Fic: Slow Dancing In a Burning Room (7/9)
Slow Dancing In A Burning Room, 7/9
Fandom: Skyfall (James Bond)
Characters: James Bond/Q, Eve Moneypenny, Gareth Mallory, Bill Tanner, OCs
Rating: Mature. Explicit in sections; depictions of canon-typical violence.
Word-Count: ~60,000. Complete, but chapters will be posted as they are returned from beta and undergo final edits.
Notes: This fic was Brit-picked by the lovely and patient starsandgraces, who isn't even in this fandom but still put up with my badgering. I was encouraged by multiple enablers, including jou and flatbear, but all credit and gratitude goes to circ_bamboo, who held my hand, cheered me on, read over every inch of this fic, plotted endlessly with me, and is hands-down the best writing partner in crime a fangirl could ask for. THANK YOU SO MUCH, BABY, ALL THE SCONES ARE FOR YOU. ♥
Summary: Q has a past, a cat, and a dangerous new boyfriend. Two of these things keep him up nights, the other pees in a box. Espionage, plot with porn, decoy flats, suit porn, scones for the Queen, invention porn, secret identities, snark, canon-typical violence, dysfunctional flirting by dysfunctional people, and Eve Moneypenny is HBIC.
Chapter Seven. The thing to remember is that it can always, always get worse.
You can also read here at the AO3. Part one of this fic posted here on LJ, part two is here, part three is here, part four is here, part five is here, and part six is here.
Technically, it was his own fault for being an idiot.
He should never have brought the damn thing with him, but if there was one thing for which Q could be relied upon, it was his stubbornness. The poison pen was one of his pet projects, and he wasn’t about to let it languish in production hell during his absence when he could be working on it. He’d requisitioned it out of works-in-progress storage right before he’d left to go meet Adrienne and Jonathan at the pub, and it wasn’t as if he would be stopping in to take it back until after his own personal skeletons had gone back into their fucking closet.
Which was how Q came to be sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor of the safe-house flat, reassembling the prototype, screwing the body of the pen back into place, when he bumped the nodule at the end of the pen and poked himself in the meat of his palm, squirting some ink on himself in the process. Or at least, he thought it was ink for the first twenty seconds, until the place where he’d pricked himself started burning like someone had poured citrus juice into it.
“Fuck,” he hissed, dropping the pen on the ground and glaring at his hand. The ink looked strange, he thought, rather viscous, less like ink and more like-
Q took a deep breath, fighting the initial and violent urge to fly into a panic. He got to his feet, going for his mobile and brought up his favorites, fast-dialing Adrienne. He forced himself to walk calmly to the sink as he listened to it ring, scrubbing the black from his hand, whimpering at the pain.
“Hello, darling,” Adrienne said cheerfully, picking up on the second ring. “How are y-”
“Where are you?” Q cut in, his voice tight. “Tell me you’ve still got your anti-venins at the bake-shop.”
“I’m-wait, what? Yes, of course, I’d never throw them out. Q, what’s wrong?”
“I think I’ve just got myself with a bit of that synthetic snake venom you advised us on a few months back, someone left actual fucking poison in one of my prototypes instead of the ink we’re supposed to use for testing, how long have I got? Can you meet me?” There was silence on the other end for several moments. Q hissed, heading now to the front hall, grabbing up his boots and jamming his feet into first one and then the other. “Adie, come on, don’t freeze up on me.”
“If you only got a tiny dose, twenty minutes max before unconsciousness, thirty till death,” Adrienne said after a moment. “I’ll head over now. Can you get a cab? I can be there in ten, I’m not far.”
“I’m out the door,” Q said, grabbing for his wallet as he rang off and shoved the mobile in his pocket. It took every ounce of self-control he had to not run hell-for-leather down the hallway as he pulled his parka on, but the first rule of dealing with deadly poisons that every member of Q Branch learned was that you must not panic if you accidentally poison yourself; you’ll only spread the toxin faster through your system if you elevate your heart rate. He paused at the head of the stairs, scrolling through his apps for the one he needed, the one he’d installed on the mobile of every high-ranking MI6 officer, the one that commandeered the closest taxi for emergency governmental purposes.
It worked like a charm: there was a cabbie pulling up to the edge of the curb by the time Q came down the front steps and crawled into the back seat. M could scream about abuse of resources later.
“Cheltenham Lane, A Piece of Cake,” he snapped. “Break every traffic law you have to, you won’t be fined or penalized, MI6 business, go.” Q fumbled open his wallet to flash his ID, the one the cabbie had to be shown when you used the emergency code, and then he nearly pitched into the foot-well as the cabbie tore off into traffic, not even bothering to wait till Q had fastened his belt.
Q sank back against the seat, peering down at his hand. The little cut in his palm was rapidly turning ugly, tissue puckering up, edges reddened and puffy like infection was settling in. His whole forearm had started to hurt, and Q belatedly raised the hand in question above his head, grabbing the handle above the door. Keep the extremity elevated, slow the venom’s spread in the circulatory system, Adrienne’s calm, professional voice said in his memory. She’d run the toxins workshop they’d have a few years back, near the start of his actual career at Q Branch.
Fourteen minutes had passed by the time they got to the bake-shop. Q was breathing hard, little flares of burning pain springing up all over his body; he was finding it harder and harder to get enough oxygen as his respiratory system shut down. There was a sour tang in the back of his throat, the tell-tale flavor of cells dying. He shoved two hundred fifty quid at the driver with a strained “Thanks,” and stumbled out the cab door, making for the entrance to the bake-shop, which was still unlocked. Adrienne came running out of the back room, a hypodermic needle in her hand.
“Do it,” gasped Q, struggling out of his parka. She grabbed his wrist and shoved his jumper sleeve up his arm, turning his hand palm-up, and jabbed the needle into his arm just above his elbow. Q cried out, jerking a little, but she held him fast, pushing down on the depressor till the syringe was empty, and then she removed it and set it aside, grabbing for Q before he fell over.
“How’d you know which one to use?” Q asked after a few minutes, when he got the use of his throat back. His voice sounded weak in his own ears, and his hand still ached, but the prickly burning was gone, and the feeling of not being able to get enough air had subsided. They were sitting on the floor behind the counter, Q sprawled on the floor, Adrienne sitting hip-to-hip with him.
“There’s only one that got all the way through processing, as far as I know,” said Adrienne. She sounded kind of shaky herself. Q reflected that she had never really liked seeing more action than making everyone dinner, even back when they were both technically criminals. “Based on cobra venom.”
“Ah. Well. I guess I didn’t need to bring the pen, then.” Q smiled ruefully at Adrienne as she gave him a look. “The cap’s on it, alright, I just didn’t want to play Russian Roulette with which anti-venin to use.” He submitted quietly to her examining the cut on his hand, but patted the lump created by the pen in his inside trouser-pocket with his other hand all the same, just to make sure the damn thing hadn’t moved.
“Yes, well, let’s go and wash this out again and put some ointment on it, all the same. Make sure you go in to medical as soon as you can, there might be lingering effects, but it doesn’t look as if you got a full dose, which is damn lucky.”
Q groaning as she hauled him to his feet, going light-headed at all the blood rushing to his brain, and allowed himself to be led to the back, leaning against one of the tables in the kitchen with his parka draped over one arm as Adrienne rummaged through drawers in search of some ointment. “No, lucky is the fact that you got a Ph.D in toxicology before you decided your true love was baking.”
