Inspired by the lovely art/comic drawn by brilcrist on Tumblr. You can see it here: post/36105468259/00q-comic-part-01-for-channeling-my-anger

Skyfall is not my property or anything. Also I haven't really edited this, just banged it out because Thanksgiving Break is upon us and I had nothing better to do.

I.

The first thing he thinks is, I should have expected this sooner or later.

The second thing is, Where the hell is Bond?

Q hides in the corner of a cold, damp tunnel deep below the newly repaired MI6 offices, and not for the first time, he considers quitting and doing something normal, like teaching. Teachers don't get threatened with guns. At least not in England.

Not that Q hasn't got his own gun. He does have one, tucked away in his pocket just in case he's found. He doesn't like using guns, though. There's something uncivilized about shooting holes in people, and Q would rather stick to the cleanliness of computers. Shooting people is Bond's job, and Q is more than happy to keep his hands from getting dirty.

Except Bond isn't here.

And Q finds this rather inconvenient, because if Bond doesn't show up sooner or later he'll have to use the gun himself, and he is better with computers than with weapons.

He checks his watch.

It's been ten minutes.

Bond is late. Again.

He pulls his knees up to his chest and listens. He is thankful for a few things: that he's wearing a sweater, which keeps him warm even though cold water is started to seep in through the back, and his glasses aren't broken.

Unlike his favorite coffee mug, which shattered into hundreds of pieces upon impact with the floor.

He can always get a new coffee mug. He can't get a new body. He must remember that.

He listens to the dripping of water, and waits.

II.

Bond is having a day off.

There are few days off for agents, but Bond has found himself in-between missions with nothing to do except test out new weapons that Q plans on giving him, which is fun. Bond likes weapons. Sometimes he thinks he'll be happy with a simple gun, but then Q gives him a bomb that will only respond to his fingerprints, or some other piece of equally complicated technology, and Bond can't help but feel like it's Christmas.

After all, why have a handgun when you could have a device that shoots bullets out of your watch, programmed to your DNA?

A statement, Q had called it.

Bond is at the bar when he sees the news reports of a terrorist attack on the MI6 building. Not an explosion, this time, but an infiltration. He can be there in five minutes.

And his day was going so well. He hasn't even finished his martini.

When he arrives, gun drawn, it's to an eerily empty building. He heads down to Q's lair. It's a lair because it feels like one, with no windows and everyone working round the clock on things that could destroy the world, had Q the mind to do it.

However, even these people are gone. In fact, Q, who never leaves, is gone, and Bond knows something has gone terribly wrong when he sees torn wires. Q would never let anyone destroy his tech. He loves his tech the way Bond loves sex, which is quite a lot. It's unforgivable, to destroy it.

And then he sees Q's Q mug, lying in shattered pieces on the floor.

"Fuck," he hisses.

He grabs his head-piece and turns it on, hearing only static. "Can anyone read me?" he asks.

A pause. Then, "007?" Q's voice, hushed but alive.

"You're wired in," Bond says, a bit surprised.

"I'm always wired in," Q snaps. "Never know when you'll get into trouble. By the way, you're late."

Bond rushes out of the room, gun drawn, but keeps talking. "I'm not late," he says, "you've just got no concept of time. And may I remind you it's my day off."

"Not anymore."

"Are you insinuating that no one else can get you out of this mess?"

"No." A pause. "Everyone evacuated. I stayed behind to put some final touches on the security for certain items that must absolutely stay within the grasp of MI6. And what were you doing?"

"Having a drink." Bond enters a hallway. The lights are all on, which is good. "Where are you?"

"In the sewers," Q answers, sounding not at all pleased. "I'm freezing."

"I'm coming down."

A sigh. Bond is surprised he hasn't come across anyone yet.

"I'm reconsidering my career in espionage," Q says, after a moment. Bond laughs, because Q reconsiders his career every week, especially when there's flying involved, but he never leaves. "Maybe I'll become a maths teacher."

"You said teaching is boring," Bond points out.

"Teachers don't need guns."

Bond turns a corner and sucks in a sharp breath; the body of one of Q's employees is slumped against the wall, and a great deal of blood has leaked onto the floor.

"What was that?" Q asks.

"Body," Bond says. "You've lost one of your pets."

"Just a normal day at work, then," Q says, but Bond can hear the slight shake of his voice.

"Do you have any idea what these terrorists want?"

"I can't say."

Bond turns another corner. Never has MI6 felt so menacing before.

"I think we should relocate to the Tower of London, you know," Q says, voice even quieter.

"Why's that?"

"Because it's underground. No one would ever look there. I mean, did anyone attack us when we were there last time? No. Besides, it's symbolic."

"Of what, Q?"

