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It’s a mission in Hanoi and the problem is, Q’s blind.
“Hang in there a moment,” Q says. “There’s something blocking my system.”
“What?” A sudden spray of gunfire erupts from Bond’s end, and then there’s a muttered, “I’m a sitting duck out here, Q. I need you to get me out.”
Q’s fingers are flying across the keys. It’s strange to have a borrowed window into Bond’s world – the shouting, the splintering sound of smashed glass, the curious, rattling shock of each gunshot – without being able to see exactly who is shouting, where the glass is coming from, who Bond is shooting at.
Gradually – insidiously – over the weeks, a dark fear has snuck deep into the marrow of Q’s bones. Even with his cameras up and working, Q would still feel blind.
“Q, get me out,” Bond says again. His voice is steady but strained.
“Alright,” Q says. “I just – you’re in room 254.”
“Yes.”
“You need to get yourself to the other side of the building. If you get onto the window ledge in the sitting room, you should be able to follow that around to a fire escape on the left.”
Q should not be like this. And it was not like this in the very beginning. Once upon a time this was as easy as chess – you move here, I unlock this door for you, you go that way. Voila. But now there is white noise every time Q tries to think and it’s as if he’s the one being chased about a hotel, heartbeat in his throat.
“I’m not going to let you die,” Q says, then thinks: I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud.
“Quiet,” Bond says. Q can hear the shrill whistle of altitude. “No distractions right now, please.”
Twenty-four seconds later and Q is back online. The camera feeds flicker, one by one by one, into life on the monitor before him. There Bond is: a tiny, poised figure inching along the side of the hotel like a beetle. If Q reached out he could smear Britain’s most prized secret agent under one thumb.
Bond makes it. Of course he does. Q lets out a breath, and then another – he’s almost gasping.
“Alright, I’m in the corridor,” Bond says. “You’re allowed to be irrelevant now.”
“The package should be two doors away on your left,” Q says.
“I hope you’re sure,” Bond says.
Q checks the monitors. Bond should know better than to ask a question like that. “Close enough.”
“Then I’m going in.”
After that bloodbath – they’ll be fishing bodies out of the Red River for months – Q puts Bond onto a direct flight to London, arriving tomorrow. He checks what’s going in and out of the Vietnamese embassy. He runs a few scans. He goes to the bathroom and dry-retches into a sink. He comes back. He puts the finishing touches on a handgun design he’s been working on for the past week.
All in a day’s work.
--
Q has started to vacillate. He has been made aware of this over the slow, wary trickle of months: the peaks and troughs becoming more and more self-evident.
When Bond is in London everything is simple. Breakfast. Coffee. Work. Lunch. The snatch of a phone call on a bathroom break, or maybe Bond is in the training room working himself well beyond where an ordinary man would have said, alright, that’s enough now, stop. Q comes home in the afternoons like the strain of a song moving to its chorus. A wordless melody patters inside him. His happiness feels inevitable; like something already pre-contracted, a foregone conclusion.
But there are places where Q cannot follow.
A murky, fast-moving river in Goa. A dirt-studded plain in Uzbekistan.
Contrary to popular opinion, Q is not omniscient – he can’t cover the entire globe. There are and always will be blind spots. There are places where even the mighty Q is in the dark.
Moneypenny sets a mug of tea on his desk like a peace offering. “He’s out on a mission again?”
Everybody can see it. Even Q can see it.
When Bond is gone Q is a man transformed.
--
Bond sets the teaspoon down. It makes a neat chink against the side of his cup. Bond is still looking down at the paper in his lap but Q can tell that he has Bond’s full attention now: immediate, scalding.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Q says.
Bond folds one corner of the paper down.
“I don’t even know what this is,” Q says. “What is this, exactly? It wasn’t in the job description. I’m fairly sure I’m not supposed to care, beyond a certain rudimentary level, whether you get hacked to pieces or not on the faraway steppes of Siberia.”
“Don’t let M hear you saying that,” Bond says.
“You’re an investment,” Q says. “And not even with my money. I’m not supposed to be attached.”
Bond closes the paper. It’s a clean, precise movement, and it makes Q want to touch him and edge away from him at the same time.
“You’re thinking too much.”