“Chemistry and baking are two sides of the same coin, darling.” Adrienne smiled at him, and then froze, looking past Q to the small windows that looked into the main cafe area. “Q,” she said, lowering her voice to barely above a whisper, “you didn’t tell anyone else to meet you here, did you?”
“Didn’t have time,” murmured Q. A chill went through him, a spike of adrenaline banishing his lethargy. He resisted the urge to look through the little window back into the bake-shop, afraid of who he’d see. “They must’ve had a watch on the bake-shop. The door out through the freezer still usable?”
Adrienne nodded. When she and Jonathan had first been renovating this location for use, Q had been insistent upon extra exit doors, because some habits die hard. And also, because sometimes old ghosts come back. Q took Adrienne’s hand, and they padded quietly along the side of the room, opening the door to the walk-in freezer and slipping inside, pulling it shut behind them. Moments later he could hear muffled voices through the freezer door behind them, and he bit his lip, taking three seconds to punch a code on his mobile in lieu of watching as Adrienne unlocked the exit door. The difference in temperature between the freezer and outside was negligible, and Q spared a moment to be glad it at least wasn’t raining as he struggled his parka back on. Adrienne hastily locked the door behind them with her key before looking at Q with a question in her eyes.
“Run,” he said. “You remember the drill.”
“Are you sure? You’re still ill, I don’t want to leave you-”
“Piss off,” he said, and shoved her. “You have a four-year-old, and it’s me they’re after anyway. Go! I’ve just sent an alert, HQ will be tracking our mobiles, go!” Adrienne cursed at him and then turned and darted down the alley, heading for the street at the opposite end. Q did not wait to see her disappear at the other end, already turning and breaking into a run towards the long line of Cheltenham Lane. Q burst onto the street and darted a glance in each direction before dashing across, throwing stealth to the wind.
He’d lose them in the Underground, providing he could get to the station first. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, and plenty of people were out on the streets, which gave Q an advantage. The burning in his lungs came back with a vengeance, but he ignored it, hustling past a slow-moving group of tourists in ugly sweatshirts as he pelted down the sidewalk towards the familiar signpost for the tube-
-only to nearly trip over his own two feet as he got close enough to see the “STATION CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE” sign posted on the neon marker at the top of the stairs, and Q glanced frantically over his shoulder, trying to gauge if he had time to use the emergency cab code again, already fumbling for his mobile. All he could see was people walking calmly down the road, several of whom were pointedly not looking at the nutter haring past them like some kind of misguided Olympic sprinter.
That was when he saw the first man, loping down Cheltenham towards him with mean intent written on his face, and Q bolted again before he had time to make eye contact, shoving his mobile back into his coat pocket. He was feeling very ill now, his limbs protesting the lack of oxygen from not-yet-recovered lungs, but he forced himself to run up the next side street he came to, lined with parked cars and rubbish bins stood out by the road. He had made it half a block before realizing it was a bad turn to make; there were fewer people down this road, and he no longer knew exactly where he was, but at least his phone was still tracking him. His chest burned, his pulse thundered in his ears, his heart felt like it was going to beat out of his ribs; Q cast a glance back down the road behind him, but he couldn’t see anyone following him. He tripped and nearly fell in his distraction, and he stumbled to a halt, bent double for a moment as a spasm lanced up his side, crippling him momentarily with the pain.
Q hissed, forcing himself upright again after a few seconds, casting another nervous glance around. Still no one. Maybe he’d lost them.
A hand fell on his shoulder. Q tried to turn, but a heavy cloth was suddenly being pressed against his nose and mouth, and he was choking, he was gasping for air, there was a sharp chemical tang in his nose, and then his vision went black.
* * * * *
“You’re an idiot,” said a voice. The voice was male, nasal, baritone; whoever it was had a thick Bristol accent and sounded absolutely livid. “You must have given him enough to kill a whale, he shouldn’t have been out for this long-”
“Piss off!” The second voice was surly. “I gave him half the normal dose, just like David said, ain’t my fault he’s such a fuckin’ lightweight.”
Q must have made a noise then, because abruptly both voices cut off. “Here, he’s coming round, get the bin,” said the first voice, and then Q found himself being propped up, which sent off a cascade of awful from his skull all the way down his spinal cord to every one of his protesting innards.
“Uuuggghhh,” he slurred. The surface he was on seemed to pitch and yaw under him, his limbs trembling with the stress of being upright.
“Shit, I think he’s gonna be sick again. Quick, pass the bloody-”
Q opened his eyes then, and found himself peering murkily at what looked to be a grimy dish bin set across his lap and a man crouched in front of him. “About bloody time you woke up,” said Voice #1, which apparently belonged to the man on the floor next to him. Q swallowed, and then the wave of nausea hit him again, and he bent over the bin, shuddering through several seconds of dry heaves that brought up little more than sickly bile-yellow spit. It looked about as lovely as it felt, judging from the expression of the man beside him.
“Fuck,” Q forced out after a moment. “What the fuck did you use on me?” He swallowed thickly.
“Chloroform,” said Voice #2, the man standing on Q’s other side, who bent down and passed him a rag to wipe his mouth with. “Bit old-fashioned but it does the trick. Here, drink some water.” He thrust a glass at Q, and Q blinked at it for a moment before taking it, somehow managing to drink more of the water than he spilled on himself. “We was wonderin’ when you were gonna wake up; the boss has been gettin’ impatient.”
“How long was I out for?” Thug #1 (having graduated from a disembodied voice) took the empty glass from him and stood up, apparently not feeling that Q was much of a threat to anyone at that exact moment. Sadly, Q had to agree with him. He could now say with authority that near-death by synthetic snake venom felt less vile than he did right now. He slumped against the surface behind him (the wall, he presumed) and shakily accepted the pair of glasses held out to him by returning Thug #1.
“Few hours,” said Thug #2. Q managed to get his glasses on, then looked up at him, taking in how stocky both men were, the buzz cuts and thick arms and nondescript clothes that said “hired muscle.” Even if he wasn’t a few too-quick movements away from another round of heaves, he was so outranked physically that it was outright laughable at this point. “You think you can stand up?”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Q said after a moment. “I think we’ve all seen about as much of my insides as we want to for today.”
Thugs 1 and 2 exchanged a glance, #2’s with a lip-curl of disgust for extra flavor. No doubt they were measuring the chances of moving him without him vomiting all over them again, and Q smiled faintly. Whatever orders they’d been given about him from David and Janessa, it apparently did not encourage them to do much past acquiring him and keeping him in one piece.
“Look, you can-” Q gestured vaguely, one hand still holding the bin in his lap, “handcuff me or ziptie me or what have you, I’m sure there’s something, but if it’s all the same to you I’ll just sit here and hold this bin in case things turn sour again.”
“Yeah, no,” said Thug #1, apparently coming to a decision. “Blake, get the cuffs an’ the laptop and bring ‘em over here, he can watch from where he’s sitting right now.”
Q stayed put, watching Blake bring a serviceable-looking machine and a depressingly sturdy-looking pair of handcuffs over. Blake set the machine on the ground, and then Q allowed himself to be bent forward, his wrists crossed at the small of his back and cuffed together before he sat back up again. He did not test the cuffs, or resist their hands at all, giving his attention to literally everything else but his restraints; he wanted no indication that he would fight them, or that he posed any kind of threat.
Now that he was no longer actively ill, he was noticing other things, too, like how shabby-looking the room was, and how chilly he was, and the fact that he could hear something he thought might be the sea or might be car traffic through thin walls. He wondered where the hell they’d taken him. If they had any sense at all, they’d have already gotten rid of his mobile, but without knowing exactly how long he’d been unconscious or where he was, it was difficult to gauge when an impending rescue might arrive.
