I totally said a bimonthly and not a weekly schedule, right? But seriously, it should go more smoothly for a little while after this (though I think biweekly might be a more realistic goal). I just had a massive self-doubt/overthinking perfectionist hurdle to get over, and we're much closer to some of the stuff I wrote last year. So hopefully I might even get something of a backlog built up so I can work way ahead of what's getting posted.
Big thanks to my sister for serendipitously letting me hang out with my almost 3-year-old niece last week, allowing me to feel more comfortable writing a 3-year-old.
Chapter 2 does not have a title, but I would like one if you have ideas.
Historical & Translation notes:
The year is 1971. In 1969, Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco closed the border with Gibraltar over a sovereignty dispute with Britain. Gibraltarians had voted to stay British on September 10, 1967 (so Happy Gibraltar National Day today!). In Gibraltar, the closure of the Spanish border led to a swelling in British pride
Q has a nice laptop, and a job saving Great Britain, and a dog called Mabel. Mabel likes to jump in rivers and onto intruders.
James Bond is accidentally and unknowingly seeing his quartermaster, whom he met too early on a cold morning when walking his dog. His dog is called Gordon, and Gordon is somewhat in love with Mabel, and is inept at hunting rabbits.
The agent known to Q only as 007 has gone missing, again.
[aka, the "I think my dog likes your dog" au that nobody wanted. With guns]
or here on the ao3
It was hideously early and the park was painted pewter with frost, glimmering where the first rays of the weak winter sun shone on the grass. London was quiet and still somehow, shrouded in mist thick enough to muffle the traffic which rumbled past Hampstead Heath, and Q, quartermaster at MI6 for two months, hunched slightly further into his anorak. Mabel, his dog – a black Labrador, coat mantled with ice from where she had dived through the glass-covered pond – barked at him, and shook herself until shards of ice flew into his face. He threw a stick for her.
The heath was empty, apart from a few birds brave enough to sing still, and a flock of Canadian geese overhead. They were late; he wondered half-idly if they would survive the winter. He watched the white-washed trees, branches clinking when they touched, and he tried not to think about how blood bounced on snow. Mabel disturbed a warren of rabbits, barking joyfully as they scarpered for safety, but he knew she would never catch them. They were not so sure, and hurled themselves back underground where they knew her teeth could not get them.
“Is that a metaphor for something?” someone said next to him, and he turned to see a man – taller than him, although most were – with ice-blue eyes and an expensive coat. He was holding a leash, leather and well-made, and over on the grass a beautiful grey dog galloped after the rest of the rabbits; there was a scream, and Q’s stomach tilted, and the dog came trotting towards its master with a young buck clamped between its long teeth.
The man looked at Q, and looked as though he were about to apologise. “He likes to hunt, and he rarely gets the chance – I’m away from home a lot, and he gets restless. It’s unfair but I took him in as a favour to a friend - I was going to get a Borzoi or something but he was so aloof that he had to be mine,” and he looked back at his dog, who was now tossing the broken-backed rabbit into the air and snapping at it with his jaws. “He lets the power get to his head – he’s a Weimaraner and far too proud of it. Gordon!” he called, and Q looked towards the park. Mabel was chewing on a stick.
“Gordon?” he said, and then shrugged. “My dog’s called Mabel. It’s from the Latin amabilis,” he said quietly, and the man turned to look at him again. His dog loped towards them, blood-stained teeth gleaming, and Q noticed that both man and dog had the same ice-blue eyes. The rabbit was still screaming, unable to move now from where it lay on the grass. The man tutted.
“He’s named after my favourite brand of gin,” he said, and walked towards the rabbit. “He never can quite finish the job,” he added, and picked up the rabbit. Q saw him whisper something, stroke its back for just a second, and then the man wrenched its neck round with such savagery that Q heard the snap, and then the whine as it died. He blinked through his glasses, and wondered if the man were a ghost or a trick of the ever-shifting light. It had just been Hallowe’en, after all.
The man threw the dead rabbit to his dog, who snatched it from the air; Mabel watched in quiet fascination, and then followed Gordon, settling at his feet as she watched him chew his prize. Q felt a little sick.
