[FIC] p (Q|007)
Title: p(Q|007)
Verse: Skyfall, James Bond
Pairing: James Bond/Q, 00Q
Rating: T
Word count: ~1K
Summary: You can see yourself; can calculate to the fifteenth decimal point the chances of falling, plummeting, the sensation of gravity pulling you down, down, down, disorientating your senses before you crash and burn in a fiery cloud.
AO3
“Come with me,” Bond says, and you’re laughing incredulously, because you’re six feet tall and slightly less than ten stone, you can barely hold a gun and aeroplanes terrify you, have terrified you since your parents’ craft shattered against the Himalayas like an egg against the counter-top. You remember seeing it in the papers, the remains of charred metal and bones, already cooling amongst a thousand years’ worth of rock and snow.
His eyes are seven shades of blue and they don’t look hard at all, they don’t look like ice at all. You’re not a poet, so you can’t think of any words to describe them; but a corner of your mind starts on an algorithm that might estimate the refraction of light in a crystal sphere. He holds out his hand, silent, and your laughter dies on your lips as rough skin ghosts over your own pale, smooth hand.
“Let’s do this together,” he says, and your smile is hesitant. You know the numbers, you’ve done the sums, you hold probability in your palm like a child holds his marbles and seashells. You can see yourself; can calculate to the fifteenth decimal point the chances of falling, plummeting, the sensation of gravity pulling you down, down, down, disorientating your senses before you crash and burn in a fiery cloud.
His fingers close around yours (so warm and hard), you can see his every individual eyelash, your blood is thundering in your ears, and you’re swallowing around the stone in your throat and whispering Yes.
His lips are unexpectedly soft.
+++
Shards of glass are raining down, and you’re running and running until the oxygen in your lungs burn and you can feel parts of you go numb. It still isn’t fast enough. There’s a stinging pain in your left thigh and you stumble to the ground cursing, and Bond is shouting in your ear to find cover. You crawl under a table in the conference room (ignore the pain, breathe through it) and there are two small phuts from your comm. You listen for heavy boots, but the footsteps behind you have stopped and you heave a great shuddering breath.
Then the boots are treading over glass, every crunch heart-stopping. A shotgun barrel could be seen dangling at his side.
“I thought you said he was down,” you say, voice calm despite yourself. Bond swears loudly (you hiss at him to quiet down) and informs you the wrong man’s dead, repeat, I shot the wrong person, the hostage is dead, the target is twelve feet away from you and I’m nineteen floors above.
“What do you have on you?” he asks. You check your gun. It’s empty. There’s nothing but a two and a half pounds in coins, a blue Skittle, and some lint in your pockets. You turn your eyes towards the belly-side of the table that’s sheltering you like a quadruped mother. Is this it then, you ask nobody in particular.
You can almost see your reflection in the patent leather of the shoes, and you’re thinking fast.
“Bond, I’m going to have to cut the comms,” you say, and his speech becomes frantic as he begs you not to, and you would chastise him for how he loses his cool so quickly when you’re in danger, but he doesn’t understand, and there’s no time to worry or explain. “Goodbye, double-oh-seven,” you say, and he yells, “Don’t you fucking dare -“
Your vision swims (you didn’t lose that much blood, but of course you’re anemic, of course you are, you should’ve seen that coming) as you pluck out the small earbud.
Your hands are quick nonetheless. Your hands have never failed you.
+++
The first time you see Bond make a cold kill, you’re sitting on a wet men’s room floor bleeding from a long but shallow gash on your right forearm. There’s the target’s laptop balanced between the knees of your crossed legs, you’re trying to track a transaction between two continents. The light makes it difficult, reflecting off the tiles in a eerie blue (to stop junkies from finding their veins, but Bond doesn’t need to find a vein, not when you don’t particularly care which part of the anatomy you hit).
Bond’s holding a rusty rebar he picked up from an abandoned construction site, it’s already dark and glistening after he works it a few times, but he doesn’t stop. You’ve seen people kill before, of course (thirteen and on the streets, used-up and desperate and always hungry, and they put Peter’s body in a garbage tip because he stole the money for crack), but those were small-time gangs who had no training or finesse. Bond’s kills are so brutal and elegant and efficient, it’s almost an art form.
When it’s done, he stands there with his mouth a grim line, wipes the sweat off his forehead and leaves a smudge of blood instead. It reminds you of something religious, something ritual, something you learnt one long night trawling Wikipedia for marginally not-boring articles. Something like the passing over of an angel of death.