“May I ask what I’m watching?” All things told, they were being fairly conscientious of him, no kicking or threats or abuse thus far. Realistically speaking, though, Q knew it was because of how terrifying Janessa and David were. The more important question was where those two were right now, and when they would be getting here.
Blake didn’t answer; he was bent over the laptop, concentrating on whatever was on-screen. Thug #1, whose name Q still didn’t know, had his mobile out now. “He’s awake,” he said after a moment to whoever was on the line. “Right. No, he seems alright-yes, he’s talking…. Right.” He turned to Q, holding out the mobile. Q stared at it for a moment as though it was a spider instead of a mobile, and then craned his head, nestling the mobile against his shoulder.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Simon,” said Janessa, into his ear. Her voice was warm and sweet like honey, her American accent slightly thickened by her years in France. “It’s been so long.” Q’s stomach twisted painfully, and he shrank a little against the wall, feeling his spine press into the plaster, the cuffs cutting into his wrists. Thug #1 watched him, his face unreadable.
“It has,” he said, because he had to say something and weeping uncontrollably seemed like a bad bet. “I admit I was surprised to wake up and not see you here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
Janessa laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, baby, we’ll be there soon. We’ll have plenty of time to catch up. But I have a little something I want you to watch before our reunion. David and I have been keeping busy getting this ready for you.”
Blake glanced up, turning the laptop around so that the screen faced Q. It was open on a Youtube page, and while the screen was black, Q could hear sound coming out of the speakers. It took him a few seconds to make out the person talking, but as soon as he did it was all he could do not to drop the mobile into the bin still in his lap. Behind his back, his careful, millimeter-fine twisting of his hands froze.
“I’m heading in now, the door’s unlocked,” said Bond, his voice staticky but easily identifiable.
Q took a breath, the air dragging painfully through his lungs. “Yes, it’s your boyfriend, Commander Bond, live from his new mission in Calais,” said Janessa. Q had forgotten how cheerful she sounded when she was planning something particularly vindictive. There was a lot of things he’d blocked out. “Everything came together so beautifully after we found you outside Carolyn’s bakery. She gave us the slip for now, but it’s only temporary, I promise.” She paused, covering the speaker for a moment, saying something unintelligible to someone at her end before continuing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be awake in time to enjoy this, but luckily you pulled through. Did you know that even Q Branch employees aren’t immune to blackmail? It’s amazing what a person will promise to do when you threaten their family. Even treason isn’t off the table.”
Q’s heart sank as he listened to Mark’s tight responses. “Is this necessary?” he asked, already guessing what the answer would be but unable to not at least try to talk Janessa out of this.
“You didn’t learn your lesson the first time, boy,” said Janessa, her voice dangerously soft. “We have to make sure it sticks this time.”
“Please, Janessa-”
“Shut up,” she snapped, and Q winced. “As if you have any right to ask me for anything after what you did to us. This is the least of what you deserve.”
“What are you going to do?” Q let his voice shake, dropped his eyes, shoulders hunching, looking and sounding every bit as sick and helpless as one could hope. His hands were almost at the right angle; now he just needed a good moment to make the final trick. Blake got up and went into the next room to do God knew what, while Thug #1 stayed where he was, crouched next to Q.
“Well, your gentleman is too dangerous to mess with face-to-face, from what we’ve seen, so we figured we’d do things the good old way and just blow him straight to hell. He obliged us by finishing his previous mission in record time as soon as he heard that you’d disappeared, which let us lead him right where we want him to go.” Q could hear other voices from Janessa’s end again, one of them David’s, he thought, trying to not let himself get distracted at how quickly James had come looking for Q. They must be at Mark’s family’s house, or Mark would never go along with them for any amount of money.
Q choked on a small sob, tears pricking in his eyes as he deliberately dislocated his left thumb. “Please don’t make me listen to this,” he said raggedly. “You already have me where you want me, please-”
“Should’ve thought of this before you turned us in to Interpol, baby,” said Janessa sweetly, and Q moaned.
There was muffled noises on the other end of the line, like the mobile was changing hands. “Hey there darlin’,” said David after a moment. His voice was gentle, and Q shut his eyes, his lips trembling.
“David,” he said. “David, p-please, please don’t kill him-”
“Oh, come on now, you should know better than to ask me for that. It sure is nice to hear you remember how to beg, though.” Q bit his lip, hard, easing his hand out of the cuff and trying not to jostle the mobile against his shoulder.
“It’ll be quick?” he asked after a moment.
“Uh-huh. He won’t even realize. Soon as it’s done, we’ll come straight there to get you, and then we can take aaaall the time we need to catch up.” Q sucked in another painful breath, letting David hear the hitch in his voice as he forced his thumb back into joint, knowing exactly what they wanted from him. “Ah-ah, crying won’t help, sweetheart. You gotta listen to the whole thing. You’ve been real bad, and you gotta pay your dues.”
“You won’t hurt Mark’s family?” The pain was making Q feel ill again, the urge to give in and panic and cry for real very strong, but he just needed to stall for a little bit longer.
“No, sweetheart, we won’t. If everyone plays nice and does what they’re supposed to, no one else has to die today. Except 007, that is.”
Q swallowed. “I…” He shuddered. “Okay,” he said weakly, and then he did start to cry, wet, broken noises that translated very well over the phone. David clucked softly at him.
“Don’t worry, it won’t be much longer now. But Jaybird and I have some things to finish setting up, so we’re gonna go now. Be good, sweetheart, we’ll see you soon.”
“Okay,” whispered Q again, and then flicked his eyes to Thug #1, nodding minutely. The live feed on the computer was still playing, and Thug #1 reached out to take the mobile from Q, who still lay slumped against the wall, tears leaking down his face.
“Right,” said Thug #1, pocketing the mobile, and then Q grabbed the bin across his lap and hurled it in the man’s face, vomit and all. “FHH-!!”
Q scrambled to his feet in the few precious seconds that stunt bought him, jamming his boot-covered foot into the man’s crotch as he screamed, and then kicked him in the head when he went down like a sack of bricks. “OY!” shouted Blake from the next room, and Q dove for the empty chair and hurled it at the doorway as Blake appeared. On a normal day when he wasn’t sick from poison and chloroform, he might still have had trouble, but fear and adrenaline were wonderful drugs, and Blake went crashing to the floor like his partner had.
Q stood there for a moment, breathing hard, the sounds of Mark and 007 on the live stream behind him unbroken. He straightened, tugging distractedly at the cuffs that still dangled from his right wrist, eyes watering profusely at the agony in his left hand. Janessa had been the one to teach him that trick; she’d thought getting out of cuffs was a useful skill to have, along with some basic sleight-of-hand. He’d never been any good at the pickpocketing, but she’d been right about the other bit coming in handy. He was very glad, now, that she’d insisted on supervising him the first two times he did it, and that he’d chosen to learn to do it on his non-dominant hand.
If he knew he had more time, he’d search around to find something to tie both men up with, but there was no telling how long before the bomb Janessa and David had planted went off, if Janessa had been speaking literally and a bomb was what they were intending. Q turned around, grabbing up the laptop and setting it on the small table against the wall, his brain going in a million directions at once.
He had to warn Bond, had to get him out. But if Janessa and David found out that Q was free, they might set whatever trap they’d rigged immediately and then take it out on Mark’s family to boot. Q hissed under his breath, leaving the live stream with Mark and Bond open in one tab and opening another to let him hack into the earpiece Mark was most likely to be using. It took all of thirty seconds before he was in. Q bent close, raising his voice, hoping the computer’s microphone was functional.
