Chapter Text
“Bond? What are you doing here?”
“Good morning, Q.”
“I thought you'd gone.”
“I have. There's just one thing I need.”
Q doesn’t even have to ask. He knows what Bond is here for. It is just a car, he tells himself. But that is a lie. The cigar is never just a cigar. The Aston Martin is metal and leather, yes, but also shared laughter in the quiet after hours when everyone else has gone home and it is just Quartermaster and 007, Val and James, talking about everything and nothing. When they’d met on that bench in the National Gallery, Bond had been a wreck of a man, but a grand wreck.
And after Silva, well, he’d been a wreck too. All the hours spent under the bonnet were not just about piecing the car back together.
So of course Val will give James the car, because they are friends. At least, he thought they were friends, thought that Bond knew him better than anyone else. But there is nothing friendly in the flat blue gaze. If not friend, then why friend shaped? Val thinks somewhat hysterically but that is the point, after all. Of course Bond knew him. Bond always knew his marks.
There is a long moment of silence. Bond’s mouth twists, like the proverbial knife in Val’s gut. He tries to smile back, but thinks it must look more like the crack in his heart blooming across his face. He had told himself that it was the two of them working in tandem, co-conspirators, every time Bond asked him to go off mission, to give him more. Val had so desperately wanted to be known, to be needed, and Bond had simply filled in the blank spaces. But he should have known, Bond is not a ship in need of a tow to the shore. Bond is the ocean, fathomless and cold, which rolls in like a wave to sweep fools off their feet.
“Do you love her?” Val should not ask. But the words spill out of his wounded mouth into the growing space between them. He could stand being left for love, he thinks. He knows that is not what this thing between Bond and Dr. Swann is, not really, but hopes Bond will lie to him. Allow him the illusion that he is being set adrift because Madeleine matters, not simply because he does not. Bond shrugs.
“Does it matter?” Yes. No. The answer is of the greatest importance. The answer changes nothing. Bond is the ocean, and the answer will not stop the tide from rolling out and away.
He hopes Dr. Swann knows how to swim.
♥ 🀢 ♥
Val knows he is not easy to love.
Even as a child, he is very easy to like. He is confident without being condescending. He is frighteningly brilliant but not precious about it. What saves him from being labeled a snob, a fate so common to genius children, is his stubborn dedication to righteousness over rules. He doesn’t hesitate to go toe to toe with teachers and administrators who he believes are acting unjustly. He is well-liked enough, in a general sort of way. He has plenty of easy acquaintanceships.
But he is not easy to love. Val is quite particular about many things that get him labeled as “picky” and “peculiar.” He doesn’t care about footie, doesn’t bother watching Grange Hill, he doesn’t listen to East 17. He has subscriptions to all sorts of odd periodicals and a habit of getting too excited about esoteric topics that not even his teachers fully comprehend. He is always welcome to study groups but never invited to the weekend parties.
The summer he turns 15 he stays with his aunt in Cornwall. It’s the first year he develops a mortifyingly confusing crush on a boy in his class and adds “gay” to his internal running list of all the things that make him different from his peers. He doesn’t tell anyone - his da and mum would likely lose the plot - but his aunt has always been able to see right through him.
She took him out to gather Kea plums, a fruit that only grows in orchards along the Fal River, where it's said the pits dropped by Portuguese sailors in the 1730s landed and took root. An act of chance or fate? No matter. She tells him, “You canno’ pick the plums, Percival, you have to harvest them with shakes. The first shake must be left out. Those plums are not good. Takes four shakes to harvest the best plums.”
They bring home their haul, and set to work chopping them and pouring them into a large copper pot. Their tart flesh makes them unsuited for eating raw, but the high pectin content makes them excellent for jam, his aunt explains as she bring them to a boil, then lets them simmer. She tells him, “Some plums are sweet n’easy to eat. These take work. But they are hardy, and make excellent jam in the right hands.”
He thinks his aunt is telling him that it is okay to be, well, different, but what he hears is that he needs to temper himself, to make himself more palatable.
That summer, Val reads John Keats and Anne Sexton and Pablo Neruda. He recites his favorite to his aunt, the one that makes him smile with its cheekiness -
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
"This is just to say" by William Carlos William
Val will be headed off to Cambridge in the fall, and his aunt won’t be alive next summer but he does not know that and so he eats her jam and writes haikus in the margins of his books and tells himself he will find his people, he will find a place he belongs.
