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Looking back now, Q thinks he should be embarrassed about the whole incident. Grabbed right off the street like the victim of some common street crime, bundled into the back of a waiting car with a needle pressed into his neck.
His recruiter would be ashamed.
Sorry, Q manages to think just before the world folds in on itself and he can barely feel the unmistakable scratch of a zip tie trussing his hands together behind his back. So sorry for the mess I’m going to make out of this.
To his idiot captors, who probably have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
To Bond, who doesn’t need more blood on his hands.
To M, to the Q branch because he really had meant to file those budget increment request forms earlier that day.
To his family, perhaps, most of all. Gracie, be good and study hard.
Q falls head first into the dark and there are dreams to catch him when he hits the bottom. Here, the reoccurring image of an empty mug on the table. Here, a new name no one knows to an old letter everyone sees. Tears, tears everywhere from people Q would have liked to care a bit more about.
And despite it all, Britain still standing tall and proud.
(At 9:32pm on a rainy Monday night, street cameras pick up blurry images of a man later identified as Q being forced into a black sedan of an indeterminate registration plate. His captors switch cars just outside Croydon and again in Epsom. A false lead is sent to Heathrow while the black sedan inexplicably turns up at the Port of London, near Tilbury. Bodies are found in each car and none of them are Q’s.)
By the time Q is discovered missing, a private chartered plane is flying across the Channel to France where Q wakes up feeling as if in a dream. The mouth of a water bottle is thrust towards him and Q drinks deeply, already waiting for the next needle that comes when he’s still swallowing. This time, Q feels the fine bones of his hands grind against each other when they manhandle him into another car and the things he sees at the bottom are darker than before.
The trail, the waking dream, the move from car to car to plane to unknown places that jolt nightmares into his bones.
It’s all just so very long.
Q regains full consciousness in a dank little room that smells like mildew and rot. The walls are peeling and the floor is concrete, surrounding air stifling enough to make Q’s stomach roil with nausea. Each breath, each inhale is heavy with moisture.
“You were out for a long while,” says a familiar voice and Q startles, his neck stiff when he cranes it to look at Sanders. Sanders has been in the Q department for years now and the lines show on his face, deep etched places where one can trace the ways Sanders laughs. Q knows Sanders well enough, might even go as far as to say he likes the man to some extent because of how neat Sanders’ coding is, but all of that comes to nothing now.
Now, Sanders isn’t supposed to exist. Q is nothing but a letter. In here, they are strangers.
“Any idea why we’re here?” Q’s tongue feels thick in his mouth, a dreadfully bitter taste that he can’t chase away no matter how many times he wets his lips and swallows. Beneath it all, the constant thrum of something in his veins, probably the last remnants of the drugs they pumped him full of still floating around in his system. Q flexes his fingers against the zip ties and finds small comfort in the fact that he can at least still feel the joints protest. “Or where here is, for that matter?”
The man whose name is no longer Sanders shrugs, a tired heave of his shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m placing my bets on the States. Somewhere in the south, judging from the damp and heat,” he says, sliding into his own role. There is blood speckled on the front of his shirt and Q can see the bruises around the other man’s neck, flecks of red near his mouth. “I don’t even know why–“ he starts to continue and that is when the door swings open, Sanders visibly stiffening as he falls silent.
The newcomer is no one Q has ever seen before and Q is hardly surprised, only blinking slowly in the face of the man who thinks they can be broken before MI6 comes crashing down around his ears.
“Having a bit of catch-up, are we now?” the man says with a polite smile. Sanders had been right, there’s the hint of a Southern-sounding twang to his words that turns the ends of his syllables soft.
“If it’s money you want, I don’t have any,” Sanders says in a desperate tone and buys Q some time to commit every last aspect of their captor to memory. Suit, off the rack from the looks of it, but still well-fitted enough to cost good money. Leather shoes that show the first signs of scuffing. Greying hair, a body that’s slowly going to waste. Brown eyes. “I’ll give you what I have, all of it, just…just let me go, please.”