His hair looks like a mat of shorn copper wires under the strange lighting. You think, I wish I made you, because then you would be mine.
And then you think, what the fuck is wrong with me.
You fix your eyes on the screen so you won’t be watching Bond strip to the waist to assess the damage.
The laptop chimes, and Bond leans over the screen to read upside-down, red on black:
СМЕРШ
Perhaps it’s the blood, perhaps it’s the light, but you can almost swear he turns pale.
+++
It’s like this: “Don’t follow me,” he says, his knuckles white, and each wrapped around a suitcase and a gun respectively.
You take his suitcase. It can because you have your own bag in your other hand, and it’s easier if one of you has his hands free to open doors and catch him if he stumbles. Or it can be because, in some idiotic way, part of you thinks if you hold his luggage ransom, he’ll stay here until you’re ready to let go.
It’s like this: “You’ll get hurt again,” he says, looking anywhere but at you.
You drop the bags, and you take the gun. It can be because it’s easier to kiss him when you both have your hands free. Or it can be because it’s less dangerous to slap an unarmed man.
The point is, he lets you, on both counts. So you choose the former. And then you press his hand to the binding on your leg, where the bullet passed clean through (people say you were lucky. You’re not sure if it’s luckier to survive a bullet, or to slowly slip away into darkness swaddled in the heat of his arms, his heart pressed against your ear, beating fast. For you.).
“Bond. I’ve killed a man. I’m not completely defenseless. Let me go with you. Then,” you continue when he opens his mouth mutinously, “at least someone can bring your corpse back if you fail.”
“I won’t fail,” Bond mutters, “not again.” He rubs a finger gently but firmly against the new bandages, and you bite back a cry of pain, force your face into nonchalance.
“Let me go with you,” you repeat. There’s a hint of your mother’s plea and a hint of your father’s steel in your voice, the night before their broken bodies made parabolae across the frigid air; it’s there without you even trying.
You can almost see the moment of defeat in the contours of his shoulders, the set of his jaws.
You hack into the CCTV system and scramble the recordings to create a 48-hour dummy surveillance video, and you feed it back to the mainframe with no fuss at all (there’s a strange reckless kind of glee in being on the wrong side of the law again). Bond sedates the agents enforcing his house arrest (M saw the danger of letting him loose with SMERSH on his mind. M always saw the dangers; he never saw the way Bond drank and fucked like a man trying to lose his mind) and acquires a cab to the airport.
You board a flight to Cardiff, and then to Warsaw, and then to Mumbai, and then to Shanghai, and then to Sri Lanka, and then to Venice (just in case we get a tail, Bond said. You see, I do know how to be careful).
When the plane taxis off at 0240 you hardly notice, because Bond’s fallen asleep with your fingers entwined. The tranquilizers you slipped into his tonic water did a number on him.
“… left to salvage.” Bond murmurs, and you shift to look at his face; his expression is blissful, so you settle back. He sighs, eyelashes fluttering.
The plane glides peacefully over London, the lights of buildings and traffic slinking backward like a piece of bejeweled black satin sliding against the window.
You blink once, and all is dark.
Silently, you count the odds again.
p (Q|007) = 0.054887652193501
End
[long A/N below:
1. СМЕРШ: SMERSH, the masterminds behind several Bond movies, including Casino Royale. Giving you more would be telling ;P
2a. p (Q|007) = 0.054887652193501 : A pesky little thing called posterior probability, which means the probability of a certain thing happening given the properties of another factor. In this case, the probability of Q given 007. Which technically doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not worth further complicating things for pleasure. Just assume it means the probability of Q “falling” for/because of 007. You can skip 2b. if you’re not interested in the details.
2b. For the mathematically- or statistically-minded, or for people who come from the social sciences, you might recognize that probability number, which could be rounded to 0.05 or 0.06 depending on how many decimal places you take into account. This does, in fact, matter a lot, because this schmuck called Fischer set the alpha (type 1 error rate) to 5%. Which means if the error rate is larger than 0.05, the results of your experiment may be due to chance, i.e. for all intents and purposes of publication, it wasn’t due to experimental manipulation and therefore is Not Important And Nobody Would Be Interested In Your Paper. There’s a fuckton of issues linked to this, but I shall refrain from discussing them here.
3. In an ideal world this would be a prologue to a longer mission!fic, but I might save it for the 00Q big bang happening on LJ (http://00q-bb.livejournal.com/) next year, depending on how many words I can fit into the monstrosity.
