Chapter Text
When it hurts… Observe
Life is trying to teach you something
Chapter One
The days that followed the air strike on Safin’s Island were contentious and chaotic, consumed by one after another CYA scenario that did nothing but complicate things further. And seriously, how could things get more complicated?!
Questions. Reports. Authorized. Non-authorized. Smart Blood. Heracles. Spectre. Hearings and more hearings. Someone just pull the trigger now…
PLEASE!
Caffeine. More caffeine.
No time to eat let alone sleep.
Self preservation.
He should have remembered The Rule. The Main Rule of Life! Chastised himself repeatedly for having forgotten.
Never openly say certain thoughts because doing so will give life to that which will most certainly become your worst nightmare.
He had tempted the Fates. Had voiced his fears. Had sent them out into the aether, and his worst nightmare had come true.
Painfully. Permanently true.
Q now stood in a private terminal at Heathrow International Airport awaiting the arrival of a flight from the Faroe Islands. Said flight was transporting a casket containing the remains of Her Majesty’s Secret Service agent, James Bond.
His body had washed up on the shores of Klaksvík located on Borðoy: a major fishing hub and the second-largest settlement in the Faroe Islands. Borne there by the currents after Bond had been blown out to sea by the barrage of Sea Viper missiles fired by the HMS Dragon.
Flotsam drifting in the wake of Safin’s biological horror.
Q couldn’t help playing, over and over, in his mind that last conversation with Bond. How he had begged him to get off the island. There was still time. He could help him. Just try.
Bond being Bond… refused to even attempt. But in the end, after they lost contact with him, Bond must have changed his mind. Attempted to make his escape.
Attempted.
He’d been unsuccessful.
“Quartermaster, would you mind terribly going out to Brize Norton? You’re familiar with Heracles…” Mallory had asked him yesterday.
“Ummm. Of course…” came Q’s immediate response, when in his head he was actually calling Mallory a fucking twat. Whilst Q might be familiar with Heracles, it had been Malloy’s pet project.
But the why of Mallory’s request didn’t matter much. As if Q would even consider not going out to the air base. Not being there. As if there was any other place he would be.
This one last service of Bond’s to Queen, Country should fall to Q.
It was right and proper, and really the only thing Q could do under the circumstances.
So now here he stood at RAF Brize Norton. Dressed in his best suit. One of the three Bond had taken him to buy not long before all the insanity surrounding Spectre and Nine Eyes. Not long before Bond had left with Madeleine Swann. It wasn’t bespoke, but tailored well enough so as not to elicit horrified eye rolls from the elite in those agonising times when Q needed to look his ‘best.’
Q reasoned a part of him had always known that sooner or later he’d be wearing it for this.
The C-17 finally landed, and following the directions of the aircraft marshaller, rolled to a stop 100 metres from where Q stood, doing his best not to think of the past and failing miserably. Q’s stomach roiled at the thought of what was to happen next. However, before he could give that much thought, two RAF airmen appeared and approached the plane as the aft cargo door lifted slowly and the ramp descended to the hardstanding. The two climbed the ramp into the plane. Q noted idly that they should have been petty officers from the Royal Navy, but the logistics had been complicated enough at the time, and the RAF had ultimately been the fastest option.
After several moments-- the anticipation of which all too much reminded Q of those agonizing seconds waiting for the missiles to strike Safin’s island of horrors-- they reappeared with another pair of airmen, somberly escorting a trolley bearing a coffin covered in the Union Jack.
However, Q was struck not by the bright colours of red, white, and blue draped atop the casket but by how the whole scene seemed as if a giant, dark, mechanical maw was disgorging back into the world a bitter mouthful that had disagreed with it.
But only for a time. Only until the earth itself reclaimed the man within.
This time there would be no resurrection.
And then the casket was just there, a bit off to his right. The trolley wheels locked, the corporals standing at attention. Offering a final salute for the Royal Navy commander who had done more for them than they, than anyone, would ever know.
A sergeant was speaking to him, a Visiting Officer. Paperwork. Transfer of cargo. Please accept our heartfelt condolences. Q heard maybe a sixteenth of what the sergeant said because of what, or rather who , now had his full attention.
The man who now stood directly behind Bond’s coffin. Q had been so focused on Bond’s arrival, he had failed to notice that 007 had not returned to home soil alone.
Tall and rugged with silvering blond hair, he was dressed all in black: suit, shirt, tie… even his overcoat. In the hangar, he stood as a silhouette of elegant, lethal precision and violence.
Alec Trevelyan.
Now the senior ranking Double-O agent of MI6.
An agent whom Q hadn’t even known existed until M shared that intel with him two days prior. The Quartermaster had always been led to believe that the 006 moniker was just to be left unfilled. No rhyme nor reason. It just was. Even Bond had, shockingly, stayed quiet on the matter.
Yet here he was. Alec Trevelyan, who in some sort of convoluted arrangement established with the old M, had existed in a shadowed world, separated from MI6, for over a decade.
But he was still one of theirs.
The man was bent slightly over the coffin. His hand had slipped under the bright yet unsettlingly somber colours of the flag to touch the grainy wood beneath. A simple pine box used for such repatriations. He was saying something to its occupant.
Q nodded absently to the sergeant at his side. A final thanks for his assistance despite Q’s attention being wholly on the man in black, straining to hear what he was saying to Bond.
