And Elsewhere

The sound wakes him up, a steady grind that cuts through his blinding headache and thrums against his cheek, his forearms. Familiar enough after a half-dozen false starts. It’s always the noise that finds him, somehow coming to find him through white noise and earplugs, a soothing playlist of classical music, through noise-cancelling headphones and a fistful of Xanax. The fact that it was only another machine, or many machines working in concert to keep all the humans onboard up in the air and roughly stable, did not help – but you love machines, sweetheart, not when they’re the only thing between me and bone-shattering fiery death – and the more he came to know the dated consoles themselves and the devices used to navigate by, the more the dread grew. It wasn’t a pathological fear, it was a perfectly sensible fear. That noise. A sourceless, awful, heartbeat-hum interrupted by grinding and whirring and the occasional siren-like blip of some alert going off somewhere, and even if it’s only the snotty nine-year-old in seat 12A whining for another blanket, Q does not trust cheery alert sounds in his line of work.

His vision is an oily sea when he tries to crack open one eye, and his head is unresponsive as a stone; for a moment he thinks about night terrors, but he doesn’t have night terrors, and this is a remarkably passive choice of nightmare. His heartbeat is still going a little faster, the spike of worry is driven deep into his guts, he puts out a hand to roll himself over from wherever he’s fallen asleep and it casts about in space uselessly, his limbs are horrifyingly weak and disobedient. He’s wearing clothes he remembers putting on, honey-colored sweater and practical shoes for wet weather, but this isn’t familiar, not at all, no, a rustle of cream-white next to him, someone’s smoking a cigar, someone touches his head lightly.

This is not a heartbeat hum, this is something else entirely, the belly of a beast.

“Ssh,” someone says, a voice familiar from crystal-clear surveillance footage, someone’s broad thumb swipes under the edge of his cuff to soothe him and to rub the bony outcropping of his wrist. “Ssh, ssh, ssh.”

---

When he wakes up, he’s immobilized, blindfolded, bound. It’s disorienting only for a moment, and then his mind rights itself perfectly.

The first thing to grip him, to unclench his insides and burst in on his brilliant brain, is not a clear head or the absence of a bullet in his brainpan, but the blissful quiet, the deprivation of that sound. The sensations against his skin are warm and organic, he’s not being kicked awake in an abandoned quarry somewhere, this must mean he’s being kept for something, in a very deliberately chosen space, on somebody else’s turf, alone, alone, deprived, drugged, but the drugs are wearing off now. And he is left only himself and his captor. Who else. It seems like poor timing to collect on a grudge, but Q is faced with the fact that he is doing battle with a genius with only a child’s sense of interpersonal logic. Or that’s selling him short – a child’s delight in pain without a point to it. Silva has a mind like ancient clockwork, all the more incomprehensible for being needlessly elaborate. Q’s seen what it can do. He has tried to take it apart and failed. The fear knotting up in his chest is starting to spread, starting to shut him down bit by bit. It’s not an irrational fear. No, not clockwork. Some barbaric, rusty mousetrap, one that’s stopped just short of snapping his neck and left him here to be squeezed to death.

He would appear to be secured ankle and wrist to a desk, or a table, which solves the immediate question of why he’s immobilized against something that stinks of old leather and wood polish. Bent over it, to be as precise as possible, face-down. He’s just beginning to get his bearings, to make his best guesses at where in the world he may now be, when his thoughts are cut through by the horrifyingly familiar lens-snap sound of a mobile phone taking a photograph.

“You won’t have much luck with that,” he calls out as a warning, more affable than he feels.

“Oh, won’t I?”

He’s not wearing a belt, which he supposes robs Silva of the fun of reaching around and undoing the buckle, but when his hips and thighs are bared and naked with just a tug at the wrong moment, he’s not thanking himself for it. The hard edge presses against his belly, his arms ache like hell when he tries to rearrange himself, and Silva runs an appraising hand down his leg. His leg which is now horrifyingly bare, prickling with gooseflesh up and down, tendons straining at the inconvenient position. Q tries to brace himself more comfortably and instead loses his footing for the briefest moments. He must look like he’s trembling, quaking with fear instead of having a painful spasm, and how Silva laughs.

It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? Q is a new addition, and he knows he must seem terribly young, and he knows he must seem like a soft touch, stick a needle in him and it’d go right through. Anyone else would be pulling out his fingernails, negotiating teary mucus-streaked phone calls to Mallory, demanding Bond’s earpiece frequency. Instead Silva has just stowed him away in a warm little room somewhere overseas, and this is personal, isn’t it. That’s the trouble.

“Trousers down. Six of the best.” Q is bent over with a broad hand to the scruff of his neck, bound wrists forced back against his face. He can feel the blood rushing to his cheeks, not embarrassment but a nauseating head-over-heels feeling, but even without seeing he can tell Silva is grinning. A big, broad, filthy smile. “No, no, you’re too young for that by decades. Another grand tradition has passed you by.”

