Chapter Text
James Bond is ten years old the first time he walks through a wall, though it’s not so much a walk as a stumble. His parents have been dead for six months, and Kincade is out on the grounds, so no one is there to tell him what this means. No one is there to tell him what a sharp turn his life has just taken.
It’s not the only dangerous secret he’ll eventually keep, not even the only one that could get him killed, but it is the first.
And it perhaps is the most important.
When he does show Kincade, the old man’s face turns grim. No one can know , he says, we’ll keep it a secret , he says, they’d take you away , he says, and James is terrified.
“I’m a freak,” he whispers, sad and lost and so terribly frightened, and Kincade pulls him into his lap for the first time in what feels like years.
“Of course not,” Kincade says, rubbing his hands along James’s back as the boy tucks his face into the groundskeeper’s neck. “You are… extraordinary.”
And so Kincade tells him about mutants , about people like James, who are different and special and rare. He tells James that there are some who think ill of his kind, who wish them harm, and he says that this is because they are small-minded and foolish and afraid of what they don’t understand.
So James uses his new gifts ( powers , Kincade calls them), but only within the confines of Skyfall, where he is safe and where no one will see. James giggles with delight every time he manages to sneak up on the older man, startling him as he emerges from a nearby wall like some sort of spectre. Kincade laughs in turn when he accidentally phases through a dining chair and lands with a thud on the ground, and when he falls through his bed, then the floor, and finally crashes onto the couch on the level below.
James is eventually taken away from Kincade, but not for his mutation. Rather, because the courts decide he’s better off in the hands of some stranger who was acquainted with his parents than this kind groundskeeper who loves him.
It is months later, when Hannes Oberhauser is reading an article about a little boy in America who has grown wings , that James realizes how very lucky he was to have had Kincade with him in that first year. James’s first thought is that having wings would be brilliant, and alongside it is that same, familiar thrill he feels every time he hears about someone else like him; about another mutant. He doesn’t voice this opinion, because almost immediately Mr. Oberhauser remarks over his paper that freaks like that kid should be locked up in a facility somewhere, where scientists and geneticists can study them and stop those things from spreading their disease. A threat, he calls them. Don’t you think so, James?
And so no one but Kincade, hundreds of miles away at Skyfall, will know James’s secret - will know who he truly is - for years to come.
*****
Q (though that is not his name yet, won’t be his name for some time) is six years old when his mother finds him sitting among a wreck of levitating metal spoons, forks and what she will later discover are the remains of their toaster. She is unspeakably proud that her son has inherited her gifts, but there is a small, wistful part of her that feels an acute twist of pain at what else she’s passed on: a life lived in shadows and faced with hardships.
It’s not fair, she thinks; he is still so very innocent, so very small, so very happy . He doesn’t deserve a future spent in hiding.
When she puts the toaster back together with her own powers, he positively beams, throwing his arms around her shoulders.
“I’m just like you Mommy,” he yells joyously, and the sudden swell of love she feels is just as overwhelming as it was the first time she’d held him in her arms, the first time he’d stumbled on chubby legs into her lap.
He is homeschooled for much of his life, because it’s hard to explain to a teacher why his metal desk shakes every time he gets excited, or why sometimes his pens just get stuck to his hand. But when he is thirteen a smiling blue man with a tail appears in a puff of smoke right in his house and asks if he would like to go on an adventure.
The adventure turns out to be a school , of all things, which is a tad bit disappointing. Soon enough, though, he'll realize what a gift this place is, for he is young and excited and he’s in America now, and there are almost one hundred kids who are different in their own ways, just like him.
His mother aches to see him go, but she knows he has much to learn, and besides, he’s only a phone call and a teleporting blue drama teacher away.
*****
When Hannes and his son die, James is sent to Eton. It is about as stifling as the Oberhauser home, only now instead of hiding from two people, he lives in constant fear of being discovered by any one of a thousand.
He hates it there, hates the rules and the rich, spoiled wankers and the teachers who care more about test scores than their students.
When James is eventually expelled (because of course he is), it is not because he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what Piggy and Jack and Sam were doing on that bloody island, or because he’s snuck out past curfew too many times, or even because of the many, many fistfights he’s started.
No, it is - much like he has always feared it would be - because he is a freak, just like Hannes had always said of others like him.
