A/N for this chapter: Slight 00Q-pairing, pre-slash. Some rude language. Mostly a character study of Bond.

I've been listening to a lot of Discworld-novels lately, and I think a bit of Commander Sam Vimes crept into my characterisation of Commander James Bond here. I'm not sure who Q would be in that world. He's a little too brash and too influential to be Drumknott, but not calculating nor influential enough to be Vetinari.

"Agent provocateur. A person employed to induce others to break the law so they can be convicted" - Oxford English Dictionary

Agent - Provocateur

For the purpose of the operation, Bond was pretending to be a collector. Not the kind who will pay absolutely anything for the oddest little items just for the sheer satisfaction of possessing it, but the kind who collects the sort of things other people will pay him absolutely anything for. He had spent weeks in Johannesburg, cultivating the image of the experienced buyer, the prospector. He was making the right connections and he was slowly catching the interest of the mark. It was a long game. Between his current trip and the preparations that had gone before it, he hadn't seen London in two, almost three, months. Even now, as he stood watching the mark from across the room in the for Bond almost homely environment of a casino, he felt his spirits sink at the thought that it might be another couple of months before he would walk down the Themes under grey skies again.

"Stop fiddling with the glasses, double-O-seven!" came Q's voice over the ether.

Bond lowered his hand from where he had unconsciously moved it.

"I'm not used to wearing them," he muttered, although he had worn them since he left Europe. He already knew full well that he should quell the impulse to touch the glasses too often, and that he could if he actually tried, but the occasional flickering of text on the lenses in front of him was so distracting that it was frustrating. The calm in Q's voice only served to grate his already frayed nerves. Bond liked the man, but he wasn't in the mood to hear other people being calm and carefree.

"You've worn sunglasses, haven't you?" Q went on in the same tone.

"Yes," Bond said, slowly, as if explaining to a particularly annoying child, "but they don't usually send me messages."

Or talk back, Bond thought.

He understood why HQ might want to see what he saw, but why he needed to both receive messages in text and put up with Q's voice in his ear was beyond him. He suspected Q just wanted to show off.

He remembered when Q had demonstrated the glasses. He'd tried them on himself, first, perhaps just to make sure they were actually on before handing them to Bond. When Q had removed his ordinary glasses, instead of merely squinting his eyes had become unfocused, the pattern of their movement separated from the ongoing stream of words that had been passing his lips, as if he'd been completely blinded. Bond had had to fight the urge to wave a hand in front of him. Q's eyes looked uncharacteristically soft when they weren't focusing in intense concentration on a screen, or glaring at Bond from under arched eyebrows.

"You shouldn't be so easily distracted," said Q.

Bond came back to the present, and hummed something that Q could take as agreement or disagreement as best he pleased.

When Bond finally got back to his hotel that evening, after another day of steady but excruciatingly slow progress, it was late. His room couldn't have been renovated in the last forty years, the walls being such a horrible shade of maroon no amount of "retro trends" could have justified it. It made Bond think of some old quote of Oscar Wilde about fighting a duel to the death with his wallpaper. Bond could sympathise. The carpet was plush and deep but smelled of cigarette smoke when he did his push-ups on it. When he turned off the lamp in the ceiling, which was fixed in the middle of a much-needed fan, a little lamp under a burgundy shade on the bedside table struggled to keep all four corners of the bed visible. Reading by that light would have been out of the question, even if Bond had felt like it.

The earpiece and the glasses had both gone dead some time earlier, with neither HQ nor Bond anticipating further action that night. Bond put the glasses on his bedside table as he sat down on the bed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Why was it people thought of technical devices that way: dead or alive, cooperating or not cooperating, being helpful or acting up? They were only tools – useful for some things, less useful for others.

Like you, James.

'So why do you need me?' 'Every now and then, a trigger has to be pulled.'

When Bond began his career in the Service, being sent on a mission meant you'd have to improvise, think on your feet, and make difficult decisions that would affect the outcome of the entire operation without having the luxury of asking HQ for advice and permission first. He had practically been his own little field office: tactician, technician, spy and executive commander, all rolled into one. Judge, jury and executioner, as Felix would say. That was what the double-O meant: that he was trusted to make tough decisions himself, even decisions about when it was or wasn't necessary to kill, and that whatever he decided to do became not just his own actions but the actions of MI6 and of England.

What was he today, with HQ watching him and talking to him every step of the way? A long distance weapon? Someone to send out when people like Q decided a trigger needed to be pulled? A tool. Perhaps not even the sharpest tool in the box, anymore.

To hell with that.

He picked up the glasses again. How did you know they were off? Why hadn't Q explained that? Or had he explained it, and Bond had forgot?

No, stop that. You're not losing your memory. You've just passed forty, not sixty-five, for god's sake. You're letting Q make you feel old, when he can't be more than ten years younger than you. If you can't remember, it's only because you weren't paying attention.

Still. Ten years could be a long time. Enough time to die a hundred times over, in Bond's line of work. Enough time for technology to run away even from someone who'd always proved adept at catching up. It had certainly been enough time for the Service to change beyond recognition. Bond found himself returning to the thought of retirement more and more often, these days. But what would he do if he did retire? Settle down in the countryside and breed sheep? Not bloody likely. Carry on in smaller scale, as a private bodyguard perhaps? What would be the point in that? If he was to be shot down protecting anything, he'd rather it be his country than some rich brat who got daddy to sign Bond's paycheck.