“Does death bother you?” the man asked. “Does killing?” he added, and then he watched Q’s face with a hawk-like interest.
“Death is an inevitable part of life,” Q replied, tucking his hands into his pockets. His phone beeped just then, and as he pulled it out, he noticed the man was pulling his phone from his pocket, too. It was M: there had been an attack on the main server. Nothing, she assured him, had been stolen, as far as they knew. Q thought of the mooks he had to work with, and tried to repress a shudder. He slipped his phone back into his pocket. “I have to go,” he said to the man, who had unwound the leash from around his arm.
“So do I,” the man said. “I’m James, by the way,” and he held out a hand to shake. His grip, as Q might have known, was vice-like.
Q pretended to rummage for Mabel’s lead as he sorted through his various names for one which would fit his cover: insomniac computer analyst, living with Eve Moneypenny and a Labrador. “I’m Felix,” he said, and cursed under his breath.
James nodded. “I had a friend called Felix, long ago,” he said, and whistled; Gordon came flying towards him, and was soon trotting by his side as they walked towards the park exit. Mabel was beside Gordon, and when James turned to go – breath bright white in the November air – she whined, and tugged at her lead until she could nuzzle Gordon’s neck. James looked at the dogs.
“She’s never usually that friendly,” Q said, and whistled until Mabel was bounding towards him. James smiled at him, and it looked like he was out of practice at it, but Q smiled back.
“Gordon’s never usually particularly fond of strangers,” James said, and patted his dog on the head. “Nor am I, for that matter,” and he turned and walked away whilst Q was still trying to work out what he had meant.
----
The tube was warm for once, and on time, and as he rattled through the Northern line – Mabel safely deposited with the lady next door to his flat – he thought about James, about the cruel curve of his mouth and the way he killed that rabbit with his hands, encased as they were in expensive gloves. He would have made a good spy, Q was sure of it, and there was something in his bearing which suggested he knew the darkness in his own soul a little too well. Q shrugged, and opened the Metro, flicking to the Technology pages. It was useful to keep up with what the public thought was going on, he told himself, but his mind kept skittering back to James, and to how his hand had felt when Q had shaken it.
He got to the office earlier than expected, walking as fast as he could without taking a puff from his inhaler. M was waiting for him, and every computer in the room was humming.
“It’s sorted,” she said, and looked slightly apologetic. “However, there is something more important – “
He ended up tracking missiles through the sky over Syria, trying not to think that each one exploded in a mess of blood and bodies and guilt, and he went home at half nine at night, when the air was cold enough to snap. He and Eve sat on the sofa and watched Britain’s Next Top Model and ate Chinese takeaway, and did not discuss the ghosts they had made that day but he dreamt of skulls with gaping eye sockets, and when he woke up Mabel had crept into his bed to curl up against his back.
The park, on a different morning when a terrorist had blown himself to pieces for a doomed cause, was colder than it had been before; winter was tightening her grip. The grass was stiff and sharp, and crackled under his feet when he walked across it; Mabel chased at a leaf, and went skittering into the pond again. Q sighed, anticipating teasing each needle of ice from her coat, and then he saw James walking towards them, Gordon prancing around his legs.
“Morning,” he said, and James nodded at him.
“It’s bloody cold,” was all he said, and he produced a bag of beef jerky from his pocket. “I thought that, since Mabel doesn’t seem to eat rabbit, she might like some of this instead. I bought it back from the States,” he added, and Mabel almost had his fingers off when he offered it to her.
“You’re up early again,” Q said, watching his dog cavort with a man who looked like he could snap him in half with his little toe.
“I always am,” James said. “I’m a light sleeper these days – I have my door open,” he said.
And your ears cocked, like a gun, Q thought, knowing all too well the signs of constant vigilance, and how they wrote themselves across one’s face. “I’m an insomniac. I work in ICT, and even when sleeping my mind is busy. I wake myself up a lot; bad dreams. Nightmares, I suppose, even though at twenty-six I’m not sure you could call them that. Bad dreams,” he added again, and James nodded at him.
