Chapter Text
It takes strong men to do what Q did every day. His routine was simple enough – get up in the morning, shower, eat, go to work and command twenty three people. Eat again when the time came, then work some more and go home to sleep. Enough time for social life on his days off, but he rather ignored those. He spent them in his flat, watching the last week's collection of sitcoms. One would say he had no life. He was that one.
The train stopped and he was yanked from his thoughts soon enough to step out. The sun hit his face when he left the darkness of a tube station. It was a beautiful summer day, hot in the concrete city, and his cardigan was proving to be too much. He suffered whole fifteen minutes it took to get to Vauxhall, because the heat was never too much to convince him to lose the fight. The MI6 building was cool enough anyway.
He didn't even bother bringing anything of his own, like a phone or a computer, to work. It would be just taken away from him for the duration of his shift. He stepped through the control with their whole body scanner and kept going, not even stopping to find out if he was clear. Of course he was. It would be foolery not to be.
The Q Branch needed him. He was their boss and the strongest asset in their team. He knew all this. He was also incredibly tired of it.
His work was exciting and he could easily lose himself in it, but it wasn't just coding and making guns, if we put it as simple as that, no, it was so much more – he was the BOSS. The one commanding the staff. The one that had the last word in everything. It was making him sick. All the people around him were depending on him and he had to put on this façade every-single-day and act like their… well, boss. It was getting too hard again.
Three days until his vacation.
He had to leave. He planned his vacations carefully, knowing how he needed some space after a while. Normally he could manage on weekends, if he had someone to spend the time with, but right now, there was no one who would care for him, and so Q waited for that one week off like for the judgement day – both dreading it and looking forward to it.
Q wasn't a guy for clubs or one night stands, but he knew there was no other way to calm him down and prepare him for another weeks in his work. Someone to order him around just like he did with his employees.
He stepped into the Q branch and had immediately the attention of several technicians running to meet him and hand him various reports. He took all of them, quickly scanning them and giving his first orders of the day. It was a rather quiet day so far, it seemed, the agents were managing on their own. Although many people felt otherwise, Q branch was mostly a place for research and work, not monitoring agents. There were people for that. Q branch was full of hackers, technicians, engineers, not au pairs. Of course, they were the once KNOWING where the agents were, with their tracking chips, and the ones issuing them with ear pieces, but that was it.
“Q, M sent for you,” R told him when he reached for the on button of his computer. He sighed and pulled his hand back.
“Did he mention what he wants?” he asked, gathering his notebook and pen, because M mostly had many things to say to him when he called him in, and he didn't want to forget a single one of them. “Was it long ago?”
“No and no, the call came about five minutes before you came.”
He nodded and went for the lift.
Eve was sitting at her desk, typing quickly on her computer. He never understood how she managed such a thing with those manicured fingers. He couldn't stand even the noise his nails made if he let them grow too long, and here she was, not even bothered.
“Should I go in?” he asked, motioning to the door. She looked up, smiled and nodded. He smiled back and opened the door.
He hesitated when he saw two agents already inside, but then stepped in and closed the door.
“Ah, Q,” M, sitting behind his desk, said and waved to the chair opposite to him, motioning him to sit. “Thank you for coming. Please, sit, this will take a while.”
“He never told us to sit,” Q heard Trevelyan say to Bond in a private voice, but loud enough for everyone to hear.
“That would be because he doesn't like us,” Bond said simply. Q looked at M, curious about his reaction.
“That is precisely the reason,” he said, not even looking at the agents. He picked a file from the desk and handed it to Q. He opened it and started reading the facts. “This is our newest target, Ethan Grant. I want you to look at that file very carefully and find anything you can that will help Bond and Trevelyan to eliminate him. You have three weeks to do so before they go to his house, they already have an invitation for his garden party. Details are inside the file.”
“What exactly should I be looking for, sir?” he asked, looking through the papers. Millionaire, playboy, surely a complete dick by the look of it, a gun magnate. Nothing special. Anyone could find a way to eliminate him. Any of his technicians, at least.
“He is just a link,” M said. “To a very powerful man called Trevor Hunt. But we know nothing about Hunt, because, as it seems, his life is in hand of a hacker of your scale.”
Q looked at M.
“Who?”
“We don't know. I believe you will, after you get to him. But so far Grant is the closest link we have. So find ANY link, anything at all that will point you in the right direction, and do it in three weeks.”
