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It is not unusual for Q to wake alone.
At the start, of course, it had been because Q had trouble getting him to stay the night. It had taken months of snide hints, guilt-tripping, and brazen manipulation. Even a quiet request, muttered at the stirring of the dawn, had no effect. After the amount of effort it took, it should perhaps have been more significant when it did, eventually, happen.
Q woke, for the first time ever, with a body pressed up against his back, and an arm wrapped loosely around his middle.
It hadn't been a particularly momentous occasion. One night James had just decided to stay. Q lay there, quietly. Eyes closed, he drank in James' presence. It felt natural. Warm skin, warmer than his, despite the yellow glow of the sun across the bed. He wasn't soft, not really, though Q knew his body well enough by now to know it would yield slightly against his fingertips until he hit the solid mass of muscle underneath.
His arm was pressed up against Q's own where it rested against his chest. It was rougher in places where their body hair rubbed together, but smoother where James' arm was scarred and rucked, pink tissue tucked in amongst folds of weathered skin.
James' head was tucked into Q's nape, his hair tickling Q's shoulder. Gentle, steady breaths were cool against the bare skin of his back. James smelt like he always did, his subtle undertone of musk beneath the fading aftershave that he always wore. The tang of Q's soap on his skin had done little to wash the gunpowder from his fingers, or lessen the slight tang of sex and sweat that still hung in the air between them.
The moment is clear in his memory. It might not have been anything particularly unique, but for them, it was unusual. It has since been supplemented by similar memories of the rare mornings they had been able to spend together.
In a similar position, perhaps, or with Q tucked up against the comforting weight and warmth of James' chest. Curled into him, their legs tangled together, Q's head tucked under James' chin.
There had been an argument once, or something of the like. Either way, they had gone to bed separately. Unusual for when they were both home, for once. James had deliberately come back later, when Q was already in bed--and yet he had woken with an armful of secret agent, who was complaining about having Q's hair in his mouth. The vibration of his voice had been reassuring, somehow. Q doesn't remember what they had argued about.
Those mornings were pleasant, rare though they may have been.
-0-
Q coughs into his hand, then takes a deep breath, running his hand through his hair and then shaking out his curls until they hide his eyes.
Slowly, uncertainly, he begins to speak.
"We all knew 007. Some of you will remember him from his time in the Navy. More of you knew him as one of the most influential members of MI6's... Um." He pauses, blinks, and then shakes his head in an almost imperceptibly small motion.
"My apologies," he interrupts himself. "My colleagues helped me write this, and I'm only just realising how little sense it makes." He glares at the little cue cards, balanced carefully on the lectern's ledge, pale white against the rich varnish of the dark oak. Only Eve is seated close enough to hear him mutter under his breath; "We spend most of our time living in tunnels for heaven's sake..."
Then he seems to regain some of his composure, though his shoulders remain hunched and he does not raise his eyes from his own scrawling handwriting. Speaking to the whole of the congregation now, he continues.
"Yes, right. Um. 007, James Bond. One of the most influential people in the... No, this makes no sense at all." This time, he doesn't even bother to lower his voice. Eve resists the urge to bury her face in her hands, and carefully studies the faces of the officials sat in the front row. They are all carefully poker-faced.
"He'd hate this, me reading off these stupid cue cards." Q continues, and for once, Eve wants to take his brutally honest brain and shove it down the pan, because these are government officials, for goodness sake. They are here for 007, the weapon, not James Bond, the man.
But Q had already told her that he wasn't one for glossing over the facts, and she knew that was true. Always, Q spoke his mind, or kept his mouth shut. If he wants to tell the congregation that James Bond was... Well, not as straightforward as most of these people assume he is, then he will. Q would never forgive himself if he thought that he hadn't done James justice. It had been the first decision she had made when Q had, sort of, asked for her help in writing the damn thing.
A large part of Eve doesn't want Q to be himself, because it might reflect badly on the rest of MI6. The rest of her, a much larger part of Eve, wants to scream at the injustice of it all because Q is not like that, and neither is MI6. They are not robots, they are not weapons, and okay, yes, they may just be pawns in the grander chess game of life, but they are human pawns.
However, even above all that, the most important thing is that the speech--whatever it turns out to be--is going to be what people remember about James. People who never met him and people who saw him every day, people who only heard his name in passing and those who cursed it or even praised it, those who knew him as a number, those who knew him as a sailor, those who never gave him so much as a second glance but have come for the look of the thing--this will be one of the last things that they remember about James.
Q has to get this right; and he knows it.
Taking a deep breath as if steeling himself, he continues.
