Walked in the rain too long like a b@d@$$. Mother warned me to put on a coat lest I catch a cold...perhaps for once she was right. But even in her rightness she is wrong...What I have caught is MUCH worse than an 3FFING cold. It kept me off my beloved blog for two days (apologies to my followers. Love) and away from my Creepypastas (of course it could not stop me from imagining them, but even then, my brain was addled with fog).
But I am back.
With a vengeance.
Make no mistake...I am not like Brayden. I will not let a pathetic "FLU" keep me down. I won't give up without a fight...That's what Jeffrey would do.
Anyway...followers (and other viewers) please wear protection.
Not even close to six, but it’s been a loooooong time since I’ve posted anything original, and it feels good to shake out the rust.
I’ll be posting this story as soon as it’s done. Could be a week, could be a month. Enjoy!
“Something’s wrong,” James said quietly.
John darted a glance across the table. James’ eyes, usually softened by the firelight on nights like this, were agent-sharp. John turned away, hiding a shiver, and shook his head. There were rules to nights like this, rules that allowed them to cross the boundary between Double O and Quartermaster, rules that allowed them to be that rarest of things in their world: people. Just James and John.
James’ fingers inched toward the no-man’s-land in the centre of the table. Calluses rasped over white linen before he turned his hand over, inviting John’s touch. “Darling.”
Something inside John melted at the warm tone even as he remembered hearing that exact word, that exact voice, just a week before, though not addressed to him. Damn their comms gear for transmitting so clearly that John couldn’t detect a hint of difference.
But it was different. They were different. They were outside MI6, badges off, weapons locked away.
“It’s work,” John answered, touching James’ hand without lingering. The brief reassurance was the best he could manage. He risked another quick look to see if it had worked.
A frown line made its brief appearance between James’ brows. But then, with a nod, James drew his hand back. “All right.” Smiling, he gestured with his fork, and said, “Try the calamari.”
Relieved, John pushed thoughts of work out of his mind and tried to focus on the excellent meal, but not even James’ cooking was enough to distract him completely from six anomalous reports.
No, they were hardly reports. More like footnotes lacking any actual information to give them context.
A whisper of sound intruded on his thoughts. He looked up from the half-empty plate where he’d been drawing patterns in red sauce and saw the seat across from him was empty of everything but James’ suit jacket. John’s stomach flipped in momentary anxiety before he told himself that James hadn’t walked out on him. Couldn’t walk out on him, actually, given that they were in James’ flat.
But James had done the next best thing. He’d gone out to the balcony, leaving the doors open. John rested his fork on the edge of his plate, pushed back from the table, and followed.
“Q,” James said without turning from his surveillance of the night, as though searching for any potential threat — though what threat he expected to see from seventeen storeys up, John couldn’t imagine.
“This hardly counts as ‘outside your flat,’” John scolded, though mildly.
James’ smirk didn’t reach his eyes. “Would you rather go back to the office?”
“No.” Abandoning the mantle of John Llewelyn — a man who was becoming more and more unfamiliar — the Quartermaster of MI6 said, “I take it we’re secure here.”
James scoffed. “Naturally.”
Two steps brought Q closer to the railing and all that empty air between him and the pavement. His skin crawled, and though he refused to show it, he knew his agent was all too aware of his fears. Just as his agent was aware that his thoughts had been elsewhere all night.
“We’ve had six signals in the last three weeks,” he began, turning back to face James. “Twenty days ago, the blinds at a particular flat in Moscow were turned up at a particular angle. Thirteen days ago, a car was parked at a particular location with the wheels turned toward the kerb. Eight days ago, two of four bulbs in a park lamp were noted to be burned out. Five days ago, a different car was parked in the same location, wheels turned the same way. Three —”
“This is all a bit old school, isn’t it?” James interrupted.
Q’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “Three days ago,” he continued, “two disparate streetlamps, these in a parking lot, were both extinguished. Yesterday, the blinds were again turned up.”
James took a deep breath, and Q saw him hold back his objection. Instead he leaned against the wall and crossed his arms, eyes going distant.
With patience John had never had before his unexpected promotion, Q waited.
Finally, James met Q’s eyes. “That’s six signals.”
“Six signals,” Q confirmed, “each generating a notification to our embassy in Moscow. Each notification was routed through our Secure Intake Server —”
“Our what?” James asked sharply.
Q bit back a sigh. “Tiago Rodriguez exploited a vulnerability in our external communications firewall. Since then, I’ve had all incoming signals routed through SIS.”
James snorted. “We are SIS.”
“Secure Intake Server was the best name I could come up with at the time,” Q snapped, already heartily sick of the often-repeated criticism since he’d implemented the system just seven weeks ago. “I’d like to see you rebuild MI6 from the ground up — literally — and come up with clever acronyms for very necessary modernization processes —”
“My apologies, Quartermaster,” James said, stepping close, though he didn’t touch. “You were saying, the Secure Intake Server?”
Q’s anger deflated, driven into the shadows by James’ proximity. His tie was off, shirt unbuttoned at the throat. Five o’clock shadow touched his jaw with highlights of pale silver and gold. He hovered somewhere between the infuriating agent 007 and the man Q was quickly coming to like — love, perhaps — in a way that scrambled Q’s senses.
My god, you’re gorgeous, he thought, though the inches between their bodies — inches they’d negotiated to preserve the boundaries between professional and personal — reminded him to keep the words to himself.
Instead, he took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of rain and James’ aftershave, and continued, “The SIS notifications were lost because they were routed directly to a deadbox — a catch-all for inactive email addresses.”
“Inactive...” James frowned again. “Whose email address?”
Q licked his lips before he could stop himself, knowing he couldn’t avoid falling into this particular trap. “It was one of M’s secure emails,” he said softly. “Not Mallory. Your M.”
