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Chapter Text

Because even a retired James Bond is still James Bond, Q is greeted by the barrel of a gun—a Beretta, not a Walther, the philistine—when he pries open the window. “We’re eight stories up. If you are going to kill me, I’d recommend pushing me off the fire escape; less disruptive for your poor neighbors.”        

“Q?” Bond asks. He’s barely half awake, but the gun is no longer pointed squarely between Q’s eyes, so all in all the conversation is a success.

“Yes, hello, Bond. How’s retirement?” Q swings his legs over the open window, easing himself to the floor. Bond shrugs noncommittally, managing to convey both great smugness and deep ennui.

“I’ve taken up knitting. I’ll make you a scarf.”

Because he’s still somewhat put out about the gun and not above pettiness about Bond stealing his fucking car—twice—Q asks, “Where’s the girl?” He knows full well that Dr. Swann left roughly six weeks into their romantic European road trip—in Q’s fucking car—and that it’s possibly fairly cruel of him to bring that up. However, it’s better than saying why didn’t you come back, which sounds far too much like I missed you, which, in turn, sounds far too much like I loved you. Bond, Q knows from experience, is very good at reading people, and at taking a mile where he’s given an inch. Best not to give him the opportunity.

“Not here, obviously,” Bond says dismissively, and unfortunately for Q’s pettiness, he really does appear to be unbothered. He supposes there’s really only so invested one can be in a six-week relationship, but still. Bond had abandoned MI6 for the woman. “Dare I ask why you’re in Paris?”

“You haven’t the clearance, I’m afraid.” Q briefly considers pushing away from the wall, but his right leg doesn’t seem to be bearing weight, so against the wall he remains. “Well. Not anymore, anyways.”

“You’ve just popped in through my window for a chat, then?”

“Actually, I’m afraid I need your help,” Q says, and stands. Immediately, his leg buckles underneath him. He catches himself before he hits the floor—or tries to, given that his body seems to be acting as an entirely separate entity from his mind. “Shitfuckshit, that hurts. Shit.”

And then Bond is looming over him, monumental, larger than life—as always—and his eyes are the blue of wildflowers and of missed chances. His hands are warm, calloused, gentle, cupping Q’s face, cradling his jaw, and Q hasn’t slept in days, hasn’t rested in months—he wants so badly to let someone else carry his weight, if only for a moment. But Bond is no longer Bond, no longer the indomitable 007, and Q is no longer his Quartermaster. And, oh, how much it had hurt to realize he had never been Bond’s friend. I loved you, he thinks, nonsensically, as Bond’s mouth forms words he cannot hear.

“—at me, Q, look at me, don’t you fucking dare—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m not dying,” Q says. “I’ve been lightly—fuck—stabbed. I’m afraid it’s become something of a habit, recently. Jesusfuckshit, ow.”

“You’ve gotten blood all over my floor,” Bond says, smiling. He’s out of practice; it wavers, a frightened thing too sharp to be relieved. Q is touched by his concern, but he’s also been touched by a knife, and the adrenaline has entirely worn off. “What have you done to yourself?”

“To myself?” Q repeats, mildly outraged until he moves his leg and is consumed by overwhelming and incandescent hatred for the man who stuck a knife in his thigh. He also feels a piercing regret that he shot the fucker cleanly in the head and therefore cannot kill him again. Bond’s hands are still on him, though one has slid down to his shoulder and the other is holding up his head. “I cannot believe I am about to say this—and I will erase you if you tell anyone—but I am going to need you to carry me to the bathroom.”

“I’m hurt, Q. Don’t you trust me?” He makes a good point, but Q is hardly feeling charitable, given that Bond—the insufferable bastard—has chosen a bridal carry, and the lifting has jostled his leg. “Sorry,” Bond says, when Q hisses in pain, not looking sorry at all. In fact, he looks deeply pleased with the whole situation—probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in months, what with the retirement. Q comforts himself by imagining shooting Bond in the thigh, and then carrying him around like a fainting damsel and seeing how he likes it. “Here we are.”

Bond deposits him—but gently, so gently, as if Q is something ethereal and fragile that might disappear at any moment—in the bathtub. It’s quite a nice bathtub—the whole flat is impeccably (and expensively) decorated, actually—but Q is distracted by the fact that his trousers are entirely soaked through with his own blood. “Oh, hell,” he mutters, and starts taking off his pants.

“You might ask me to dinner first, Quartermaster,” Bond says, leering. It would be entirely ludicrous except—of course—it’s Bond, so it’s actually quite hot, what with the smoldering eyes and the smirk and the scarred expanse of his chest, because he is—of course—shirtless. Instead of responding—because really—Q removes the gun from his hip holster and sets it on the edge of the tub. “Are you old enough to use one of those?”

“Do shut up, Bond, and fetch the first aid kit, ta,” Q says, disinfecting the gash. The wound isn’t particularly wide, but it’s fairly deep, although it doesn’t appear to have hit anything vital. “I’m going to need stitches.”

“What happened?”

“I was stabbed. Pay attention, if you please, I’m bleeding out in your bathtub.”

“You aren’t bleeding out,” Bond points out, although he’s moving extremely quickly, already threading the sterilized needle with steady hands. “And I meant more—should I be on the lookout for men with large knives and violent intentions following after you through my window?”

“No, I took his knife. Ow, shit, I hate this.” Q hoists himself up onto the lip of the tub and allows Bond to maneuver his leg around so that it’s laying over Bond’s lap. “And, more to the point, I shot him in the head, so it’s unlikely he’ll be crawling through any windows. Christ, oh, you motherfucker.”

“First time?” Bond says, once the stitch is tied off. His eyebrows have lifted slightly, amused, and that infuriating smirk is back, but his focus doesn’t waver for an instant. He pushes the needle through again.

“Hardly,” Q grits out between his teeth. “Fuck, I am going to remove Putin’s testicles with a melon baller, сукин сын.”

“Извините.” Bond is smiling outright, now, as he pulls the gash closed, stitches neat and even. He runs his off hand down the outside of Q’s leg, soothing. “What have the Russians done to earn your ire?”

“Worked with SPECTRE to meddle in the democratic process of the most powerful country on the planet,” Q says, and then, as Bond finishes another stitch, “Ow, ow, and also, more importantly, stabbed me, jesusfuckingchrist, but the point is SPECTRE appears to be making overtures towards legitimate governments—well, for certain values of legitimate, anyways—shitfuck, which is making the powers that be very anxious.”

Bond recoils very slightly, his jaw hardening and his eyes turning glacial. His grip on Q’s thigh tightens. “SPECTRE’s back?”

“Back?” Q says, honestly confused, and then it all clicks. “Bond, tell me you have not been operating under the assumption that by pointedly not shooting your megalomaniacal, delusional foster brother you had actually managed to dismantle an entire international criminal organization—an organization, may I remind you, that was influential enough to nearly gain control of the entire security networks of nine countries, had I been a little less brilliant?”

“He was in charge of the thing,” Bond says, wryly, but his face is still held cold and severe, unyielding. “Besides, it seemed very final.”

“It seemed very final,” Q repeats. He heroically resists the urge to laugh in Bond’s face, as he imagines it would not go over well. “You do realize that the world does not actually revolve around your personal drama.”

“Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, yes.” Bond punctuates this remark with another stitch, during which Q curses eloquently and extensively. “That still doesn’t explain why you are in the field, Q. Or why you’re here.”

“I was in the neighborhood and found myself in need of medical attention.” The truth is, of course, that instead of deleting the SmartBlood files, Q moved them to his personal computer, and has been intermittently keeping an eye on Bond for the past year, although it is sheer coincidence that he got stabbed three metro stops away from Bond’s flat. But cultivating an air of omniscience is part of the job, really, and Bond doesn’t need to know any of that. “And I am in the field because my skillset is both extensive and highly adaptable, as well as deeply classified.”

“Oh, I know exactly how extensive your skillset is, Quartermaster,” Bond purrs, which really is ludicrous—even Bond can’t redeem a line that terrible. Q conveys this point by raising a single, unimpressed eyebrow, and Bond concedes with a somewhat sheepish grin, lifting the hand not currently forcing a needle through Q’s leg—fuck, he says again, feelingly, but at least Bond appears to be done, now—in a conciliatory gesture. “You really aren’t going to tell me?”

“Against the rules, I’m afraid,” Q says, trying for a combination of regret and conviction he learned from 008, who is a far better actress than Q could ever dream of becoming, and possibly his favorite of the double ohs. She, he thinks somewhat wistfully, would probably stitch me up without subjecting me to terrible innuendoes in the process. “I wasn’t kidding about it being classified, Bond, and you are a civilian, regardless of the number of illegal firearms you have hidden around your flat.”

“Ah. That.”

“Quite. But you needn’t worry,” Q adds at Bond’s lingering pensive expression, “I am here with the full knowledge and support of MI6. I just need to arrange transportation out of the country, and then I’ll be off.”

“Returning home, then?” Q doesn’t miss that he says home, instead of England-London-MI6, and tries not to read too much into it. Bond’s hands are fantastically warm against Q’s bare skin, and Q follows their path as they tape down the gauze over those neat stitches.

“Not quite yet,” Q says, thinking of the days stretching on endlessly ahead of him, the promise of victory at the end. He’s almost done, now—the men who could have raised suspicions against him are corpses, lying cold and still at the bottom of the Seine along with the two field agents who had been acting as his protection detail. He’s done what SPECTRE has asked of him, proved his trustworthiness.  Finish the job, close the deal, he thinks, get access to the network, and then—then, then, then—go home. “But the worst is over.”

