Work Text:
Q comes from a long line of obsessive people. It could be a need for a chemical, a fixation on a puzzle, or a compulsive need for a distraction of any sort. He is no different.
Q comes from a long line of brilliant people. The minds of his family are exceptional. Their thoughts whirl and twist and make connections that are so devastating, so exceptional. He is no different.
These two qualities often drive people to ruin. Q’s eldest brother works himself to exhaustion, fuels his body with caffeine, tyramine, tryotophan, and cannabinoids, artificially creating the sensations of happiness that he lacks in his busy life. His other brother was worse – his brilliance is abstract and overbearing. Drugs, neurotic work, and starvation are only a few of the attempts he uses to quiet his mind. Their mother shot her brains out onto the hand printed paper in the parlor to ease the clatter of thoughts bouncing off each other.
Q had similar problems. He was no different than the rest of his family, really. He had worked relentlessly at his job until he had climbed to the top of the ladder.
Now, he had nowhere to go. Monotonous was not something employees of MI6 usually described their days as.
Then there was Skyfall. Q had a few wonderful, blissful hours of mental stimulation. The atrophy that had begun to set in his mind was burned away as neurons fired and neurotransmitters danced. Now, though, Silva was dead, which was fortunate in a ‘world peace’ sort of way, but also meant that the only intellectual and technological equal that Q has come across in the last ten years was dead, too. He felt guilty for feeling remorse for the end of a brilliant mind – he wasn’t heartless, Q’s loyalties were strong – but he had been outclassed, if only for a day.
Q returned to his morose state. He went to MI6 to alleviate boredom, returned home to alleviate boredom, and then returned to MI6 again.
Except this morning, there was something new for him in Q Branch. He walked up to the boxes piled in the tech station and peered inside of one. The computers from Silva’s island stared back.
Q comes from a long line of people hard put to find distractions in the dull world that surrounds them.
But now he had a distraction. Q has a marvelous distraction.