“Mark, it’s Q, don’t give yourself away, just sneeze twice if you hear this,” he said. There was a few seconds’ pause in his feed, and then Mark sneezed audibly, twice in a row. “Brilliant. Okay, listen, I know what the Markhams are doing, I know they have your family, I am going to save them, just stall for time, alright? Don’t get 007 killed. But don’t give yourself away. Sneeze once more if you understand.”
“Oh lord, my allergies are killing me today,” said Mark, and then sneezed again, loudly.
“Try not to die on me,” said Bond, and Q smiled thinly.
Next order of business. He went to Thug #1’s unconscious-or-dead body and dug the handcuff keys and his mobile out of the man’s pocket, and dialed Moneypenny’s number from memory, praying she’d answer the unknown number as he fiddled the remaining cuff off his wrist and chucked it into a corner.
She answered, but not till the fourth ring. “Hello,” she said, and Q nearly cried again from how good it was to hear her voice.
“Don’t react,” he said instead. “It’s me. I’m fine, but we have no time, the Markhams are holding Mark’s family hostage to force him to lead Bond into a trap. Send a stealth team to the house to rescue them so I can extract Bond without the Markhams retaliating.”
“Understood,” said Moneypenny. “It’s fine, I’m in a secure location. Two seconds.” Q waited on the line as Moneypenny covered the phone and said something to someone before coming back. “They’re on their way. Where the hell are you?”
“I haven’t the faintest fucking idea,” said Q, already back at the computer, working to hack into the CCTV at Bond’s location, “as the two men I knocked unconscious weren’t exactly forthcoming, but hold on a second and I’ll have a location for you… there.” He tapped a few buttons, staring in mild surprise. “Farmhouse ninety minutes outside of London, south and east on the M20. Hold on. GPS location sent to your mobile, now.”
“I have a team headed there now to extract you,” said Moneypenny evenly after a ten-second pause, and Q let out a long breath. “Do me a favor and don’t die before they can get there.”
“Working on it,” said Q. “I’ll call you back, I have to find that bomb and-fuck. Found it.”
“What?” asked Moneypenny sharply. “Bomb? Don’t hang up, stay with me, Q.”
“At Bond’s location,” said Q. “I told you, it’s a trap.”
“How-”
“I don’t fucking know, alright, hold ON-” He set the phone down, jabbing the “speakerphone” button to free up his hands. The bomb was a small metal affair, sat neatly on a chair in the middle of the table in the room it was hidden in, on the very top floor of the hotel. It was on a timer, so far as Q could tell, and he muttered to himself at this laptop’s slow processor as he increased the zoom on the camera and had to wait several seconds for the new view to load. The picture re-focused again, and Q swore. Ten minutes was all he had. “Time to get some escape routes going,” he muttered, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Tell me when Mark’s family is safe; I’ve got to have enough time to get Bond out and I can’t do that till the Markhams have been neutralized.”
“They’re going as fast as they can,” said Moneypenny tensely. “Can’t you hack into Bond’s earpiece remotely?”
“Of course I fucking can, but I don’t want him to give himself away,” said Q. He licked his dry lips, realizing abruptly that it had been hours and hours since he last ate. Now was not the time to get woozy, God dammit. He flipped through camera feeds, searching for anything that might be used to get 007 out of the death-trap of a hotel he was in. He found an old fire escape on the eastern wall that looked doable, if a bit rickety. Q narrowed his eyes, then opened a new tab to find the hotel’s security systems and open a few windows.
The minutes crawled by, Q watching tensely; it was another five minutes before Moneypenny exhaled and said, “They’re in, they’re safe. Get Bond out now.”
“Done,” said Q, and ended the call. He entered the last line of code on screen to drop him into Bond’s ear. “007, abort your mission, you’re being led into a trap.”
“Q?” On-screen, Bond started minutely and glanced down the hall, frowning, though the gun in his hands (that he’d stolen from someone in security at the foot of the hotel) never wavered. “What are you doing on the line, they said you’d been taken! Where the hell are you? I’m-”
“James, for the love of God, there is a bomb in the hotel you are in, it is going to go off in four minutes, now shut the hell up and do what I tell you, I’m not listening to you die today!”
He didn’t know how many people might be listening in from headquarters, and at this point he no longer cared. Q was at the absolute limit of fucks he had to give, and nothing else mattered right now except getting 007 to safety.
“Tell me what to do,” said Bond.
“Go to the room at the end of the hall, the door is unlocked.” Q tapped out the code to kill all the security on Bond’s floor, simultaneously turning on the fire alarm; hopefully anyone still in the building deserved what they got, but Q was doing his best with what he had. “Now out the window and down the fire escape.”
“There are people outside who were shooting at me, you know,” said Bond, but to Q’s everlasting gratitude he did as ordered anyway, moving out the window faster and more gracefully than Q thought possible.
“Not anymore, there aren’t,” said Q. “They’ve all run for cover, since they know there’s a bomb about to go off. There’s a car in the lot at the foot of the hotel, I’ve unlocked it already but I can’t jump-start it on this piece of shit machine I’m using, can you hot-wire it?”
“How big of a bomb are we talking about here?” demanded Bond.
“I don’t fucking know, I’ve only been awake for twenty minutes and I spent five of those throwing up,” said Q, more shakily than he wanted to. Bond didn’t answer; he was too busy running flat-out across the parking lot, and Q glanced at his other feed, his stomach twisting as the timer on the bomb counted down. Bond was out of his camera sight now, and Q felt the gorge rising in his throat as he watched the timer on the bomb go down. Forty seconds. Thirty-nine. Thirty-five…
The sound of an engine revving filled his ears, and he exhaled sharply as the car he’d directed Bond to peeled across the parking lot, passing in and just as quickly out of his last remaining camera feed. “Oh thank God,” he breathed, and slumped against the table, coming shaky and sick all over. “Oh thank God.”
“Talk to me, Q,” said Bond. “Where are you? Are you hurt? Tell me where you are, I’m coming.”
“I’m in some shithole farmhouse ninety minutes outside London, but the two men who brought me here are unconscious, and Moneypenny’s got a crew on its way to me,” Q said. He killed the windows that looked in on the hotel; on another day, he might have watched the explosion, for curiosity’s sake, but today it was too close to home. He still heard the muffled boom as it came through Bond’s ear-piece, though, and he shuddered at how loud it was. He forced himself to take a deep breath, shutting his eyes, savoring the sound of Bond’s voice in his ears. “Please say you’re coming home now,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“I am,” said Bond. “And you’d better be waiting for me in medical.”
“God, yes.”
“Are the Markhams apprehended?”
“I don’t actually know,” said Q. “They were at Mark’s family’s house. They were blackmailing him to set you up.”
“Jesus.” A pause. “I’m still angry at you.”
“Well, I’m still angry at you, so there,” said Q. He smiled despite himself. “James…”
“Yes, Q?” Q knew Bond well enough now to know a smile when he heard it.
“I-”
A thick forearm snaked around his throat, and Q choked, hands coming up too late to beat at the arm pinning him. “Q?” demanded Bond from the feed. “Q!”
Q kicked helplessly, his knee catching the table, his breath gurgling in his throat. His attacker staggered backwards with him, the arm pressing harder against his trachea, and Q was being forced to the ground, a knee in the small of his back. Bond kept shouting his name, and Q couldn’t answer, couldn’t get a breath, and then a bag came over his head and everything went dark.