“I should hope so,” Bond says. He looks up, brow furrowed and eyes focused inward, and the silence stretches out. His hand moves again, sweeping up and down along the outside of Q’s thigh, holding it in place. There is something coming to life in the depths of his gaze; some sleeping creature is slowly awakening, stretching beneath his skin. Q wonders how long Bond will stay here, playing house alone in a country that is not his. Perhaps not much longer, now that he has been reminded of Q’s world—their world—of spies and secrets, now that Q has shattered the cloying, quiet stillness that clings to him.

“We kept your flat,” Q says. It seems very important, suddenly, to make sure Bond knows there is something for him to return to. “We didn’t sell it, I mean. In case you—well. Just in case, I suppose.”

Bond just looks at him for a moment, nonplussed, and then he smiles brilliantly, as though Q has said something a great deal more profound than we didn’t sell your flat. The smile expands, pulling at the corners of his eyes, softening the weathered lines of his face, genuinely, disarmingly pleased. Goddammit, Q thinks. This is what he had tried to forget, in the months after Bond left; this is what hurt to remember, held close and hidden within his chest.

The feeling of being seen—understood, recognized, known—is a heady thing; being seen by James Bond is nearly paralyzing, the weight of his attention settling like the warmth of the sun across Q’s shoulders. Whatever Bond sees in Q’s face, his smile turns smug, his eyes considering. This, too, Q remembers, the chameleon, mercurial nature of him, how he changed so quickly from staid to laughing to calculating to cold. Of all the complaints one can make about Bond’s personality, boring is not one of them, and really, that’s the beginning and the end of it for Q.

“Did you miss me while I was away, Quartermaster?” Bond is playful again, a lazy, self-satisfied cat batting at an unsuspecting mouse. Q pointedly removes Bond’s hand from his thigh and pats him twice on the head, patronizing.

“Not at all,” Q says, voice steady and clinical as a scalpel. “It’s just that the real estate market in London has been terrible.” Bond does not look convinced. In fact, he looks as pleased as if Q had actually gone absolutely around the bend and said yes I missed you constantly and pathetically and I want you to come back and continue wreaking havoc upon my departmental budget.

“To be expected, I think, what with Brexit and England in general going the way of the dogs,” Bond replies. “Perhaps you should move to France. If only for the real estate.”

“I remain rather partial to the UK, unfortunately. But I will take your couch for the evening, if you please.” He wants to add a pithy comment about Bond obviously caring very little for real estate values given the number of buildings he destroys in an average month, and then remembers the great big derelict fuck-off manor in the Scottish moors and decides not to bring it up.

“I think a stab wound is probably grounds to demand the bed,” Bond says. Q folds his pants over his arm and grabs the pistol off the edge of the tub, then forces himself to his feet. The pain is manageable, now that he knows to brace for it. “Should you be standing?”

“I’ve walked on worse,” Q says, and then realizes it’s not exactly reassuring when Bond’s eyebrows fly up into his hairline. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t make that face at me. It’s not like you haven’t done exactly the same, Bond. I’m fine.” He takes one admittedly very wobbly step before Bond steadies him with an arm beneath his shoulders.

“Yes, obviously, you’re fantastic. You’ll take the bed.” Q doesn’t really see much point to arguing, given that he feels as though he might pass out at any moment. He gives Bond a look that has been known to make lesser men piss themselves when it seems as though he might try to carry Q the rest of the way. Unfortunately, it does not have the same effect on Bond, but it does stop him in the process of sweeping Q into another goddamn bridal carry, thus leaving him with at least a modicum of dignity intact.

He doesn’t bother getting under the covers, just shucks his jacket, places his glasses next to his gun on the bedside table, and lays down on Bond’s—obscenely large and comfortable—bed. Right before he loses consciousness, he remembers that Bond is an incredibly nosy man, even if he’s no longer a spy by occupation, and that Bond will almost certainly try to access his laptop as soon as Q is asleep. He considers warning him, but it seems a lot of effort, and getting tased by a keyboard is hardly going to kill the man.

It would serve him right, Q thinks, already drifting, followed immediately by, jesusfuck, my leg really hurts. If Bond doesn’t have Earl Grey somewhere in this palatial flat, it is going to be an excruciatingly unpleasant morning.

Bond wakes up from the feeling of drowning to the uncertain gray of the moments before dawn. It’s a dream—nightmare—he’s had on and off for years, since Venice, water closing over his head, frantic blindness giving way to the numb blue-green tinge of the canal. Sometimes there is someone else, grasping desperately at the iron bars of a cage. Usually, he is dying alone, chasing after the barest memory of someone else.

He watches from the chair beside his bed—where he fell asleep, Christ, his back hurts—as the sunrise slowly paints over Q’s pale face in gold. In the morning light, without the force of his quicksilver mind to animate him, he looks diminished. Exhaustion has turned the fine bones of his face haggard—he bears only a passing resemblance to the man Bond left in the basement of MI6 a year ago. He had given little thought to the aftermath of his retirement; it had seemed so remote at the time, unimportant next to the rush of victory and the promise of love. And after that faded, he had been left with only the same tired, directionless ache that had haunted him since M’s death.

But looking at Q, now, Bond feels none of that. There is a kind of excited anticipation he thought he had lost forever seething in his chest; he itches to move, to act. He feels the secrets behind Q’s sly smile pulling at him, the beckoning call of London, MI6, the mission.

“I do hope you haven’t been sitting there watching me sleep the entire night,” Q says, one eye slitted open.

“Of course not.” Q sits up, carefully. The only sign of his injury is a slight stiffening in his shoulders as he shifts. “The security measures on your laptop are quite impressive.”

If he’s hoping for sputtering outrage at his audacity, he’s disappointed. Q only smiles, slow and pleased, as he settles his glasses over the bridge of his nose and adjusts the cuffs of his hopelessly wrinkled shirt. He does not seem at all surprised that Bond tried—and failed—to hack his computer. “That laptop is perfectly capable of stopping a man’s heart. Be glad I hadn’t set the voltage higher,” he says. Q’s smile turns vicious as he looks up at Bond, and the sight settles low in his stomach. He’s always had an appreciation for dangerous things.

“And yet you couldn’t manage an exploding pen.” Q visibly heaves a sigh, but the corners of his mouth are still twitching upwards. Of course, the point of the exploding pen wasn’t really the exploding pen; it was demanding something outrageous of Q simply to watch him come up with something better. Q has something of a flair for creating impossible things, and they’re usually explosive or otherwise deadly. Bond has an appreciation for that, as well. “How do you take your tea?”

Q stands, the muscles in his legs—lean and whip-cord strong, like a runner—tensing, weight more on the left than on the right, and scoops his gun off the bedside table, checking the safety before tucking it into the waistband of his pants. “Black, no sugar, thank you.” He walks into the hallway and immediately focuses on where his laptop sits, partially opened, on the coffee table in the lounge. He casts a cursory glance around the room—cataloguing exits, possible weapons, potential threats, like a field agent—before settling down in an armchair, setting his laptop across his knees.

There’s very little response to that but to prepare the tea, which Bond does while observing Q out of the corner of his eye. The differences between the man before him and the one he remembers are small, but vital. There is something infinitesimally sharper about his expressions, as though the excess emotion has been whittled away by strain. He has always held himself precisely, unmoving and steady, but now his stillness seems to hold the potential of movement, of violence. He remembers the way Q said I shot him in the head, like it was nothing, like it was something he had done a hundred times before.

And he also remembers the way Q said we kept your flat, the way he smiled slightly when he said it—self-conscious, stiff, but so unexpectedly kind. Q, who refused to admit he missed Bond but revealed it all anyways with the warmth of his voice. Bond wonders if he, in turn, has managed to hide anything from Q, who always seemed nearly omniscient, with the world at his fingertips; he suspects he hasn’t. To trust someone is to give them a blade and tell them to hold it to your throat, and yet—and yet.

Q ignores him entirely when he stands to disappear back down the hallway, and again when he re-appears wearing slacks that are clearly Bond’s, and only kept around his hips by virtue of an equally stolen belt. He has also somehow managed to acquire a horrifyingly orange sweater that Bond is sure he bought only for the pleasure of burning it for various sartorial crimes. “Oh, by all means, help yourself,” Bond says, fishing the tea bag out of the pot with the handle of a butter knife. He thinks Q probably prefers loose-leaf, but he wasn’t expecting company and therefore can’t be blamed for tea-related disappointments.

Q quirks an eyebrow as he settles back down with his laptop, wincing slightly. “Shit, ow—yes, clearly I’ve exhausted your wardrobe in my hunt for clothes that are not covered in blood,” he says, reasonably. Bond still wants to burn that god-awful sweater, but he can remember—with a painful twist in his stomach—what Q looked like, hurt and blood-soaked, in the moments when Bond thought he was dying.

He delivers Q’s tea with a sarcastic flourish and barely resists the urge to ruffle that ridiculous hair. Q hits the enter key decisively, the thoughtful line of his mouth relaxing, and then looks up at Bond, appraising. He looks exactly as he used to before giving Bond something that could level a building, a combination of resigned exasperation and anticipation, and the comforting familiarity of it all settles next to the vague energy buzzing up his spine.

“There is a painting- Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Bruegel the Elder. It depicts a rather colorful country scene, with a grand ship and a white city in the distance. It’s in the Musée des Beaux Arts, in Brussels, if it matters. But in the corner, hidden in shadow, cut off from the world—there, if you look carefully, Icarus is drowning, silently, unnoticed.” Bond feels the weight of memory pressing in, again, sitting broken and useless and still half-dead, a metaphor for a dying age. Q, then, was a cruel reminder of it all. “It inspired a poem by Auden, which I’ve always quite liked, the point of which is the capacity of humanity to trudge on largely unbothered by the passing of great things, the operatic cycles of tragedy and triumph. They do not see; they do not care. No one celebrates the flight; no one mourns the fall.”

