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So here's the thing about James Bond: he's a bit of a trouble magnet. More so than any other six year old. He comes home every day with scraped knees and elbows that have a patchwork pattern of bruises on them from playing out in the wilderness of the Scottish countryside. Not that he cares about them, of course - he won them honourably, after all, saving the world in his imagination.
There's less of this when his family packs up and moves to London, selling the house to venture out into the big city where his parents wouldn’t even think of letting him wander off alone at six years old.
It's not all bad, though, even if James misses the freedom of being able to roam the countryside as he sees fit. One day, his parents send him to the house across the street, to the home of the new neighbours that they've made friends with, to make friends with their daughter of the same age - Vesper, a quiet girl, with dark hair tied in bunches and wide green eyes that seem too serious for her age.. She's initially a bit suspicious of James, creeping around him and mumbling half replies to his persistent questions, but she warms to him after a few visits, and soon she's climbing trees and running around after him, doing all the things that he does to have fun. James is pretty sure that he hears whispered comments behind his back about bad influences, but the Lynd family never stop him coming over, so it can't be that much of a concern, and Vesper is permitted to come along on the world-saving escapades with him.
It's not the same as it is back in Scotland, back at home - how could it be, in the middle of the city? - but it sure comes pretty close.
+
So here’s the thing about James Bond: he’s ten years old when his parents die, and he has no idea what he’s supposed to do.
His aunt takes custody of him, and he has to move house again - only a few minutes away, still within child-friendly walking distance of Vesper's house, but this place doesn't feel friendly like his parent's house always had. There's none of their warmth here - there's just a cold floor in the spare room where James now sleeps, the room where his things are piled in boxes, and a rather solemn looking picture of his parents in their younger years that hangs in the hall, mockingly reminding him of the fact that they're gone.
The Lynd family are suddenly very, very quiet about bad influences, their mild annoyance replaced by sympathetic glances and pitying words of comfort towards the boy with the sad blue eyes that sits at their dinner table at least once a week.
(Still, Vesper doesn't really climb trees anymore.)
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: his first kiss is also at the age of ten.
He doesn't tell Vesper about it, because his first kiss is with a boy from the local council estate, ten minutes walk from his aunt's house. Vesper herself is on holiday with her family, leaving him to make his own entertainment for three weeks, and by this point he's sort of caught on to the fact that he's charming enough to sway people to his way of thinking, so he shouldn’t be surprised that he soon finds himself with a new friend.
It's a little like being six years old again, minus the imaginative plot of saving the world; they climb trees and run wild around the neighbourhood, holding hands and not letting go until they're sitting under the shelter of some plastic tarpaulin tied between some trees as a makeshift tent, still running on the adrenaline of it all.
And then it just kind of happens - a soft peck on the lips, nothing more.
James doesn't quite know what to do about it, but the other boy flinches away as if he’s been burned.
"My dad says boys aren't supposed to kiss boys," he says in a quiet voice, as if he’s scared someone will overhear, even if there’s only James to hear him in the first place.
“Oh.”
James always been acutely aware of what's going on around him, and so he knows that there are more than a few people that would not like that he kissed another boy.
“Right,” he says, when the other boy doesn’t say anything else, and he himself doesn't have any other kind of response. “Yeah.”
He goes home soon afterwards and doesn't mention it to his aunt, nor Vesper. He shoves the memory to the back of his mind, because if he's not supposed to kiss boys, then that's fine, he can just kiss girls.
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: he's twelve and he wants to kiss girls a lot.
He also wants to kiss boys quite a bit too.
He's in high school now, with a friendship group that has now expanded beyond Vesper - they've become a team of four people, joining up with a girl called Eve and a boy called Tanner (first name Bill, but they've never called him that). But, even now, the idea of wanting to kiss boys doesn't seem socially acceptable. So he kisses girls. Quite a few of them, actually - Sévérine, Madeleine, Camille, even Eve at one point. That one is a bit awkward, and the lunch table is in collective silence for three days straight.
The awkwardness doesn’t stop him from kissing the girls. It also, as much as he hopes it might, doesn't stop him wishing he could kiss the boys.
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: he notices Q from the moment he sees him. Well, kind of.