It happens like this: there is a boy to whom James has been particularly unforgiving, mostly because he’d made a joke about ‘poor little orphan boys’ when he'd first arrived. The boy (sporting a black eye courtesy of James himself) comes up to him with a cricket bat in hand, and James knows, as the bat comes swinging towards his head, that he'll end up in A&E, or dead, if it hits him.
His body protects itself instinctively, and the other boy yells in alarm as his weapon sails through James as if he weren’t there. His assailant is gaping, sputtering, and while there is no doubt in James's mind that he's one of the stupidest boys in all of Eton, mutants rights activists and their opponents are all over the news. It wouldn't take a huge leap for even this moron to put the puzzle pieces together.
So James bolts.
But in his panicked haste to get away, to hide, he phases through the nearest wall, and then right through his history teacher.
After that, he's taken to the headmaster's office, where he is called a delinquent, a liar, and, of course, an aberration (which, James had learned in class, is a fancy word for freak, which is what he is).
He is kicked to the curb and sent to some other school in Scotland, though Eton officially claims its reason is some sort of inappropriate behavior with a maid.
It will be many years before James realizes that the school lied not because it was simpler than the truth, but because it was embarrassed to have unknowingly allowed a mutant in its distinguished halls.
*****
The boy who will be Q attends the School for Gifted Youngsters and quickly learns that each of the youngsters in question has their own burdens to bear, and more than enough baggage to make friendship a tentative, wondrous thing.
There is one girl who cannot get close to anyone else, whose touch siphons off the powers and energy of others. She barely speaks to anyone, let alone him, for the longest time. He's heard whispers about her, that she'd kissed a boy and put him in a coma. He supposes that's reason enough for her to be wary, but he decides they should be friends because he has no interest in kissing not just her, but any girl.
There's another who can quite literally shed her skin. Her aversion to touch isn't so much a fear of hurting others as a fear that she will lose control and repulse her companions. She has yet to realize that soon-to-be-Q and the other students are not frightened or disgusted, but rather fascinated by her. She's as wonderful and unique as the rest of them, skin peeling or not.
One boy, who the rest call Beak, has the face of a strange, flesh-colored bird and seems to be slowly growing more avian-like: just last week he started to sprout feathers on his arms. His own hesitation to interact with the rest of them is easy enough to understand, but would-be Q thinks that if there were any people that could help him cope with his perceived ugliness it would be the others at the school. There's the blue teleporter with the tail and the scientist with the teal fur and the girl who is a humanoid shark most of the time and....
The point is, Beak is not as alone as he'd once thought.
The boy who will be Q has his own hangups, of course. He knows that every time he uses his powers the others think of that man . The one everyone talks about, but only in whispers. That man - the dangerous one, the metallokinetic like him - is frightening, no matter what his intentions are, no matter whose side he’s on.
His mother, when he tells her about his worries, admits that she faced similar problems when she was younger.
“You’d never hurt anyone, sweetheart,” she says, “You don’t have a malicious bone in your body. They know that. Just...let them get used to it.”
Eventually, the other students stop whispering when he uses his gifts, stop muttering that famous name under their breaths every time he so much as bends a spoon.
They trust him, and like him, and he’s glad for it, but the hesitance he sometimes sees in their eyes, as well as the haunted looks that will occasionally cross the faces of his teachers and the headmaster at the sight of his powers, never truly disappear.
*****
James isn’t stupid enough to tell MI6 he’s a mutant when he signs up. He decides at the time that he’ll wait it out and see if the people running the show prove themselves trustworthy.
They don’t.
It becomes clear to James within his first year that there is a firm divide between the human agents and the mutant. There are operatives, and then there are mutant operatives. It’s quickly apparent that M and the other department heads see James’s mutant brothers and sisters more as sentient weapons on leashes than as actual agents, salaries and benefits aside.
It doesn’t matter that Agent Donovan is fluent in nine languages; that Agent Bennett spent three years in a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan; that Agent Nash can break into a vault or safe in under a minute, even without James’s particular skills. At the end of the day, to MI6 they are the one with the quills, the one who can stretch his body like rubber, and the one with the bat wings, respectively.
James would much rather be Agent Bond than “the one who can walk through walls.”
Still, very few people at MI6 are openly hostile toward mutants, so James supposes that’s something.
It’s an awfully low bar he’s set for his human colleagues, when basic decency is something to celebrate.
He doesn’t encounter any real challenges when it comes to hiding his powers until he becomes a double-oh. Until Montenegro.