“Well somebody out of the two of us has to do it,” Q says. “And since it isn’t going to be you, it might as well be me. This isn’t going to work in the long run. Bond, I’m not like you. I can’t disassociate from things at will. I can’t shag you one week and watch you getting shot at in the next. I’m not – ” He huffs out a breath of air, frustrated. “I just can’t do it.”
“You don’t trust me not to get myself killed.”
“It’s not as simple as that, stop trying to make it sound simple,” Q snaps.
Bond looks at him, steady. “I can take care of myself.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. A stray shot could do it. A piece of shrapnel. A fall from the wrong kind of building. And the way that you drive, I wouldn’t be surprised – ”
“Q,” Bond says.
“I think we should stop,” Q says. “I think we should just – stop.”
They sit there and watch each other.
“That isn’t going to solve a single thing,” Bond says, eventually.
“I was fine before this happened,” Q says. “I was operational. I could walk you through a mission without breaking into a cold sweat. I could hand you your plane tickets without wanting to tear them to pieces and set fire to them. I know exactly what’s happening here. And I know this is the way to fix it.”
“But you just said it yourself. You can’t disassociate from things at will.”
Q shrugs. “Out of sight, out of mind. This will work.”
A beat passes.
“Alright,” Bond says at last. Q looks on as the blue eyes grow stony and cold; it’s the front that James Bond presents to an enemy. “If that’s what you’d like. I can have my things out of your place by this afternoon.”
“Okay,” Q says, and lets out a breath. “That would be nice.”
--
Q pulls out his earphones. “It’s a bit early in the morning for – ”
“Where has he gone,” Moneypenny says.
Q busies himself in stirring the sugar into his tea. He makes a show of sipping it, very slowly. Moneypenny is sitting on several important documents and Q is trying to work out a way of getting them out from underneath her without having to answer questions.
“He just upped and left, yesterday evening,” Moneypenny says, in that no-nonsense way of hers when she’s talking business. “I hope you didn’t provoke him into doing something stupid.”
“He doesn’t really need provoking for that,” Q says.
Moneypenny sighs. Her face, unexpectedly, softens. “Did something happen?”
“My washing machine broke down.”
“Q,” Moneypenny says. She takes the mug out of his hand and sets it firmly behind her back. “I’m not going to pry into something that’s not my business. But what is my business is making sure that M doesn’t have a heart attack today because his best agent’s just disappeared off the map, without notice, without any indication of where he’s gone or what he’s doing.”
“I think he just needs some time to himself,” Q says, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. “He’ll come back.”
“How can you be sure?”
Q isn’t sure. Q has never been sure of anything. The moment he thinks he’s pinned James Bond down – this is who he is, finally, finally – the game changes.
“You’re sitting on the prototype for our first ever exploding envelope,” Q says.
Moneypenny just looks at him.
--
It isn’t empty. Not by a long shot. But then for some reason it doesn’t quite feel like home, either.
--
Bond sat down at his table; an inelegant, sideways lurch into the wicker.
Q paused with a forkful of egg halfway to his mouth.
“Q,” Bond said. He looked paler than usual. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to interrupt your lunch.”
“You’re meant to be in Cairo,” Q said.
“I am still in Cairo,” Bond said. “If you know what I mean.”
Q put his fork back down. He took the napkin from his lap and wiped his fingers, just for something to do. Bond was sitting strangely, as if to cradle one side. There was a single spot of blood on his collar.
“You’re shot,” Q said, feeling the dread drop into his stomach.
“You have excellent deductive skills,” Bond said.
Q took him back to his own apartment, because it was the only half-secure place he could think of while put on the spot. He turned the hall lights on. He sat Bond down in the sitting room. Then he realised what a bad idea this was the moment Bond took off his jacket.
They managed like that – Q with the first aid kit, Bond with his teeth gritted and not saying a word.
“Thank-you,” Bond said afterwards.
“You’re welcome,” Q said, feeling oddly formal, and washed the blood out from under his nails.
A part of him whispered, though he hadn’t listened to it at the time:
You could’ve prevented this.
--
A body has been dredged up in the Yangtze River. Unidentified white male. Nothing to be alarmed about – these things happen every day – but Q is alarmed. It’s a sudden, blind sort of feeling. It’s terrifying.
He tucks the article away underneath several large and formidable-looking files.
That afternoon he accidentally deletes a blueprint he’s been working on for the past month.