4. This short story survived three drafts, and this is the version I’m happiest with. Hopefully you enjoyed it :) Comments are what I live for :) ]
Verse: Skyfall, James Bond
Pairing: James Bond/Q, 00Q
Rating: T
Word count: ~1K
Summary: You can see yourself; can calculate to the fifteenth decimal point the chances of falling, plummeting, the sensation of gravity pulling you down, down, down, disorientating your senses before you crash and burn in a fiery cloud.
AO3
“Come with me,” Bond says, and you’re laughing incredulously, because you’re six feet tall and slightly less than ten stone, you can barely hold a gun and aeroplanes terrify you, have terrified you since your parents’ craft shattered against the Himalayas like an egg against the counter-top. You remember seeing it in the papers, the remains of charred metal and bones, already cooling amongst a thousand years’ worth of rock and snow.
His eyes are seven shades of blue and they don’t look hard at all, they don’t look like ice at all. You’re not a poet, so you can’t think of any words to describe them; but a corner of your mind starts on an algorithm that might estimate the refraction of light in a crystal sphere. He holds out his hand, silent, and your laughter dies on your lips as rough skin ghosts over your own pale, smooth hand.
“Let’s do this together,” he says, and your smile is hesitant. You know the numbers, you’ve done the sums, you hold probability in your palm like a child holds his marbles and seashells. You can see yourself; can calculate to the fifteenth decimal point the chances of falling, plummeting, the sensation of gravity pulling you down, down, down, disorientating your senses before you crash and burn in a fiery cloud.
His fingers close around yours (so warm and hard), you can see his every individual eyelash, your blood is thundering in your ears, and you’re swallowing around the stone in your throat and whispering Yes.
His lips are unexpectedly soft.
+++
Shards of glass are raining down, and you’re running and running until the oxygen in your lungs burn and you can feel parts of you go numb. It still isn’t fast enough. There’s a stinging pain in your left thigh and you stumble to the ground cursing, and Bond is shouting in your ear to find cover. You crawl under a table in the conference room (ignore the pain, breathe through it) and there are two small phuts from your comm. You listen for heavy boots, but the footsteps behind you have stopped and you heave a great shuddering breath.
Then the boots are treading over glass, every crunch heart-stopping. A shotgun barrel could be seen dangling at his side.
“I thought you said he was down,” you say, voice calm despite yourself. Bond swears loudly (you hiss at him to quiet down) and informs you the wrong man’s dead, repeat, I shot the wrong person, the hostage is dead, the target is twelve feet away from you and I’m nineteen floors above.
“What do you have on you?” he asks. You check your gun. It’s empty. There’s nothing but a two and a half pounds in coins, a blue Skittle, and some lint in your pockets. You turn your eyes towards the belly-side of the table that’s sheltering you like a quadruped mother. Is this it then, you ask nobody in particular.
You can almost see your reflection in the patent leather of the shoes, and you’re thinking fast.
“Bond, I’m going to have to cut the comms,” you say, and his speech becomes frantic as he begs you not to, and you would chastise him for how he loses his cool so quickly when you’re in danger, but he doesn’t understand, and there’s no time to worry or explain. “Goodbye, double-oh-seven,” you say, and he yells, “Don’t you fucking dare -“
Your vision swims (you didn’t lose that much blood, but of course you’re anemic, of course you are, you should’ve seen that coming) as you pluck out the small earbud.
Your hands are quick nonetheless. Your hands have never failed you.
+++
The first time you see Bond make a cold kill, you’re sitting on a wet men’s room floor bleeding from a long but shallow gash on your right forearm. There’s the target’s laptop balanced between the knees of your crossed legs, you’re trying to track a transaction between two continents. The light makes it difficult, reflecting off the tiles in a eerie blue (to stop junkies from finding their veins, but Bond doesn’t need to find a vein, not when you don’t particularly care which part of the anatomy you hit).
Bond’s holding a rusty rebar he picked up from an abandoned construction site, it’s already dark and glistening after he works it a few times, but he doesn’t stop. You’ve seen people kill before, of course (thirteen and on the streets, used-up and desperate and always hungry, and they put Peter’s body in a garbage tip because he stole the money for crack), but those were small-time gangs who had no training or finesse. Bond’s kills are so brutal and elegant and efficient, it’s almost an art form.
When it’s done, he stands there with his mouth a grim line, wipes the sweat off his forehead and leaves a smudge of blood instead. It reminds you of something religious, something ritual, something you learnt one long night trawling Wikipedia for marginally not-boring articles. Something like the passing over of an angel of death.
His hair looks like a mat of shorn copper wires under the strange lighting. You think, I wish I made you, because then you would be mine.
