It's not clear whether MI6 attracts the sort of people who get headaches, but it's definitely an environment that causes headaches.
Q gets migraines and has a complicated regimen of medications and remedies that has evolved since he started having them as a teenager.
Bond has cluster headaches. One of the reasons he disappears for days (or weeks) at a time is to deal with episodes. The most effective medication is a nasal spray that makes everything taste awful, so he indulges his senses to the fullest when he can.
Eve gets migraines, too, with extreme visual aura. She sometimes gets just the aura - Q found out about the migraines when Eve bumped into a desk. Acupuncture helps reduce the frequency. In an emergency, acupressure can often stop the progression. Q knows just where to press (they go to the same acupuncturist). Bond knows how, too, and Eve is considering teaching M.
Tanner gets horrible tension headaches. He holds stress in his shoulders and neck, which starts the headache, then the pain makes him tense up even more. Working out helps. Bond introduced him to the heavy bag; pummeling away definitely seems to help.
M(allory) has TMJ which causes both headaches and dental problems. Unfortunately circumstances where he grinds his teeth and the bite guard would be most helpful - when meeting with infuriating politicians - are exactly the times he can’t wear it.
M, herself, never got headaches. She liked to say she had nothing but pains in the arse. However, she had terrible arthritis that she denied and tried to hide.
Q Branch builds a float tank in one of the labs that quickly becomes a favorite destination for all the headache sufferers. Q adapts some polygraph equipment into a biofeedback rig. A couple of the poison specialists chemists come up with personalized aromatherapy formulas.
It's happening! Kicking off the first day of 007 Fest 2023 with some MI6 worldbuilding headcanons for Headcanons Day (AKA the HCs crammed into my WIP to make sense of film-world MI6)
Q Branch is just a small part of Six (and everyone else thinks the double-oh programme is more trouble than it's worth)
Q Branch makes no sense. As film!Q is a shorthand for the mission support teams for narrative ease, Q Branch seems to run independently and Q himself is a polymath taking on all the roles.
Eh, I'm okay with genius Q because I love him 🤷 Other Q Branchers are all wildly smart and eccentric in their own ways. That's Q's hiring policy
Most analysis, missions, etc. are run through logical departments with hundreds of staff, which the problem children doubles-ohs and Q Branch build on for their specialist missions
Lots of Six staff don't like the double-ohs and Q Branch by extension – they burn through the budget, cause havoc and get away with multitudes, and a little more secrecy and intelligence in the SIS would be much preferred
Maybe it's for the best that Q Branch is away from HQ up-river at Millbank Pier (based on this excellent post)
Essentially, Mallory has hundreds, maybe thousands, of staff and assets globally, yet it's 1% of his staff that causes 99.9% of his headaches
Heracles isn't the first off-book project and it won't be the last
Mallory was used as a character to hang the Heracles plot on, but it leaves a lot of questions. Why was he even involved? Why isn't it the responsibility of the Defence Science and Technology Lab?
I figure all the UK's intelligence agencies have joint off-book operations like the Heracles research, some farmed out to private contractors, etc. So, Heracles isn't special, it's just that this secret got found out and had big consequences
Maybe Mallory had a hand in Obruchev defecting, so those consequences were extra personal
Also, imagine being Mallory: was Chair of the committee looking into MI6 shadiness, only to get hired as M and get tangled into all this shadiness
After Spectre, they didn't know who to trust, except one another. They keep Six running and they're each other's rocks and best bitching buddies
Q, despite what he says, is the most dramatic of the three. Moneypenny, of course, delights in winding Q up. Tanner isn't as catty as those two, except for when the mood strikes and he's the worst
Tanner gets swept up in various antics, often Bond's, along with Q and Moneypenny. However, he's perfected bland-faced innocence and Mallory never gives him grief for it. Q and Moneypenny find this very annoying
Bond washes his socks by hand, every day. Every pair of socks, no matter where he is, whether at home or on a mission. He learned in the Navy that you can never have enough pairs of clean socks (he will never speak of that month-long assignment to the rain forests of Guatemala EVER), so he religiously washes his used socks each night before sleep and lays them out to dry before he packs them away in the morning.
Felix introduces Bond to his pair of lucky socks on their first joint mission. On a Sunday morning, when Bond dons thick wool socks for their hike through the Andes, Felix slides on his lucky socks and sends his thoughts heavenward for a much-needed victory. That night, when Bond points out that Felix’s lucky socks let them down—their mission having fallen apart spectacularly—Felix checks the score on his phone and scoffs that they made two interceptions in the final quarter and won by 7 points. Bond gives him a queer look. Maybe Bond doesn’t believe in sports rituals, but Felix will do whatever it takes to support his favorite team; even if he can’t attend in person, he’s not gonna let the Saints down.