There is a cover story that every MI6 employee is required to have, an entire life crafted out of paper that’s filed away neatly in a cabinet somewhere for funeral homes, hospitals and autopsies. Q knows his story inside out, but practice runs can only prepare one so much for the real thing.
“What do you want with us?” Q asks and the man laughs, a truly delighted sound that manages to chill Q to the marrow.
“Oh, they’ve trained the both of you so well.” He circles Q’s chair and Q feels something that tastes a bit like raw panic starting to rise in his throat when a hand is placed on the back of his neck. It’s a warm, sticky weight against his skin and the hand squeezes Q ever so gently. “This is going to be fun.”
Their clothes are taken. Sanders is dragged from the room and Q is left without his glasses, given a pair of sweatpants that hang low on his hips. They're two sizes too large for him.
“Think about what you have to tell us, Q,” the man says and Q lifts his head, only says “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” with the barest hint of a forced waver in his voice.
“I’m sure we’ll be able to jog that memory of yours soon enough. Think, Q, and think carefully.”
So Q thinks. Q relaxes against the metal chair he’s bound to and steadies his breathing, thinks of the collected calm that always saturates MI6 when they have something important on their plates. Q thinks about what MI6 is doing at this moment, thinks that Bond will probably argue his way into being put onto the retrieval team. The idea almost puts a smile on his face.
Q thinks about how M will probably let him have his way and how Q will get yelled at when he finally goes home, a blanket around his shoulders for shock he will claim not to have. He thinks about the week long leave forced upon him for recovery’s sake and how he’ll make it through three days before someone from the office calls, needing him to reign Bond in before Bond screws something up again. Anther smile.
Thinking, thinking, a thousand thoughts that keep him rooted in the passing of every hour he is kept here.
Something close to twenty-four hours must have passed since Q has seen London and MI6 has an average retrieval rate of three to five days.
Ninety-six hours more, then.
Q knows that he’s meant to hear what they’re doing to Sanders outside the room. Sanders' screaming keeps sleep at bay and each time it stops, Q can only pray that it doesn’t restart, the sound of Sanders begging them to stop, please stop, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m not who you think I am god please no, no, no a constant drone in the back of his mind.
Don’t think, Q tells himself when he hears the sick crush of flesh and bone. Don’t think about it.
Day three. There is a window the size of his fist in one high corner of the room and Q marks the passage of time through the play of sunlight on the walls, counts the number of flies that come up against the glass. This is the thirty six hours in and Q has been given stale water with mouldy bread, blindfolded and walked to a closet-sized toilet twice a day.
Sanders hasn’t made a sound since the night before and for everyone’s sake, Q can only pray that the man is dead. No more screaming, no more sound of blunt force, a body hitting the floor over and over again. No more clear messages that say this is you next, so tell us what we want to know and maybe you won’t get it so harsh.
Q finds that he cannot stop thinking.
“Q, my dear boy, whatever are we going to do with you?” The man is back and Q has taken to calling him Grey in his head, after the salt and pepper colour of Grey’s hair.
“I don’t know who or what you’re talking about,” Q says and Grey has another chair brought in so he can sit opposite Q, leaning forward with his elbow on one knee and his chin resting on the open palm of his hand.
“This game is getting a bit old, but I’m in a fine mood today so I’ll indulge you this one time.” Grey straightens and sits back against his chair. “If you think we have the wrong person, then tell me: who do I currently have strapped to a chair?”
Q tells Grey the story MI6 helped him write, the one that only morgues will ever know. His name is Jeremy Mckenzie, age twenty eight and he works as tech support with an accounting firm in South London. He doesn’t know who or what Q is and he certainly isn’t with MI6 or anything of that sort.
Jeremy just wants to go home, he really does.
“Touching,” Grey says when Q is done and stands, calmly kicking Q’s chair over. “But try again, Q.”
“My name is Jeremy,” Q only says, head hurting something awful from where it had connected hard with the concrete floor. He’s gone and accidentally bitten through his lip from the sudden impact, but a little blood is nothing right now, the coppery taste of it on his tongue a suddenly welcome distraction from Grey looming above him. “My name is Jeremy.”