Fandom: Skyfall (James Bond)
Characters: James Bond/Q, Eve Moneypenny, Gareth Mallory, Bill Tanner, OCs
Rating: Mature. Explicit in sections; depictions of canon-typical violence.
Word-Count: ~60,000. Complete, but chapters will be posted as they are returned from beta and undergo final edits.
Notes: This fic was Brit-picked by the lovely and patient starsandgraces, who isn't even in this fandom but still put up with my badgering. I was encouraged by multiple enablers, including jou and flatbear, but all credit and gratitude goes to circ_bamboo, who held my hand, cheered me on, read over every inch of this fic, plotted endlessly with me, and is hands-down the best writing partner in crime a fangirl could ask for. THANK YOU SO MUCH, BABY, ALL THE SCONES ARE FOR YOU. ♥
Summary: Q has a past, a cat, and a dangerous new boyfriend. Two of these things keep him up nights, the other pees in a box. Espionage, plot with porn, decoy flats, suit porn, scones for the Queen, invention porn, secret identities, snark, canon-typical violence, dysfunctional flirting by dysfunctional people, and Eve Moneypenny is HBIC.
Chapter Seven. The thing to remember is that it can always, always get worse.
You can also read here at the AO3. Part one of this fic posted here on LJ, part two is here, part three is here, part four is here, part five is here, and part six is here.
Technically, it was his own fault for being an idiot.
He should never have brought the damn thing with him, but if there was one thing for which Q could be relied upon, it was his stubbornness. The poison pen was one of his pet projects, and he wasn’t about to let it languish in production hell during his absence when he could be working on it. He’d requisitioned it out of works-in-progress storage right before he’d left to go meet Adrienne and Jonathan at the pub, and it wasn’t as if he would be stopping in to take it back until after his own personal skeletons had gone back into their fucking closet.
Which was how Q came to be sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor of the safe-house flat, reassembling the prototype, screwing the body of the pen back into place, when he bumped the nodule at the end of the pen and poked himself in the meat of his palm, squirting some ink on himself in the process. Or at least, he thought it was ink for the first twenty seconds, until the place where he’d pricked himself started burning like someone had poured citrus juice into it.
“Fuck,” he hissed, dropping the pen on the ground and glaring at his hand. The ink looked strange, he thought, rather viscous, less like ink and more like-
Q took a deep breath, fighting the initial and violent urge to fly into a panic. He got to his feet, going for his mobile and brought up his favorites, fast-dialing Adrienne. He forced himself to walk calmly to the sink as he listened to it ring, scrubbing the black from his hand, whimpering at the pain.
“Hello, darling,” Adrienne said cheerfully, picking up on the second ring. “How are y-”
“Where are you?” Q cut in, his voice tight. “Tell me you’ve still got your anti-venins at the bake-shop.”
“I’m-wait, what? Yes, of course, I’d never throw them out. Q, what’s wrong?”
“I think I’ve just got myself with a bit of that synthetic snake venom you advised us on a few months back, someone left actual fucking poison in one of my prototypes instead of the ink we’re supposed to use for testing, how long have I got? Can you meet me?” There was silence on the other end for several moments. Q hissed, heading now to the front hall, grabbing up his boots and jamming his feet into first one and then the other. “Adie, come on, don’t freeze up on me.”
“If you only got a tiny dose, twenty minutes max before unconsciousness, thirty till death,” Adrienne said after a moment. “I’ll head over now. Can you get a cab? I can be there in ten, I’m not far.”
“I’m out the door,” Q said, grabbing for his wallet as he rang off and shoved the mobile in his pocket. It took every ounce of self-control he had to not run hell-for-leather down the hallway as he pulled his parka on, but the first rule of dealing with deadly poisons that every member of Q Branch learned was that you must not panic if you accidentally poison yourself; you’ll only spread the toxin faster through your system if you elevate your heart rate. He paused at the head of the stairs, scrolling through his apps for the one he needed, the one he’d installed on the mobile of every high-ranking MI6 officer, the one that commandeered the closest taxi for emergency governmental purposes.
It worked like a charm: there was a cabbie pulling up to the edge of the curb by the time Q came down the front steps and crawled into the back seat. M could scream about abuse of resources later.
“Cheltenham Lane, A Piece of Cake,” he snapped. “Break every traffic law you have to, you won’t be fined or penalized, MI6 business, go.” Q fumbled open his wallet to flash his ID, the one the cabbie had to be shown when you used the emergency code, and then he nearly pitched into the foot-well as the cabbie tore off into traffic, not even bothering to wait till Q had fastened his belt.
Q sank back against the seat, peering down at his hand. The little cut in his palm was rapidly turning ugly, tissue puckering up, edges reddened and puffy like infection was settling in. His whole forearm had started to hurt, and Q belatedly raised the hand in question above his head, grabbing the handle above the door. Keep the extremity elevated, slow the venom’s spread in the circulatory system, Adrienne’s calm, professional voice said in his memory. She’d run the toxins workshop they’d have a few years back, near the start of his actual career at Q Branch.
Fourteen minutes had passed by the time they got to the bake-shop. Q was breathing hard, little flares of burning pain springing up all over his body; he was finding it harder and harder to get enough oxygen as his respiratory system shut down. There was a sour tang in the back of his throat, the tell-tale flavor of cells dying. He shoved two hundred fifty quid at the driver with a strained “Thanks,” and stumbled out the cab door, making for the entrance to the bake-shop, which was still unlocked. Adrienne came running out of the back room, a hypodermic needle in her hand.
“Do it,” gasped Q, struggling out of his parka. She grabbed his wrist and shoved his jumper sleeve up his arm, turning his hand palm-up, and jabbed the needle into his arm just above his elbow. Q cried out, jerking a little, but she held him fast, pushing down on the depressor till the syringe was empty, and then she removed it and set it aside, grabbing for Q before he fell over.
“How’d you know which one to use?” Q asked after a few minutes, when he got the use of his throat back. His voice sounded weak in his own ears, and his hand still ached, but the prickly burning was gone, and the feeling of not being able to get enough air had subsided. They were sitting on the floor behind the counter, Q sprawled on the floor, Adrienne sitting hip-to-hip with him.
“There’s only one that got all the way through processing, as far as I know,” said Adrienne. She sounded kind of shaky herself. Q reflected that she had never really liked seeing more action than making everyone dinner, even back when they were both technically criminals. “Based on cobra venom.”
“Ah. Well. I guess I didn’t need to bring the pen, then.” Q smiled ruefully at Adrienne as she gave him a look. “The cap’s on it, alright, I just didn’t want to play Russian Roulette with which anti-venin to use.” He submitted quietly to her examining the cut on his hand, but patted the lump created by the pen in his inside trouser-pocket with his other hand all the same, just to make sure the damn thing hadn’t moved.
“Yes, well, let’s go and wash this out again and put some ointment on it, all the same. Make sure you go in to medical as soon as you can, there might be lingering effects, but it doesn’t look as if you got a full dose, which is damn lucky.”
Q groaning as she hauled him to his feet, going light-headed at all the blood rushing to his brain, and allowed himself to be led to the back, leaning against one of the tables in the kitchen with his parka draped over one arm as Adrienne rummaged through drawers in search of some ointment. “No, lucky is the fact that you got a Ph.D in toxicology before you decided your true love was baking.”
“Chemistry and baking are two sides of the same coin, darling.” Adrienne smiled at him, and then froze, looking past Q to the small windows that looked into the main cafe area. “Q,” she said, lowering her voice to barely above a whisper, “you didn’t tell anyone else to meet you here, did you?”