Moneypenny wears plain hose at MI6 (with the exception of her monthly, when she wears the pairs with extra tummy shaping), nude with no embellishments. Although there was one memorable holiday party when she purchased and wore a pair of full-fashioned stockings with the seam up the back that caused quite a kerfuffle. There were so many collisions and bruises amongst the staff attributed to her hosiery that HR had to request that she restrict their use to extracurricular occasions only.
Tanner makes a point of dressing appropriately and not drawing undue attention to himself. However, he has a sizable collection of novelty socks courtesy of his children’s gifts over the years, and he takes comfort in having a piece of his home life with him when at his stressful job.
Q is not a morning person and, as such, can’t be arsed to tell the difference between navy and black when getting dressed before dawn. He doesn’t give a shit whether his socks match his trousers; he has more important concerns on his mind, thank you very much. And outside of the office, he avoids socks altogether; barefoot in loafers or trainers is his preferred style.
MI6 Medical released an emergency advisory in 2019: No toe socks in the office! The infernal footwear became all the rage in 2018, and they did no harm so long as staff wore proper footwear to protect their feet in hazardous areas. But when a Q Branch technician reported to Medical limping badly, staff were appalled to find that he’d shoved his toe-socked foot into a colleague’s borrowed footwear to enter one of the more hazardous labs, and the toe-sock seams had cut off circulation to more than one toe over the course of three hours. Never again!
Alec learned early in life the importance of blending in and conforming to expectations. It earned him a reputation for being steady and dependable at the orphanage and later in the Navy. One of the easiest ways to conform was to mimic the styling of the most respected person around you. At school, it was the head boy. In the Navy, it was his commanding officer. And at MI6, it’s Bond, whose style is the fiddliest to imitate. (Those bespoke suits cost a bloody fortune!) Most obnoxious are Bond’s favorite silk-blend socks, which are nonabsorbent and require delicate washing. But Alec bides his time, keeps in line, wears the damn socks, and passes himself off as a loyal operative while he makes plans for his eventual defection….
Mallory dated a peer a couple decades back; a handsome fellow who cut a very fashionable figure. Mallory has some fond memories of their time together, as well as a keepsake set of platinum cuff links…and an unfortunate kink for sock garters. Mallory resolutely doesn’t own or wear any himself, but he’s aware that Bond and Trevelyan wear them on occasion. He does his best not to think about that when they’re seated across from him, their trouser hems riding up their ankles, eyeing how taut their socks are pulled, and wondering.
Madeleine has always hated the cold, and Altaussee is a bleak wasteland of tourists and ice. Her office, with its impractical exterior glass walls, is always two degrees lower than the interior rooms, and her usual hose doesn’t keep her ankles warm enough for a full day of listening to billionaires’ midlife crises. She’s taken to keeping a pair of double-layer cabin socks under her desk, and she kicks off her high heeled pumps and slides the cozy socks on overtop her hose every time she has an appointment in her blasted icebox of an office.
The sweaters that Q’s cats wear are cozy. The sweaters are warm. The sweaters feel like safety and Q’s gentle fingers sliding them on. But once a year, there is more. There are hats. There are strange collars. And there are socks. The socks are the enemy. They are confinement. They are slipping imbalance. The socks slide on like punishment for imagined crimes. Q lifts his cats and places them on the cat tree. Q coos, “Don’t you look precious.” A shutter clicks, and his fingers are no longer in the way, no longer trying to stop the inevitable. The socks are prey. They must be destroyed. Long claws pierce them. Rend them. Teeth dig in, merciless, and shake them limp. Dead socks taste of cotton victory. “Sorry darlings,” Q laughs. Surely Q will learn from this. There will not be socks again. “Not for another year,” Q promises.
For headcanon day, I thought I'd focus on the books the MI6 crew like to read!
I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts too, so leave them in the replies, reblogs or ask box if you have any you want to share ❤️
It's no secret Bond likes nature writing and nonfiction. He has every book worth having on birdwatching and sailing. He reads memoirs of explorers and adventurers. He's more picky about military memoirs, especially the bestselling paperbacks about the SAS, but he does like reading about their operations in WWI and WWII. You also can't convince me he doesn't love an old spy novel.
Q never has time to read anything that isn't on a screen, but when he does take a rare week or two of leave, he always packs a few Sci-Fi and fantasy books. Classics are good, and the more cerebral or dense the better. I think he loves stuff like The Three-Body Problem and Dune. I think he also likes nonfiction books on art and design, especially if they're technical.
