[fanfic] I Seem to be Confusing (You for Daniel Craig)
Title: I Seem to be Confusing (You for Daniel Craig)
Author: sonofon
Character(s): Q, Bill Tanner
Summary: Q’s halcyon days at MI6. Or, his life before meeting James Bond.
Notes: I had the intention of writing some kind of Bond/Q schoolboy AU but my creative detours tend to really lead me astray. There's also a link at a03!
-/-
i.
He didn’t think of himself as Q until the fifth day. Entering headquarters, a security headache, that day, he felt an ease he hadn’t truly experienced since his undergraduate days; and, swiping his badge for the third time, stating his name for the fourth, he wondered if he was falling into an indoctrination he had always pretentiously avoided. The rhetoric sounded a lot like: “You belong.”
There were, of course, deviations. It was true. He was a young outlier. He heard stories of the men who had previously occupied his position: army majors, medical doctors, even a con artist turned government mole. His back hunched, his fingers naturally twitching, Q embarked on the work of a highly confidential security protocol program. But forgetting his predecessors was easy enough. They were dead, after all. The dead couldn’t criticize, couldn’t protest at the changes he was enacting on behalf of Q Branch. Gone were the exploding pens, the smoke-detecting briefcases, the underwater Esprit. Gone was the Wall Street dress code. Gone were the five-quid street side wall posters, the mismatched mugs crowding the common room cabinet, the phone cord with no phone, the eccentricities which oh-so homily had characterized the branch amidst the warfare they were responsible for creating.
Q hadn’t the imagination. He wasn’t old enough for sentimentality. In one of his preliminary interviews, Q was asked if he remembered his dreams, and, scoffing, he replied in code. The systematic breakdown of the mind begins in numbers. It’s all in the math. Little else matters if the head thinks in algebraic terms, and then transforms them into words. The interviewer was thoroughly impressed. “He is utterly without heart,” the interviewer proclaimed, which was, he was later told, the key to his appointment over the qualifications and experiences of ten other final candidates.
Did Q have a heart? He would’ve said no. He would’ve wanted to say no, with a smirk on his face, just to see how the person who’d asked would react. He enjoyed these reactions, he liked to shock people in the smallest of ways. If you asked him he preferred Gauguin over Van Gogh, John Clare over John Donne…
ii.
And yet, there were times when he allowed himself to meander, to fall, into a pattern of meaningless living. Patterns, quickly disordered, took up a manner of appearing meticulous. Beneath, it was all smoldering chaos and disorganization. Sometimes he dreamed in blinding colors, in negatives, in a color palette cheekily reminiscent of Degas. (White is not the absence of color. Dreams seem the most real when they’re about something you most want.) Sometimes he dreamt of the problem sets he scribbled last minute from his university days; glitches that couldn’t be fixed; bugs which kept surfacing in every other code; cold coffee in thrice-used Styrofoam cups; girls, who, occasionally, glasses slightly lowered and hair messily done up, asked to be fucked in return for a bit of programming ingenuity. He sometimes took pleasure in these moments, taking care to remember the frustrations he’d once faced in Java, the taste of sweat, the bitter cold sensation of skin against metal.
As the years pass he cared less and less, but he could never entirely bring himself to be heartless.
iii.
On the fifty-seventh day, Tanner told him he had been arranged a rendezvous with a double-oh agent. They were to meet, make introductions, and “ah,” noted Tanner, “this would be an opportune moment to give him his specialized handgun.”
“I haven’t got one for him.”
“Well,” Tanner smiled. “You have until next Wednesday.”
“Well,” Q said.
“If you so desire,” Tanner added, “you may even choose the location of meeting.”
“I couldn’t have hoped anything more liberating,” said Q. “Maybe I’ll make it at a museum. The British Museum, the center of all that is excellent and superb about British culture. Afterward we’ll head to the tearoom at the Savoy, and chat over cucumber sandwiches. Talk about our dying rich aunts or another topic of equal substance.”
Tanner said, “I’ll have Sarah bring you the appropriate paperwork. Half past three in the afternoon should suffice, correct?” Q heard the spaces in between Tanner’s words and tried to fill it with his own; singing, then, in the style of a Gregorian chant, Tanner’s words rang out, wrung the life out of him in a practically screaming show of sound, as words tend to when it is a early Monday morning and the trucks are blaring their lights as they rush to reach their pressing deadlines. It was undoubtedly true. The double-oh agent was invariably a boy-man, Q corrected himself, and chuckled.
By then Tanner was gone. Would the man have a heartbeat? He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully clean. It was an absurd notion because of course double-oh agents didn’t breathe; they served Queen and country before any else; they killed like imbeciles let loose in the Coliseum. Without doubt they were made of brawn. He didn’t understand their purpose. They were so brutish and so dumb.
Still he wondered: what if he too was caught in negative space? also, indeed, unsure of whether he ought to be supplying words or fulfilling them? What if, God forbid, he was a kindred spirit?