“I can certainly sympathise with that,” he said, and then shrugged. “I dream of death, of falling, or failing. It’s the same thing to me. I work in the Civil Service,” and Q tried to contain a flicker of interest.
“Which part?” he asked, casually, and James shrugged again.
“It’s very boring,” he said, and the way he looked out across the frozen park suggested the exact opposite.
“I used to want to be a Grand Master at chess, or maybe a pirate. So I suppose exposing the vulnerabilities of various systems was a fairly good halfway point,” he said, and felt as exposed as if he were a beetle spliced onto a card. James looked at him, and under his gaze Q felt strangely warm, despite the frozen morning.
“I suppose I wanted to be a knight, of sorts. Saving people, damsels in distress. Queen and country, and all that,” James said, rolling a cufflink between his thumb and forefinger. “I was in the Navy for a bit, met a few pirates. I can’t say I liked them much,” but his smirk said otherwise. Mabel and Gordon were digging together, making a mess of the flowerbeds where snowdrops would grow, hopefully.
“I don’t suppose – “ Q began, and thought of himself at fifteen, cautious and infinitely breakable, and took the plunge. “I don’t suppose you’d like to get coffee? Only, it’s not even seven yet, and I’m half asleep as it is, and only strong tea can make me feel human,” and he coiled Mabel’s lead around his arm, in preparation to call her and run.
James looked amused, eyes glinting as he grinned. “I don’t drink tea, but coffee sounds excellent. There’s a Starbucks around here somewhere, or there must be. The bloody things are everywhere now,” and he whistled for Gordon, and then looked back at Q. “We can sit outside with the dogs,” and Q liked that idea, of the two of them being a we, a unit.
The Starbucks was warm inside. Q ordered a chai latte, at which James scoffed. He himself had two espressos, which he drank alarmingly quickly and then slammed them back down onto their saucers, sending them skittering across the table. The table was so cold that it had stuck to Q’s hand where he had tried to steady them, and when he tried to pull it away, he felt the painful burn of skin ripping.
James put his hand – calloused, with short fingernails and a dubious scar – over Q’s, and it was warm, but that wasn’t why Q inhaled sharply. James watched him, face smooth but eyes alive, as if he were laughing inside at some private joke, and then he pulled both their hands free from the table. Q stretched his fingers backwards until his clipped nails touched the backs of his hands, and James cocked an eyebrow.
“I’m double jointed,” Q said, and James watched him like a hawk, like he wanted to bend him over the table there and then, and Q ached to touch him, to put his hands inside his ridiculously expensive coat, and bent to feed Gordon and Mabel some of the bacon from his sandwich.
James’s phone beeped at him, and he sniffed once but, cramming the last of his Danish pastry into his mouth, he stood up. Gordon barked as he did so, and James unwound the lead from his arm – where it had been left to look like a falconer’s glove – and turned to go.
“This has been – nice,” he said, as if words of courtesy did not often pass his lips, and he looked as if there was something else he wanted to say.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be wandering Hampstead Heath at any point in the not-too-distant future?” Q asked, and James looked relieved. It looked odd on a man so clearly used to getting what he wanted without fuss.
“I hope so,” was all he said, and Q watched him go, trying not to focus on the way his arse moved in his obscenely tight and well-tailored suit.
At work that morning, there was talk of another Cold War. Q, who did not remember the last one, sat and listened to the old legends, the old ring-masters of that lost circus, discuss the situation.
“The Russians want to reclaim the Motherland, which as they see it is the entirety of the former Soviet states and anywhere else they can take. Moscow is ruthless, and we know from Litvinenko that they have no scruples when it comes to silencing people,” said Tanner, and M pursed her lips.
“Moscow is not foolish enough to enter into a war, not when they need our trade,” said Hamilton from behind his desk. “It gets awfully cold there in winter when all you have to live on is promises of Soviet glory,” and M smirked. She was warming to him, old dinosaur that he was.
