small, fragile smile that doesn’t come near his eyes.
“I know you’re doing all you can,” he continues, not letting himself wonder why he’s talking when there may be nobody to hear him. “I know you’ll be watching this will the statutory horrified responses, and M will quietly stoic and R will be frantic and Tanner will be trying not to vomit, because he’s always so terrible with violence, and James, you’ll be hanging around with your jaw so tense it’s practically popping while terrorising my branch into working faster.”
It is a comforting image, actually. Q shifts slowly, carefully, knees to his chest, forehead too hot against the cold tile.
“Don’t scare the minions,” Q murmurs to Bond, eyes closed a moment, smiling to himself at the thought. “They’re a good team. Oh, on that – I want a full security check on everyone in the fucking building before I get back there, do you understand?”
He waits for an answer that will not, of course, come. Q pauses just long enough to avoid the silence becoming oppressive.
“Yes, and R, I know power scares the hell out of you - you’ll be fine. Don’t let anybody touch the Colombian coffee beans except Nigel, he knows what to do for a good coffee, and get rid of everything Chris has been working on because fuck knows I’m not using a damn thing he’s done,” Q says, the words spreading into one another, blurring the edges, everything turning slightly foggy.
He thinks of Bond again, smiles faintly. “I’d tell you not to watch, but you won’t listen anyway,” Q notes, watching the consistent light of the camera like Bond is there, just a long way away. “But don’t, please. There’s no point. It won’t help anything.”
Bond won’t listen. Q has little he can say.
A small sigh. “This is ridiculous,” he murmurs to himself, smile falling away, breathing slightly unsteady. His arms twist around himself, tightening around his torso, holding himself together.
Q squeezes his eyes tighter shut, and doesn’t speak for a little while. When there is a sound from the door, he looks up slowly, blinking a little languidly. “Ding ding, round five,” he mumbles, with a trilling little laugh, the smile still playing in the corner of his mouth as the man moves closer.
-
Chris leaves.
Q retches for a little while, falls back against the wall, trapped in the corner with hands over his face, fingers trailing to knot in his hair, head nestling in his arms for a moment. The taste refuses to go, cuts through even the acid of bile. He slams a flattened palm against the tile with what limited range of movement he has, an angry sound, reverberating curiously.
Cloying silence.
“Fuck, you’re taking a long time about all this,” he says through a bruised throat, not looking at camera, addressing them anyway.
His body wracks in coughs for a moment, and Q winces, hissing air back into his lungs when he can, when his body isn’t trying to turn him inside out, his own goddamn organs seem to be making a bid for freedom while Q sits, stranded, numb.
A little while of quiet. Q reaches out for the thermos at some stage, tries to open it with nerveless fingers, succeeds, smells. “Tea,” he says, sounded surprised. He sniffs it again, confirming, eyes wide with something like wonder.
A sudden dart of movement, and the tea is discarded, loose beige swirls against the tile, Q watching it like it is somehow hypnotic as tears track down his pale cheeks. “Rule one, don’t drink anything. Could be drugged,” he murmurs, crying expressionlessly, mourning the tea at it dissipates against the tile.
-
Chris leaves.
Q is scratching at his skin. Chris’s touch had been gentle, so gentle again, so intimate, almost remorseful, the touch of a lover or partner, his mouth tasting the sweat, cleaning everything away, feeding him water and soup in small sips, tender and careful and loving in a way that is so entirely wrong that it’s almost worse, almost, almost worse than everything else he does.
He scratches until his upper arm is bleeding and raw, and stares at the camera suddenly. “Psych must be having a field day,” he comments flippantly, laughing and sobbing in tandem, eyes eventually sliding shut from sheer exhaustion.
-
Chris leaves.
Q is unconscious.
He remains thus for several hours.
-
Chris leaves.
Q looks directly at the camera, gaze bright and electric and constant. “Status update: everything hurts,” he says, with a touch of sarcasm, a strange dispassion that is a little worrying to see. “Still have no idea where I am. You’re still not here. I’m not blaming you, merely stating fact.”
The words break off, Q swallowing slightly. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he admits, brows contracting a little.
A longer sigh. Q glances around, looks at the new thermos, the one to replace the one he spilt before. A slightly mocking chuckle to himself. He looks at the camera, looks at the thermos, expression almost pleading.