They're fourteen, and it's Monday morning. James and Vesper are in their usual seats at the back of the room, because that's where the trouble kids sit (not necessarily Vesper, who is as serious as always, but certainly James, who, by this point, has a bit of a reputation) when there's a knock at the door and one of the women from the front office is leading a lanky boy with unruly dark hair and glasses that have been bandaged with sellotape at least three times into the room. He doesn't introduce himself, and the teacher doesn't ask, just tells him to take a seat in the empty row at the front of the room. He looks very much like an outsider, hunched in an anorak that is too big for him, flicking through his exercise book that is covered in doodles (James doesn't even know where his exercise book is), but he doesn't look like he's the slightest bit interested in fitting in with the others. James watches him with a kind of curious fascination, until he’s distracted by Vesper asking if he knows what the answer to question number five is (he doesn’t).
Eve drags the boy over to their usual lunch table that very same day.
"This is Q," is all she says, gesturing for him to sit down, before she starts questioning Tanner about the Shakespeare quiz they have in English that afternoon. Q doesn't really say much, just picks at his lunch and observes them all from behind the chunky rims of his glasses; he seems, James thinks, like the type who picks his words carefully.
Over the next few weeks, however, when Eve makes it clear that he isn’t escaping them any time soon, Q starts being a little more open, sharing little snippets about himself. He's one of a set of twins - he points out his twin one lunchtime and James sees the resemblance immediately between Q and the dark haired boy that spends his lunch break with that Alistair kid from the year above. He loves cats. He's very clever and knows it. He claims to be not much use to anyone without his glasses. Every piece of information that they manage to coax out of him makes him more fascinating, which is both a good thing and a bad thing, because James is still very much committed to his policy of kissing girls and suppressing the part that wants to kiss boys - or, specifically, the part that now kind of wants to kiss Q.
But he's a master at suppression by this point. He just needs to get through the rest of high school, and then Q will take his genius somewhere that challenges him better, and everything can go back to the way it was, right?
Right.
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: he's not actually as good at suppression as he claims to be.
Also, Q doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. He’s settled in well enough over the past year, and is actually pretty likeable once you take the time to get to know him. By the time they’ve all moved up to their final year of high school, his brother has also started to join them, now that his other friend has left. Danny is shy as opposed to Q being somewhat antisocial, but he slowly warms up to them all too, particularly Tanner. They bond over pretentious classic literature that James doesn't have time for. He has romantic conquests to keep up, after all, to the point where Eve complains that she’s getting a headache from all this back and fro he’s doing, and this is the year of prom, the night that everyone (supposedly) is going to remember forever. Everyone expects him to ask Madeleine, considering the unofficial thing they've had going on for the past two months, during which James all but forgets about school and responsibilities and takes a chance on the teen romance those awful films Vesper makes him sit through have always promised. His aunt tries to talk to him about it more than once, and then gives up when she realises that he's not listening, but she still shakes her head and looks disappointed every time he tells her he’s going to study at Madeleine's house, because she knows damn well by his slowly slipping grades he's not studying for anything.
He's always been a bright child, he hears her complaining on the phone one evening, when he’s sneaking in late, and maybe she’s right, he can be bright when he could be bothered to put the work in, but right now he can't.
Eve catches up to him eventually, and even though she's three months younger and a whole lot shorter, she's scary when she's angry, especially when she’s passionate. She berates him for not paying enough attention to school, saying that he'll regret it when he's older in a voice that reminds him a little of his mother, and, to make her stop, he agrees to study more (and actually study this time). Q offers to help him with this - he’s somewhat of a genius, after all - which is, of course, where the problem lies. James can do a decent job of ignoring the elephant in the room when they’re surrounded by their small circle of friends, but he's not doing so great when he hasn’t touched his maths book for twenty minutes, studying abandoned in favour of watching Q, sitting opposite him on the blanket in James' back garden, chewing on his lip as he ponders some higher equation that he could probably do in his sleep and is probably just making a show of solving it to help James with his equations.
Three revision sessions later, he brings up the whole prom debacle with Madeleine. She accepts.
+
So here's the thing about James Bond - he's never had the concept of a boyfriend as a viable option. Even in high school, in the twenty first century, he’s never heard anything of the like, unless it was being thrown around as some kind of insult. Kids could be mean to those that were different - and James, who often finds his eyes lingering on boys and girls in equal measure, is a little different.
It’s only when Danny brings up Alistair, the kid he used to hang around with, refers to him as Alex, refers to him as his boyfriend, that James starts to consider that, once you get to university, nobody bats an eyelid about what you like.
“Did you know?” James glances to Q, who just shrugs.