“Encouraging.”

“Let me finish, Bond, Christ.” Q takes a sip of his tea, mouth pursed thoughtfully against the rim of the cup. “See, importantly, both the painting and the poem omit Daedalus. Because of course, it’s not true—Icarus did not die unnoticed and alone. His father tried to save him. We exult in triumph; we immortalize our heroes. We fight, always. And even when humanity cannot prevent tragedy, it bears witness, and it remembers.” He pauses briefly, and then adds, almost to himself, “The sun was rising over the Temeraire.”

He looks at Q—at his expressive face, the slightly mournful turn of his mouth, the clarity of his eyes, the exhausted, determined slant of his jaw—and is almost in awe of the courage of him. Bond remembers having conviction, faith, like that, before it was worn down by time and bitter disappointment and the paralyzing weight of failure. He still believes, in a vague, distant way, in England, in queen and country and protecting the innocent. But it seemed such an empty, thankless thing by the end.

The moment stretches, pulled thin as the threads of fate, the haze of possibility. He remembers all the exhaustion that drove him to leave, the hopeless sense of loss. And yet—he also remembers the knowledge, solid and secure as the weight of a gun in his hand, that he was making a difference. He had lost that, but he sees it in Q now, the certainty in the set of his shoulders. He sees the great beast of MI6, sitting upon the Thames, broken and built again, and all of the people who have fought for him and with him.

“You must be fun at parties,” Bond says, instead of how can you contain all of yourself without collapsing inwards under the weight of it or you are the most irritating person I have ever met you insufferable shit or in this extremely long-winded metaphor are you Daedalus or are you the sun or are you the watcher standing by.

“Hmm.” Q shuts his laptop and settles it into his bag, and finishes off the cup of tea, placing it carefully back on the table before standing, reloading the gun as he walks to the window. He holds his pistol casually, easily, barely limping at all. “And I’m sure you were a joy to have in class.”

“I was,” Bond says, smirking. This is familiar ground, the game of needling Q to watch him draw up his spine and tilt his chin and fail to hide his smile. “I’m actually extremely charming.”

“For a given definition of charming, I suppose,” Q says absently, smirking and adjusting the strap of his bag around his shoulder before opening the window, peering down at the street intently. Then he looks back, directly at Bond, sharp-eyed and soft-mouthed and changeable as the sea. He thinks of Icarus falling in sunlight, drowning in shadow. He thinks of the water closing countless times over his head. “Thank you, Bond.”

We’ve been here before, he thinks. Countless times. But before Bond has always been the one leaving, an unstoppable force ready to wreak havoc; he is unaccustomed to standing on the outside of a story looking in. “Good luck out there in the field, Quartermaster,” he says. “And do try to bring the equipment back in one piece.”

Q smiles, brilliantly, his mouth pulling outwards slightly more on one side than the other, and brings two fingers to his brow in a mocking salute. He slides gracefully and silently back out onto the fire escape and disappears in the space of a breath. Bond’s mouth goes dry around the long line of Q’s back as he moves. Well, shit, he thinks, because this is not unprecedented, but it is unexpected.

In Q’s absence, the flat feels quiet and unfamiliar, alien. He is left with only the vague shape of his want, held uselessly in his hands, new and flowering and growing along well-worn paths. “Well, shit,” he says again, aloud, because there is nothing else to be said. “That pretentious little bastard.” He looks around, feeling lost and unmoored and vaguely irritated at the sheer audacity of the world at large, and wonders about the inevitability of some things and the unpredictability of others.

The idea of home is a very distant thing, undefined. But he thinks of Q’s pale hands and Moneypenny’s smile, of Mallory’s placid scheming and Tanner’s dependability, even of the double ohs and their general insanity, and the concept begins to gain shape. He wanted to stop running, but he thinks it was maybe less about the running than about the emptiness waiting at the end of the road. It was the exhaustion of running alone.

But he wasn’t alone, and he has never left a job unfinished. SPECTRE looms in his memory; Q’s voice is warm in his mind across the breadth of the world. He feels something shuddering to life in his lungs. Bond breathes—his head does not quite break the surface, but he sees the sunlight play across the water, beckoning.

Six days later, he walks through the doors of MI6 and into Mallory’s office with nothing but a stolen keycard and the same unhesitating self-confidence that has allowed him to bluff his way out of certain death for a decade. The office is empty, so he settles himself down in Mallory’s chair, settling his heels on the edge of the sturdy desk, folding his arms behind his head.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Moneypenny says from the doorway, a file tucked under one arm. “I hope you brought back Q’s car.”

“Hello, Eve,” Bond purrs. She rolls her eyes, extensively, re-holstering the pistol she has pointed at his forehead. It disappears beneath the sharp lines of her navy blazer, perfectly coordinated with the color of her sheath dress, leaving no trace. “Fancy a drink?”

“Get out of that chair, James,” she says, in a comparable tone of voice that somehow contains undertones of I will impale you on my stilettos if you don’t. “Enjoy your retirement?”

“Not particularly,” he says. “Too peaceful. Distinct lack of murderous secretaries.”

Moneypenny turns away, but he catches the edge of her smile, a grudging thing. “You’re very lucky that I’m not actually a secretary, murderous or otherwise. Otherwise, I likely would have felt obligated to file your resignation, Agent Bond.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It’s not the first time you’ve run off with a woman, and it doesn’t tend to stick,” she says, not unkindly, looking down as she flips through the file. “And it’s rather a lot of paperwork for someone who isn’t a secretary to deal with. Though we really didn’t expect you to stay away quite this long. You’ve used up your vacation time for the next decade or so.”

Bond smiles at that, smug—being an inconvenience has always been a particular talent and pleasure of his. “And no one noticed you were missing a 007?”

“Oh, we’ve had a 007. From time to time, at least.” She looks halfway between fond and irritated. “He’s quite good, actually. But I worry about him anyways.”

Bond quickly assembles a Venn diagram in his head of people who can operate in the field and people who can inspire the expression on Moneypenny’s face. The overlap is exactly one person. “You’re kidding.” Moneypenny shrugs, smiling, typing something out rapidly on her phone. “You’re not kidding. Really?”

“Well. He’s efficient.” Bond imagines efficiency is something the Quartermaster is often accused of. “And his scores on the range are better than all of the other agents except 003 and 009—yes, Bond, including yours—and he once blew up a warehouse remotely while pissed off his head on the cheapest vodka we could find on short notice.”

Obviously, he knows Q is dangerous in the abstract, the man who builds his weapons and designs his missions. It is a different thing entirely to think of the damage Q can do in concrete terms. He thinks of the comfortable way Q held his pistol and said I shot him in the head. He thinks of Q’s sharpened features and his violent smile.

“And Mallory approved of sending him after SPECTRE? On his own?”

“Q is perfectly capable of handling himself, Bond, and he’s not—” Moneypenny cuts herself off, looking at him sharply. And then her eyes widen. “Oh my god. Oh my god. You saw him, didn’t you? In Paris. Something happened, he cut off contact for almost a full day, which he never does—he was with you.” She’s grinning at him, now, as knowing as if she can see the memory of Q’s voice and the curve of his neck coiling in Bond’s stomach. “You came back for Q.”

“Not quite,” he says, which is true. He came back because of Q, maybe, because of what Q said to him about drowning and memory and loneliness, but he came back for himself. It’s a small distinction, but an important one.

“Eve, what—oh, for fuck’s sake,” 008 says, standing in the doorway. She braces one hand on her hip and the other across her temples. “Eve, you sent me an SOS. That means there is an emergency or possibly Chris Hemsworth is standing shirtless in the office right now, not James Bond is once again taking the piss. Did he at least bring back the car?”

“I think this qualifies as an emergency of some kind. Maybe a very small one.” Eve half-covers her face with the file folder, and stage whispers, “He came back for Q!”

“Oh,” Margot says. And then, “Oh. Really? That’s what happened in Paris?”

“I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with the fact that apparently the entirety of MI6 knows where I’ve been living,” Bond says. “I was a private citizen; I think that means I’m entitled to some privacy.” Margot gives him a very pitying look and turns back to Moneypenny.

“Have you told M?”

“He’s in a meeting, I didn’t want to bother him.”

“Oh, for—you couldn’t have summed this up in an e-mail?” Tanner asks, from just over Margot’s shoulder. “Hello, Bond, welcome back. So on and so forth.”

“I’m sorry,” Bond says, feeling slightly put out. “Are none of you actually surprised to see me?” All three of them turn to look at him for a moment. Margot makes a gesture that implies the self-evidence of the answer to that question.

“Could I possibly have access to my own office?” Mallory asks. “I don’t know why I pay you people, honestly. Do get out of my chair, Bond, and I hope you brought back the car. You left quite the mess for us to clean up when you ran off to France.” Bond throws up his hands—what is it with these people and the car?—but he does get out of the chair. “008, I don’t suppose you’ve finished the after-mission report for Tunis.” Margot smiles brilliantly and hands him a single sheet of extremely creased paper. After a beat of silence in which Mallory looks from Margot’s smiling face to the sheet of paper in his hand, he sighs and places it on his desk.

“While we’re on the subject of paperwork, we will need to get you re-cleared for fieldwork, Bond,” Moneypenny says, with only the faintest hint of glee at Bond’s disgruntled expression. She types something on her phone and sends it with relish. “Medical will be ready for you shortly.”

“Wonderful,” Mallory says. “Please get out of my office.”