Eve set a folder of papers on M’s desk. “I think,” she began, “that perhaps at the moment, we need Russian oil and Russian oligarchs more than they need us. We need their billions, their football club-owning whims, their arms deals and their energy, and they see that. They know that all too well. We cannot risk cutting ourselves off from that income,” and M nodded at her.
“We might have to,” muttered Hamilton. “We cannot risk open warfare – “
“Who said anything about open warfare?” M said. “We’re a secret intelligence service. We can afford to be clandestine. Send 007,” she suggested, and everyone in the room straightened up.
Q had heard many tales of 007, the man with possibly fewer scruples than Putin, or so he had been told. Reckless and ruthless and alarmingly brilliant, was how Eve had put it – when she had returned from Turkey shaken and wan. Q had hugged her, and told her she was so brilliant that she had killed the unkillable, and then they had got drunk on boxes of wine. Spies were never as well paid as the stories would like the public to believe – who would believe that people would fight and die for their countries and eat lentils? Eve had confided to him, three boxes of wine down, that Bond was “devastatingly attractive and dangerous”, and Q had put her to bed with a bucket and a glass of water. He had not slept that night, but 007 had not come back from that mission.
“He’s back,” M said, to general amazement. Q looked round at her. “He was lying low, maintaining a civilian presence for a few months. Getting back to fitness, getting London back into his lungs,” she added, and then she shrugged. “He wanted to disappear, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that we wouldn’t notice his bloody Omega bills,” and Tanner laughed at that.
“He’s back. I’m not surprised, by this point. Moneypenny! You didn’t kill him after all,” he said, and Eve smiled and then looked like she might cry, just for a second.
“Back to the Russian situation,” M said. “We send 007. He’ll probably sleep with a few women, a few men, find the information we need in the most complicated and expensive way possible – there’s a point, actually,” and she looked at Q.
“No gadgets this time – the Russians know what we’re like now. We’ve been playing this great game for centuries with them, and they recognise every trump card and pawn. He will have to just survive this,” she said, and looked down at her hands for a second.
Tanner nudged Q. “There are some weapons systems we’d like you to get at, if you can. Those pesky Ukrainian separatists have gone far enough, if you’re up for a challenge,” and Q thought of James’s wolfish smile, and nodded.
The morning passed in a blur of Ukrainian and Russian and some Farsi thrown in, with GCHQ barking translations down his earpiece almost as fast as he was typing. Eve came past at one point with a bowl of soup, which he spilled down his front and swallowed in equal amounts as he concentrated, and that night he did not dream.
An MIA husband, a screaming child and scrutiny from M were all adding up to an epic headache and Q was going to need some time on the shooting range or the munitions bunker later so he didn’t accidentally kill someone on his way home.
The newest tale in the Saga of James and Q trying to raise a family and still manage to do their jobs.
I apologize that I wasn't able to post on Sunday. Things came up. *shifty eyes*
Skyfall rec today! A restaurant AU, no less. It's a re-interpretation of Mostly Martha, No Reservations, and Skyfall. The interactions between James Bond and Q are really sweet and in character, so it's definitely one you should consider reading. :)
tirami su by fangirlflail
James runs a tight operation at Skyfall, Chicago’s finest steakhouse. So when his niece and new sous-chef turn everything upside down...
Still no sign of it on the scanners. No proof that the damn thing is real. And at this point, I don’t know what proof I’d need, to believe that it isn’t a hallucination of my desperate mind. I doubt the proof of my eyes and my hands, because I know a mind can lie.
It isn’t the believing in hallucinations that worries me. It’s what will happen when I stop believing in things that aren’t hallucinations.
Bond is on a spaceship going to an alien world, he knows that because of the time required for space travel, he will die on the spaceship MI6. Q is an alien who has been following the tracks of his soulmate across space. They can sense those things.
“If you find out...” Tanner stopped himself, knowing that he couldn’t just ask for information that was above his security clearance.
It seemed that information on James Bond was above everyone’s security clearance.
Sorry today's update is late! I got caught up in errands and totally forgot it was Wednesday. Here's the finale to Last of His Knights. Thank you all for reading!