"Don't you know anything about the Tower of London?"

Bond is about to say that no, he doesn't, because he hasn't spent his free time studying history of all things, when he hears a noise.

"Bond?" Q sounds nervous, because there's no way Bond would let his previous comment slide.

Silence. Then—

BANG!

Bond ducks to the side as a second gunshot rings out. It's coming from the direction he'd been headed in.

A third shot lands centimeters away from his head.

"Fuck," he says.

And then, from Q: "Bond, I think they've found me." Calm, collected.

Bond runs towards the gunshots.

III.

Q might be trained in the arts of espionage, or something, just because it's a job requirement to work for MI6 even if you're just the computer nerd who runs everything from behind the scenes, but that doesn't make up for the fact that he's young and skinny and wears glasses and hates getting his hands dirty. That doesn't mean he won't fight, it just means that he won't be as good as Bond.

It doesn't surprise him that he shoots his gun at the masked men who spot him, hits one and misses the other, and then has the gun knocked out of his hand. And then the man grabs him, and tears his sweater which is just rude because that was a Christmas gift and then the man shoves him against the wall. And Q can't escape because the man's twice his size. And there are two other men with guns behind him, and Q's lost his own gun.

He can only hope Bond is on top of his game.

"Has anyone ever told you that breaking and entering is rude?" he asks the masked man in front of him.

The man snaps, "Cuff him," and the other two men who aren't wounded manage to cuff Q's hands together. And then one takes off his glasses and steps on them. Now they're all blurry. That doesn't matter, either, because they blindfold him.

"What's going on?" Q asks, because he fully expected to be dead by now.

"Do not be impatient," the man in front of him says, and he feels the other two men grab him, and his feet find solid ground again. "Now walk, or I will shoot you in the head."

It's an easy choice, really.

Q walks.

Somehow they don't realize that Q is still wired in to the system. Somehow they haven't noticed his earpiece yet.

"Where are you taking me?" Q asks.

"He has an earpiece," the man next to him says. Q sighs and the earpiece is ripped out. So much for that.

But as Q is marched out of the building, and down into the sewers, he knows that he has a small radio transmitter in his trouser pocket, and if Bond figures out how to use his computers, he should be able to track Q's location no matter where he is.

The problem is, Bond using computers.

The problem is, Q isn't going to get rescued.

As they walk, Q starts to think of a Plan B.

IV.

In the end, Bond doesn't find anything except for crushed glasses and an earpiece that no longer works. He's angry, because they got away, and they took his Quartermaster.

Nobody is allowed to kill Q except for Bond, and only if Q messes up really badly. Or is a pain in the ass for extended periods of time.

He knows nothing about these terrorists. He knows nothing about where they might be hiding. He doesn't know what they want. He doesn't have a link to Q.

He could go home. Instead he walks back up to Q's headquarters and powers up the computer because there has to be something.

He ignores the agents that file into the office hours later, when everything has been cleared. He is searching, but not finding. Q was always better at this. He looks at video feeds of the terrorists, of their methods of getting past MI6 security, of the deaths of several agents at their hands.

Bond wishes he could just shoot the computer, but shooting computers generally doesn't solve problems.

He wonders how Q gets by with all of this mind-work. Shooting people is so much easier.

V.

They never take the blindfold off. They never state their names. They never state their final intentions. It is never the same person who questions him.

They keep him tied to a chair, and they don't feed him, though sometimes they give him water, and it's cold. They don't let him sleep. They have a thing attached to his hand that sends electric currents up his body at their whim, which is often. It hurts. Q names the thing The Bond Machine, because it's as irritating as Bond on a bad day.

Q knows what they want. They keep asking him how to hack into MI6's computers. They want access to the government. They want access to information on all of Great Britain's leaders. They want to take over, though for what reason, Q isn't quite sure.

Right now they're doing a great job. Except for one thing:

The only person who has access to all of the information to bring down the British Government is Q. They've succeeded in capturing him.

But Q isn't going to say a word.

They're wasting they're time.

They haven't even offered him tea. They've destroyed his mug. His sweater is ruined. His gun is probably on the floor of the sewers somewhere. He's cold, tired, hungry, and in pain. His glasses are smashed. He's pretty sure someone slapped him at some point. They took away his earpiece and tied him to a chair. An uncomfortable chair.

Needless to say, Q is very displeased. And he is not agreeable when displeased.

So when they ask him for information, or even (at one point) put a computer in front of him so he can type out the codes, Q refuses. He is more than capable of reciting everything from memory; in fact, his memory is where everything is kept. He can type blindfolded, certainly. But he isn't going to give up.

Bond is late, as usual.

So Q waits. And waits. And waits.