“I really do think you could have summed this up in an email,” Tanner says, once they’re back out in the hallway. Bond breathes; he feels as though the world has settled into place around him, a familiar mantle of sunlight and movement and the scent of clean rain. He feels the steady beat of his heart and the strength in his limbs. He feels returned to himself, a ship coming into harbor after weathering the storms of the open sea. “Well, it’s good to see you, Bond. Work to be done, and all.”

“It’s very like him to fuck off for a year and come back when all the difficult work is finished,” Margot says as Tanner walks away. Bond smiles at her, feeling quite satisfied with himself. “Oh, turn that off, I’m quite angry with you. You were vacationing in Paris while the rest of us were chasing SPECTRE around the globe. I mean, honestly.”

“Q is going to be livid,” Moneypenny remarks. “Bond isn’t going to have hot water for a month. He really was angry about the car, you know.”

“Oh my god, the car,” Margot says. She wrests the file folder from Moneypenny’s grasp and thwacks Bond over the head with it. “You fucker, as if it wasn’t bad enough you pissed off with a woman you had known for three days—” she hits him again, to which Bond yelps and yanks the folder out of her hands and returns it to Moneypenny’s comparatively non-violent hands—“you also had to take the car? I thought Mallory was going to pop a blood vessel.”

“You’re very lucky Q likes you so much, or I think he would have blown up your apartment with you inside of it years ago.” Moneypenny tucks the folder back under her arm. “I told him we would cover for him; we like him quite a bit more than we like you, Bond.”

“I suppose I should stop by Q Branch to say hello,” Bond says. Moneypenny shoots Margot a look, lifting her eyebrows pointedly.

“Why yes, you should. But unfortunately, Q is off being daring and competent and generally doing your job, as he has for the past year.” Moneypenny shrugs. “So I’m afraid you’ll simply have to wait for him to get back from single-handedly destroying an international crime syndicate.”

“He was injured,” Bond says.

“Field agents often are,” Margot says.

“It was a stab wound.”

“Only a minor one,” Moneypenny says. “Don’t make that face, Bond, he’s fine. He’ll be back tomorrow, and then I expect he will gracefully retire from the field and return to controlling the world from the safety of Q Branch, to our collective relief.”

“What,” Bond says, “exactly is he doing?”

“Essentially, a very high-risk job interview. It was Q’s idea, actually.” Margot looks at him sidelong. “After Nine Eyes, SPECTRE was left vulnerable. They needed a replacement for Silva, to hide them again, and Q really is the best at what he does. Once he has access to their network, he can take it apart from the inside.”

“He’s been undercover,” Moneypenny says, delighted. “As a hacker.”

“He is a hacker.”

“Yes, but a different hacker.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Margot says. Moneypenny shrugs, and answers her phone. “Anyways, Bond, it’s likely a good thing you decided to abandon us all, because I don’t imagine you could have taken care of this by shooting people or having sex, which appears to be your only approach to missions.”

“To be fair, I’m very good at both of those things,” Bond says, cheerfully. “And it’s always worked well for me in the past.”

“That’s demonstrably false,” Margot says. “I’ve seen your mission records.”

“Shit,” Moneypenny says. “Oh, shit.”  Her face has gone completely ashen; she looks like she might be sick as her eyes flicker between the phone held in her white-knuckled grip and Bond’s face. Bond feels the world shift out from underneath his feet, set adrift once again. Margot goes still in his peripheral vision, suddenly and unmistakably dangerous. “You’re going to want to pass those tests. They have Q.”

Chapter Text

“How could you lose him?” Moneypenny asks, with familiar undertones of impending homicide. R looks haggard, her skin sallow. Q’s second in command has aged years in the two days since they lost Q, and the rest of Q branch is faring little better.

“We didn’t lose him,” R says. She gestures at one of the massive monitors standing in the center of the branch. “He was taken.” The screen is completely dark except for a horrifyingly familiar message—not such a clever boy—and the threat hangs over the techs like an asteroid crashing to the earth. They’ve kept the reminder of their failure as a motivation.

“Fine, then. How was he taken?” Margot puts a hand on Moneypenny’s shoulder and presses down, very slightly. It’s very unlike her to be working to prevent bloodshed, but then again, desperate times, and all. Bond, himself, feels the impulse to prevent Moneypenny from murdering the techs, although he’s not sure if it really stems from pacifism rather than the overwhelming desire to do it himself. He feels almost unbearably on edge, with nowhere to direct the energy.

“We don’t know,” R admits, but she sounds so upset that Bond’s rage begins to slide inexorably into fear. He thinks of Q as he saw him last—grinning, defiant, beautiful in the way of all things that are so vibrantly alive—and he cannot help but imagine every possible terrible thing that could happen to him. “We think he got caught linking their network back to us, so we could access the information from Six. It’s the only way they could have known who he was. Q created his false identity himself; there’s no one alive who could have traced it back to the Quartermaster.”

“You’re sure of that?” Bond asks.

“The entirety of Q Branch combined couldn’t manage it,” she says, shrugging. The faintest hint of a smile pulls at her mouth before collapsing back into worry. “He’s Q for a reason.”

Bond looks around at the branch again, re-evaluating. They’re not terrified because they’ve lost the Quartermaster—they’re terrified because Q might be in danger, because they’re loyal to him. Because they love him. He feels a terrible sympathy for them, but it doesn’t entirely displace his desire to find someone to violently kill for the crime of putting Q in that position.

“Did he get you the information before he got caught?" Bond asks. Moneypenny looks at him, outraged, and, unfortunately Margot seems far less inclined to protect him than the techs.

“We have everything,” one of the techs says. Bond vaguely recognizes her—short, blond, and, like the vast majority of those in Q Branch, bespectacled—but can’t remember her name. “I mean, really, everything. I could tell you how much this Serbian domestic terrorist put aside for his second son’s college fund.”

“She could,” the man sitting next to her adds. The woman winces; he’s kicked her under the table. “But she won’t, because all of us are focused completely on finding Q, and therefore should not be murdered.”

The woman catches sight of Moneypenny’s expression and visibly pales. “Thank you, Arjun,” R says, sighing. Arjun waves. “Our problem is that we’d need Q to find Q. We know exactly where he was—in a north-western suburb of Moscow—but they’ve disappeared completely. They likely won’t even be in the country by this point, much less the city.”

“You don’t have any trackers on him?”

“Of course, we do,” R says, and then swallows, closing her eyes. “They were—removed, about a day after he broke open their systems. It’s how we knew something had gone wrong.”

“Removed,” Margot says. The hand she still has on Moneypenny’s shoulder tightens; Bond knows exactly what she’s thinking of. The thought of Q—pinned down, terrified, suffering—having trackers removed from his body is sickening. The image solidifies in Bond’s mind, blood laid in jewel-bright lines across pale skin. He swallows it down.

“Can you find him?” Moneypenny asks. She is too professional to allow her distress to affect the tone of her voice, but it shows in the lines around her eyes and the tightness of her mouth. Bond hears what she doesn’t say—can you find him while there is still something left of him to find.

R holds her gaze, then turns to Margot and Bond in turn. “He is our Quartermaster,” she says, but she makes no promises. Her shoulders are tense, held high and pressed back like she is Atlas bearing the weight of the world. The posture is familiar—it’s how Q holds himself, when things go to shit, and how M held herself before him, resolute and unbreakable as steel. Bond settles the memory close within his skin along with the shape of Q’s smile, a meager comfort.

Bond tastes iron and the sticky sweetness of honey. He should have gone with Q in Paris. He should not have left his Quartermaster to fend for himself in the field, temporary 007 or not—he feels his heart trying to beat faster. He can’t sit here waiting; the restless energy will drive him insane. “Do let us know if there’s anything we can do to help,” he says, carefully casual.

“You could check his house.” It’s the blond woman from before, who apparently is completely incapable of reading a room. The man sitting next to her kicks her again. “Ow. But, actually. If I were the Quartermaster, I would have backups of my backups. And I’d probably keep them where only people I really, really trusted would get to them.”

Moneypenny glances at Bond over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow. He shrugs, hands in his pockets. “Lunch date?” Bond says. Margot snorts, and Moneypenny swats him with her file folder again, but pulls him along behind her anyways.

The executive offices are nowhere near as frantic as Q Branch, but there is a wire-thin, humming tension beneath the superficial calm. Tanner looks as placid as ever, but he looks up at Moneypenny and his entire face goes tight, fingers tapping out a rapid rhythm on his desk. Bond recalls, vaguely, that he and Q spent the occasional lunch break working their way through the collected works of Shakespeare; he once saw them do a surprisingly compelling rendition of Hamlet. It’s another piece of Q preserved, in amber, wielded as a weapon in defiance of the world. Bond refuses to consider the memories might soon be all that remains; he will not allow it.

“We might have something,” Moneypenny says, and Tanner nods. Mallory leans out of his office, not looking nearly as put together as Tanner—suit jacket removed, shirtsleeves pushed up above the elbow—and gestures for her to continue. “Nothing certain, but—permission to search the Quartermaster’s residence, sir?”

“That man is the only competent employee I have. I’d give you permission to shoot the PM if you thought it might get the Quartermaster back.”

“Tempting,” Bond says, smiling. “Granted, very unlikely to be productive, but extremely tempting.”

Mallory looks at him, very clearly thinking that he’d rather shoot Bond and regretting that he is currently too occupied with other matters to do so. “Quite,” he says. “Keep me posted. 007, consider yourself officially reinstated, at least until the next time you do something to make me regret my career choices. And for the love of God, man, try to avoid causing any international incidents for at least your first week back.”