At first Q struggled to make sense of the quiet, clearly intimate words… until he realised they were in Russian. Dusting off his skill with a language he hadn’t expected to use today, Q remained at a respectful distance and kept his face blank as he let Trevelyan believe his words with Bond were private.
If Q was a better person, and usually he at least tried to be, he would not have eavesdropped, but 006 was a complete unknown whose very existence had poked at Q’s professional and personal instincts ever since Mallory had revealed the man’s existence in conjunction with his offer to escort James Bond’s remains home.
How Trevelyan had found out Bond’s death, and why he had made the offer to see Bond home was a complete mystery, even to M, so Q wasn’t being so much nosy as he was simply gathering necessary intel
Yeahhhhh. That was it.
It didn’t matter that Q caught only every third, whispered word, each one was critical to learning something new about Alec Trevelyan.
“You’re home now, Yasha,” Trevelyan said in Russian, the accent of a native speaker thick on his tongue. “You’ve done all you can for her. Mission complete. Time to rest.”
With that, Trevelyan stood straight, pulled his hand from beneath the flag, then turned his cool, green gaze directly on the Quartermaster.
Q didn't get intimidated easily. Due to the twistedly complex nature of his childhood, he had learned from an early age that he could show no fear. Could never back down, and he could say with confidence that he never had done so.
Until now.
But then, the eyes on him were those of a predator.
Nevertheless, Q steeled himself and reached a hand out to the taller man. “Thomas Caldwell” he offered, one of his sobriquets. “I’ve been assigned to meet Commander Bond’s casket. Escort it to MI6.”
Trevelyan took his hand. Shook it. Looked him up and down, from head to toe, with eyes that seemed to assess every molecule in his being.
“Thomas Caldwell. Doubt it. I see they still aren’t very inventive in making up aliases.” Trevelyan gave him the once over again.
“And I highly doubt you were ‘assigned’ to meet James,” he added. “Not just anyone would be sent for him. MI6’s top agent, even if he was retired. So that leaves us with a question to answer: who Thomas Caldwell really is.”
The interrogation was interrupted by an attendant who informed Q that their transportation was now in place.
It took the honour guard mere moments to load Bond’s casket into the dark panel van once it pulled up in front of the hanger. Q gestured for Trevelyan to join him in the salon he had taken from Six to the base, but the agent, as well as the man who attended him, jumped in after the casket and quickly settled into the plush passenger seats just behind the driver.
Q sighed, rolled his eyes, and indicated to the salon driver, JIO Rico, he’d be joining the other two. A tad risky, perhaps, and something in Rico’s glare clearly agreed with that assessment, but Q was equally loath to leave Bond alone with them. The odds were just as high that the man would find a way to get into as much trouble dead as he ever did alive.
Q tucked his tablet into his messenger bag and climbed into the seat directly across from Trevelyan, the Visiting Officer closing the double doors securely behind him. With a nod for the driver once Q was buckled in, they pulled away from the hangar to make their way back to Six.
It was a good 15 minutes into the two hour drive before any of them broke the silence. Surprisingly, it was Trevelyan who finally did so.
“He will be buried at Skyfall.”
Q normally was far from unnerved by agents, and would never show it outwardly, even if he was, but the one who sat across from him -- maybe it was the circumstances under which they were meeting -- was an exception.
“Those were Bond’s wishes.” He replied in agreement with Trevelyan’s statement.
“And how does one ‘just assigned’ to escort duty know of Yasha’s wishes?” Trevelyan stared at Q as if he was capable of seeing into his very thoughts, and Q couldn’t help of think of the man as death’s escort demon in human disguise.
“And how does one who was non-existent until two days ago also know Bond’s wishes?” Q threw right back at him.
Had Trevelyan and Bond been in contact over the years? In talking with Moneypenny after M had dropped his bombshell, he’d learnt that there was a well-known, long-standing hatred rooted in betrayal between the two 00s. Had it healed over time?
The man’s words to Bond’s remains had been tinged with grief. Barely, but it had been there. However, it was Trevelyan’s use of the intimately familiar ‘Yasha’ rather than calling Bond ‘James’ revealed more than anything else. Q just wasn’t entirely sure what… at least not where their past was concerned.
As far as the present went, however, it told Q that no matter what the condition the two men’s relationship had been in for the last 15 years, Bond’s death had clearly managed to reset it in a way that soothed some of those wounds.
At least for now. At least in this moment.
Who knew what would happen once Trevelyan and his man, Guard?…Lackey?…Henchman?, walked through the doors of MI6. The armed escort Mallory had waiting for them was testament to that uncertainty.
For now, however, Trevelyan’s only reply to Q’s retort was a cold, thin smile, which oddly did more to settle Q’s discomfort rather than unnerve him further.
“Why was James on that island?” Trevelyan asked after another mile of neither man breaking each other’s gaze.
“M will answer that question. Or not,” Q replied with a barely there, noncommittal shrug. M had, in fact, authorised Q to answer most of the questions he thought 006 might ask, but something in this man triggered Q’s innate snark and sass, and he just felt like keeping him waiting. To say nothing about leaving the current M to deal with the old M’s mess. While not strictly above Q’s pay grade, he was quite content with pretending like it was.
And he wasn’t ready to give Trevelyan his true identity. He would no doubt discover the truth when they reached MI6. But for now, the Quartermaster would leave his newly reclaimed agent wondering.