Recruitment attempt #1

castillon02:

Notes: Canon divergence AU–Q and Bond’s first meeting goes very differently. For the mi6cafe prompt ‘Eff.’ 

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Q woke up with a gun in his face. It was being held by a hard-eyed man who was hiding what looked like a lot of muscles underneath his Tom Ford suit. 

Well. Q had always known someone would come for him one day. He gripped the blankets in order to keep his hands out of trouble, stop them from doing something silly like trying to fight back. His mobile was…somewhere. Great; very helpful. “Can I help you?” he asked, squinting to look at the man beyond the barrel of the gun. Blue eyes, blond hair, grim expression, slightly blurry. When Q had time, he was going to engineer a pair of glasses he could wear to bed. 

“You can,” the man confirmed. “You’re going to come with me. There’s an important woman who wants a word with you, something about needing some IT help with our servers. Can’t imagine why.” His mouth quirked in a fake smile. He stepped back, his eyes never leaving Q, and jerked the gun in a ‘get up’ gesture. 

Q extricated himself from the blankets with care, not wanting to aggravate the man with the gun with any sudden movements. Whose servers, exactly…? He had been in so many of them. 

As he shifted, his knee knocked against his mobile under the sheets. 

“What?” the man asked immediately. Shit; apparently he was the type of goon who could actually use his eyes, and Q was far too used to being able to hide his face behind a screen.  

“My phone,” Q said, because he couldn’t lie worth a damn. He could, however, trick himself into feeling a very specific fear. What if the man destroyed it? It had taken ages to make that mobile! He looked up at the man with wide eyes.  

“Throw it on the floor next to my feet,” the man directed. 

Q let his relief show. Not destroyed just yet. He focused on that thought—he was relieved the man wasn’t destroying his hard work—even as his clever fingers gripped the phone under the blankets and executed their triple-tapping trick on the power button before drawing it out and tossing it at the man’s feet. 

Q started a mental countdown. 30, 29, 28… 

“Up,” the man repeated. “And I’ll take this, since it seems so important.” He picked the phone up and slipped it into his jacket pocket, his gun never wavering.  

Don’t throw me in the briar patch, Brer Fox.

“Please don’t,” Q said, still honestly concerned in his brain’s own tricky way. After all, what if the man had a pacemaker? 

“Now,” the man repeated, snapping his gloved fingers. “We have somewhere to be.” 18, 17, 16… 

“That’s a Beretta, isn’t it?” Q asked. 

The man stepped forward, apparently impatient, and Q flinched away, hands held high, not a threat, definitely not a threat. He couldn’t have the man touching him.  

“Only,” Q said, “it’s a great gun, but it’s got an external hammer, right? It tends to snag?” 

The man stared at him. “What?” 

8…7…6…

“You should use something like a Walther PPK,” Q said. “Still small, still automatic, better draw time.” 

The man drew in a quick breath, eyes narrowing. “Yes, please keep lecturing one of Her Majesty’s top agents about his own gun, you little—” At that point the man’s mouth dropped open, his eyes flicking down to his chest where the needle-like probes from Q’s mobile-cum-taser prototype had just stabbed him, probably in multiple locations. “F—” 

The ‘uck’ was lost in a shout as electricity crackled through the air and the man’s body convulsed, fifteen million volts of electricity coursing through him. A few moments later, he was twitching on the ground, his gun thrown clear by his trembling fingers. Thank fuck it hadn’t gone off.  

Q jerked open his bedside drawer, withdrew a medical syringe full of ketamine, double-checked that it was free of air bubbles, and then stabbed the man in the shoulder. He kept his finger on the plunger until it was empty. It was difficult to fatally overdose someone on ketamine. If they were lucky, the man would stay in a happy, unmoving daze for a few hours, and he wouldn’t even remember Q when he woke up; ketamine often had amnesiac effects. 

(If they were unlucky, or if the man already had alcohol in his bloodstream…well, the man would still be mostly paralyzed, but it might be a bad trip.)

Q grabbed his glasses, his laptop, and his go bag. After waiting a few interminable minutes to make sure the man was really out, he dragged him into the recovery position so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit. 

Sorry not sorry, he wrote, scribbling a note to leave under the man’s gun. I don’t do well in captivity. 

He had his fake papers and his disguise in his bag. A few hours would be plenty of time to get out of England and into a safer sort of country. It wasn’t like the man would chase him across the globe, right?