“And the one before you said his name was Harry, until we cut his tongue out and now he doesn’t say a word any more.”
Grey squats beside where Q is lying, still bound to that bloody chair. The world is tilted on it’s side and Grey turns his head so Q can see him better.
“We won’t take your tongue, Q, but be rest-assured we’ll take other things from you.”
“It’s Jeremy,” Q breathes out and Grey kicks him in the face until Q is struggling to breathe through his own blood flooding his nostrils.
The torture is almost exquisite in it’s execution, Q finding himself slowly running out of ways to tune out the pain.
When they take branding irons to his bare skin, Q shakes and screams and copes by crafting Jeremy’s life down to the minute detail. The life that Q could have himself, perhaps, in a different place and time.
There’s a long-term girl friend named Samantha who stays over on the weekends (they make him watch as they heat the iron over a flame, the metal growing red to white to terrifying) and a Jack Russell called Toby that Jeremy rescued from the pound three years ago (the brand is a simple one, a straight four-inch bar pressed parallel to each shoulder blade and alternating with each side, searing inwards).
Each month, Jeremy pays a reasonable amount for an apartment in South London that has faulty heating (burning flesh, arms that hold him down, so much pain oh god just so much pain that Q blacks out for a while every time the brand presses into his back and comes away with singed flesh crusted on the ends), but it’s a decent enough place with a good view.
“You know the stats of each double-oh ,” Grey says and someone holds Q’s head steady, Q trembling from the pain as he makes himself stare Grey straight in the eyes. Jeremy owns a blue Peugeot. “Tell us enough about each and this can all stop.” Jeremy is an only child and grew up in London. Jeremy speaks passable French but has never actually been to France.
“Q, stop being difficult and just tell us what you know.”
His back is on fire. The scarring will be horrendous, if Q’s body doesn’t decide to roll over and give up before then. MI6 is late. Breathing is painful, thinking even more so. Fuck Jeremy.
“I know Mac operating systems,” Q grits out and surprise, surprise. He’s pushed down onto the floor again, a dead weight on both his arms and legs even though Q knows he doesn’t have it in him to struggle anymore, no point in flinching when the brand will come down all the same. Q screams are hoarse this time around, and the pain is closer to unbearable than ever.
Even though Q knows it’s not through an act of pity that he finds himself drugged on the night of the fourth day, Q can’t help but feel gratitude flare in his chest. The chemicals pull him under into a haze that alternates between a burning red and daze of nothing, Q left sprawled on his front as delirium keeps him docile for most of the night.
He dreams of Jeremy’s life. Sitting at Jeremy’s table in the morning, reading the newspaper, looking at a text message from Samantha.
(“Bloody toaster,” Bond says, standing somewhere just out of the scene. Q, Jeremy, whoever he is right now, looks over his shoulder to see nothing.)
7pm tonight will be fine Jeremy texts one handed.
(“Upset that I keep breaking your toys?” “Refer to them as toys again, Bond, and I will send you out there with a water gun made to look like a Glock.”)
The glass in the windows of his apartment blow in when Jeremy stands and Jeremy is Q again, coming awake with a scream as a boot grinds down onto the wounds of his back.
(“You’re insufferable.” “And you like it, so stop complaining.”)
“Good morning,” Grey says in an easy voice and Q is hauled onto his knees for today’s round of questions.
“Agent 007. You know him, yes?”
It’s a stupid question. Of course Q knows 007, knows the psych evaluations and personal history files like the back of his hand. Q has the professional record of every agent under his care memorised down to the very last detail, after all, and 007 is no different. Bond shouldn’t give himself so many airs.
“I don’t know any agents, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bond. First name James. Early forties. Double-oh status granted approximately five years ago. Kills in double digits and climbing.
“His name is James Bond.”
Lives in Chelsea. Cannot do interior decorating to save his life. Surprisingly good at keeping plants alive. Has an affinity for wearing sweatshirts while at home. Is difficult to wake up on off-days.
“I don’t know a James Bond.”
Q’s head is forced down into the water again and held there. And held there. And held there.
They drug him, still soaking wet and trying not to whimper on the floor when someone purposefully kicks him square in the back.
