Work Text:
November 2012
Bond knelt in the old, abandoned church next to his childhood home, cradling M’s slowly-cooling body in his arms.
It was cold, but he didn’t feel it. A thought passed through his mind that this was probably a bad thing, but he gave it no heed; it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
He heard a scuffling sound nearby and tensed. An old, familiar voice echoed across his hearing, but he couldn’t understand the words.
Safe, some instinct said, so he let the voice drift over him like a slow-flowing river.
A low thrumming filled the air, vibrating and reverberating in his chest, growing louder and louder. He ought to move, he knew, but he didn’t. It didn't matter.
Voices, loud and crashing -- discordant -- thundering in his aching skull --
He flinched and curled his body around M’s.
(Safe.)
Voices, closer. Talking to him. Saying--- what?
He couldn’t hear, but he didn’t want them near. He didn’t want them--
...A hand reached for him--
No! Protect. Protect M...
Silence.
No, whispering...whispering about him…
“..shock...should we do?...attacked...sedate him…”
He held M closer.
(Safe.)
A shrill ringing filled the air. Some tinny, annoying tune that was just as suddenly cut off.
“Bond. 007.”
A voice filled the air, but different, slightly metallic.
Familiar.
Calm. In control.
Makes-me-feel-a-bit-melancholy. Cup-of-earl-grey. Put-your-back-into-it.
(Safe.)
“Look at the screen, please, Bond. Ah, there you are. Thank you.”
There, on a tiny screen in front of him -- (phone, that little voice at the back of his mind told him)...
Dark-rimmed hipster glasses. Ridiculous floppy dark hair. Pale, angular young face.
(Safe.)
“ This is your Quartermaster. Now, Bond, are you injured?”
He shuddered, and suddenly, he was shivering, his teeth chattering in his head.
“...N-no.”
“You’re wet. Did you go for a swim in the lake?” the voice asked lightly, as though chatting over tea.
“...F-fell.”
“Are you cold?”
“I...t-think so…”
He was, wasn’t he? Yes, he was cold. He shuddered.
. . . . .
“Bond,” Q said in his calmest voice to the shivering agent on his computer screen, “I’m fairly certain that you’re in shock. Will you allow these nice people to look you over?”
The back-up team and the medics had arrived at Skyfall, only to find the estate in ruins and Silva and his men dead.
M, too, was dead.
Bond and the old gameskeeper, Kincade (Albert Kincade, age 75, no criminal history), were the only survivors of the desperate battle.
The old man had reacted readily enough when the team had burst into the church, demanding that they put their hands in the air.
Bond, however, had remained unresponsive to their entreaties and commands, save to lash out blindly when they approached him and M’s body.
The medical team reported that he seemed to be in shock, and that he was soaking wet, neither of which was a good thing in the cold Scottish November night. Shock, even in temperate climates, could kill a man, and quickly.
Q had grown frustrated with the medical team’s useless attempts to communicate with Bond, and had told the lead medic that he would be calling his phone and ordered him to position it so that Bond could see the video on the screen.
At least that had elicited some reaction out of the man. Q gave a mental sigh of relief that Bond remembered him at all in his state.
The agent was still staring at the phone with an unfocused gaze, so Q repeated his question.
“007. Will you let the medics examine you, Bond?”
Bond looked up at the people surrounding him, but didn’t seem to register them very well. He merely blinked sluggishly at them with a blank expression.
Q sighed. He couldn’t very well order the medics to approach Bond again; he had already given one a black eye and had broken the nose of another.
Sedation was to be avoided, too -- It was not a good idea to sedate a double-oh unless strictly necessary, as it generally brought up bad memories for them, which in turn made them more violent in the long run.
Q tried again. “Bond? Look at me, please. Listen to my voice. I’m going to stay on the line with you every step of the way, but I need you to help me help you, alright?”
The blue eyes, murky in the dark light of the church, found their way to the screen (and his face) again.
“Q?” The man sounded puzzled, but Q would take whatever he could get.
He smiled encouragingly. “That’s right. Very good, Bond. Now, the nice lady next to you has a blanket. Can she wrap it around you? Would that be alright?”
“...Yes.” Bond sounded uncertain.
Q instructed the woman to move slowly and telegraph any movements she made before approaching the traumatized agent. She finally managed to drape the orange shock blanket around Bond’s shivering shoulders without incident.
“There, that’s good. That’s warmer isn’t it?”
Bond made no answer, save to duck his head down, as though burrowing a little into the blanket.