“Didn’t have time,” murmured Q. A chill went through him, a spike of adrenaline banishing his lethargy. He resisted the urge to look through the little window back into the bake-shop, afraid of who he’d see. “They must’ve had a watch on the bake-shop. The door out through the freezer still usable?”
Adrienne nodded. When she and Jonathan had first been renovating this location for use, Q had been insistent upon extra exit doors, because some habits die hard. And also, because sometimes old ghosts come back. Q took Adrienne’s hand, and they padded quietly along the side of the room, opening the door to the walk-in freezer and slipping inside, pulling it shut behind them. Moments later he could hear muffled voices through the freezer door behind them, and he bit his lip, taking three seconds to punch a code on his mobile in lieu of watching as Adrienne unlocked the exit door. The difference in temperature between the freezer and outside was negligible, and Q spared a moment to be glad it at least wasn’t raining as he struggled his parka back on. Adrienne hastily locked the door behind them with her key before looking at Q with a question in her eyes.
“Run,” he said. “You remember the drill.”
“Are you sure? You’re still ill, I don’t want to leave you-”
“Piss off,” he said, and shoved her. “You have a four-year-old, and it’s me they’re after anyway. Go! I’ve just sent an alert, HQ will be tracking our mobiles, go!” Adrienne cursed at him and then turned and darted down the alley, heading for the street at the opposite end. Q did not wait to see her disappear at the other end, already turning and breaking into a run towards the long line of Cheltenham Lane. Q burst onto the street and darted a glance in each direction before dashing across, throwing stealth to the wind.
He’d lose them in the Underground, providing he could get to the station first. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, and plenty of people were out on the streets, which gave Q an advantage. The burning in his lungs came back with a vengeance, but he ignored it, hustling past a slow-moving group of tourists in ugly sweatshirts as he pelted down the sidewalk towards the familiar signpost for the tube-
-only to nearly trip over his own two feet as he got close enough to see the “STATION CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE” sign posted on the neon marker at the top of the stairs, and Q glanced frantically over his shoulder, trying to gauge if he had time to use the emergency cab code again, already fumbling for his mobile. All he could see was people walking calmly down the road, several of whom were pointedly not looking at the nutter haring past them like some kind of misguided Olympic sprinter.
That was when he saw the first man, loping down Cheltenham towards him with mean intent written on his face, and Q bolted again before he had time to make eye contact, shoving his mobile back into his coat pocket. He was feeling very ill now, his limbs protesting the lack of oxygen from not-yet-recovered lungs, but he forced himself to run up the next side street he came to, lined with parked cars and rubbish bins stood out by the road. He had made it half a block before realizing it was a bad turn to make; there were fewer people down this road, and he no longer knew exactly where he was, but at least his phone was still tracking him. His chest burned, his pulse thundered in his ears, his heart felt like it was going to beat out of his ribs; Q cast a glance back down the road behind him, but he couldn’t see anyone following him. He tripped and nearly fell in his distraction, and he stumbled to a halt, bent double for a moment as a spasm lanced up his side, crippling him momentarily with the pain.
Q hissed, forcing himself upright again after a few seconds, casting another nervous glance around. Still no one. Maybe he’d lost them.
A hand fell on his shoulder. Q tried to turn, but a heavy cloth was suddenly being pressed against his nose and mouth, and he was choking, he was gasping for air, there was a sharp chemical tang in his nose, and then his vision went black.
* * * * *
“You’re an idiot,” said a voice. The voice was male, nasal, baritone; whoever it was had a thick Bristol accent and sounded absolutely livid. “You must have given him enough to kill a whale, he shouldn’t have been out for this long-”
“Piss off!” The second voice was surly. “I gave him half the normal dose, just like David said, ain’t my fault he’s such a fuckin’ lightweight.”
Q must have made a noise then, because abruptly both voices cut off. “Here, he’s coming round, get the bin,” said the first voice, and then Q found himself being propped up, which sent off a cascade of awful from his skull all the way down his spinal cord to every one of his protesting innards.
“Uuuggghhh,” he slurred. The surface he was on seemed to pitch and yaw under him, his limbs trembling with the stress of being upright.
“Shit, I think he’s gonna be sick again. Quick, pass the bloody-”
Q opened his eyes then, and found himself peering murkily at what looked to be a grimy dish bin set across his lap and a man crouched in front of him. “About bloody time you woke up,” said Voice #1, which apparently belonged to the man on the floor next to him. Q swallowed, and then the wave of nausea hit him again, and he bent over the bin, shuddering through several seconds of dry heaves that brought up little more than sickly bile-yellow spit. It looked about as lovely as it felt, judging from the expression of the man beside him.
“Fuck,” Q forced out after a moment. “What the fuck did you use on me?” He swallowed thickly.
“Chloroform,” said Voice #2, the man standing on Q’s other side, who bent down and passed him a rag to wipe his mouth with. “Bit old-fashioned but it does the trick. Here, drink some water.” He thrust a glass at Q, and Q blinked at it for a moment before taking it, somehow managing to drink more of the water than he spilled on himself. “We was wonderin’ when you were gonna wake up; the boss has been gettin’ impatient.”
“How long was I out for?” Thug #1 (having graduated from a disembodied voice) took the empty glass from him and stood up, apparently not feeling that Q was much of a threat to anyone at that exact moment. Sadly, Q had to agree with him. He could now say with authority that near-death by synthetic snake venom felt less vile than he did right now. He slumped against the surface behind him (the wall, he presumed) and shakily accepted the pair of glasses held out to him by returning Thug #1.
“Few hours,” said Thug #2. Q managed to get his glasses on, then looked up at him, taking in how stocky both men were, the buzz cuts and thick arms and nondescript clothes that said “hired muscle.” Even if he wasn’t a few too-quick movements away from another round of heaves, he was so outranked physically that it was outright laughable at this point. “You think you can stand up?”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Q said after a moment. “I think we’ve all seen about as much of my insides as we want to for today.”
Thugs 1 and 2 exchanged a glance, #2’s with a lip-curl of disgust for extra flavor. No doubt they were measuring the chances of moving him without him vomiting all over them again, and Q smiled faintly. Whatever orders they’d been given about him from David and Janessa, it apparently did not encourage them to do much past acquiring him and keeping him in one piece.
“Look, you can-” Q gestured vaguely, one hand still holding the bin in his lap, “handcuff me or ziptie me or what have you, I’m sure there’s something, but if it’s all the same to you I’ll just sit here and hold this bin in case things turn sour again.”
“Yeah, no,” said Thug #1, apparently coming to a decision. “Blake, get the cuffs an’ the laptop and bring ‘em over here, he can watch from where he’s sitting right now.”
Q stayed put, watching Blake bring a serviceable-looking machine and a depressingly sturdy-looking pair of handcuffs over. Blake set the machine on the ground, and then Q allowed himself to be bent forward, his wrists crossed at the small of his back and cuffed together before he sat back up again. He did not test the cuffs, or resist their hands at all, giving his attention to literally everything else but his restraints; he wanted no indication that he would fight them, or that he posed any kind of threat.
Now that he was no longer actively ill, he was noticing other things, too, like how shabby-looking the room was, and how chilly he was, and the fact that he could hear something he thought might be the sea or might be car traffic through thin walls. He wondered where the hell they’d taken him. If they had any sense at all, they’d have already gotten rid of his mobile, but without knowing exactly how long he’d been unconscious or where he was, it was difficult to gauge when an impending rescue might arrive.