♥ 🀢 ♥
Val meets Major Boothroyd in his second year at uni. His work is already getting noticed, and Major Boothroyd is nothing if not a keen judge of character. By his third year, his research is getting published, and he is being invited to conferences. Major Boothroyd is honest with him from the start - Val is going to be offered highly respected positions in academia, and highly lucrative positions in the private sector. Public service can offer neither the kind of notoriety nor money he could find elsewhere, but it can offer challenge and purpose. Val already knows where he is headed before he begins his second PhD.
Once he signs the paperwork and gives his life over to Queen and Country, it becomes clear fairly quickly that Val is being groomed to take over the Branch when the Major retires. And while he certainly would never turn down this opportunity, it sets him apart from his peers. He won’t be invited to pub quiz night or weekend rugby matches. But Val never expected to be included that way, and you can’t really miss what you never had.
By his second year, he is Q in all but title. Major Boothroyd stays on, a defacto vote of confidence for the soon-to-be youngest Quartermaster in MI6 history. It’s a sad irony that an explosion at headquarters is what solidifies Val’s position. It becomes clear in the aftermath who is in charge of the Branch, and the Major happily retires and hands over the reigns officially.
New Q appears from the outside to be unbothered and unflappable. He deftly outmaneuvers those tetchy executives who think he’s too green and diplomatically dismisses the self-serving politicians who try to curry his favor for an in at MI6. His team in Q Branch already had the measure of the man and rallied behind him immediately. And with the absolute shit show M is dealing with following the explosion, dragging her to odd-hour meetings at Downing Street, it was deemed necessary for the Quartermaster to take a more active role in managing the double-0s.
As recalcitrant as the double-0s are, it doesn’t take any of them long to realize that Val cares more about them safely completing their objectives than strictly adhering to policy. He follows rules when they are logical and lead to the best outcomes. He conveniently forgets them if they don’t.
“The Lawful Good,” he tells 004 after a particularly hairy mission where he breaks at least three international laws to bring her back to British soil, “do not survive at MI6.”
This endears him to agents rather quickly. That doesn’t mean he hesitates to dress them down if they’ve earned it, but frankly, this only endears him more. A bunch of certifiable masochists. He’s even working on 006, who is the most difficult to coax into compliance because they’ve only communicated a handful of times and never with faces to their names with the agent’s deep cover mission.
But Trevelyan isn't rude, as 001 had been, or patronizing like 008. He is just, well, skittish, and Val can't blame him for that. He is a bit worried at the frequency and duration of the missions the man is sent out with less support than he threatens the other agents with when they misbehave. Val has vowed to see changes made to the policies around long-term deep cover missions.
In the end, he thinks it is his concern over Trevelyan that made Bond start to treat him with a modicum of respect. But it's probably his willingness to bend the rules that makes them what Val had thought of as friends.
Not such a clever boy, indeed.
Never mind that. He will continue to drag MI6 into the brave new world, kicking and screaming if necessary. He will continue to make sure his Branch is as removed from the political machinations as possible. He will build smarter weapons, stronger firewalls, better systems for gathering Intel. And starting now, he will bring 006 back in from the cold, and make sure no double-0 is treated as Trevelyan has been.
And he will never again be so stupid as to forget that he is easier to use than he is to love.
♥ 🀢 ♥
It is well past midnight and Q has sent home his team after they manage to guide 002 out of a rather tight spot. He wants nothing more than a good cry, a shower and a nap, in that order, but 009 will be online in less than an hour. Another Cup Noodles it is, then, and time to switch to coffee. Suddenly a message pops up on the secure TSS network.
♞006: Are the rumors true then?
Q knows what Trevelyan is asking. He knows enough about the history between 006 and 007 to know the men are close. Whatever “close” means to either of them he really can't begin to guess, he thinks darkly.
♚Q: This is MI6. The entire organization runs on rumors and alcoholism. You will need to be more specific with your request for information.
♞006: Did Bond really do a runner again?
It is a simple answer. Yes, he is gone. Along with my car, and god knows how much of my “lost” tech, and my sense of propriety, and worst of all pieces of my heart. He is gone .
♞006: Q?
♚Q: Confirmed.
♞006: Oi.
♞006: Well, never mind. The wanker will go find a beach to get drunk on for a while. Always his way when he wants to try and wash the blood off of his hands.
♞006: The man is a bad penny glued to the back of a cockroach.
♞006: Believe me. He’ll turn up.
Q sighs and sets aside his Cup Noodles. He finds he is not very hungry anymore.
♚Q: 006, I have you booked for a flight into London tomorrow at 0430. Please do not try and smuggle a flame thrower onto the plane. I look forward to meeting you in person.
♞006: You are no fun, mate.
♞006: But thank you, Quartermaster. See you soon.