“Waste of time,” says someone.
“No better than the one before.”
That night, Q sees Sanders sitting in the corner of room. He looks surprisingly alright for someone who has just been dragged kicking and screaming across the Atlantic to be tortured to death.
“I’m sorry,” Q says. Sanders turns dead eyes to him and shrugs.
“What makes you think I’m dead?”
Oh.
Sanders bares his teeth in a grin that looks near inhuman and Q is reminded of the stupid American serials that Gracie watches, the one with demons and vampires and things that go bump in the night.
“This is a dream,” Sanders tells him when he’s standing over Q and there are coals where his eyes are. Burnt out. So that’s what the screaming was for. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know,” Q sighs. “But they will.” Sanders throws his head back and laughs until his sides split and blood, black as shadows, runs down his sides.
Morning comes. They rub salt into Q’s burnt flesh and the pain is like nothing Q has ever felt before, every grain a new death that has Q throwing up sour bile onto the floor. They haven’t fed him in a while.
“Stop,” he prays out loud, once. “Please, please god, make it stop.” They laugh, call him a good little boy whose Sunday school teacher will be proud of and their hands come back again, reaching in to probe open raw tissue so that more granules can be worked in.
Q sobs and swears and thrashes against the ground until he can move no more, cheek pressed against the warm floor. Breathe, breathe. There are tears running down his cheeks and Q needs to tell himself to just breathe. O2 molecules, alveoli, deoxygenated blood, the biology of being alive. Fourth form basics of respiration. Q pulls up notes from the dregs of his memory and recites them backwards in his head.
“Come now, save your tears,” Grey tells him. His assistants all have bloodied hands, but Grey is still impeccably dressed as ever, sitting across Q once again with his chin in his hand. “There’s really nothing to be too upset about. Salt is considered sacred by many religions. Purifying, even. A ward against evil.”
Never has breathing been this hard.
“We can stop this ridiculousness any time you want,” Grey reminds him at the end of the day. Q’s voice is by gone by then, throat in bloody shreds from all the screaming and pleading he has done. He can’t speak even if he wanted to, but Grey has already anticipated this. An assistant presses a pen into Q’s shaking hand and throws a notepad onto the floor, pushing Q down towards it. Someone places his glasses on his nose and Q fights the insane urge to laugh, ask them if they could please wipe the damned lenses for him.
I’ve got all the time in the world, he scrawls.
“Not the reply I had been looking for,” Grey sighs and the pen is taken away, his glasses as well. The world is suddenly softer again. “I wish you’d stop being so difficult, Q. One does find such proceedings rather dull after a fashion.”
Sorry to disappoint, Q thinks in his mind and the defiance must show in his eyes because Grey has Q yanked up by the hair and thrown onto the ground on his back, a foot planted on Q’s chest grinding the burns into rough concrete.
There is darkness after that. Blessed, blessed darkness.
Bond is waiting for him when Q stirs, a shade that smiles and looks every inch like the patronising arsehole that Q thinks he loves.
“You’re late,” Q murmurs, trying to sit up. He gives up after a while and just curls into himself on his side, with his knees tucked against his chest. “I bet you stopped for coffee and a shag on the way here.”
“There’s no good coffee here. You’re in America, Q, please do try and keep up.”
Q closes his eyes and Bond is still there, a look of utter passivity on his insufferable face.
“You’re taking a very long time to get here,” Q says at length, eyes still closed. Bond stretches his legs out and looks thoughtful for a moment. This is a dream. Bond has never once in his life had the inclination to even consider thoughtfulness.
“You’re very far away,” is what Bond replies. “Do try not to die before I get here.”
“Okay.” Q feels a chill run through his chest. “I’ll try.”
There is no time any more, only night and day, pain and the confused relief of a nameless drug coursing through his veins. They bring him Sanders who’s still alive, but just barely.
“You’re colleagues,” Grey says tiredly. “We’ve already established that, Q, stop playing.”
“PricewaterhouseCoopers is a large company. We might be.”
They hold Q’s head still and force him to look when they snip off the tips of Sanders’ fingers, the man making pained noises all the while behind his gag.