“May I ask what I’m watching?” All things told, they were being fairly conscientious of him, no kicking or threats or abuse thus far. Realistically speaking, though, Q knew it was because of how terrifying Janessa and David were. The more important question was where those two were right now, and when they would be getting here.
Blake didn’t answer; he was bent over the laptop, concentrating on whatever was on-screen. Thug #1, whose name Q still didn’t know, had his mobile out now. “He’s awake,” he said after a moment to whoever was on the line. “Right. No, he seems alright-yes, he’s talking…. Right.” He turned to Q, holding out the mobile. Q stared at it for a moment as though it was a spider instead of a mobile, and then craned his head, nestling the mobile against his shoulder.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Simon,” said Janessa, into his ear. Her voice was warm and sweet like honey, her American accent slightly thickened by her years in France. “It’s been so long.” Q’s stomach twisted painfully, and he shrank a little against the wall, feeling his spine press into the plaster, the cuffs cutting into his wrists. Thug #1 watched him, his face unreadable.
“It has,” he said, because he had to say something and weeping uncontrollably seemed like a bad bet. “I admit I was surprised to wake up and not see you here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
Janessa laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, baby, we’ll be there soon. We’ll have plenty of time to catch up. But I have a little something I want you to watch before our reunion. David and I have been keeping busy getting this ready for you.”
Blake glanced up, turning the laptop around so that the screen faced Q. It was open on a Youtube page, and while the screen was black, Q could hear sound coming out of the speakers. It took him a few seconds to make out the person talking, but as soon as he did it was all he could do not to drop the mobile into the bin still in his lap. Behind his back, his careful, millimeter-fine twisting of his hands froze.
“I’m heading in now, the door’s unlocked,” said Bond, his voice staticky but easily identifiable.
Q took a breath, the air dragging painfully through his lungs. “Yes, it’s your boyfriend, Commander Bond, live from his new mission in Calais,” said Janessa. Q had forgotten how cheerful she sounded when she was planning something particularly vindictive. There was a lot of things he’d blocked out. “Everything came together so beautifully after we found you outside Carolyn’s bakery. She gave us the slip for now, but it’s only temporary, I promise.” She paused, covering the speaker for a moment, saying something unintelligible to someone at her end before continuing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be awake in time to enjoy this, but luckily you pulled through. Did you know that even Q Branch employees aren’t immune to blackmail? It’s amazing what a person will promise to do when you threaten their family. Even treason isn’t off the table.”
Q’s heart sank as he listened to Mark’s tight responses. “Is this necessary?” he asked, already guessing what the answer would be but unable to not at least try to talk Janessa out of this.
“You didn’t learn your lesson the first time, boy,” said Janessa, her voice dangerously soft. “We have to make sure it sticks this time.”
“Please, Janessa-”
“Shut up,” she snapped, and Q winced. “As if you have any right to ask me for anything after what you did to us. This is the least of what you deserve.”
“What are you going to do?” Q let his voice shake, dropped his eyes, shoulders hunching, looking and sounding every bit as sick and helpless as one could hope. His hands were almost at the right angle; now he just needed a good moment to make the final trick. Blake got up and went into the next room to do God knew what, while Thug #1 stayed where he was, crouched next to Q.
“Well, your gentleman is too dangerous to mess with face-to-face, from what we’ve seen, so we figured we’d do things the good old way and just blow him straight to hell. He obliged us by finishing his previous mission in record time as soon as he heard that you’d disappeared, which let us lead him right where we want him to go.” Q could hear other voices from Janessa’s end again, one of them David’s, he thought, trying to not let himself get distracted at how quickly James had come looking for Q. They must be at Mark’s family’s house, or Mark would never go along with them for any amount of money.
Q choked on a small sob, tears pricking in his eyes as he deliberately dislocated his left thumb. “Please don’t make me listen to this,” he said raggedly. “You already have me where you want me, please-”
“Should’ve thought of this before you turned us in to Interpol, baby,” said Janessa sweetly, and Q moaned.
There was muffled noises on the other end of the line, like the mobile was changing hands. “Hey there darlin’,” said David after a moment. His voice was gentle, and Q shut his eyes, his lips trembling.
“David,” he said. “David, p-please, please don’t kill him-”
“Oh, come on now, you should know better than to ask me for that. It sure is nice to hear you remember how to beg, though.” Q bit his lip, hard, easing his hand out of the cuff and trying not to jostle the mobile against his shoulder.
“It’ll be quick?” he asked after a moment.
“Uh-huh. He won’t even realize. Soon as it’s done, we’ll come straight there to get you, and then we can take aaaall the time we need to catch up.” Q sucked in another painful breath, letting David hear the hitch in his voice as he forced his thumb back into joint, knowing exactly what they wanted from him. “Ah-ah, crying won’t help, sweetheart. You gotta listen to the whole thing. You’ve been real bad, and you gotta pay your dues.”
“You won’t hurt Mark’s family?” The pain was making Q feel ill again, the urge to give in and panic and cry for real very strong, but he just needed to stall for a little bit longer.
“No, sweetheart, we won’t. If everyone plays nice and does what they’re supposed to, no one else has to die today. Except 007, that is.”
Q swallowed. “I…” He shuddered. “Okay,” he said weakly, and then he did start to cry, wet, broken noises that translated very well over the phone. David clucked softly at him.
“Don’t worry, it won’t be much longer now. But Jaybird and I have some things to finish setting up, so we’re gonna go now. Be good, sweetheart, we’ll see you soon.”
“Okay,” whispered Q again, and then flicked his eyes to Thug #1, nodding minutely. The live feed on the computer was still playing, and Thug #1 reached out to take the mobile from Q, who still lay slumped against the wall, tears leaking down his face.
“Right,” said Thug #1, pocketing the mobile, and then Q grabbed the bin across his lap and hurled it in the man’s face, vomit and all. “FHH-!!”
Q scrambled to his feet in the few precious seconds that stunt bought him, jamming his boot-covered foot into the man’s crotch as he screamed, and then kicked him in the head when he went down like a sack of bricks. “OY!” shouted Blake from the next room, and Q dove for the empty chair and hurled it at the doorway as Blake appeared. On a normal day when he wasn’t sick from poison and chloroform, he might still have had trouble, but fear and adrenaline were wonderful drugs, and Blake went crashing to the floor like his partner had.
Q stood there for a moment, breathing hard, the sounds of Mark and 007 on the live stream behind him unbroken. He straightened, tugging distractedly at the cuffs that still dangled from his right wrist, eyes watering profusely at the agony in his left hand. Janessa had been the one to teach him that trick; she’d thought getting out of cuffs was a useful skill to have, along with some basic sleight-of-hand. He’d never been any good at the pickpocketing, but she’d been right about the other bit coming in handy. He was very glad, now, that she’d insisted on supervising him the first two times he did it, and that he’d chosen to learn to do it on his non-dominant hand.
If he knew he had more time, he’d search around to find something to tie both men up with, but there was no telling how long before the bomb Janessa and David had planted went off, if Janessa had been speaking literally and a bomb was what they were intending. Q turned around, grabbing up the laptop and setting it on the small table against the wall, his brain going in a million directions at once.
He had to warn Bond, had to get him out. But if Janessa and David found out that Q was free, they might set whatever trap they’d rigged immediately and then take it out on Mark’s family to boot. Q hissed under his breath, leaving the live stream with Mark and Bond open in one tab and opening another to let him hack into the earpiece Mark was most likely to be using. It took all of thirty seconds before he was in. Q bent close, raising his voice, hoping the computer’s microphone was functional.