This is not right. This is not the correct way of things. Q is the disembodied voice, the objective viewer on the side-lines with the map and compass; he is not involved. Q survives on distance. A grenade going off is just decibels across a communication line. A derailed train in Kuala Lumpur takes second place to the fact that, once again, Q has left his umbrella at home in the middle of a thunderstorm.
An agent’s last breath doesn’t touch him. A bullet going through somebody’s skull doesn’t hurt.
“I think you should take a day off,” Moneypenny says, peering into his face.
“I’m alright,” Q says. He scrubs at his eyes. “Just a bit tired.”
The truth of the matter is, Q’s ribcage feels as hollow as it did on the day that his parents died.
--
Q drops his grocery bags on the floor. Then he remembers that one of them contains a carton of eggs.
“Shit fucking shit,” Q says. “You just made me – what are you doing?”
Bond doesn’t look too much the worse for wear. At least he doesn’t, in Q’s opinion, look as if he’s just crawled out of a river. Bond looks the way he always does at home – a little out of place. You can’t miss it when Bond walks into a room. He seems to draw all the heat away from the air, strip the oxygen out of it.
“I’m missing a Smith and Wesson,” Bond says. “You haven’t seen it, by any chance?”
Q just stares at him.
“I might have left it taped to the kitchen cupboard,” Bond says.
“Oh,” Q says.
Bond drops a used towel back into the basket, closes it. “That was my subtle attempt to get you to check the cupboard, Q. In case it slipped your notice.”
“Oh,” Q says, again.
Q goes and opens a cupboard. He closes it again. Something inside him is loud, confused, clamouring for his attention. His heartbeat is up in his ears. There is mould underneath the sink – there is always, always mould – he picks at a bit of it distractedly with his nail.
What Q would really like right now is to be able to breathe.
“I’ve found it,” Q says at last. He straightens up. “This is one of mine, isn’t it? Coded to you?”
Bond nods and holds out a hand. “That’s the one.”
Q remembers Bond’s palms on his hipbones, holding him down. Q remembers the heavy, savage whisper in the air between them that night: you’re coded to me now, too. You’re mine.
“007,” Q says, then stops. “No. That isn’t right. James.”
Bond waits.
Q sighs and drops the gun into his palm. “Here. Take it. Where are you going to go?”
“Not sure yet,” Bond says. “Hopefully a place where people aren’t waiting to shoot at me.”
“James,” Q says again.
Bond’s fingers catch Q’s wrist. A shock of something goes right up Q’s arm, skates along his nerves and through his spinal cord and almost makes him choke. Before he even understands it he’s reeling forwards. Bond’s mouth meets his midway, crushes him back against the fridge – all those pesky fridge magnets digging into Q’s back – Q scrabbles to get a hold on Bond’s shoulders, can’t help the low noise that scrapes out of his throat when Bond bites his lip.
“This is going to be a disaster,” Q finds himself saying.
“No,” Bond says. “No, it really isn’t.”
--
He goes out onto his balcony. Normally, Q avoids this place like the plague. After years of designing sniper sights Q isn’t all that keen to provide a clean shot. But it’s quiet, and the city is laid out like a flickering map: this is the world that Q has his sights on, this fluttering, opaque, transient world that he can make or destroy with a single keystroke.
Bond had said it, once: The difference between you and Silva, Q, is that nobody has betrayed you yet.
“Thinking again?”
Q turns away from the view. “Trying to get away from you, actually. You’re making it very difficult.”
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Bond says. “I can’t remember who said that. But I don’t think it was me.”
There’s something like a smile in Bond’s voice. Q wants to kick him.
Q also wants to kiss him, hard.
“I can’t remember who said that either,” Q says. “But they were probably being very stupid at the time.”
“It’s not stupid to be afraid,” Bond says.
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” Bond moves to stand beside him, elbows on the balcony rail. “But you can’t protect everybody you love. I’ve tried, before. It doesn’t work that way.” There is a neat bite-mark on the side of Bond’s neck; Q drags his eyes away from it. “It isn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just what happens.”
For a moment, they both look out. The moon is small and coy, just a cream-coloured slash in the sky. A traffic light blinks from red, to orange, to green. A bird somewhere trills.
“It does get easier,” Bond says at last.
“Yes,” Q says.
The city below sleeps on.