Moneypenny is an eclectic reader (there's no genre she won't try once), but she wants you to know she loves a beach read and has no shame about it. She's the sort of woman who will happily bring a bottle of wine into a bathroom to sit in the tub and read for three hours. She's tried audiobooks and can't make them work. She'd rather read as a way to unwind after a long day at the office.
Mansfield, to her late husband's constant despair, could never abide poetry unless it was an epic that could be performed or interpreted in some other way than reading it (she always quite liked the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for instance).
Tanner is a huge reader. He keeps up with the nonfiction bestseller list, and reads previews of books in The Guardian or the Times. He likes to spend his morning rides to work reading when there are no pressing emergencies. His preferred genres are politics, history and travel writing, but he has a stash of pulp horror for when he's feeling really terrible about the world and needs to check out.
Mallory, likes the classics. He doesn't get time to read anything except intelligence reports these days, but when he does, he has to know he'll love it. Also, I think he has a (not so) secret thing for Jane Austen and Agatha Christie.
I also think the Double-0s have a very warped sort of book club. They never have time to meet up properly, but they leave books in each others' desks from trips abroad. They can be in any language on any subject. Some of the agents have been so bored while recovering from injury between missions that they've learned whole languages to read these books. And they can always count on 007 finding the cheapest, pulpiest erotica around in any language.
Alex was saved in the nick of time, but still had to leave, and being angry at the people and the system ended up dropping off the radar and turning his skills to trying to find information to expose the corrupt and nefarious deeds of the government. But Danny, believing he was gone set out on his own mission of revenge, learning to code, and getting swept up into 6 as a way of keeping him "silent" and "under control". But he still has a purpose he keeps hidden, planning to rise through the ranks and get access to everything he can, and he eventually gets promoted to the Quartermaster position.
As Q, he finds himself pitted against an unknown hacker that is trying to crack his system, and they end up testing each other repeatedly, the hacker trying to gain access, and q-branch trying to track him down, until Q think he's found an opening and the hacker expresses his anger at being torn from the one he loved, from the life he could and should have had, and he won't stop until the government pays... and the gears are turning.... Q finds a way to reach out and offer an alliance, not yet realising who it is
James Bond: In OHMSS, Bond thinks about his childhood experience at the beach, noting, “How far he had come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade!” (ch.1) If he drank fizzy lemonade today, he wouldn’t like it, but sometimes he sees a bottle at the store and thinks about it for a fleeting moment; he wishes he could capture how they tasted to his child self, a boy who associated lemons with joy and holidays instead of with Vesper martinis.
Eve Moneypenny: Liquorice Catherine wheels. She’s had better liquorice by now, having traveled to Finland, but she’ll never forget the gleeful anticipation and pleasure of unwrapping and eating the whole wheel before she got to the sugary middle. The last time she saw one was at her niece’s birthday party; she showed her how to eat them properly, chomping a bite into one side and directly through the center because life was too short to take the circuitous route; it tasted far too sweet, and then inexplicably bitter as she swallowed it down.
Q: Fizzy cola bottles. He wrote some of his first code with fingers sticky from having licked off the sour sugar; he had half a pack clutched in his hand, unthinking, when he and most of Q Branch evacuated from the old Six building, when his designation changed, when he inherited the full grief and skills and ambitions of his department.
Gareth Mallory: Aniseed balls. That strong flavor! The way it lingered in the mouth before you got to the crunchy seed in the middle! The satisfaction of earning one from the schoolteacher who gave them out. This was before he learned that they could be used as a crude timing device for an explosive if necessary---they dissolve in water in about half an hour.
Bill Tanner: Jelly babies. The fourth Doctor used to hand them out on TV and small Bill wasn’t immune to propaganda---still isn’t. He very carefully only eats them when he’s watching Dr. Who, and although he eats them less voraciously than when he was a kid, he now has the joy of watching his niblings gobble them down at each new premiere while brandishing their sonic screwdrivers at each other.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: James Bond (Craig Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Characters: James Bond, Q (James Bond)
Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Fluff
Summary:
Q has a crap day. James comes to save it. (Headcanon: James enjoys spoiling his lovers.)
It’s the first day of Fest, so let’s start with something simple: your headcanons! Once it hits midnight on July 1 in your timezone, tell us what you believe to be true, even when it’s not explicit in canon.
Do you need some prompts? Try answering one of these questions
What was Mallory’s worst vacation ever?
What is Q Branch’s go-to movie for movie nights after hard missions?
What was Q’s first day of university like?
What songs are on Moneypenny’s feel-good playlist?
What is Tanner’s favorite meal to cook for friends?
Tag any headcanon posts with #007 Fest for us to reblog!