“Try a different answer this time.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
Q knows he will never be able to forget the mechanical clicks of grass clippers, the slick, wet sound that somehow resounds louder than Sanders’ screaming.
“You have very, very poor memory, Q.”
Sanders has a family. A homely looking wife and two beautiful children. Q knows this because he turns a blind eye to employees who keep family photos in their desks while under his watch. MI6 will give them a nice, fat sum of money, maybe even put the children through the best schools in the country. The wife will receive condolences in the form of a anonymous fruit basket.
Grey has Sanders kneel in front of Q and the two men lock gazes for a moment. Q blinks, slowly. MI6 may buy secrets, but they never sell. Not at such low a price, at any rate.
“You will let him die for his country?” Grey asks, amused as he watches on from above. “You will send him to his grave because of this…patriotism you claim to have?”
“People die for less every day, or so I’m told.”
Q has seen many, many people die. Has orchestrated deaths across the world, all from behind the safety of a screen. There is no blood on his hands because voices in people’s heads don’t carry guilt, not when they’re not the ones who pull the triggers.
Sanders’ family will be compensated. Q will see to it himself.
“You have a smart tongue, Q.”
Q has enough audacity left in himself to tip his head in acknowledgement. Grey looks strangely pleased with this development. The gun is nestled just under Sanders’ chin.
“Do you know who this man is?” Grey whispers in Sanders’ ear. A heartbeat. Sanders shakes his head.
Q doesn’t need anyone to make him watch and just before the trigger is pulled, Sanders looks him straight in the eye. I forgive you, Q reads in the calm there and Sanders dies messily, a gaping crater where his face used to be.
Q composes letters in his head when Grey isn’t trying to make him talk and the drugs haven’t really kicked in yet. Lines upon lines that he whispers to himself, confessions and promises to people he wants to see again. Sanders' body lies less than seven paces away from him and the blood has dried all over the floor. Q closes his eyes when he writes.
Dear mum and dad,
I’m not really a software engineer at a private security firm. I hope you don’t mind. You were right about accounting being a good path. Make sure that Gracie gets all her shots before she goes off to Africa or wherever the rocks are this time around, you know how she keeps forgetting.
Dear Gracie,
You’re going to be the best geologist in the world. I know it, you’ll…rock. Don’t pretend you didn’t laugh at that, you idjit. Listen to mum and dad. Also, please don’t forget your shots again. I’ll watch your stupid vampire show with you when I come back, I swear it this time around.
p.s. the south is as awful as you see it on-screen, possibly even worse
Dear Bond,
You’re an arsehole of immeasurable magnitudes with horrendous time-management skills.
Sanders’ body is left in the room with Q for a long while, the smell of flesh decomposing in the wet heat making Q dizzy. “I’m sorry,” he says to Sanders many, many times after Grey leaves the room. “I’m so sorry.”
Sanders only says “It’s alright” during the night and Q cannot sleep because a dead man keeps trying to tell him that he is absolved of all his sins.
Grey complains about the smell soon enough and Sanders is taken away. Q is handed a bucket of water and a rag, a bottle of bleach that stings his eyes.
“Get to work,” Grey tells him and there’s someone stationed at the door at all times, if only to make sure Q doesn’t try to kill himself by swallowing the cleaning agent.
Sanders’ blood doesn’t come easily off the cement and every movement tears through Q’s badly healed back, but it’s better than anything else Q thinks Grey might have decided to put him through so Q doesn’t even think about complaining. Rinse, wash, repeat. It’s a mindless job and he’s only yelled at to move faster a few times, a boot to the side when he doesn’t comply fast enough.
“So you’re a scrubber now?” Bond laughs in his head, all schoolboy humour and Q works at the bloodstains until his hands are raw.
The room smells like bleach and another dose leaves Q slumped in a corner watching the water dry in slow patches. A fly is buzzing against the window, the constant tap tap tap sound it makes against the glass holding Q’s attention rapt.
MI6 will come for him.
They will.
Grey doesn’t usually come to him at night, but when he does, Q can only close his eyes and tuck his chin into his chest, running through all the possible computer troubleshooting scenarios he can think of in his mind.