“Alright, so I know rule number one and all the rest, but this is an entirely new rulebook given the circumstances,” he says quickly, tremulously. “I know it’s not regulation, and James, you’re going to be livid because I know I shouldn’t, but I’m really fucking thirsty and I miss tea, I miss having something that reminds me of… not this.”
Q curls, head in his hands, almost panting with the effort of controlling himself, controlling god alone knew what.
A hand darts out, closes around the thermos, cradles it close. Q lets out an active, open keen when he smells it, pours some into the lid – and his hands are steady, and he doesn’t understand how that’s even slightly possible – and takes a sip, and is sobbing pathetically while sipping a cup of tea in a tiled room with nothing but a camera and a steadily red LED light that could mean anything, anything at all.
Q’s entire body seems to wrap around the lid, and he is still crying. “The bastard makes really good tea,” he says softly, and now, only now, his hands start to shake.
-
Chris leaves.
Q has started monologuing. He’s been at it for a while. Strings of words and thoughts and ideas. So many words.
“I like numbers because they’re constant,” Q says simply, smiling slightly as he looks at the camera, head lolling. “Two and two will always equal four. You can do clever things to that four, those twos, but they will always be what they are. History is moveable; a single shred of evidence and everything you know changes. Science, the same. We know so little.”
Q’s brow contracts, glancing around him, shrugging slightly as if at his own naivety for ever thinking anything could be permanent; he curls his arms tighter around him, gaze steady, the lightness in his eyes somehow disconnected.
“But we will always know that two and two is four. I like that. It’s why I like you, James. People change identities like clothes,” he continues, gesturing to his tiled prison, laughing disjointedly. “They’re not who they say they are, one second to the next, they lie. You don’t. And I know that doesn’t make sense because you’re an agent, you lie for a living, but not to me. You don’t lie to me. Two and two will always be four, and you’ll always be James Bond, 007, and you don’t pretend to be anything else.”
There is a noise at the door, Q’s head turning sharply. “That won’t have gone down well,” he says quietly, as the door slams open, and Q flinches violently.
-
Chris leaves.
Q is laughing and sobbing and screaming in a strange rotation, and the shaking is everywhere, blood and bone and skin and heart, his entire body vibrating to remind him he’s alive, even when he thought he fucking well couldn’t be because hurt on that level means death is near, it has to be near, but no, he’s still here, heart still beating and body still shaking, still here, still here, still here.
-
Chris leaves.
There is quiet, calm. Eerily so. Q is tracing the patterns in the grout with his eyes, right angles almost entirely precise barring the edges where it’s only a half-tile, and its split wrong, and is consequently slightly wonky.
"I should probably say any goodbyes now,” he realises aloud, hands dangling in his lap, clean and dry, and Chris gave him a blanket to go with the latest thermos, so he’s warmer than before which is a nice novelty.
He doesn’t say anything more for another minute or so. Blinks a little. It’s difficult to make thoughts cohere. “R, take care of my branch, and try not to nuke anywhere, the paperwork would be monumental,” he says suddenly, almost taking himself by surprise by actually speaking. “You’ll be fine. You’re good, very good. The scramblers are clearly posing difficulties, but don’t worry, they were designed by the best.”
A slightly smug smile, which really, he feels he’s allowed at this stage. “I was a damn good Quartermaster,” he murmurs, taking a deep breath, exhaling slowly and enjoying the memories of everything he’s done, everything he’s achieved.
Q sighs, all motion languid. Remembers what he was saying.
“M, it’s been a delight. Tanner, I hated your shoes, but you’ll outlive all of us, so I should really commend you for that.”
Q giggles at the thought of Tanner’s shoes. Patent, black, too-shiny, made his feet look like boats. He knows he’s grown distracted, too much time has passed, he looks a little bit crazy and doesn’t really care.
“Eve, try not to kill anyone, and thanks for everything. Minions, go off and have productive lives, don’t procrastinate on Tetris for the rest of your existences. Seems little point saying goodbye to the agents given that they’d never return the favour, so that leaves Bond. Everybody out, please.”
Q waits patiently for a moment, allowing the first wave to dispatch themselves. “That includes M, Eve, and everybody else who’s lingering for no good reason,” he continues wryly, gaze not leaving the camera. He knows them too well. Usually, he is the one at the other end. Times change.
“Good,” he murmurs after a moment, smile slipping.