“I’ll do my level best,” Bond says, saluting. Mallory sighs before retreating back into his office, clearly knowing that Bond actually means I’m likely to cause one before the end of the day, actually and there’s very little he can do to prevent it. Bond likes to think it’s part of his charm; there’s something very sexy about being a threat to international stability. “Onwards, then, Ms. Moneypenny.”

Moneypenny opens the front door of Q’s Notting Hill rowhouse with an ease that comes from habit. She anticipates the way the lock catches halfway into turning, pushing her weight in and down to get it to unstick, and sticks a foot into the half-open doorway to prevent what appears to be a morbidly obese gray tabby from escaping.

“Back, you terrible little beast,” she says. The cat shrieks, loudly. “Hello, darling, yes, it’s me, and I’ve brought a guest. His name is Mr. Bond, and you’re free to shed on him all you’d like, because he is an enormous wanker. Say hello, Mr. Bond.”

“Hello, Prokofiev,” Bond says. He’s been inside Q’s home a handful of times before, but he’s never had the advantage of a key to make his way inside, and he’s accustomed to roughly twice as many cats. “Where’s Fauré?”

“Fauré died about four months ago.” Moneypenny’s eyes settle somewhere around Bond’s feet, where Prokofiev is winding his way around his legs, before she looks up. “Q was distraught. For weeks. Which you would know, if you hadn’t fucked off to France and left me to do rather a lot of paperwork. Not to mention the international criminal organization you left mostly intact.”

“This conversation feels extremely familiar. Also, I did blow up that facility,” Bond points out. He does not mention that the explosion was mostly a happy coincidence; he doesn’t imagine that will help his case. “Besides, you seemed to have everything well in hand.”

“We did,” Moneypenny says. “Until Q was kidnapped. Doing your job.”

Bond swallows. It is not precisely guilt, balled up in the back of his throat—it’s anger, sharpened and pointed inwards, and a preemptive kind of grief. Here, in Q’s home, with his ridiculous cat splayed out in the sunlight and his bookshelves nearly overflowing, the Quartermaster’s absence is even more keenly felt. “I am aware of that,” he says, voice tight. He crouches down to scoop Prokofiev into his arms, where the little beast promptly dissolves into a cat-shaped puddle. “But you sent him out there, Moneypenny, so let’s do assign blame with that in mind.” Bond smiles at her, mocking.

“And if he dies, I will never forgive myself.” Moneypenny pulls her shoulders back and tenses her jaw. For a moment he half-expects her to lunge at him, and he would welcome it—anything to distract from the emptiness in his lungs—but then she deflates. She looks caught somewhere between crying and violently disemboweling something. “After we bring him home, you’ll be very lucky if I don’t shoot you again just for catharsis. Really, James Bond, I am going to be angry with you for months.”

“After we bring him home, you’re quite welcome to try. I’ll do my best to stand still, so you can manage.” His eye catches on the teakettle, put neatly away on the counter instead of left out on the stovetop, a habit Bond had always found mildly irritating. Now he thinks he would do anything to see this house returned to cheerful, careless messiness. What will become of them all if Q can never again leave the kettle out in eternal anticipation of preparing tea? I barely remember what it is to have a home, Bond thinks. I don’t know if I can do this without him.

“You’re not funny,” she says, but she’s smiling. He follows after her into Q’s home office, which consists mainly of bookshelves overflowing with half-finished prototypes and scrap parts, still holding the dissolved Prokofiev in his arms. She sits down at his desk, which holds three different monitors in addition to a laptop, and taps at the keyboard until the screens light up. There are two user icons on the leftmost screen: the ‘Q’ scrabble tile and a photograph of Q, Moneypenny, Margot, and Tanner, all of them smiling bright enough to shame the sun and obviously drunk. “Here we are.”

There are blueprints scattered across the workbench for something that looks suspiciously like an exploding pen. Every remark he’s ever made about the thing coalesces in his mind, the evolution of their relationship over months and years of bantering and arguing and learning to trust each other. He drops Prokofiev down to the floor and tries not to fall to his knees; there is no escape from this terrible, encompassing feeling in his chest, so bright it is almost pain. He’s known love before, but never like this—never the slow spread of warmth, as tentative and sure as the first growth of spring, enduring and expansive as the violent sea.

“Hello,” Q says. The speakers have captured the precise intonation of his voice, but none of its subtle warmth. “If you’re here, Ms. Moneypenny—and if this isn’t Moneypenny, please do pause this and fetch her—it’s because I’m currently, ah, unavailable.” He pauses, and Bond can almost see his expression—the slight smile, awkwardly self-conscious, the sardonically lifted brow. “If my minions have managed to work uncharacteristically quickly in my absence and have already found me, disregard the rest of this message. If not, I believe the information on this computer could be of some assistance. I trust that you’re capable of opening files without my guidance, my dear.”

“Irritable little bastard, isn’t he,” Bond says, but he’s fooling no one. He sounds dangerously fond; Moneypenny’s face softens.

“You know, Q was the one who convinced M to keep your designation in reserve, even before he took it up on a temporary basis. We all knew you would come home, but he was so determined that you would still have your life when you did,” she says. She smiles, a little ruefully, before turning back to the computer. “Not that we all didn’t want you to have something to come back to. But Q—he’s done a great deal for your sake.”

“He does a great deal for all his agents,” Bond says. “He’s a good Quartermaster.”

“Yes, but not—my point is—you should tell him. I don’t think he would say no, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

It isn’t, really. Bond is well-practiced in reading desire, and he’s seen it in Q almost since the beginning, in the inviting shape of his smile, in the lingering warmth of his voice over the comms. Some of it, he thinks, must linger still. He hadn’t expected to find it in himself, but it’s there all the same, settled sharp and heavy next to the dangerous affection in his chest, every time he thinks of that wry mouth and clever hands.

He’s fallen in love before—not often, not like the bright, quick-burning flare of lust sparked on the tinder of danger—but he thinks this is a different beast entirely. It’s something like what he felt for Vesper, but even that was still a spark, catching fire, reduced to ash. Bond thinks again of trust—the deadliest thing in the world, proved time and time again—and how there is no one else in the world he trusts the way he does Q, implicitly, instinctively. With the weight of the entire world, with the incomparable burden of a human heart.

“Oh, you clever man,” Moneypenny says. She pulls out her phone and types rapidly before sending the message with an emphatic flourish. “You clever, paranoid little man. Bond, he’s saved the SmartBlood files to this computer, and he’s injected himself. We have him.”

Bond looks over her shoulder at the screen, resting a hand on the back of the padded chair, and sighs heavily through his nose. “For Christ’s sake, what is it with these people and Central Europe? Is it the vaguely ominous accents, do you think?” Moneypenny looks at him, bemused, for a silent beat.

“I would love to read the transcripts of your psych evals.”

“Oh, those won’t help,” Bond says, grinning. “I lie shamelessly and extravagantly. Also, extremely convincingly. I like to see if I can get diagnosed with a different disorder every visit.”

“It’s a wonder you do such a good impression of a functional human being.” Her phone chimes and she checks the message, her expression turning serious again. A line of concentration cuts its way between her eyebrows. “Well, Mr. Bond, we have a flight to catch.”

And, there—the purposeless energy coiling in his stomach coalesces into razor focus, the kind of icy rage that has sustained him so often before, kept him breathing through the drowning, through his own death. Bond thinks of Q, alone and in danger, and knows there is very little he would not do to bring the Quartermaster home, back to his books and blueprints and his ridiculous cat, to the halls of MI6 and the odd little family he’s made there. “So we do, Ms. Moneypenny,” he says. “I expect I’ll be needing another gun.”

After three days, it’s the cold more than anything else that begins to break him. Pain is immediate, tangible—it can be ignored by force of will, which Q possesses in abundance. But the cold, the slow-dragging paralysis of his mind and body, the exhaustion pounding at his temples, will wear him thin. He thinks he has pneumonia, which is a disappointingly undignified way to go.

He hasn’t slept in days—weeks? He flexes his fingers, chasing sensation, but there’s nothing. He tries again. If he can get his hands free, he can probably manage to get to the computer sitting on the table in the corner—and then what? He doubts he can escape in the condition he’s currently in, and if Moneypenny hasn’t already found the SmartBlood files, it’s unlikely he’ll last long enough for MI6 to extract him. But he allows himself the comforting fantasy of razing this pitiful little compound to the ground before he dies.

“You know, I liked you, Quartermaster,” the smiling man says. Q knew his name, but he’s forgotten it. He can’t quite follow a thought—his mind stutters, drifts, stumbles onward. He coughs, hacking up fluid and the taste of bile. “You were very good at your job, and there’s something to be said for efficiency. Are you sure we can’t convince you to help us? It’s only that this seems such a waste.”

“I’m afraid I really don’t see the appeal of accessorizing with fascist cephalopods,” Q says cheerfully. He has a sympathy for Bond’s little quips; it’s something about agency, about identity in the face of this terrible dehumanization. How fragile we are, he thinks. How little stands between us and the void. He tilts his chin up; there is sunlight on his face, or perhaps not. Before him is the wine-dark sea, the emptiness of his own mind as it cannibalizes itself in the murky abyss of fever. “Sorry, next question, fuck you very much.”

“There’s no need for that,” he says. There is a flicker of movement and then Q finds himself bent double. He’s been punched, again, in the liver. He tastes blood and he can’t breathe. He coughs again, extensively, but his lungs are failing. His vision fades, in and out. He thinks of falling and of drowning—was he Icarus, or was that Bond? “We are willing to be patient. We will change your mind.”