On the week mark he yells at his captor, "Aren't you going to bring me tea? You've broken my favorite coffee mug; the least you could do is give me some Earl Grey!"

Stony silence.

When they next come, Q snaps, "For the love of god, if you can't figure it out yourself you're not fit to be running the country."

He recognizes the irony of this; the British government couldn't unravel Q's work to save their lives. Still, he likes insulting his captors, even if it gets him shocked and, on more than one occasion, slapped.

At some point, someone pours freezing water over him, and he yells, "You owe me a new sweater!"

His sweater clings to him, icy against his skin, which he is sure has ceased to give off an acceptable amount of heat.

His captors leave him alone sometimes, and this is when he waits for Bond.

And this is when he wonders whether he should get a new job.

And then he realizes that he's being stupid, because he knew this would happen. He accepted the job, and all of its risks. He's the youngest Quartermaster MI6 has ever had but that doesn't mean he's naïve. He knew.

Well, he thinks, at least it's over with now.

And he waits.

VI

Bond enlists the help of several computer geeks (his terms, not theirs) to figure out a way to find Q. Meanwhile Bond spends the rest of his time keeping an eye out in London for any suspicious activities. Sometimes he searches the sewers. It is suspicious that the terrorist came, took Q, and didn't come back, but Bond knows what that means. They wanted Q.

This shouldn't be surprising, but is. Most of the time Bond considers Q an annoying pain in the ass who happens to supply him with good weaponry and is occasionally helpful at finding things on the computer that Bond could have found on his own given a little more time and a little less nagging. He's young and he looks like one of those ridiculous hipsters who frequent the coffee shops with their laptops and sketchbooks, except Q doesn't actually know what a hipster is and Bond is surprised that he himself knows.

In other words, Bond has sort of forgotten that Q knows how to destroy the British government in under five minutes, and that he's the only one in MI6 with that sort of information. And that makes him Important.

And that makes Bond realize that the terrorist group is smart, as well. Most terrorists would go after the agents, not the quartermaster, but this group has realized that the quartermaster is the one with the information and the agents are merely there to protect that information. Bond likes to think he knows a lot about MI6, but he also has to admit (grudgingly) that Q knows a lot more than him.

Q has been his quartermaster for a year, and Bond isn't ready to lose him yet.

At one point, Q's co-workers manage to track him down. He's under London, still, but in a completely different area of the city.

He's under the Tower of London, which was evacuated when MI6 left to return to their rightful place further east down the river. It remained that way just in case the vacant space needed to be used again.

Bond hates irony, sometimes.

VII.

Eight days and Q hasn't got his cup of tea, nor has he got a new mug, nor has he been given a blanket, though he sorely needs one. He also needs sleep. And a vacation. He might ask M for a vacation to somewhere in Spain. He can travel by train, which is nice, because planes are not for him.

The cuffs have rubbed his wrists raw, and Q knows that he can't get his hands free without breaking something. He also knows that if he gets his hands free he can untie himself from the chair.

He also knows that for approximately two hours the guard leaves him alone, at night. He assumes it's night, at least.

On the eighth night, Q plans his escape.

It's not so much a plan as an, "I'm going to try this one thing and I really hope it works." Bond has gotten by on less, so Q hopes that some of the Badass Super-Secret Agentness has rubbed off.

When the guards leave for that two hour stretch, Q does something he would never do were he not trapped underground by terrorists. He manages to break his thumb, dislocating it in the process. He learned about this in training, but never thought he would use it. Which was stupid. There's a reason they taught him that.

Q slips his hand out of the cuff, stifling a cry of pain, but he sets to work immediately in untying the rope, and he hopes that the door isn't locked. Which is futile; the door is of course locked. But perhaps he can find a way to open it.

He's supposed to be a genius, after all.

What ends up happening is that the moment Q stands up the door slams open, and Q sighs because he should have realized that they'd be watching the room.

He stays standing, however, because he's not a coward no matter what people say about him and his fear of flying and dislike of guns, and the guard walks towards him, and stops right in front of him.

"You can tell your superiors that this is a bloody waste of time," Q says, "because I'm not going to tell you a damn thing. And you still owe me a new sweater."

His blindfold is yanked off and he can see a blurry shape in a suit.

A familiar blurry shape.

"Bond?"

"Q?"

They stare at each other for a moment. Bond looks blurry. Mostly.

"I can't see," Q says. "And you're late."

Bond fumbles with something and Q feels a pair of glasses shoved into his hands. He puts them on and sees Bond clearly for the first time in quite awhile. He looks upset, and a little bit astonished.

"At least you're good for something," Q says. His legs feel shaky.

"Can you walk?" Bond asks.

"Yes. Why?"

"Because we're going to have to run."