They are alone.
Q can almost see him. As predicted: jaw so tight the skin could split, stoic to the last, left hand clenched in a fist, the other loose, free to go for his gun. The military posture, the absurdly charming smile, the way he has of watching with such intensity it can leave anyone breathless, men and women, so many women, and Q. At the end of it, Q has been one of them.
“I’m sorry,” he tells his James Bond, continuing before the man can interject. “Not for dying, not… it’s just, I really thought I’d be the first of your many lovers to not die, tragically and pointlessly, within a few months,” he says with a sad smile, glancing away briefly, unable to bear Bond’s eyes on him.
He pulls the blanket up slightly, a shield, Bond so close, so close, and his eyes are red LED lights not his bright blue and Q watches him anyway, believes in him anyway. “You deserve so much better than this,” he tells his lover, and imagines Bond’s smile, the tease, the inevitable jokes and the way he would have laughed in response, and he is laughing, because he can almost touch Bond’s voice. It’s so close, now.
Bond’s voice murmurs something inaudible, and Q keens quietly, wishing he could just reach out and Bond would be there, able to make everything go away, make everything stop, please just make everything stop, because I don’t know how it’ll be before he gets bored or I throttle myself with the goddamn blanket because I don’t want to do this any more, I don’t want to keep living and living and living, I don’t know how you do it.
Q falls very quiet. He shivers, the movement going through his entire body.
“I can’t quite believe all this is happening,” he admits, closing his eyes. There is a sigh of nothing, a hand breathing against his face, a caress that he leans into on instinct because it smells right. Such a silly little thing, but so important. It is James, and he could live another hour or day or week or forever and still seek out this, at the end of it.
The door opens, and Q doesn’t bother opening his eyes. There seems limited point.
-
Chris leaves.
Q is unable to talk. There are rings of bruises mottling his throat, inside and out, and he can taste blood, a lot of blood. The hunger has moved from a dull ache into a constant sore, an ulcer, and Q is so tired, of begging and fighting and hurting and hating, and sanity is there by the thinnest of threads, and depends on a fucking red light that could frankly be his imagination by this point, he has no idea any more.
He stares at the camera, and the taste and smell and feel of everything is wrong, but he escapes because he can. If all this ends, he knows it will be very unfair on Bond. Q has started to pin everything on one person, and that one person has problems of his own to deal with.
It isn’t fair.
The tea spills by accident, and Q bursts into tears again. Not quiet this time, but louder and more obvious, the tears of a hurt child, breathing and hitching and slightly hysterical and desperate for attention, for somebody to take hold of him and tell him it will be okay.
-
Chris leaves.
Q’s eyes aren’t focusing, and consciousness is coming and going like the ocean, tides ebbing, flowing, leaving and going, and Q speaks in fractured sentences, and apologises to James, conducts one-sided conversations with nobody, smiles and laughs, all while lying on his side in a heap like a broken doll.
He draws patterns on the tile with slippery blood, fingers playing along the edges, the texture, slimy smooth tile and rough dusty grout, and he closes his eyes, drifting, rather wishing for the shaking, because honestly, he has no idea if he’s still alive any more.
“Don’t forget me,” he pleads brokenly, entranced by the shape of his own fingers, the curl, the darkness of dried blood around his nails, the utter whiteness of his skin. Beyond them, Bond is a distorted silhouette, and Q cries until Bond dissolves, slides away, away, away.
-
Chris leaves.
The door opens.
“Oh, just, no. Not this soon, just go away, please go away,” Q pleads, the pain through his backside and spine and stomach and upwards and he is falling apart, nothing more, please, please, there’s always time, time to talk to Bond and MI6 and pretend they’re replying, pretend he’s keeping himself together, while a little part at the back of his head thinks about how the psych teams will all be jotting things down on clipboards and shaking their heads sadly, and Bond will probably break somebody’s nose because he doesn’t deal with stress very well.
“Q.”
He looks up.
A moment of simply not understanding.
“Hi,” he manages, with a smile that is so genuine it aches, stabs through everything. Q trusts this single figure, this face, this voice. He trusts so much, so blindly, that everything else lies forgotten for a time, and he places all of his dependence firmly in the lap of somebody who will never abuse it.
A soft touch, a caress, fingers against his cheek.
Q reaches out a hand, and Bond is just there.