“Oh, I’m quite stubborn.” Q twists his wrists against the handcuffs. If he dislocates his thumb, he thinks he can manage to get his hand out—granted, he’ll be typing one-handed, but he’ll manage. The morons who kidnapped him obviously haven’t done their research, if they think handcuffs alone will be enough to keep him in this fucking chair. Spite is a wonderful motivator. He heaves a breath and it catches in his throat, airless and aborted. He was thinking something before, about the sun, or perhaps about flight—but he can’t remember. “And you aren’t very persuasive.”

The smiling man slaps him across the face. His head falls backwards, weightless. He watches as if from a distance, fading. The sunlight wavers. He sees the light but feels no warmth. “You are very loyal. It’s sweet, but quite pointless. If you do not do it, we will find someone who will.”

Q laughs. It’s slightly hysterical, but he thinks it’s earned; he has been slightly tortured. The laugh breaks off into a terrible hacking half-way through, and he can’t stop coughing, which is probably a bad sign. He thinks he might throw up. “Good fucking luck with that,” Q says. His smile is a vicious thing, sharp and bloodied and grimly pleased. “I tore your systems open so wide a kindergartner with an iPod fucking touch could access them.” As the Romans did to Carthage, he thinks. As Achilles did to the white towers of Ilium.

“So you have,” the smiling man says. He is no longer smiling. He gestures with a hand and his companion punches Q again, higher up, in the ribs instead of the liver. Something snaps in his chest, and the pain shoots through him sharp and cold as ice.

“Jesusfuckshit, fuck me,” Q says. “Oh, you motherfuckers, ow, eat shit and die.” Stoicism, he thinks, is overrated. It hardly matters, in the end. He has nothing to prove about his endurance or lack thereof. And in all the excitement, it’s likely they’ve missed the fact that he’s pulled his left hand free. He feels the blood pooling in the palm of his hand, dripping down his fingers.

“Such language, Quartermaster,” the smiling man says, delighted. He grabs Q’s jaw in his hand, tilting it, and presses his thumb into a bruise. It hurts, the dull ache sharpening and flaring into his neck. He can’t breathe—he suspects a punctured lung, which seems like overkill in addition to the possible pneumonia.  

“Well,” Q says, and pushes his left thumb back into the socket. “I’m rather fucking disinclined to be polite at the moment.” And then he brings his knee up in a sudden burst of movement—he goes directly for the groin, which is hardly sporting but can probably be excused given the circumstances—and the smiling man doubles over with a high-pitched squawk.

That result is extremely satisfying, but there’s two other men in the room who pose significantly more of a physical threat. Q is stronger and far more dangerous than he looks, but he’s also injured enough that if he doesn’t finish this very quickly, the adrenaline won’t be enough to keep him going.

He drops beneath the arms of the man moving to catch him and grabs the folding chair by its legs. Q pushes up from his crouch and uses the momentum to swing the chair upwards and around to bring it down over the first man’s head. He pivots and strikes the other man twice in quick succession in the gut, then drops the chair and takes a hold on the back of his neck, pulling down as Q drives his knee upwards into the man’s nose. There’s an impressively disgusting crunch and then the man drops, unconscious.

The first man has unfortunately recovered from being bludgeoned over the head by a chair, but he’s obviously still disoriented—he throws a hook that Q ducks easily, stepping in and dropping his shoulder, jabbing twice to the liver before connecting an uppercut to the jaw. His hand is throbbing and his lungs ache, but he can’t afford to rest. If he loses the advantage for even a moment, he’s unlikely to gain it again.

Q grabs the loose end of the handcuff in his free hand, steps behind the man while he’s still reeling, and swings the chain across the front of his neck. It’s not particularly graceful—if only they hadn’t taken the cufflinks, he thinks. What I wouldn’t do for a paralytic on the end of a needle right now—but it makes a functional garotte.

The man chokes and drives his elbow back into Q’s chest. “Fuckshit, ow,” Q says. The pain is piercing enough to buckle his knees beneath him, but he doesn’t loosen his grip, and the added weight of his body pulls harder at the man’s throat. He sucks in a breath that catches on the way down. He can’t breathe; he wheezes, choking, and wonders which of them will pass out first.

The man pulls at the chain, but Q is desperate and in pain and absolutely fucking enraged at the whole ordeal, and he pulls tighter even as his vision begins to blur. Q snarls and locks his arms, digging his elbows into the other man’s back to increase his leverage.

When he collapses, Q falls to the ground with him, propping himself up on his elbows. He starts coughing and cannot stop, and it hurts, from his stomach up into his chest and throat and head, it hurts like he’s dying.

“Very well done,” the smiling man spits. The sound of a gun cocking ends his sentence like a punctuation mark. Shit, Q thinks, I forgot about that fucker. He slides a hand beneath the body of the man for the pistol Q had felt tucked into his belt. “Consider me impressed.”

“I live to please,” Q says. What was his name? Something vaguely Eastern European, to match the irritating way his accent keeps sliding around and refuses to settle on any region more specific than Slavic-adjacent.

“Yes, I had heard stories of you. The Quartermaster of MI6, a legend in cyberspace, a man to be feared,” he continues, settling into his monologue. Christ, Q thinks, closing his hand around the grip of the gun—a Glock 19, he notes with mild disdain—and flicking off the safety, this is worse than any of Bond’s missions. “And look at you now, without any screens to hide behind! As deadly as any agent in the field. It is a shame that all of it must go to waste, but you’ve forced my hand. A pity that all of your prowess cannot save you from a simple bullet. So you shall die as any man, by my hand, falling before the might of SPECTRE.”

There’s a great deal Q would love to address in that little speech, but never let it be said that he doesn’t learn from the mistakes of others. He fires—and misses, of course, because he’s not actually James Bond—but the shock of the gunshot startles the smiling man into firing wide and buys him enough time to get up onto his knees. He fires again, and misses, and readjusts his aim—when he fires a third time, he catches the man in the shoulder.

“For the love of fuck, shut up,” Q says, heaving himself up to standing. He shoots the man at his feet and does the same to the man with the broken nose—cold, perhaps, but he has little faith in his ability to subdue even a toddler at the moment and can’t risk either of them regaining consciousness before he’s finished.

He limps slowly over to the table, dragging the chair along with him, and collapses in front of the computer. The man groans, clutching at the bullet wound in his shoulder. Q sighs, steels himself against his panicked conscience, and shoots him too. He’s accustomed to killing, but rarely without the buffer of a screen and miles of distance between him and his victims. Like this, close and personal and terribly visceral, it always leaves him cold and nauseous—although, at the moment, it’s entirely possible that’s the pneumonia. Later, if he has the luxury, he’ll take a moment to face everything he’s done in the course of this mission, to face what he’s become.

For now, he turns on the computer, which has perfectly respectable security measures for the average person but is woefully unprepared to face someone of Q’s abilities—honestly, this entire undertaking seems to speak of woeful unpreparedness on SPECTRE’s part. Handcuffs and a folding chair in an abandoned warehouse, he thinks, huffing out a breath in amusement. I half-expected a Persian cat.

He’s about to pass out, but he’s bringing this sad little compound down around their ears first. He cuts out the power, floor by floor. He sets off every fire alarm in the building and then locks down every door. They must think they’ve been very clever, setting up everything on a closed system, to stop someone like him from accessing it. But they brought him inside and made the mistake of giving him access to a computer. It is not a mistake any of them will live to regret.

He tears out the heart of the main generator, leaving it a sparking, useless mess, and then overloads the backup, setting up a feedback loop that will lead to an extremely satisfying and hopefully fantastically deadly explosion in around twelve and a half minutes. They should have known better than to underestimate him. Sing, o muse, of the wrath of the Quartermaster, he thinks, and smiles.

And then someone kicks in the door. Q chokes halfway through a breath, his lungs spasming and seizing around the liquid in his chest. The coughing pushes at his broken ribs; it feels like he’s burning. He can’t breathe. He can barely see, but he manages to get the gun pointed in the general direction of the silhouette in the doorway. If he fires enough bullets, he’ll probably be able to hit something.

“Put that away before you hurt yourself,” the silhouette says. Q thinks, I’m hallucinating a rescue fantasy about James Bond. That’s fairly pathetic. He also thinks, it’s a good thing I’m dying, because Eve would never let me live this down. Then Bond walks into the room, wearing a several-thousand-pound suit and holding one of Q’s guns, looking exactly as he always has, exactly as he did before he left—indomitable, dangerous, relentless. And extremely self-satisfied. “Hello, Q. You’ve a terrible habit of getting yourself injured.” And then, for the benefit of whoever is listening over the line, “Yes, I have him. Send Moneypenny and 008 here at their earliest convenience. Meaning now.”

“You’re back,” Q says, instead of anything even a little bit useful or clever. Bond responds to this stunning display of wit with a pointed look at the gun Q is still pointing towards the door. “Oh. Yes. That.” His body won’t quite obey him; he can’t feel his hand as anything more than a numb awareness of pressure. “Am I to assume you’ve taken care of the rest of the operation, then?”

“They were otherwise occupied. Someone had set off all the fire alarms. Though, apparently,” Bond says, raising his eyebrows at the bodies on the floor, “you would have managed quite well on your own.” The fire alarms have stopped going off, and the gunfire in the hallway echoes like thunder in the silence. Bond turns, unfolding and aiming in a single smooth motion, and fires, followed by the sound of a body dropping.

“No,” Q says, absently tracing over the familiar, handsome features of Bond’s face, the clear, shocking blue of his eyes. “I’d have run out of bullets.”

Bond grins. Goddamn it, Q thinks; it illuminates his face as though he’s swallowed the sun, as though he has caught starlight in the line of his smile. Bond’s very presence, his existence, demands attention, but when he smiles—Q can’t look away. “I imagine you would have found a way,” he says. “You always do.” There’s another gunshot from the hallway, and Bond turns to aim again, half-concealed by the doorway. “You’re late.”

