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Bond suffers through a two-day stint in medical, following a longer stay along the French Riviera that leaves him with new scars and a new limp—or perhaps an old limp that he can no longer hide. Q finds him, freshly released judging by his unshaven, dead-eyed appearance, threatening life, limb, and family of a vending machine in the break room.
While Bond battles for his crisps packet, Q tells him, "You know those kill about a dozen people every year."
"Not very impressive, is it?" Bond grunts, hefting his weight against the machine. "I’ve tallied that in half the time." The machine rocks back onto the ground. Bond’s bad leg almost goes out from under him for the effort, and the crisps remain firmly in limbo.
Q decides this is not the defeat Bond needs right now.
"Can I tempt you to dinner at mine, Bond?" he asks. "It’s no Wotsits, admittedly, but at least I won’t rob your pocket change."
Immediately, Bond’s gaze pins Q and his intentions beneath it, searching. A reel of questions flickers through his eyes, like old film, spinning one frame to the next. The agent glances at himself. Though they’ve discharged him in a fresh change of dark MI6-issued clothes, the scruffy state of him still speaks of the recently incapacitated.
The twist of Bond’s mouth says no, but Q interrupts before his words can do the same.
"I’ve also a rather nice bath."
Bond’s presumed ‘no’ changes to a rough, "Why?"
"Hygienic purposes, mostly."
When Bond only stares at him, with that look that scrubs him over like sandpaper, Q relents.
"Because I know double-ohs, and I know every last one of you would prefer starvation to anything served at medical," Q turns and continues washing out the day’s mug in the breakroom sink, adding, "And by looks, you could do with a hot shower."
Even if Q has picked up on certain implications from Moneypenny, there’s no need to make conjecture about how the globetrotting agent lives when he’s not causing chaos abroad. The man’s been gone. He’ll have nothing fresh at home, the same as anyone recently back from travel. It’s not pity so much as sense, although Bond often acts allergic to both.
"Not the most wooing invitation I’ve ever gotten," the agent points out.
"I’m not batting my eyelashes at you, I’m afraid. Either you want a meal or you don’t. Do you need me to drop to one knee for sake of your ego—"
He turns to find that Bond has taken Q’s raincoat off the hook and is holding it out to him. Q masks his surprise. He doubts he’s worn the thing since the very first time they met, but Bond recognises it anyway. Q has a beat of silence in which to be touched by the gesture, sliding one arm through the sleeve as Bond leans in toward his ear—
"Why stop at one knee?" Bond murmurs, as Q’s jacket is settled around his shoulders.
"Oh, 007," Q sighs, glancing into that beautiful, smug face, "It’s a miracle your knee is the problem when you’re so good at shooting yourself in the foot."
Q steps away before Bond can respond, ducking the other man’s searching gaze before it can read him too closely. He glances back when he doesn’t hear Bond following him.
"Not hungry, then?" he calls. Bond limps after at a distance, like a wary street dog offered scraps. Q thinks it best to keep moving before either of them can stop long enough to second-guess the arrangement.
Really, it’s just a dinner. A kindness.
Their plan lasts only until they reach exit doors, where they stop to stare out into a cold, pelting rain.
Q glances at James’ thin cotton shirt and moves to shrug off the jacket. "Maybe you should—"
"Don’t push your luck," Bond interrupts. It smarts until Q sees the quirk at the corner of Bond’s mouth and the levity in his eyes. Instead, he finds himself unable to resist returning the look.
"Fine," he sniffs, "go back to medical with pneumonia. See if I care."
"You would," Bond accuses, like it’s some personal failing on Q’s part, then turns on his heel and starts walking back into MI6. "Wait there," he calls over his shoulder. "I’ll bring my car around."
"I don’t think you brought a car," Q says and is ignored. "Bond?" he calls down the empty corridor. "Bond, what car—?"
. . .
In the passenger seat of an all-too familiar DB10, Q is slunk down into a heap of his own indignation.
"Weeks," he laments again, Vauxhall fading behind them in the mirror, "absolute weeks working on this. It barely even exists on paper. How on Earth did you find out about it—no, don’t answer that I don’t want to have to fire anyone, but so help me if you manage to drive it into the Thames while we’re just trying to get to Waterloo—"
"You really should start making them submersible," Bond points out, as if it’s Q’s fault all his very expensive, state of the art spy cars end up at the bottom of some culturally significant river. Deviancy and an Aston Martin have given Bond some of his spirit back.
For dignity’s sake, Q focuses on his anger, pretending it’s not to distract himself from how smoothly Bond’s hands navigate the wheel, how he touches the back of the passenger’s seat when he glances over his shoulder to reverse. Bond isn’t even trying for seduction now, which makes the effect more maddening and, paradoxically, more irresistible. Q regrets not installing an ejector seat.
"I cannot express to you how very street illegal this car is, driving it around without authorisation. And just how many pain killers with ‘do not operate heavy machinery’ printed on the label does medical have you on—?"
("Not enough, really.")
"—because this is a fair bit worse than just heavy machinery if you happen to miss the radio button—"
("Is it now?")
"—and M, if he finds out, he’ll have us both in the stocks. Joyriding of all things. He always thinks we’re in it together, you know—"
"Q," Bond interrupts, to which Q bites out a pitched,
"What?"
"We usually are in it together. And we’re here."
Q jerks up, mystified at the sight of his own street and terrace house, just one in a series of brick likenesses. They have swung effortlessly into a tight parallel parking spot. Q slumps in the passenger seat for a long time, a theatre of defeat playing out on his hardened face.
He sighs.
Bond stares at him, perplexed. "Not yours?" he asks, glancing toward the front door of number 43.