“Mark, it’s Q, don’t give yourself away, just sneeze twice if you hear this,” he said. There was a few seconds’ pause in his feed, and then Mark sneezed audibly, twice in a row. “Brilliant. Okay, listen, I know what the Markhams are doing, I know they have your family, I am going to save them, just stall for time, alright? Don’t get 007 killed. But don’t give yourself away. Sneeze once more if you understand.”
“Oh lord, my allergies are killing me today,” said Mark, and then sneezed again, loudly.
“Try not to die on me,” said Bond, and Q smiled thinly.
Next order of business. He went to Thug #1’s unconscious-or-dead body and dug the handcuff keys and his mobile out of the man’s pocket, and dialed Moneypenny’s number from memory, praying she’d answer the unknown number as he fiddled the remaining cuff off his wrist and chucked it into a corner.
She answered, but not till the fourth ring. “Hello,” she said, and Q nearly cried again from how good it was to hear her voice.
“Don’t react,” he said instead. “It’s me. I’m fine, but we have no time, the Markhams are holding Mark’s family hostage to force him to lead Bond into a trap. Send a stealth team to the house to rescue them so I can extract Bond without the Markhams retaliating.”
“Understood,” said Moneypenny. “It’s fine, I’m in a secure location. Two seconds.” Q waited on the line as Moneypenny covered the phone and said something to someone before coming back. “They’re on their way. Where the hell are you?”
“I haven’t the faintest fucking idea,” said Q, already back at the computer, working to hack into the CCTV at Bond’s location, “as the two men I knocked unconscious weren’t exactly forthcoming, but hold on a second and I’ll have a location for you… there.” He tapped a few buttons, staring in mild surprise. “Farmhouse ninety minutes outside of London, south and east on the M20. Hold on. GPS location sent to your mobile, now.”
“I have a team headed there now to extract you,” said Moneypenny evenly after a ten-second pause, and Q let out a long breath. “Do me a favor and don’t die before they can get there.”
“Working on it,” said Q. “I’ll call you back, I have to find that bomb and-fuck. Found it.”
“What?” asked Moneypenny sharply. “Bomb? Don’t hang up, stay with me, Q.”
“At Bond’s location,” said Q. “I told you, it’s a trap.”
“How-”
“I don’t fucking know, alright, hold ON-” He set the phone down, jabbing the “speakerphone” button to free up his hands. The bomb was a small metal affair, sat neatly on a chair in the middle of the table in the room it was hidden in, on the very top floor of the hotel. It was on a timer, so far as Q could tell, and he muttered to himself at this laptop’s slow processor as he increased the zoom on the camera and had to wait several seconds for the new view to load. The picture re-focused again, and Q swore. Ten minutes was all he had. “Time to get some escape routes going,” he muttered, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Tell me when Mark’s family is safe; I’ve got to have enough time to get Bond out and I can’t do that till the Markhams have been neutralized.”
“They’re going as fast as they can,” said Moneypenny tensely. “Can’t you hack into Bond’s earpiece remotely?”
“Of course I fucking can, but I don’t want him to give himself away,” said Q. He licked his dry lips, realizing abruptly that it had been hours and hours since he last ate. Now was not the time to get woozy, God dammit. He flipped through camera feeds, searching for anything that might be used to get 007 out of the death-trap of a hotel he was in. He found an old fire escape on the eastern wall that looked doable, if a bit rickety. Q narrowed his eyes, then opened a new tab to find the hotel’s security systems and open a few windows.
The minutes crawled by, Q watching tensely; it was another five minutes before Moneypenny exhaled and said, “They’re in, they’re safe. Get Bond out now.”
“Done,” said Q, and ended the call. He entered the last line of code on screen to drop him into Bond’s ear. “007, abort your mission, you’re being led into a trap.”
“Q?” On-screen, Bond started minutely and glanced down the hall, frowning, though the gun in his hands (that he’d stolen from someone in security at the foot of the hotel) never wavered. “What are you doing on the line, they said you’d been taken! Where the hell are you? I’m-”
“James, for the love of God, there is a bomb in the hotel you are in, it is going to go off in four minutes, now shut the hell up and do what I tell you, I’m not listening to you die today!”
He didn’t know how many people might be listening in from headquarters, and at this point he no longer cared. Q was at the absolute limit of fucks he had to give, and nothing else mattered right now except getting 007 to safety.
“Tell me what to do,” said Bond.
“Go to the room at the end of the hall, the door is unlocked.” Q tapped out the code to kill all the security on Bond’s floor, simultaneously turning on the fire alarm; hopefully anyone still in the building deserved what they got, but Q was doing his best with what he had. “Now out the window and down the fire escape.”
“There are people outside who were shooting at me, you know,” said Bond, but to Q’s everlasting gratitude he did as ordered anyway, moving out the window faster and more gracefully than Q thought possible.
“Not anymore, there aren’t,” said Q. “They’ve all run for cover, since they know there’s a bomb about to go off. There’s a car in the lot at the foot of the hotel, I’ve unlocked it already but I can’t jump-start it on this piece of shit machine I’m using, can you hot-wire it?”
“How big of a bomb are we talking about here?” demanded Bond.
“I don’t fucking know, I’ve only been awake for twenty minutes and I spent five of those throwing up,” said Q, more shakily than he wanted to. Bond didn’t answer; he was too busy running flat-out across the parking lot, and Q glanced at his other feed, his stomach twisting as the timer on the bomb counted down. Bond was out of his camera sight now, and Q felt the gorge rising in his throat as he watched the timer on the bomb go down. Forty seconds. Thirty-nine. Thirty-five…
The sound of an engine revving filled his ears, and he exhaled sharply as the car he’d directed Bond to peeled across the parking lot, passing in and just as quickly out of his last remaining camera feed. “Oh thank God,” he breathed, and slumped against the table, coming shaky and sick all over. “Oh thank God.”
“Talk to me, Q,” said Bond. “Where are you? Are you hurt? Tell me where you are, I’m coming.”
“I’m in some shithole farmhouse ninety minutes outside London, but the two men who brought me here are unconscious, and Moneypenny’s got a crew on its way to me,” Q said. He killed the windows that looked in on the hotel; on another day, he might have watched the explosion, for curiosity’s sake, but today it was too close to home. He still heard the muffled boom as it came through Bond’s ear-piece, though, and he shuddered at how loud it was. He forced himself to take a deep breath, shutting his eyes, savoring the sound of Bond’s voice in his ears. “Please say you’re coming home now,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“I am,” said Bond. “And you’d better be waiting for me in medical.”
“God, yes.”
“Are the Markhams apprehended?”
“I don’t actually know,” said Q. “They were at Mark’s family’s house. They were blackmailing him to set you up.”
“Jesus.” A pause. “I’m still angry at you.”
“Well, I’m still angry at you, so there,” said Q. He smiled despite himself. “James…”
“Yes, Q?” Q knew Bond well enough now to know a smile when he heard it.
“I-”
A thick forearm snaked around his throat, and Q choked, hands coming up too late to beat at the arm pinning him. “Q?” demanded Bond from the feed. “Q!”
Q kicked helplessly, his knee catching the table, his breath gurgling in his throat. His attacker staggered backwards with him, the arm pressing harder against his trachea, and Q was being forced to the ground, a knee in the small of his back. Bond kept shouting his name, and Q couldn’t answer, couldn’t get a breath, and then a bag came over his head and everything went dark.