“I was busy. You found him?” Eve pushes past Bond with barely a consideration for the gun in his hand, and when she sees Q her eyes blow wide. She looks ill, as though the sight of him has reached into her stomach and wrenched out her guts. “Oh, God.”

Moneypenny crosses the room, almost running, and nearly picks him up out of his chair to crush him to her chest. “Ms. Moneypenny,” he says. “I—what are you doing here? Don’t you have an intelligence agency to keep functioning?”

“They couldn’t keep me away from you, silly man,” she breathes into the side of his neck as he wraps his arms awkwardly around her waist. He feels the strength of her grip, the wavering of her breath, a steady warmth glowing in the center of his chest. It hurts terribly, but he doesn’t want her to let go. “Not for all the paperwork in the world. You had us all so worried. You had me near out of my head.”

“You’re sure it’s not just because you’d like the chance to shoot Bond again?” Q asks. “And while we’re on the subject of Bond—I don’t suppose you still have my car?”

Moneypenny’s grip tightens and she chokes on a laugh. “For fuck’s sake,” Bond says, tilting his head back as if appealing to the heavens, “I would like to point out that it’s not technically your car; it’s MI6’s car.”

“I mean,” Margot says, from the doorway. “He did build the car, didn’t he?” Bond shoots her a look that implies she’s very lucky he’s saving the bullets in his pistol for the remnants of SPECTRE. Moneypenny finally releases her death grip on his ribs, which is helpful in that she’s no longer putting pressure on his various life-threatening injuries, but unhelpful in that it vastly increases the likelihood that he will fall out of the chair. “I think he’s entitled to the product of his labor. Hello, Q, how are you?”

“Communist,” Bond mutters.

“I’m exemplary.” Q fights back another fit of coughing—if he starts hacking up a lung now, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. “Sorry I’ve missed game night, 008, though it’s saved you what I’m sure would have been a spectacularly embarrassing loss.” She dismisses that with a wave of her hand, smiling at him.

“Oh, game night,” Bond says, nudging at the bodies with one foot and sounding entirely too gleeful for the environment. “You do know how to have a good time.”

“Copious amounts of alcohol are involved,” Moneypenny says. “Q always wins. He’s a very poor sport about it, too.”

“Ah, shit,” Q says, remembering that he was in the middle of being an extremely poor sport and rigging things to explode just before Bond broke the door in. “The generator—” the words catch on the edge of his tongue. He’s coughing again, and he can’t stop; he tastes blood pooling in his mouth, the ragged edges of his ribs grinding against each other. “The generator,” he tries again, his voice a raw, wounded thing, dragging needles up his throat and into his brain, “is going to—fuck, it’s going to explode—”

“Fuck,” Margot says.

“Indeed,” Bond says. “When?”

“About five minutes,” he says, and then starts coughing again. His vision fades to gray in fits and starts, a patchwork haze. The void eats away at his mind, eroding as rivers do to the land—carving away at the base of him, until nothing remains but the hollow shape of a person. It is terrifying in a way little else is, to be aware of the slow slide into absence; to watch, helpless, to know there is nothing he can do. Q does not want to die, not now, when it seems that everything has come together at last. “Well, agents? Let’s see a modicum of urgency, please. I’d like to remain un-exploded, if at all possible.”

“Christ, I’ve missed you,” Bond says, and then looks extremely surprised that he’s spoken out loud. Margot snorts. Moneypenny looks delighted. Q decides magnanimously that he will not bring it up again unless Bond is being exceptionally irritating.

He tries to push himself up out of the chair, which turns out to be an enormous mistake. His legs won’t support his weight; he falls back onto the edge of the chair and then collapses past it onto the ground. His lungs spasm. His chest feels like it’s on fire, like he’s drowning, choking on his own blood, and, fuck, it hurts—all he can think is that it hurts.

And then Bond is crouched over him, looking like his heart is stuttering in his chest, cradling the back of Q’s head and lifting his shoulders off the floor. Q grasps at his wrist, holding to it as if Bond can lend him strength. This feels familiar, he thinks. He wishes he’d had more time. He wishes he’d been braver, that he had told all of them that he loves them. He wishes he’d told Bond that he loves him.

“I—” Q says, but he can’t get the words out. He’s already too far gone. He tries to keep his grip on Bond’s wrist, but his entire body is numb, a dead thing already. He reaches up, trembling, weak and unsteady as sunlight through seawater, and his fingers brush against Bond’s cheekbone, his thumb against the corner of Bond’s mouth. Bond closes his eyes like it hurts to watch and turns his face into Q’s shaking hand.

Q feels Bond’s breath warm against his skin and smiles. The world falls away.

Bond is sitting on Moneypenny’s desk, generally making a nuisance of himself, when Tanner gets the message. “The Quartermaster has begun threatening to start installing viruses on MI6’s email servers if he isn’t discharged from Medical,” Tanner says, clicking rapidly with the mouse to apparently little effect. “And—yes, my computer isn’t turning on, so I think he’s willing to carry through.”

“He usually is,” Moneypenny says, smiling fondly. She shoves Bond off of her desk, from which he recovers by adjusting the lapels of his suit and leaning casually against the wall, before hitting the intercom button on her phone. “M? I assume you’ve heard about the Quartermaster.”

Mallory sighs audibly, and after a brief pause, the door to his office swings open. “If you could possibly take care of that,” he says. “I’ve seen what he can do; I have no desire to experience it firsthand. Take one of the double ohs, I want him under protection until he’s fully recovered. Maybe 008; he might cooperate if it’s her.”

“I’ll take him,” Bond says.

“Are you 008?” Moneypenny asks. “He shouldn’t have to deal with you when he’s sick, he hasn’t the patience; he’ll snap and kill you within a day."

“I’m willing to risk it. I like his cat.” Moneypenny looks at him for a moment, appraising, and then smiles, slow and sly. Bond holds up a finger before she can say anything. During Q’s recovery, he’s visited Medical almost daily, and he’s hardly going to stop keeping an eye on him now that he’ll be out of the care of medical professionals. There had been a moment, when Q collapsed to the floor, unbreathing, blood pooling in the corners of his mouth, that Bond had thought he was about to watch Q die. The feeling of that moment—the fear, the helpless loss like a punch to the gut—has not quite left him.

“I don’t care who does it, so long as it gets done,” Mallory says, rubbing at his forehead. “Dear God, if I’d known it would amount to managing argumentative toddlers, I’d have not gone into the intelligence service. Bond, if you damage my Quartermaster, I’ll have your balls for Christmas ornaments.”

“Graphic,” Bond says. Tanner snorts, still clicking at nothing on his blank computer screen. “But very effective.”

“Onwards and upwards,” Moneypenny says cheerfully, herding Bond out of the executive offices and down towards Medical. “We’ve an armed and dangerous Quartermaster to wrangle.”

“Is he armed?” Bond says.

“Depends on one’s definition of ‘armed,’ but he’s certainly dangerous,” Margot says, appearing around the corner to hand Moneypenny a key ring, which Moneypenny hands over to Bond. “I managed to get that out of his locker; it’s for his car, which is still in the garage. According to my sources, some poor idiot let him get his hands on a computer, which he is currently doing unspeakable things to while laughing maniacally. I like my hot water functioning properly, so I am staying out of this. Good luck, have fun.”

Moneypenny watches her go, looking vaguely defeated. “I somehow doubt we’re going to be having fun.”

“Oh, I plan to have a great deal of fun,” Bond says. Moneypenny swats him with her file folder again, and Bond makes a face. “Ow. How do you always have one of those on hand?” She shrugs as he rubs at the side of his head.

Q is waiting for them in the lobby of Medical, still bandaged and paler than usual, but looking very much like himself again, which is to say he looks irritated and homicidal and entirely lovely. “Ah,” he says, with a great deal of disdain. “My protection, I assume.”

“I prefer chauffeur,” Bond replies, flashing the keys. Q raises an eyebrow and Moneypenny pinches the bridge of her nose, muttering Jesus Christ. “After you, Quartermaster.”

For a moment it seems like Q might refuse, holding himself as rigid and obstinate as if he is made of steel. But then he releases, his chin dropping infinitesimally. His mouth pulls into a rueful smile as he lifts one shoulder. “Needs must,” he says, and starts off down the hall, still just barely favoring his right leg. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ms. Moneypenny.”

“No,” she calls after him, smiling. “You’ll see me tonight, when I come for dinner. You’ll see MI6 in three days, when you’ve finished your mandatory medical leave.”

Q makes a gesture that expresses exactly what he thinks of that, which is fuck you, I’ll do what I damn well please. Watching him walk away, straight-backed and sure, Bond feels an almost unbearable fondness for the Quartermaster. “He’ll be back tomorrow,” Moneypenny says, resigned. Bond pats her on the shoulder.

“I’m certainly not going to stop him,” he says, following after Q, as he always has. “It would be a little hypocritical of me, don’t you think?”

Moneypenny lays a hand on his arm as he walks by. “Bond,” she says. “I love him very much, and I tolerate you on your good days, and I’m fairly certain the two of you love each other, in your own weird, dysfunctional way, and I think you will be exceptionally happy and probably somehow twice as effective together. So don’t fuck it up.”

“You know, I am actually a competent adult who can have open and honest conversations about my emotions,” he says. Moneypenny does an admirable job of not laughing in his face, but she lifts one hand and tilts it from side to side, pursing her lips. “Well, I thought I might try.”

“Yes, I think you should,” she says, brushing off his arm. “Give Prokofiev my best.”