“Yes, sir,” Q said with his eyes lowered to the table, and immediately froze. He slipped. He is still Q. Straighten your back. Look straight.
“Sir,” he said, this time knowing it was just a polite title. “I my leave is in three days,” he reminded him. M winced and nodded.
“Yes, I am aware. I hoped you could manage to wait three weeks. Then you can take additional paid week and be only on call, if you want. But this is a real emergency. I will explain why in a second.”
Q closed his eyes and thought about it. Another three weeks? No. He was already on edge.
“No,” he opened his eyes. “I can't change my plans. But I know what we can do. I will have one week of paid leave now, making it a week of studying this file and working from home. What do you say?”
M raised his eyebrows and seemed to consider it.
“And your plans won't suffer because of it?” he asked and clearly didn’t understand what was so important and still left him enough time to work.
“I will manage. I believe I can do more from home than I could here. You will just have to give me a permission to take this with me,” he waved the file. “… and work with my personal computer or take one of the ones here.”
M nodded. “Alright. I hope you understand the security risk it brings.”
“I do. Now, what is so time pressing?”
M leaned back in his chair and looked at the agents, still standing by the wall.
“Gentlemen,” he said.
“Should we juggle?” Trevelyan asked and Bond chuckled.
“Please, just get on with it,” M growled.
“Should we make a show?” Bond asked with a smirk and started to unbutton his snow white shirt. Trevelyan did the same, but where Bond started at the collar, the Russian went for the hem.
“So watching you undress would be even more painful? No, thank you.”
Q didn't understand what was going on. He watched the agents shed their shirts, staying only in their undershirts, and he was stunned to see what their clothes were hiding – Trevelyan had both hands covered in tattoos, while Bond's right arm bared only one, and when Q looked at it more carefully, he saw that that was the same as Trevelyan had, almost lost between the others. They both turned so he could see their right arms, and he recognized the shape of a condor.
“Our military marks,” Bond said. “We got them back in NAVY.”
“Those don't look NAVY at all to me,” Q said. Trevelyan smiled grimly.
“Well, that's because you probably never met any living soldier from THIS division,” he said. He pulled his dress shirt back on and so did Bond. “We were N45, a secret division with specific orders that we still can't talk about. But we were also on a wrong side of the barricade, which we didn't know. That's how we got into MI6 – the old M contacted us on our day off and told us that we were manipulated into terroristic actions against Britain. We were led by Hunt. When we told everyone what we found out, thinking they would help us kill him, they rather tried to turn to NAVY, which, of course, lead to a massive bloodshed that only the two of us survived. And Hunt, who left the ship on his personal motorboat.”
“Two days ago,” M said and Q looked at him. “… we interrogated a man that stole codes from American nuclear base. He claims he did it under threats of death of him and his family, and that he met Grant, whose name he knew, and only once met a man that seemed to be his employer. He had a condor tattoo on his right arm. We believe this is Hunt.”
Q nodded. “So what exactly should I do when I get to him?”
“Tell us where he lives and give us guns,” Trevelyan said. Q looked at M for confirmation.
“Yes,” he said. “That actually is what we need right now. His location. And every information against him; what he wants to do with the codes, what else he has, when he plans to attack, why is he doing it, all his contacts.”
“And you say the hacker that covers for him is so good he can let him disappear so well not even MI6 can find him,” Q said. “Do you know this person's name? Nickname? Anything?”
“We hoped you would know when you look at his work.”
“We can help you with background check on Hunt while he was in NAVY, or at least point you at anything linked to N45,” Bond said. “Three days, right? Well, I guess that will have to be enough. But it would be best if we started right away. M?”
M nodded and dismissed them. Q gathered the papers and went for the door, opening them for both agents and stepping out after them. Bond turned to face him, but Q, now deep in his thoughts, already managing his time to collaborate with his days off, ran right into him.
“Sorry, sir... ehm, Bond,” he closed his eyes with embarrassment. He was such an idiot.
“Am I having an identity crisis?” Bond asked, his voice amused.
“That's when YOU don't know who you are,” Alec said. Q opened his eyes.
“Yes, very funny, can we go?” he said, irritated, and headed first out of Eve's territory. The agents followed closely behind him and he could feel their strong present. These will be very hard three days.