“Can you stand, Bond?” Q said gently. He didn’t want to rush Bond, but the longer he was out there, the more dangerous it would be, both healthwise and in terms of security. “Take your time. There’s no hurry.”
Bond made a distressed sound, like a wounded animal. It only took Q a moment to realize what the issue was.
“Bond? You can let go of M now. They’ll take good care of her, alright? You did a wonderful job looking after her.”
“M…” Bond’s voice cracked on the one-letter designation.
Such a short syllable for such a large personality, Q mused distractedly.
The old man -- Kincade, Skyfall’s gamekeeper -- spoke softly in his gruff voice. “Let them take care of Emma now, Jamie, there’s a good lad.”
To Q’s surprise, Bond listened, and even allowed the old man to help him to his feet.
Encouraged, Q asked Kincade for his help in checking Bond over for injuries, since it seemed that he trusted the old man sufficiently to let him get close enough to examine him.
Cuts and bruises, and minor burns, too, from the explosion, but nothing major, aside from the shock, and possibly some lake water in his lungs.
Together, Kincade and Q coaxed Bond out of his wet clothing and into the spare sweats that the medevac team had brought. It took a little more cajoling to get him to put the oxygen mask on, but it seemed that Bond had very little of his famous mulishness on hand at the moment, so they managed to keep it on him for the entirety of the helicopter ride back to HQ.
Q stayed on the video call while he took care of the cascading effects of what basically amounted to a minor digital apocalypse from his computer station.
He couldn’t keep talking directly to his traumatized agent, but he noticed in his brief glances at the small window for the video call with Bond that the agent’s eyes tracked his movements on the small phone screen and he seemed to be taking in the words that Q barked out to his techs.
Q took it as a good sign that Bond hadn’t gone back to being completely catatonic, though his relative non-response was worrying.
. . . . .
Bond allowed himself to be guided to Medical without his characteristic resistance, which caused a small frown of worry to appear on Tanner’s face, though it was quickly smoothed over by the calm, businesslike expression the Chief of Staff usually wore.
Tanner went to debrief Kincade, then Bond, since they were the only two people to survive the battle, and no one but Bond had any real idea what had happened.
There, however, he ran into a problem. The old gamekeeper narrated his part of the adventure readily enough when questioned, but Bond only curled onto his side in the hospital bed and clutched at the phone, which was still connected to Q, silently watching the young man run his branch like a well-oiled machine.
After several attempts at trying to capture Bond’s attention, Tanner finally had to concede defeat.
He texted Q: “I think you’d better come up here. It seems that Bond won’t respond to anyone but you.” And Kincade, apparently, but he had responded verbally to only the quartermaster so far.
“Give me a few minutes, Tanner,” Q responded several seconds later, “I’ll be right up.”
True to his word, the young man came into the room within ten minutes holding a paper cup. Ah, the ever-present cup of tea that Q could not do without.
However, it turned out that the drink was not for Q, but for Bond.
“Hello, 007,” Q said pleasantly, as though he’d come up for a run-of-the-mill meeting, “I’ve brought you something warm. Drink it while it’s still hot.”
When Bond made no sign that he’d heard Q, still gazing blank-eyed at the now dark screen of the borrowed mobile, the young man tsked and half-coaxed and half-scolded the older man into sitting up by nudging and pulling gently at him as one would a sleepy child.
“Hurry up and drink this,” said Q briskly, handing him the flimsy paper cup, “before it cools. You’re freezing.” He stood there, hands on his skinny hips until the agent brought it up to his lips.
Bond, in that moment, proved himself less broken than Tanner had thought. “Could use something stronger,” he croaked, scowling at the plastic lid on the cup.
“It’s about a quarter whiskey,” Q said dryly. “Drink up.”
Bond blinked a couple of times, then managed to focus well enough to look quizzically at his young quartermaster, who raised an eyebrow at him, clearly asking, ‘Well, why aren’t you doing what I said?’
Bond sniffed and a muscle twitched in his cheek, like some kind of proto-smile.
He drank, at first sipping carefully, then taking longer drafts of the warm drink.
Tanner watched the two men.
He saw how the younger man sat comfortably on the edge of the bed as though he belonged there, as though he were an old friend of the injured man, as though the patient weren’t one of the most dangerous men in Britain -- the most, possibly, at the moment, seeing how close he was to snapping.