Q is waiting for him, leaning against the driver’s side door of his car—an enormously unimpressive but practical steel-grey Honda, which appears to be a hybrid—and tapping something out on his phone. “Oh, you’re not driving.” Q sighs, but crosses around to the passenger side without protest.

The drive passes mostly in silence, other than a brief discussion of the music selection—Bond puts on a Bach concerto, Q shoots him a look that would make a lesser man piss himself and switches to Chopin, Bond groans expressively and tries Tchaikovsky’s 3^rd Symphony, which Q accepts. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not quite easy. Too much lies unsaid between them, in humming webs of potential.

“Shall I put the kettle on?” Bond asks as Q unlocks the door, sticking his foot into the gap in exactly the way Moneypenny did. Prokofiev screeches his displeasure at being thwarted.

“If you don’t mind. Yes, hello, Seryozha, you ridiculous demon child, I’m home, stop shouting,” Q says, leaving the door open for Bond to deal with as he scoops Prokofiev up and settles him on his back like some kind of monstrously obese infant.

By the time the water boils, Q has stretched himself out lengthwise on the couch, forearm draped carelessly across his eyes, with Prokofiev wedged between his side and the cushions. Bond leaves the tea—black, no sugar—on the coffee table and then sinks into a crouch, looking at the clean, spare lines of his face in profile as Q lifts his arm and opens his eyes. “Moneypenny sends her love to Prokofiev. God only knows why; he’s a terrible little sociopath who would kill all of us if given half a chance.” Q smiles, slightly. Prokofiev continues purring, entirely unbothered.

“All of this,” Q says, and then pauses, looking uncertain. “You needn’t feel obligated to handle me like some kind of invalid, Bond. I assure you, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“You’ve made that abundantly clear, yes,” Bond says, thinking of how he looked, bloodied and half-dead and unbreakable. A thing of razor-sharp edges and whip-cord strength. “It isn’t a matter of obligation. I—” he breaks off. I should have been here, Bond thinks. I should have been with you.

Q looks at him, in the way he always has—like he sees straight through every defense Bond can throw up, straight to the heart of him. Bond wonders what Q sees, as he lays his hand next to Bond’s, so that their fingers brush. For a moment, he thinks Q may take his hand, but he pulls away slightly.

“The world really doesn’t revolve around your personal drama, Bond.” He sighs—his breath, for the first time in days, is steady. He gestures vaguely with his other hand—still swollen and bandaged—at the room, at himself, at the world at large. “This is not your fault. I was doing my job, which happens to be extremely hazardous, which I knew going into it. You cannot blame yourself for everything in the world that goes wrong. Granted, I do wish you’d not left us with quite so much of a mess to clean up, but considering the circumstances and your timely return, I suppose you’re forgiven.”

“You don’t hold a grudge nearly as well as Moneypenny,” Bond says. Q tilts his head back, mouth pulled to one side.

“Ask me again once the pain medication wears off. I’m certain I’ll be feeling less charitable then, if you’re feeling nostalgic for people threatening to kill you.” He pushes his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose, and then brushes that mass of hair off his forehead. “Apparently, severe pneumonia brings out my homicidal tendencies. Jesusfuck, my lungs hurt.”

Bond takes Q’s hand and presses it against his face, the palm cradling his cheekbone, the long fingers trailing up into his hairline. Then he turns his head and carefully, gently, presses his mouth to the center of Q’s palm. It’s not quite a kiss, but he thinks it gets the message across. Q falls still, the tense line of his mouth gone slack. Bond drops his head to Q’s chest and breathes—he can feel Q’s heartbeat, steady and strong and defiant. He swallows against the tightness in his throat. “I thought,” he says. “I couldn’t—"

A hundred explanations wander through his mind, but none of them are true, none of them are what he wants to say. And he can’t quite manage to say the truth: I thought I might never see you again. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, for fear of losing you. Bond’s life so often depends on his ability to adapt, to keep moving forward regardless of the fear, regardless of the danger; he rarely feels this uncertain. Slowly, Q’s hand slides from his cheek to the back of his neck. He closes his eyes. The cold, desperate rage that has sustained him thaws, easing into a quiet warmth as Q runs his fingers through Bond’s hair, lingering at the base of his skull, soothing.

“You irritated me out of retirement,” he mutters into Q’s sternum. “You broke into my flat and you bled all over my floors, and then you lectured at me about a goddamn painting—that terrible fucking painting—and then you hadn’t even the courtesy to be here when I came back.”

“Terribly rude of me, was it?” Q says, dry as bone. Bond smiles, despite himself.

“Atrociously.” Q makes a noise that could be a laugh. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Ah, well,” Q says philosophically. “The next time I’m abducted, I’ll let them know I have a prior engagement, shall I? Thanks ever so, but I shan’t be going with you today—no, don’t laugh, this is extremely serious—I won’t be accompanying you and your pseudo-fascist friends to your ominous lair, tempting as the offer sounds, because I’ve a standing lunch date with James Bond—really, if only I’d thought of this at the time—and if I stand him up, he shall be extremely fucking put out.”

“I rather think I merit at least dinner, don’t you?” Q’s hand pauses and then shifts to Bond’s jaw, tilting his chin upwards so he’s looking Q in the eyes. Q looks exhausted, still, but unbroken, and the fine bones of his face have lost their desperate sharpness. There is nothing soft about the Quartermaster—not in his quiet, capable deadliness, his vicious smile, the hard lines of his shoulders—and yet his eyes are kind, bright and depthless

“James Bond,” Q says, very carefully. He swallows; Bond cannot help but follow the elegant line of his throat, catching on the soft curve of his mouth before returning to his eyes. “Do you want to have dinner with me?”

This is it: the last moment he can back away, step out of the water before he gets any deeper. But what would be the point of that? The shore is bleak and distant, cold and empty and alone. “Desperately so, I should think. I still have to return that fucking car.”

Slowly, Q smiles. Bond wants to capture the sight and weave it through his heart, to keep it close and guarded as something holy. “Unexpected,” Q says, hand resuming its soothing, steady path through Bond’s short hair. “But not unwelcome.”

“Yes?” Bond tries not to sound as though his heart has stopped in his chest, paralyzed by the hope and fear, like being in free-fall and suddenly finding a parachute already in your hands.

“Yes,” Q says. “Yes, yes, of course, yes. Though I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few days, unless you’re terribly keen on soup or having a dinner companion who is mostly horizontal.”

“I have a great appreciation for dinner companions who are mostly horizontal, actually,” Bond says, because he really can’t help it. Q levels him with a look that manages to convey a full paragraph of statements, among which is, I’m trying not to laugh right now because you really shouldn’t be encouraged, and also, you’re very lucky I like you so much or I’d be liable to ruin your credit score every time you opened your mouth. Bond preserves that sight along with Q’s incandescent smile. “But I could do without the soup. I can wait, Q. I’ve learned patience, in my old age.”

 “Oh, yes, the very epitome of patience, you are,” Q says, scoffing. “Honestly, 007, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wait patiently in the entire history of our acquaintance.”

I’ve waited for you, he thinks, which isn’t really true, but it feels true, suddenly—that he’s been waiting for Q for all these years, that he’s been moving inevitably towards this moment. “Acquaintance?” Bond asks.

“What would you call it?” Q smiles, baiting.

“An affair, I should think.”

“Hardly.”

“Well,” Bond says, half-rising from his crouch so that his face is level with Q’s. “In retrospect.”

“Perhaps,” Q says, and tilts his chin down to glance at Bond over the top of his glasses. “Continuing, then. Come here, would you?”

There’s nothing for it, then; Bond kisses him, slowly, carefully, as he has wanted to for what seems, in retrospect, like eternities. Q smiles against his mouth and runs his hands under Bond’s suit jacket, up his back, pulling him over and down so that Bond settles onto his knees, propped up over Q by one arm resting along the back of the couch. Bond runs his other hand up into Q’s hair, lifting his head slightly to bring him closer, and—

Prokofiev screeches loudly as Bond nudges against him with a knee. Q immediately dissolves into helpless laughter, a lovely, musical noise turned rough and low around the edges. Bond burns; he hasn’t wanted someone like this in years. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, “that fucking cat.”

“All right,” Q says, voice still shaped like laughter. Prokofiev stretches disdainfully and crosses to the other end of the couch, managing to take up more space than an adult human being. “Off, off. I’m afraid I’m not a weight-bearing Quartermaster at the moment, Bond. And I’m about five minutes from falling asleep.”

Q pushes himself up, turning, so Bond can sit down next to him, pressed together shoulder to hip to knee. Slowly, his head tilts to the side, until his temple rests on the muscle of Bond’s shoulder, and Bond thinks of sunrise and cold, clean wind, of a white city in the distance, of the enduring and encompassing sea.

It is too early to speak of love, but it is there all the same. Here, in the shape of Q’s eyes, in the steadiness of his hands—the teakettle on the stovetop, the blueprints scattered across the tables, the obnoxious cat, the things he carries with him through the violence and terror of the field—Bond feels, at last, returned home, to the people who have become something like a family. He feels returned to himself. God, I love you, he thinks. And in the end, it’s the easiest thing in the world to say it, a different kind of resurrection-- breathing into Q’s hair, the warmth of his body pressed against Bond’s.

“And I you, of course. As I have, and as I will,” Q says. He takes Bond’s hand, fingers sliding between his own, and presses a kiss to the back of it. The sun is setting, as it always does, as it will always rise again. Q, he thinks, will never let him drown. “And I imagine you’ll be delighted to hear that you’re invited to game night.”

“I look forward to losing terribly. I’ve heard you’re a poor sport,” he says, meaning I love you. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to take up poker?” Q smiles, meaning the same. It is just as easy to say it—I love you; I love you—the third time, and every time after.