"James Bond, as you know, was killed in action just over a week ago, whilst working for the good of Queen and Country, halfway across the world in some awfully hot country, most likely with palm trees and possibly even coconuts." The edge of his lip quirks up in a rueful grin, though it's not real amusement that makes him smile. "This time, he might actually do us the honour of staying dead, unlike the last few times we lost him."
He looks so young and vulnerable up there. His pale skin and dark hair looks odd next to a suit, her having seen him only in cardigans for as long as she can remember. There are dark circles under his eyes, much clearer from the side than the front, where his glasses can't hide them. He looks too tired to be doing this.
"Sorry, sorry, I know you're not supposed to say things like that about dead people. I'm not glad he's dead, I just..."
Eve tries not to wince. She catches R's eye in the audience, and his mouth is turned down, looking half sympathetic, half-embarrassed on Q's behalf.
"Oh bugger. I knew there was a reason I never write speeches."
Rather decisively, he places the first of the cue cards down on lectern. That done, he brushes off the front of his jacket, and places his hands on the wood. Eve recognises the pose - he often stands at the main desk in Q-Branch like that, staring at the screen. Q looks at his audience for the first time.
Gaining his composure, he pulls his back up straight, and stares straight out across the congregation, taking in the sea of black suits and slim dresses. There are faces both familiar and unfamiliar, but he can't focus on any of them. The silence stretches out uncomfortably. Somebody coughs, the sound echoing up to the high vaulted ceiling of the church.
R catches Eve's eye and gives her a desperate look. She nods, and is about to rise to her feet when Q opens his mouth, and speaks. It is not the voice that he was using just a few minutes before, but his commanding voice. It wavers slightly, admittedly, but his branch members are already sitting up straighter in their seats, as if reacting to his tone. Eve stops, remains seated, and watches.
"The thing about death..." Q begins again.
-0-
It is not unusual for Q to wake alone, his legs tangled in cool white sheets instead of warm tanned skin. James works away from home, sleeps in hotels and safe houses and tents and even caves halfway across the world. Even then, it's not so far that Q cannot reach him. There's always the earpiece, the little electronic signal that connects them.
"007, a lot of work goes into making your equipment." Q says at work. He hands Bond a budget form. Bond smirks, shrugs one shoulder.
"Stop losing my stuff." He chides on the way home in the car, slapping James' questing hand away from his thigh. James smirks, returns both hands to the wheel, and promptly does a completely unnecessary handbrake turn that has Q swearing that he's walking home for the next month, and taking a vow of chastity until then. James hums, non-committal and horrendously out of tune. Q rolls his eyes.
"Please don't lose my connection." Q whispers against James' lips. James breathes back into his mouth, makes no promises. It's fine. He doesn't.
-0-
She cries, at the end. Most of the congregation clap. For most people, it's just polite, but there are a few faces that she sees that have a slightly different expression. Alec, stoic as ever, is solemn, unsmiling, but there's a calm, respectful quality to the air around him that Eve wasn't expecting. It's unusual, for Alec. Most of Q-Branch, too, seem a little emotional, and aren't trying to hide it. There are some tears, she notices, which seems a little ironic. She supposes that they must be on Q's behalf, because Bond himself was the terror of TSS. Even R is wiping his eyes and sniffling, though he's handing out tissues to the rest of the interns instead of using them himself. Delegation. Eve shakes her head, wonderingly. How they are always somehow in work mode, she will never know.
As Q finally steps away from the podium and makes his way back to his seat, Eve can see that his expression is a little bit crumpled. He's not crying though, so she feels somewhat less guilty about the little breath of relief that escapes. Q needed that speech. Well, he needed to get it all out, anyway. Trust him to do it in the most unconventional of ways.
There's not much left to do after that. They don't say prayers and sing hymns. It's short, and bittersweet. At the end, they all file out in an orderly fashion, and Q instantly vanishes into the crowd, despite Eve's best efforts to locate him.
"Crap." She swears, and taps her heels, frustrated at how slowly the line is moving. A thick, solid hand suddenly lands on her shoulder, the grip gentle but firm. For a second, she turns, ready to tell James to piss off.
"I'll find him." Alec leans down and whispers in her ear, too quietly for the others nearby to hear.
She nods, and he releases her, pushing through and finding his way through the crowds of people as easily as if they were water. They close in behind him, and he too vanishes from sight.
Beside her, M coughs, cordially, and she jumps. She'd almost forgotten that he was there. He has a way of doing that.
"It was a good speech."
The seemingly innocently conversational comment throws her a little, but only for a second.
"It was."
"How strange. I was under the impression that it was, as I believe you put it, 'messy, uncoordinated and confused'."
She contemplates it for a second.
"It was."
The slight glance of a smile is welcome, if only because it means that she hasn't said the wrong thing. It's hard to tell, with Mallory.