"I don't think those two words mean the same—"

But Bond grabs his hand and they're off.

VIII.

When Bond finds Q, it isn't pretty.

Q is standing, apparently in the midst of an escape operation, and he says a few things about not giving away information. He's blindfolded and pale and thin, and wet. He's shivering.

This makes Bond angry for some reason. Being imprisoned is his thing; Q is meant for offices and computers.

Still, they have little time. Bond has shot a lot of guards and he hasn't exactly been subtle about it. He and Q need to leave.

He may have also set off an explosive of the terrorists' that will blow up the facility and kill everyone underground.

As they run, or rather, as Bond drags Q, he hopes that they don't come up against any adversaries.

Luck is never on his side, and there are guards blocking the entrance.

Bond grabs Q and tries to run in the other direction, but there are guards coming from that way as well.

"How are you in a fist fight?" Bond asks as he and Q stand back-to-back.

"You are kidding, right?" Q asks.

"No."

The men are holding guns. This can't end well. And yet—

"You can't shoot," Bond says. "If you kill him, the information is lost. And you might miss."

"They can't be that incompetent at point-blank range," Q says.

Bond glares at him.

One of the men steps forward and extends an arm to Q. "Come with me and neither of you will get hurt."

Q moves forward, but Bond stops him. "What are you doing?"

Q pulls away and the man grabs Q by the arm.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Q does some sort of strange kick-punch combination that Bond wasn't even aware he knew and the man drops his gun and lets go of Q, who grabs the gun and shoots the man point blank. Blood spatters the walls behind him and Q makes a face of disgust.

Bond takes this as a sign to start beating the crap out of everyone else.

Ten dead guards, a hallway full of blood, and five minutes later Bond and Q, race up the stairs and out into the sunlight.

"The area underneath the Tower of London's going to blow up any second," Bond says, as they make their way to the nearest Tube station.

Q grimaces, squinting in the sunlight. It isn't actually sunny—London is perpetually gray—but Q hasn't seen proper daylight in over a week. "M won't be pleased," he says.

"No, I don't imagine so."

They reach the Tube station just as a muffled explosion sounds from beneath the Tower, and smoke rises up through the cobblestone.

Unconcerned, Q and Bond head underground to board their train.

IX.

Debriefing for Bond is long and arduous and involves names he's never heard of and a statement of how blowing up national monuments is wrong and he should endeavor to avoid such methods in the future.

Bond retorts with, "the actual Tower wasn't destroyed."

To which M replies, "That's not the point, Bond."

All in all, Bond is relieved that it's over.

He gets to visit Q, who is recovering in the hospital. When Bond arrives Q is sitting up in his bed, attached to an IV line, with a cast on his thumb, and typing away on a laptop perched on his lap.

"Thinking about that teaching job?" Bond asks.

Q looks up and smiles, for a moment, before his expression becomes serious. "I could never be wanted for information on how to destroy the government as a teacher."

Bond lowers his voice. "They hurt you."

Q shrugs. "I knew they would, eventually. I signed up for this job and I knew what I was doing."

"But still—"

"The question is, what were you doing?" Q regards Bond with a frown. "I had my radio transmitter in my trouser pocket the entire time and it took you eight days to figure it out?"

"You had your transmitter?" Bond repeats, suddenly feeling a bit dumbstruck.

Q raises an eyebrow. "You didn't know?"

"We ran other programs to find you," Bond says. He hates the look Q is giving him. It makes him feel stupid, and he is most definitely not stupid.

"And they call you a top agent," Q says, shaking his head.

"It's not my fault you invent all this technology we can't comprehend."

"It's not my fault you can't comprehend it. It's a bloody radio!" Q looks at his laptop. "And I was making a new gun for you. I might have to wait now."

Bond glares at him. "You are insufferable."

"And you still owe me a new sweater." Q smiles, then. "Come on, admit it, between the two of us I got the short end of the stick."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Bond asks.

Q turns away from him. "Figure it out, Bond."

Bond sighs. Then he remembers something else M told him. "Apparently you're accompanying me to India next week."

"That sounds about right."

"You hate flying."

Q looks up at Bond. "Yes, but I have found myself intrigued by field work. Besides, the last time I let you travel abroad with my technology you left it there."

"It wasn't like anyone else could use it!"

"I'll need to make sure you bring it back."

"I don't need supervision, Q."

Q simply hums and returns to typing.

Bond turns on heel and stomps out of the room, hearing a "See you next week!" called after him in a far too cheery voice.

Part of him wants to throw his explosive watch at Q just to see what happens (probably nothing—Q probably knows how to disarm it midair.) The other part of him wonders if he and Q can survive a mission together, and he finds that he's actually not too opposed to the idea.