And then you think, what the fuck is wrong with me.
You fix your eyes on the screen so you won’t be watching Bond strip to the waist to assess the damage.
The laptop chimes, and Bond leans over the screen to read upside-down, red on black:
СМЕРШ
Perhaps it’s the blood, perhaps it’s the light, but you can almost swear he turns pale.
+++
It’s like this: “Don’t follow me,” he says, his knuckles white, and each wrapped around a suitcase and a gun respectively.
You take his suitcase. It can because you have your own bag in your other hand, and it’s easier if one of you has his hands free to open doors and catch him if he stumbles. Or it can be because, in some idiotic way, part of you thinks if you hold his luggage ransom, he’ll stay here until you’re ready to let go.
It’s like this: “You’ll get hurt again,” he says, looking anywhere but at you.
You drop the bags, and you take the gun. It can be because it’s easier to kiss him when you both have your hands free. Or it can be because it’s less dangerous to slap an unarmed man.
The point is, he lets you, on both counts. So you choose the former. And then you press his hand to the binding on your leg, where the bullet passed clean through (people say you were lucky. You’re not sure if it’s luckier to survive a bullet, or to slowly slip away into darkness swaddled in the heat of his arms, his heart pressed against your ear, beating fast. For you.).
“Bond. I’ve killed a man. I’m not completely defenseless. Let me go with you. Then,” you continue when he opens his mouth mutinously, “at least someone can bring your corpse back if you fail.”
“I won’t fail,” Bond mutters, “not again.” He rubs a finger gently but firmly against the new bandages, and you bite back a cry of pain, force your face into nonchalance.
“Let me go with you,” you repeat. There’s a hint of your mother’s plea and a hint of your father’s steel in your voice, the night before their broken bodies made parabolae across the frigid air; it’s there without you even trying.
You can almost see the moment of defeat in the contours of his shoulders, the set of his jaws.
You hack into the CCTV system and scramble the recordings to create a 48-hour dummy surveillance video, and you feed it back to the mainframe with no fuss at all (there’s a strange reckless kind of glee in being on the wrong side of the law again). Bond sedates the agents enforcing his house arrest (M saw the danger of letting him loose with SMERSH on his mind. M always saw the dangers; he never saw the way Bond drank and fucked like a man trying to lose his mind) and acquires a cab to the airport.
You board a flight to Cardiff, and then to Warsaw, and then to Mumbai, and then to Shanghai, and then to Sri Lanka, and then to Venice (just in case we get a tail, Bond said. You see, I do know how to be careful).
When the plane taxis off at 0240 you hardly notice, because Bond’s fallen asleep with your fingers entwined. The tranquilizers you slipped into his tonic water did a number on him.
“… left to salvage.” Bond murmurs, and you shift to look at his face; his expression is blissful, so you settle back. He sighs, eyelashes fluttering.
The plane glides peacefully over London, the lights of buildings and traffic slinking backward like a piece of bejeweled black satin sliding against the window.
You blink once, and all is dark.
Silently, you count the odds again.
p (Q|007) = 0.054887652193501
End
[long A/N below:
1. СМЕРШ: SMERSH, the masterminds behind several Bond movies, including Casino Royale. Giving you more would be telling ;P
2a. p (Q|007) = 0.054887652193501 : A pesky little thing called posterior probability, which means the probability of a certain thing happening given the properties of another factor. In this case, the probability of Q given 007. Which technically doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not worth further complicating things for pleasure. Just assume it means the probability of Q “falling” for/because of 007. You can skip 2b. if you’re not interested in the details.
2b. For the mathematically- or statistically-minded, or for people who come from the social sciences, you might recognize that probability number, which could be rounded to 0.05 or 0.06 depending on how many decimal places you take into account. This does, in fact, matter a lot, because this schmuck called Fischer set the alpha (type 1 error rate) to 5%. Which means if the error rate is larger than 0.05, the results of your experiment may be due to chance, i.e. for all intents and purposes of publication, it wasn’t due to experimental manipulation and therefore is Not Important And Nobody Would Be Interested In Your Paper. There’s a fuckton of issues linked to this, but I shall refrain from discussing them here.
3. In an ideal world this would be a prologue to a longer mission!fic, but I might save it for the 00Q big bang happening on LJ (http://00q-bb.livejournal.com/) next year, depending on how many words I can fit into the monstrosity.
4. This short story survived three drafts, and this is the version I’m happiest with. Hopefully you enjoyed it :) Comments are what I live for :) ]