The hard tip of the cane scrapes down his thigh. Not a seductive stroke – definitive and pointed, quite clear. It traces up to hitch in the cloth of his briefs, to prod, and Q’s temper flares in silence.

Silva tuts and sighs, sorrowfully.

“So scrawny. No fight to be found in you at all. I prefer a man with more muscles, you know, more to work with.”

“If this is some roundabout way of getting at 007, you’re going to have a hard time of it.” His lungs are beginning to ache and Silva hasn’t even started beating him yet. His breath comes in wheezes. “He doesn’t seem to care for me much.”

Negotiations? Q imagines he could negotiate. Put him in front of a computer terminal, he’ll pretend to destroy it, a code, he’ll pretend to break it, he might even really break it if it’ll make his performance seem genuine. But Silva seems amused; he traces another horizontal track with the cane’s tip (rattan, or bamboo? something else? what an inane question) and drawls on, bored.

“How fortunate for all three of us that this is not the case. This isn’t even about MI6, truth be told; if I wanted state secrets I’d break your arm. This is a matter between the two of us, as colleagues. I don’t want you to be thinking about him now, hmm, I want you to be thinking about me.”

Whatever is obscuring his eyes is not entirely opaque, how unfortunate for Q; distantly he realizes his glasses might be anywhere. Q closes his eyes tightly, and retreats inside himself to regroup. He doesn’t think about computers or coding or work at all, he tries to sink his thoughts deep into something pleasantly innocuous – the places where he buys his clothes, the process of rearranging his grocery budget, the metrical structures of the poems he learned in school. He braces, he sets his jaw, and when the cane comes whistling through the air and meets its mark high on his tensed thigh, he doesn’t make a sound. Not a whimper. He doesn’t even breathe, the breath stuck dead in his throat.

It’s not terrible at first, if not pleasant, startling and clean and sharp enough to take his breath away. Silva pats him afterward, like he’s been a good boy, or a bad one, whatever he’s playing at; the resemblance to a ghastly parody of a bedroom game is obvious and likely quite deliberate. Is this really to be his punishment for besting him as cyberterrorist supreme? At the time it’d seemed suspicious like giving him exactly what he wanted. If he thinks he’ll get under his skin this easily, the fool deserves everything Mallory can throw at him, but it’s never that simple, is it.

“How’s that? It seems almost insulting to break you in this way, given your talents, but you’re still new to the Service. You’ll catch up.”

Q makes an annoyed sound that stops just short of a curse.

Latin declensions, the Greek alphabet, Euclid props, the digits of pi, his childhood telephone number, street address. Not computers, not code. It’s a pity he thinks so damned fast, because none of this is helping like it should.

The second stroke is much harder, and lined up in precisely the same place. Q remains stiff, he remains calm, he does not yield, but the pain is doubly sharp, searing a clear stripe. Ow ow ow damned ow. The stroke is delivered hard enough to make his whole leg jump, to force him harder against the desk’s edge. No pat this time, but a long, pregnant pause.

“Well?”

“It bloody stings, what do you want me to say?”

“A little humility would be in order.”

“Well, you aren’t going to get it, I’m afraid. Is this the best idea you have? A damn good thrashing?”

“No better than you deserve, little quartermaster.”

By the third stroke, his eyes are stinging too, and he draws in breath after the stroke lands, not sharp enough to be a gasp but desperately dragged through his teeth and past his tongue. By the fifth, he buckles in his frustration and sobs against the varnished desk top, only once.

Silva’s fingers toy with the waistband of his briefs, releasing the elastic back again with a snap. They’re blue, Q knows this because he’s the kind of person who likes to have everything sorted by the day of the week, and they’re tight, and he’s honestly never considered himself a likely candidate for sexual assault but right now it seems grotesquely possible.

“The look on your face, when you unwrapped the present I’d left for you – I’m sure you’ll insist otherwise, but it must have done something to you, mm? Panic. Such a proud face. You must feel like a king in front of those screens of yours.”

Q is silent, listening sharply. Silva’s fingers are drumming against his shoulder blade.

“Did they tell you why the last quartermaster left?”

“He retired, sir.” Q cringes as soon as it’s left his mouth. Is that what he wants? Is that what he’d like?

“Oh, sir, I like that. Very good. Yes, he retired, and his predecessor?”

“Quit.”

“Quit because of me, as a matter of fact. I drove him out. His greatest failure. Now, let’s see what I can do with you.”

He caresses with the flat of his hand, humming to himself indulgently, not a tune, mere sounds, hmm-hm-hmm-hmm. The skin beneath his buttocks feels searingly hot, more tender than he would ever have expected – Q wonders if he’s bleeding. Not after six strokes, it’s hardly possible.