"And yet he managed to make it emotional and meaningful. Fascinating."
It's an interesting point. That's the thing about M; he is a politician. He can say things that suddenly turn your brain around and make you think around corners, and he can manipulate it so that he knows exactly what conclusions you will arrive at. Eve nods, slowly.
"He is."
-0-
It's not unusual for Q to wake alone. It is unusual for him to clutch the sheets so hard between his fingers that his knuckles turn white and his hands shake. It is unusual for him to press his lips together, his breath stuttering and gasping. It is unusual for there not to be a voice on the other end of the line.
Even when Bond mutes his precious com. Even then, Q could listen to him shoot and lie and fuck his way through a mission. He could wake up with the smell of him lingering on Q's sheets, the taste of him on his tongue, the memory of his touch burned into his skin.
It is unusual for the earpiece to lie silent and forgotten on the tabletop when James is not at home.
-0-
The thing about death is...
Well.
The thing about death is that it just is. That. Death.
It happens to everyone. It's an inevitability, it's predictable, assured, even. It's the one constant that can always be trusted. (Breath. Pause.)
Is it irrational, then, that humanity feels the need to mourn the dead? Perhaps not. Cold-hearted though I may be, I can understand. Empathise, even. Death is just a thing that happens, but at the same time, it's so much more.
It hurts less, I think, when you have a chance to say goodbye, or to prepare for what is going to happen. We spend our whole lives preparing, really, and yet we're never ready. There's always the hope, that vital human trait, that this time, maybe this time, it will not be. Of course, it always is. (Pushes glasses up nose. Deep breath.)
Does that make sense? (Pause.)
No, I suppose it doesn't.
What I'm trying to say is this; if death happens with such predictability, how come the human brain reacts so violently? The tears, the grief, the heartache - I suppose it's because you have lost a friend, a family member, a lover, or a loved one. Grief is rather selfish, in that manner. (Breath.)
I cannot bring myself to cry. I know I should, I know it will clear my head, but I can't do it. It seems so very selfish, to cry over something so trivial, in the grand scheme of things. I will never see him again, I know. I shall never speak with him again, never laugh with him again, never make love to him again. It is selfish, perhaps, to mourn my loss, rather than his. It is what I will miss, though, and I cannot deny it. (More fluently, now.)
I should wax poetic about that more, I think, but I don't want to. I feel it would rather insult his memory to go on about how wonderful and beautiful he was. Because he wasn't. He was scarred and broken. (Nervous chuckle.) Of course, his scars were handsome, heroic in their own way. Even his broken heart; that too, sacrificed for the greater good. He would give anything he could for his country, and sometimes, he was forced to give more. For some reason I cannot explain nor rationalise, that was attractive to me. It may have been what drew me to him in the first place. He was imperfect, and so I cannot describe him in poetry, and yet he was beautiful in his own way. An unconventional way. Not beautiful at all, really. I think he'd resent me using that word. (Pushes glasses up. Deep breath.)
I did love him, in case you were wondering. I loved all of him, even the broken parts. Especially the broken parts, really. That was what made him who he was. I cannot conjure his picture without the scars. Sometimes all I remember of him is the blood. He used to come home to me covered in it. I could never really tell what was his and what was someone else's. To be fair, I often wasn't trying very hard; it is difficult to be concerned about whose blood is whose when it is dripping on the brand new cream carpet of one's flat. (Slight laugh. Sobers quickly. Pause. Reconsiders.)
People like to claim that it was glorious, what he did. I disagree. It was necessary. It was part of who he was, and it was what his country demanded of him. It was, and still is, demanded of all of us. It still will be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.
We will go back to work. More people like him will be killed, some on our orders. More people will mourn. Whether they are good people or bad people; it does not matter. I don't think he was a good person. I don't think he was a bad one either. He was just James.
(Pause. Glances around.)
I struggled to write this speech. I couldn't decide what things about him needed saying, and what didn't. Many of you know him as 007, one of the finest secret agents the world has ever seen. A somewhat debatable title, considering most of the world seems to know who he is. (Corrects.) Was. I
knew him as James, at home, Bond, at work, and 007 when he was being a dick. (Some laughter from congregation.)
In the end, really, there is very little to say. He did his job, and he did it well, though it destroyed him in the end. Ironic, really, that I warned him of that, one of the first times we ever met.
This speech, it turns out, has very little to do with James Bond, 007. It is all about his death. And it is rather a mess of a speech, because, you see... well, I knew him. I knew him well. And I discovered that it is infinitely harder to write about the life of someone you knew well, than someone you barely know at all.