No, he'd carry on in the service until he died, there was no point in denying that. If the prospect didn't thrill the way it once had, well, surely that was only to be expected? If he sometimes found himself thinking "just don't let me become an embarrassment before I go out", what did it matter?

He held up the glasses in front of himself, staring into them as he would if they were mounted on another person. A younger agent. The new model. Whatever they needed these days. Bond wasn't even sure what the MI6 required of him anymore.

"Who are you?" he asked the glasses.

They gleamed in the lamplight, and offered no reply.

"Feeling introspective, Bond?" said a voice in Bond's ear.

Bond flew to his feet before he had a second to think, his hand reaching for the Walther under his arm. His heart had taken up lodgings in his throat and was hammering away there when he gathered his wits about him again.

"Q? What the hell? I thought you left hours ago."

And I had forgotten I was still wearing the earpiece, Bond didn't say, because no good would come of telling Q that. It was enough that Bond's voice teetered on the brink of "obviously shaken". He sat back down on the bed and leant against the headboard.

"I came back out here to check on the emergency connections before I go to bed," Q replied.

Bond's brain immediately got to work with the implications. "Back out here" could only mean the main hall of Q-branch that Q had been speaking from earlier. Yet he had chosen the words "before I go to bed" rather than "before I go home".

"Sleeping at the office, Q?"

"Only these last few days when we've been monitoring the mark, until he makes a move," Q said, not even bothering to deny it.

Where could Q sleep? He had an office down in Q-branch somewhere; Bond was sure he had seen the door, but he had never seen inside it. Was it large enough to hold a sofa bed? Had Q made arrangements for this sort of thing? It was practically part of his job description, after all: problem solving and sorting out the practical arrangements, making sure the equipment every MI6 division needed was where they needed it, when they needed it. No true quartermaster could spend all his time sitting by a laptop, no matter how much damage he could do with it.

"Is there an emergency bed that folds out of the wall in your office," Bond asked, "or hammocks in the armoury perhaps? That could be a nice place to sleep. Perfectly sound proof."

Q laughed. Bond found himself smiling. When he closed his eyes and shut out the room around him he could almost imagine he was back in London, stopping by to talk to the Quartermaster at the end of the day.

"There's just a sofa," Q admitted, "but at least it was selected especially to be comfortable enough to sleep in. Hammocks in the armoury might be a good idea if we ever have to go into lock down, though. Maybe I should ask M for the funds."

"I'm sure he'd appreciate the foresight," Bond said, still smiling.

"If he doesn't, I'll just tell him it was your idea," Q replied.

They were both silent for a moment. Earlier, when the operation had been in full swing, Q's silences had been filled with the noises of people walking, conversation being carried out in the background, and keyboards being typed on. Now, Bond could hear Q's breaths, slow and steady.

"Are you alone?" he asked.

The breathing stopped.

With the slow reactions only a bone-deep tiredness could cause in him, Bond realised what a line like that could be construed as in this context. What it usually was meant to be construed as if it came from him.

"The building's never empty," was the reply when it came, and then, perhaps because Q remembered that Bond knew that already, "but down here, yes. Cook will be here in a few minutes to monitor what needs monitoring overnight, but he's not back from his dinner yet."

Q's voice was studiously flat. It held no innuendo, no disapproval, no hints of any kind.

Bond considered his choices. He could end the call with a simple "good night then, Q". He could carefully test the waters for something else by asking if Q was annoyed to be kept from his bed. He couldn't say, shouldn't say, "will you please talk to me until he comes back, because your voice is better than the ones in my head," but part of him wanted to.

That made up his mind.

"Don't let me keep you then," he said.

Q's breathing was steady again. Bond imagined him leaning over his little podium in the empty hall, hall in darkness. He wasn't sure why he imagined it to be dark. It could be flooded in light for all he knew. Q breathed in, and out, and in ...

"I should say a few words to Cook when he gets here, either way," Q said.

In his relief and in an impulse to keep up the conversation, Bond rather embarrassingly found himself asking what the weather was like in London. Instead of remarking on the trite and predictable choice of subject, however, Q quickly launched into a tirade about unrelenting rain, hints of sleet, and winds that had no business being so cold at this time of year, and ...

"... I really just wish I was there with you."

Q went abruptly quiet, remained so for a second, then blurted out: "I mean ... You know what I mean. Because of the weather. Obviously."

Yes, it had been obvious. That unfortunately hadn't stopped the image of Q's lanky body stretched out on the bed beside him from forming in Bond's head.

"I'm sure the weather would be glad to have you," Bond's said before he could stop himself. He almost bit his tongue, but Q laughed again. It sounded a little bit strained, but that could have been the late hour and nothing more.

"Sometimes, Bond, I can't believe you're real."

Before Bond could ask if that was a compliment or an insult, a door clicked and he heard footsteps.

"Here's my replacement," Q said. With relief or with regret, Bond wondered?

"Good night then, Q," he said out loud this time.

"Eight o'clock tomorrow, your time," said Q, indicating the time the glasses would have to go back on Bond's nose. He realised he was still holding them, and placed them back on the table.

"Yes, I remember," he said.

"Good. Good night."

The line went dead. After a moment of silence, Bond took out the earpiece and put it down beside the glasses.

Tools, he thought. Tools of communication, connecting him to London. No more being the lone gunman. Perhaps he could learn to live with that.