"Statistically, one of us was going to be gay," he says, and Danny rolls his eyes.
"Didn't we beat that statistic?"
Q raises an eyebrow, and then smiles a little. “If we're being specific, yes, we did."
And just like that, he's out of the closet. James has no idea how he does it so calmly. But, then again, everyone knows how Q feels. Q wouldn’t have to go into detail about how, no, he can’t be gay because he knows he likes women too, but these other feelings - this has gone on too long to be some fleeting phase of curiosity. Whilst Q can say it so easily, James can’t even think about telling someone how he feels when he doesn’t even know how to describe it.
(Later that night, when he knows his aunt is asleep, he pulls up Google on his phone and searches I want to kiss boys and girls which brings up nothing except some dodgy looking YouTube videos. He switches the search to interested in boys and girls which pulls up another website, the one he’s looking for.
It's nearly one AM, on a school night, when James Bond labels himself as bisexual for the first time.)
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: he cant express his feelings properly. He's spent years holding things in and stewing over them, he's not sure he knows how to let them go.
He wants to tell Vesper about all this, finally, because she always knows the right thing to say, but he can't form the words. He's been at her house for two hours now, sitting in her room with the door open (because they're adults now), trying to find some way of just telling her what’s going on, it's like the words are shards of glass stuck in his throat, and he can't get them out.
"You look like you're about to throw up," Vesper comments, jokingly at first, but then her tone becomes increasingly more worried when he doesn’t answer. "James? What is it?"
"I -" He sucks in a sharp breath, trying to make the words that don’t want to leave him. It's like being ten years old all over again, sitting under that stupid sheet of tarpaulin and being told that people think it’s wrong for boys to kiss other boys.
Except this is Vesper. Vesper, who looks at him with kindness in her green eyes. The same Vesper who climbed trees with him when they were children, and who, still so young herself, held him when he finally felt safe enough to cry over the loss over his parents, and suddenly its like a knot has been cut loose in his stomach. Vesper isn’t going to toss him aside about something like this. She never could.
"I think I'm bisexual," he says, before this good feeling leaves him and has to spend days, weeks, chasing to get it back, even if he can't quite look her in the eyes right now.
Beside him, Vesper just snorts, and then squeezes his hand in hers. "James, dear, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but I already knew."
It's the best response he could have hoped for.
+
So here’s the thing about James Bond: once he does something once, he picks up very quickly how to do it again.
Slowly but surely, he starts to tell everyone in his life., His aunt wraps him up in a hug when he hesitantly tells her, and it might be the most emotional interaction they’ve ever had. Eve and Tanner are almost as unsurprised as Vesper - “I guess it was kind of obvious when you think about it,” Tanner remarks - and Danny and Q make a point of welcoming him into their ranks by gifting him a handkerchief-size bisexual flag that James rolls his eyes at but tucks securely into the pocket of his jacket.
He tells Madeleine too, after school one day when it’s just them, and almost expects the worst, but even that goes surprisingly well. She listens to him without interrupting, only to kiss him on the cheek and say, with a toothy smile, when he asks why she isn’t freaking out, "Let’s just say, I know exactly what it's like to want to kiss girls."
Well, then.
They both chuckle after this, a mutual understanding, and agree not to go to prom together after all.
(Eve comes up to him the next day, wondering what the hell is going on and demanding to know why Madeleine Swann, of all people, just asked her to prom ten minutes ago. James simply smiles and tells her to say yes.)
+
So here's the thing about James Bond: he's incredibly blinded by his own feelings, and apparently oblivious to everyone else’s.
He’s opted to spend prom night with the person he would’ve asked anyway, which means he’s sprawled on the sofa in Q’s living room, watching terrible spy films and listening to the boy pick apart every plot hole before explaining how he could do it so much better. He’s not really listening to the commentary itself, he’s more watching Q get so passionately involved with the whole thing, so it's a bit of a shock when Q, probably having built up to this during the conversation that James has missed entirely, kisses him first, sloppily and with chapped lips and too many teeth involved, but there's something right about it, and James thinks it isn't so bad for his second kiss with a boy ever in all of his sixteen years of life.
“Sorry,” Q says when he pulls away, and with his untidy hair and slightly askew glasses, he looks so very flustered, and so very lovely, and James thinks, for a moment, of all the times he’s thought about moments like this and then squashed them down without daring to hope that they would ever happen.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says, and when Q kisses him again, this time he’s very much prepared.