007 was a man with a gun, who, and this is in his own words, 'couldn't give a toss about those bastards in government, because as long as we're out there fighting, England rests safe at night'. The fact that he declared this in the middle of an argument with me, and then proceeded to go out and get himself killed without giving me a chance to retaliate, let alone reconcile, is rather besides the point, but completely typical for him. (Smiles, awkwardly.)
Bond was always a fickle man. He was proud, and his ego was dangerous. It did endanger him, in fact, several times, but he never learnt his lesson. Stubborn. Arrogant. Endlessly antagonising, sometimes purposefully. He would go against orders just to spite, if he could get away with it, and he nearly always did. There was no stopping him. He was determined, I'll give him that. He would follow a job through, to the very end, every time. Except one, of course, but some things can't be helped. He could be charming when he wanted to be, and he always, and I really do mean always, had a sharp or witty retort to everything.
And those damn suits - I would have sworn, just over a year ago, that the things were surgically attached to him. (Small laugh.) Of course I soon discovered that it really wasn't hard to get them off, but we're not going to talk about that in polite company. (Laughter from select members of congregation.) Despite all that, I wouldn't have changed anything about him for all the world - well, except maybe give him a more regular return rate for my equipment. (Smile. Pause. Shuffle. Glasses. Deep breath.)
He's a right bastard for dying on me like this, but as I said at the very beginning of this speech; it was inevitable, in the end. In a way, I'm glad he went like this; he would have been furious if he'd died at home, of old age or of pneumonia or some equally 'pathetic' disease. Not that he didn't try his hardest, mind - and the staff at medical will attest to that, as long as it doesn't fall under the official secrets act.
He just wasn't the type to die like that; he lived his life on the edge, in the most literal sense. He was always doing stupid things like getting shot at and getting caught in explosions. Feeding my guns to dragons, I seem to particularly remember. (Eve claps. Some laughter. Q nods.) It's rather fitting that he went out much the same way as he came in; with a bang. (Looks down. Continues talking. Quieter.)
My first thought when I heard what had happened was that I should have been there. I had been for every other mission, every single other time, and he chose the one where I wasn't supervising to get himself blown up. That was the guilt talking, of course, the Quartermaster instinct. (Pause.) The second thought was that it would have been kinder for us to drift apart slowly; it would have hurt less. (Breath.) That was my heart talking, of course. It was selfish, I must admit - but you know, it's true. If we had slowly, over time, just ceased to be, then it wouldn't have hurt so much. I would be more used to his absence, more accustomed to the silence. I would not have had to do this stupid speech. (Smile.) Someone else would have done it, someone who didn't know him so well. They'd probably have done a better job of it too. (Breath.)
I don't want you to misunderstand me. I will miss him. I will grieve for him. Possibly cry for him, once I've got this damnable speech out of the way. And now that I've had time to think about it, I am glad that it ended this way. He would have been bloody awful at getting old. Not one for retirement, was James.
I would have liked a while longer, of course, but time is not a luxury we had. What we did have, we made the most of, and I speak not as his colleague but as his partner when I say that his wit and charm will be sadly missed. I speak as his supervisor when I say that he was a damn pain in the arse sometimes. (Laughter.)
There's no way to summarise the entire life of a person in one short speech. It is far too complex. It would be a travesty, one feels, to miss out something that you may judge to be trivial, but which to somebody else may be a priceless memory.
We all have our own memories of what he was like. I have shared some of mine with you today. It’s important to remember what we knew about him, I think. But that's not... That's not what I want to take away from this.
I'm not going to spout any such rubbish about him living on in our thoughts. I wouldn’t dare. I just want you to remember that he was a man who was loyal to his country, and who never gave up. Not once. It seems such a trivial thing, but it was an integral part of him. I'd like to think that I am not the only one who is grateful for what he did for us. Yes, sometimes he was crude, and seemed to have a skewed view of both his moral standpoint and the limits of his human capabilities, but he lived and died fighting for us, and I, for one, am grateful to him for that.
Thank you.
-0-
It is unusual for Q to wake alone, and to try not to take a breath because his sheets no longer smell faintly of gunpowder. To keep his eyes shut, because he cannot bear to see the hollow emptiness of the space on the other side of the bed. To long for the dark unconsciousness of sleep that he used to find such a useless necessity.
Q wakes, remembers, and presses his face into the pillow to stop the tears from falling.
Then he gets up and does what he has always done. It takes little real thought, but just enough effort to occupy his mind. The continual cycle of repetition dulls his cognitions enough to help him forget about the sharp pain of it, even just for a while.
Wake, eat, work, eat, work, eat, wash, sleep.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
On and on and on.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
Eve tells him sympathetically that it will take time. Q shuts her out of his branch. R makes him tea, and silently corrects his mistakes.
Q lives, and breathes, and gets on with it, because if he doesn’t then he will be forced to acknowledge the fact that James is...