Author: sonofon
Character(s): Q, Bill Tanner
Summary: Q’s halcyon days at MI6. Or, his life before meeting James Bond.
Notes: I had the intention of writing some kind of Bond/Q schoolboy AU but my creative detours tend to really lead me astray. There's also a link at a03!
-/-
i.
He didn’t think of himself as Q until the fifth day. Entering headquarters, a security headache, that day, he felt an ease he hadn’t truly experienced since his undergraduate days; and, swiping his badge for the third time, stating his name for the fourth, he wondered if he was falling into an indoctrination he had always pretentiously avoided. The rhetoric sounded a lot like: “You belong.”
There were, of course, deviations. It was true. He was a young outlier. He heard stories of the men who had previously occupied his position: army majors, medical doctors, even a con artist turned government mole. His back hunched, his fingers naturally twitching, Q embarked on the work of a highly confidential security protocol program. But forgetting his predecessors was easy enough. They were dead, after all. The dead couldn’t criticize, couldn’t protest at the changes he was enacting on behalf of Q Branch. Gone were the exploding pens, the smoke-detecting briefcases, the underwater Esprit. Gone was the Wall Street dress code. Gone were the five-quid street side wall posters, the mismatched mugs crowding the common room cabinet, the phone cord with no phone, the eccentricities which oh-so homily had characterized the branch amidst the warfare they were responsible for creating.
Q hadn’t the imagination. He wasn’t old enough for sentimentality. In one of his preliminary interviews, Q was asked if he remembered his dreams, and, scoffing, he replied in code. The systematic breakdown of the mind begins in numbers. It’s all in the math. Little else matters if the head thinks in algebraic terms, and then transforms them into words. The interviewer was thoroughly impressed. “He is utterly without heart,” the interviewer proclaimed, which was, he was later told, the key to his appointment over the qualifications and experiences of ten other final candidates.
Did Q have a heart? He would’ve said no. He would’ve wanted to say no, with a smirk on his face, just to see how the person who’d asked would react. He enjoyed these reactions, he liked to shock people in the smallest of ways. If you asked him he preferred Gauguin over Van Gogh, John Clare over John Donne…
ii.
And yet, there were times when he allowed himself to meander, to fall, into a pattern of meaningless living. Patterns, quickly disordered, took up a manner of appearing meticulous. Beneath, it was all smoldering chaos and disorganization. Sometimes he dreamed in blinding colors, in negatives, in a color palette cheekily reminiscent of Degas. (White is not the absence of color. Dreams seem the most real when they’re about something you most want.) Sometimes he dreamt of the problem sets he scribbled last minute from his university days; glitches that couldn’t be fixed; bugs which kept surfacing in every other code; cold coffee in thrice-used Styrofoam cups; girls, who, occasionally, glasses slightly lowered and hair messily done up, asked to be fucked in return for a bit of programming ingenuity. He sometimes took pleasure in these moments, taking care to remember the frustrations he’d once faced in Java, the taste of sweat, the bitter cold sensation of skin against metal.
As the years pass he cared less and less, but he could never entirely bring himself to be heartless.
iii.
On the fifty-seventh day, Tanner told him he had been arranged a rendezvous with a double-oh agent. They were to meet, make introductions, and “ah,” noted Tanner, “this would be an opportune moment to give him his specialized handgun.”
“I haven’t got one for him.”
“Well,” Tanner smiled. “You have until next Wednesday.”
“Well,” Q said.
“If you so desire,” Tanner added, “you may even choose the location of meeting.”
“I couldn’t have hoped anything more liberating,” said Q. “Maybe I’ll make it at a museum. The British Museum, the center of all that is excellent and superb about British culture. Afterward we’ll head to the tearoom at the Savoy, and chat over cucumber sandwiches. Talk about our dying rich aunts or another topic of equal substance.”
Tanner said, “I’ll have Sarah bring you the appropriate paperwork. Half past three in the afternoon should suffice, correct?” Q heard the spaces in between Tanner’s words and tried to fill it with his own; singing, then, in the style of a Gregorian chant, Tanner’s words rang out, wrung the life out of him in a practically screaming show of sound, as words tend to when it is a early Monday morning and the trucks are blaring their lights as they rush to reach their pressing deadlines. It was undoubtedly true. The double-oh agent was invariably a boy-man, Q corrected himself, and chuckled.
By then Tanner was gone. Would the man have a heartbeat? He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully clean. It was an absurd notion because of course double-oh agents didn’t breathe; they served Queen and country before any else; they killed like imbeciles let loose in the Coliseum. Without doubt they were made of brawn. He didn’t understand their purpose. They were so brutish and so dumb.
Still he wondered: what if he too was caught in negative space? also, indeed, unsure of whether he ought to be supplying words or fulfilling them? What if, God forbid, he was a kindred spirit?