Then he saw how the tired agent’s shoulders slowly lost their tension, and realized that even a half-feral lone wolf like Bond needed someone to care for him -- not only that, but to take care of him. He needed someone who wasn’t afraid to reach out and even dig in and stay when he pushed everyone away.
Tanner watched. And he knew then that this young man was exactly what the double-ohs needed. Not only Bond, but the rest, too. Q had already done wonders with 006 in the years before his promotion to quartermaster, and it seemed that he was bringing 007 under his sway, too.
With M gone, Bond had lost his anchor. Without an anchor, Bond was dangerous. Q, Tanner thought, would serve as an excellent new anchor for Bond. Trust was important to the double-ohs, especially to Bond after the Vesper Lynd fiasco, and the young man had proven his loyalty to his agent by putting his burgeoning career on the line for someone he had only just met.
It seemed that Bond was pondering this question too, since he asked, “Why?” He stared at the lid of his cup, as though looking for the answer written on it.
“Why what, Bond?” Q responded quietly.
“Why did you help me?”
Q mulled his answer over carefully before he replied. “Double-oh agents tend to die early in their careers. Those who don’t have something special. Better instincts, better luck -- who knows. You’ve outlived nearly all of your contemporaries, and then some. I looked at the available data and decided to trust your instincts.”
Bond snorted derisively. “Too bad my instincts were wrong.”
Q tilted his head. “Were they?”
“M’s dead.” Bond said it through gritted teeth, nearly spitting the distasteful words from his lips.
“So is Silva,” Q returned calmly.
“M’s dead!” Bond threw the cup on the floor, and the dark, milky contents exploded out of it upon impact with the white tile, splashing hot cocoa onto the legs of Q’s awful plaid trousers.
Q didn’t flinch.
“I think that in the end,” he said as quietly as ever, “she chose death over retirement. Remember Turner’s ship?”
Tanner watched Bond furrow his brows at the unexpected segue that obviously meant something special to the two men, though it had been he who had arranged their rendezvous at the National Gallery.
“Grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap?” Bond sounded puzzled, but also intrigued enough to be drawn out from his distressed state. “Wasn’t that supposed to be me?”
“I rather think the Temeraire would have preferred to go out in a fiery battle with a dedicated captain at her helm.” Q looked Bond square in the eyes. “What do you think?”
Behind them, nearly forgotten in the room, Tanner held his breath.
Bond dropped his gaze and stared at his scarred hands for a long moment, his breath rasping in his lungs. Then he suddenly gave a great shudder and his granite face crumbled, the tears rolling silently down his cheeks and dripping off his nose.
Q sat and waited patiently for his agent, giving him his privacy by turning his attention to the equipment surrounding the bed, projecting his thereness but not intruding.
A phone vibrated, and Tanner realized after a quick pat-down of his own pockets that it was Q’s. The man himself, however, made no move to take the call, or even showed that he knew the phone was ringing.
“You going to answer that?”
Q gave Bond a disdainful look, even as his hand dipped into his pocket. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bond. Of course I am.”
He answered his phone with a clipped “Q.” Then he huffed out a displeased sigh. “Fifteen minutes. I leave you lot alone for fifteen minutes and you’ve devolved into chaos? Honestly, are you children? I’ll be right down. Don’t touch anything. I mean it.”
There was a spark of amusement in Bond’s eyes when the quartermaster (not long out of childhood himself, really, and much younger than any of the staff he had just scolded) turned to him and put his hands on his hips again, looking for all the world like a vexed schoolmarm in his mustard cardigan and dark-rimmed glasses.
“Now, Bond,” he said, as though to an errant child, “be nice to Tanner and debrief properly. He put his neck on the line for you, too.” He patted the astonished agent’s arm. “Be good, now. Don’t give him any trouble.”
Then he left the room, leaving a trail of slightly sticky chocolatey footsteps in his wake.
Bond’s startled blue gaze followed him out. He looked more bewildered than Tanner had ever seen him. “Did he actually tell me to be good?” he asked incredulously.
Tanner suppressed his smile. “Yes, he did.”
“He does realize that I kill people for a living?” Bond continued to look perplexed, as though he couldn’t fathom anyone knowing this and still treating him like that, much less a spotty, specky adolescent who looked like a uni student.
“Yes, Bond,” Tanner said, opening his laptop cover and setting up. “He’s well aware of that fact.”
Bond was still looking at the door Q had exited through, mystified. “Strange man.”
“He is. But we’re none of us exactly normal, are we? Now, please start at the beginning, Bond.”
. . . . .