The thing about his mutation, James thinks as he’s tied to the chair, as Le Chiffre hits him again and again where he's most sensitive, is that it’s a little inconvenient.
Which isn’t to say that it hasn’t saved his life dozens of times, but still.
Firstly, in order to actually hit people he has to be tangible, which means that, conversely, the person he’s hitting is able to hit him back. Secondly, in situations such as this, when he’s half-conscious and his head is pounding, he’s not in full control of his powers. So if he tries to let the rope phase through him, there’s a distinct possibility that he could lose control mid-swing. He doesn’t much fancy the thought of having Le Chiffre’s makeshift weapon impaled inside him.
Of course, even if he were in full control, even if he were to use his powers, MI6 wants Le Chiffre alive. He could phase out of his binds, maybe incapacitate his captors, find Vesper, and escape, but what good would it do? He would expose himself to Le Chiffre, and the bastard would surely tell MI6 what he’d seen, and then James would be in deep shit. James doesn’t know the protocol or punishment for hiding a mutation, but he imagines it wouldn’t be pleasant for him.
In the end, it doesn’t matter: Le Chiffre is shot, and James isn’t in a position to get a good look at his killer. He passes out before he can phase through the ropes tying him down.
The following weeks find James a mess of anxiety, of excitement. He’s never told anyone about his powers, never so much as considered it, but - he sees a life with Vesper unfolding before him, sees a future he’d given up on having years ago. He loves her, wholly and without reservation, and he knows she feels the same. But she doesn’t know about his mutation. He’s confident she won’t look at him any differently, but the fear niggling at the back of his mind is louder than he’d like.
When it comes, the pain of her betrayal — stealing the money, selling him out — is like nothing he’s felt before, a heartbreak so cutting he can practically feel the blood seeping within him. He’ll never trust her again, that future splintering apart before his very eyes, but by god, does he love her still. He has to save her from herself.
She locks herself in the sinking elevator, and as James reaches for the grated door it goes crashing into the water below. He dives without a second thought, tugging at the metal and when that fails starts to phase through, reaching an arm out. Vesper flings herself away, eyes wide and startled as she shakes her head.
James freezes, unable to move in his shock.
Is she… afraid of him?
He hesitates a moment too long, and it costs Vesper her life. She dies in his arms, and he’ll never know if the only woman he’s ever loved could have loved him entirely.
*****
The man who will be Q doesn't disclose his mutation when he signs up for MI6.
Well, “signs up” is a bit of an exaggeration.
More accurately, he doesn't disclose his mutation when MI6 tells him that he can either come work for them or spend the rest of his life in maximum security.
He isn't sure how well it would go over, that he's not only a potential cyber security threat, but also an omega level metallokinetic with the same gifts as the most notorious mutant extremist currently living. He has visions of plastic computers and a rubber workshop, or even worse, a life as a lab rat. He's heard that MI6 is more mutant-friendly than the other intelligence agencies, but that could be PR bullshit, for all he knows.
He often has to remind himself mid-movement that he can't just summon the wrench on the floor over to the newest engine Boothroyd has him working on, that he has to actually get up and walk to pick it up.
With his hands .
It feels positively archaic.
He's grown used to working in his own space, where he can type with both hands while pouring his tea (in a metal pot, of course), where he can pull malfunctioning computers and tablets apart without so much as lifting a screwdriver.
It's an adjustment, to constantly hide himself; he hasn't spent much time in human spaces. He was homeschooled, then he went to the School for Gifted Youngsters, where he was surrounded by other mutants, and since graduation he's mostly kept to himself, working freelance from his apartment.
His new boss, the Quartermaster, susses him out within three months. Boothroyd (for only the agents and department heads call him "Q" or "Quartermaster"; the old man doesn't particularly care for titles) says one late night when it's just the two of them hunched over the remnants of an American satellite: So, what's your mutation, then?
He has never been so terrified in all his life. I don't know what you mean , he says; you must be mistaken , he says; please don't tell anyone , he says, shaking and wide-eyed.
But Boothroyd just smiles, tells him he was wise to keep his powers to himself; tells him that for all that she's tolerant, M can be a bit Machiavellian when it comes to her mutant assets; tells him that your old Quartermaster can keep a secret, that's for sure.
The man who will be Q is fiercely grateful, and feels a great swell of affection for his new boss. He will be devastated six years later, when an explosion rocks Vauxhall and Boothroyd is caught in the crossfire, crushed under debris.