Silva draws his fingernails down the unspeakably tender flesh of Q’s thigh – outer, not inner, where he can still feel the phantom sensation of the cane’s tip against the skin.

Anything seems possible.

Two fingers rub indulgently between Q’s legs, from behind, and Q lets out an unexpectedly sharp sound. The heat from his thighs has begun to radiate out and up, a miserable delicious ache that it is suddenly critical for him to ignore; suddenly he is grateful for being forced facedown, for fear of what Silva might do if he knew. The man is completely deranged.

---

“You could do better, I’m sure you know. What do they pay you? I could pay triple.”

“I doubt you could afford it.”

Snap. Another click of the camera.

---

Time passes.

A door opens, somewhere not far off – it’s no respite, no salvation; Q is seized with so much terror at the thought of another party joining the session that he nearly gags. But Silva greets someone with a friendly “Ah!”, and there’s rustling behind his back.

Footsteps.

A brief exchange – Russian? Q never figured he’d have to work much with spoken languages, so he’s rustier than he really should be and it’s hard to rally together his vocabulary skills when he’s bare-arsed and bent over and prime to be violated. Q struggles to hear, when it becomes clear that he can’t peel back the blindfold by vigorously forcing his cheek against the tabletop.

A pause.

Then there are the sounds of shots fired, two, three, four – very loud and very very unbearably near. Q cries out in alarm, but the bullets are not for him, it’s for the unseen associate. The sound of something very heavy hitting the floor, one supposes a person. A few moments of raw, coughing struggle, and nothing. He has just heard a man die. Silva hums. More footsteps.

To the left of him, something is set down, a tray? A metallic sort of settling sound, and a silvery rattle that is unmistakably ice against the walls of a glass. And the weight of something unmistakably heavy settles down between his shoulder blades, hard against his spine, still smelling of cordite, recently fired.

His initial whimper becomes a whine once the gun’s side touches flesh. Not hot enough to blister, but too damn hot regardless, and his shoulders feel like they’re going to pull from their sockets and he can’t ease the strain with anything short of balancing on tiptoe. He can’t shrug it off. On second thought, perhaps he is blistering. Something smells like flesh.

“Which would you like inside you, the ice, or the gun?”

“What?” His own voice sounds hoarse and disbelieving in his ears.

“The one will be painful, or at the very least profoundly uncomfortable, and I’m sure you’ll find it humiliating, but all in all, harmless. The other is painless, mostly; you might even enjoy it. But when you’re playing with firearms there’s always the chance – not insignificant – that they’ll go off. And then what would become of you and all your talent, mmm? Now I am going to ask you – Which would you prefer?”

Q comprehends, and crumbles.

“The ice,” he says, wretchedly, something in him curling up to die. “The ice, please.”

“Clever boy,” Silva says, pleasantly.

Warm fingers pry him apart, and what happens next is neither warm nor pleasant.

When Silva returns with his next toy, he has no such playful attentiveness about how he beats him, or with what. His fists become very familiar, and the sound of his laughter; a doubled-over length of extension cord makes a memorable appearance.

In hindsight, Q prefers the cane.

---

MI6 remotely terminates his phone before Q is even awake again, let alone alert. After a very long while, when the hospital smell’s finally starting to leave his skin (better than the smell of polished wood, Q can’t catch a breath of that without choking) he receives a heavy packet containing its replacement. He’s not ready to return to HQ just yet, but the notion that he must be deprived of anything resembling work in order to be afforded a full recovery is irksome to him, and one can hardly be a modern individual in London without a smartphone these days. How else is he meant to schedule appointments with his trauma specialist, really. His body is more or less knit up, even if he can’t speak with respect to anything from the neck up.

Q sinks into his favorite chair and has a look. It’s a twin to the last, same familiar model in the same colors, absent only the careless scuffs and inevitable familiar fingerprints. Only when he plugs it in and turns it on (his hands are not yet fully obedient, they still ache and fumble) does the incongruous make itself evident. Fresh and clean, blank and empty and new. His data is restored – every contact and fiddly bit of home-baked programming, every safeguard and every familiar feature. Fine, then, he has backups. MI6 knows it, even if they don’t generally look too deeply into the specifics. All present and intact.

There are four photographs saved to a folder within a folder on his media card. They depict him from such an unfamiliar angle that he hardly recognizes himself, from such an angle that his brain does not initially process these lines and colors and shapes as a person. When he does, Q goes faint.

They are so carefully framed that under other circumstances they’d look posed. Three of them show nothing but his splayed body in increasing state of misery, his subjugated head – limp but clothed and whole; half-naked and striped in scarlet; half-naked and bloody; broken and beaten black. The fourth is identical in content to the others, except for barely visible in the bounds of the frame, the well-remembered hand of the photographer resting proprietarily on his lower back.

Q sinks back in his chair; the phone falls to the floor and he shudders like a child.