(The first time, he has his three usual assistants with him, one of them a thin, reedy man with a nasal voice that keeps calling Q a fucking faggot. Do you like it like this? Up the ass, you little fag? Open wider now, that's a good boy.
No, not this, anything but this, Q thinks wearily and craves for the drugs they’ve been forcing into him, craves for an iron brand seared into his skin, just anything to make it stop. My name is Jeremy. My name is Jeremy and this is not who I am. This is not me.)
Error. Reboot. Answers in binary code, the building blocks of worlds. Q solves every problem much too fast and everything snaps back into sharp focus far too soon.
“Fag,” someone snarls above Q and spits on him when they’re done.
For queen and country, Q wants to say in return but everything hurts, everything is at a breakpoint.
Dear Bond,
They don’t pay me enough for what I do.
Dear Bond,
Have they cleaned out my desk yet? Has Q branch gone to shambles?
Please reply.
Dear Bond,
Where the fuck are you?
Please reply.
Dear Bond,
Please reply.
“It’s a waste of time,” mutters a sullen voice above him. Q doesn’t bother chasing consciousness, lets himself come awake as slow as possible. What will it be today? Waterboarding? The brands again? Good old fashioned kicks to the stomach and blows to the head? Q wants to laugh, but his ribs hurt far too much for that. There’s nothing more they can do, nothing more that they can hurt that isn’t already hurting. This is the terminal stage of dispassion, detachment at it’s finest.
“When you’re in charge, then perhaps you will be the one to dictate what is and isn’t a waste of time,” Grey’s familiar tone drawls. The voice falls silent after that, only to be heard again when it asks Q the usual questions.
Q drifts and answers when spoken to, cries out when beaten. Four words over and over again until he knows he’s starting to believe it himself.
My name is Jeremy.
There is comfort in the knowing that the human mind grows bored with repetitive tasks. As dulled as Q’s senses are by now with the drugs, he knows that Grey is reaching the last limits of his patience.
Good.
Not long now.
The thing about death is that it really isn’t as terrifying as everyone puts it out to be. He’s had a long while to prepare for this, has said all that he wants to say to the people he cares to remember, even if none of them will ever hear a single word. It will not be quick. It will hurt. Q has recited these truths to himself more than enough times to know them not only as words, but as feelings, a deep-set understanding that he clutches to at night.
The greatest fears stem from the unknown. Know your fears and fear will cease to be.
Bullshit Q rages quietly in his head and wonders what to do when what you fear is what you know will eventually come.
Thirst like he’s never known. Throat parched and painful, lips cracking and tasting like rusted copper when he touches them with the tip of his tongue. So, so thirsty.
A feverdream. A rising heat that starts in his back and spreads to the tips of his fingers, to the places where they cut him just to watch the blood flow, not even for answers any more. A slow burn along his nerves. Drifting.
More needles. More haze. Good, great, everything is fine.
Q screams for the drugs now, cannot bear thinking or feeling any more. Just that next hit. Just.
“Q.”
“Jeremy,” Q corrects out of habit and braces for the inevitable kick to the ribs, eyes squeezed shut. The heat behind his eyes is scorching and crawling under his skin, the infection on his back finally deciding to run it’s course. The ground under him is wet with sweat and Q is still shivering out of his skin, hands clenched into tight fists against his chest. “It’s Jeremy, godfuckingdammit.”
A hand, strangely cool and familiar, pressed against his cheek and Q doesn’t want to open his eyes because good god, the hallucinations have grown tangible and this is the end, this is really the end.
“Q,” Bond says again, softer this time. “Q will you open your bloody eyes and look at me so I know you’re not dead?”
The world is a haze and Bond’s face refuses to come into focus. They never did give Q his glasses back after that one time with the pen and paper, but Q forces his hand to relax. Raises it to wrap weakly around the base of Bond’s neck because that bastard, Q had planned on dying alone.
“Sorry I’m a bit late.”
“Fuck you,” Q breathes out and before he can tighten his grip, there is a darkness that rushes up to greet him.