"Mine," Q sighs, completely resigned and unsurprised as they meet eyes, "but I never told you where I live."
Bond’s mouth quirks. The driver’s door shuts behind him.
Q curses and hurries after before the man can get himself absolutely drenched.
. . .
While Q cooks, he sets a damp Bond loose upon his apartment like a new cat. The man limps from wall to wall, inspecting every bit of gadgetry and décor he can get his hands on—as well as a few things that Q will not let him touch, though he’s sure he does anyway whenever Q tends the skillet.
He pokes through Q’s arrangement of knick-knacks, a section of shelving that is starting to look alarmingly like a crow’s shrine of baubles and curios.
"Rob a bric-a-brac shop, did you?" Bond observes, poking at a mouse skeleton suspended in a resin cube.
"I have a hard time parting with gifts. Even ones that overestimate my eccentricity."
Bond holds up a whole fistful of various ‘Q’ monogrammed items, cheap keychains, magnets, pens. The letter has even been stamped on the side of a tiny metal pyramid. Bond lifts an eyebrow of accusation.
"009," Q explains fondly, before Bond can assume he has a bizarre sense of vanity, "Labelled by country, typically, as well. She does like her souvenirs, and she has an exceptional return rate on her equipment."
Bond mumbles something under his breath. Q thinks it sounds an awful lot like Quartermaster’s pet, but he can’t be sure.
"When you’re quite done overstepping boundaries," he says, over the music Bond has just started up by dropping the needle on his record player, "you should go and get cleaned up. Bath’s upstairs. I’m sure you can find your way, though if you can get there without making an incident, we’ll see."
He half-expects Bond will go rummaging about his bedroom, too, but for a typically private person, Q realizes he doesn’t have all that much to hide there. If Bond wants to snoop through his collection of jumpers, he’s welcome to waste his time.
He’s left alone with nothing but the ingredients of a full English—Bond’s request—spread about the kitchen and bubbling on the stove top. The strange stirrings of another person in his house animate the air. The floorboards creak overhead and the water runs through the pipes behind the walls. Q doesn’t have people over much, he knows. But he doesn’t have people like James Bond over ever.
He tries not to think about it.
After Q is done adjusting temperatures and leaving things to cook, he realizes all at once that it has gone very quiet. Even his cats are quiet. Some deep-seated parental instinct stirs to life in him, equating silence with trouble. He turns to look around the house.
Alarmingly, he finds Bond back on the ground floor, freshly scrubbed, shaved, and shirtless, now stretched like a classical painting on Q’s living room rug. He palms through an old family photo album Q keeps on the bottom shelf of his coffee table, where it can be routinely forgotten and overlooked. Q’s pulse spikes like a seismograph.
"What are you doing?" he demands, taking less steps than it should to cross the room and reach uselessly for the book. Bond pins a protective elbow on the album, holding in his other hand one of the pictures he’s pilfered from its sleeve.
"What is this?" Bond asks, half-laughing.
Q braces in anticipation of his even-more-gangly teenage self. Maybe a misguided haircut or an unflattering couple picture from some long-forgotten secondary school romance. What Bond turns to him instead makes him deflate.
"Oh. That was my dog, thank you very much," Q scoffs, making another reach for the photo. Bond keeps it away.
"It looks like a pelican." They’re both in the floor now, Q all but straddling Bond as he reaches for the photo and struggles with a man twice his muscle mass. "What is it called? A bourgeois—?"
"A borzoi!"
"—same difference."
Bond relents only when Q gets a knee up against his bad rib, and the picture of Q’s (admittedly silly-looking) long-faced dog is wrestled from him. Q pushes the album away, sliding it across the floor and out of reach.
It leaves them both breathless, Q’s legs around the man’s hips, perched over him like a lover.
Q swallows.
"You shouldn’t touch things that don’t belong to you, you know," he accuses.
"Oh, well then," Bond retorts, and counters by running his hands slowly up Q’s thighs. The jolt of it goes straight to Q’s core. The shock is too clear on his face. He peels off of James in a flourish, scrambling to get to his feet.
"No," Bond says, a strong hand curling into Q’s jumper and pulling him back down into the awkward crash of their bodies. Q’s hands fumble, land on Bond’s naked chest, on his wounded ribs. It must hurt, surely, but Bond does not even grimace. "No," he repeats, "I’m not letting you do that again."
"Do what?"
"Run away. Either you want me, Q, or you don’t—"
And Q is all indignation now, raised hackles and affronted stare. His glasses have gone lopsided on his face.
"Because heaven forbid someone be kind to you, Bond, without wanting to sleep with you." He tries to pull away again, but Bond's fist is a vice in the front of his shirt. Q is certain Bond must feel the hammer of his heart against the back of those bruised knuckles, where it beats frantically against his ribs, trying to run while the rest of him cannot.
"I'm not asking you to sleep with me, Q." An uncertain silence falls in the interim, leaves only the rain tapping against the roof and windows. Bond sighs. "I'm asking if you want me."
All at once, James Bond is on full display beneath him. His age, his scars. His naked expression, which is always the more fierce, like a wounded animal. This is not the Bond who flirted with him in the break room; not the Bond who ran his hands up Q's thighs without hesitation. The mask has been thrown aside. This Bond waits for Q's verdict like his neck is in the noose. The question breathes in the space between them. Bond styles it as do you want me? but Bond already knows the answer to that. They both do. That's no secret, because secrets are impossible with Bond. Really, the question is: are you ever going to trust me?
"James," Q whispers.
Bond stays silent, gives him nothing. Q suffers beneath his waiting gaze.
Long seconds trickle by. Q's throat bobs without finding words. Rain beats on in the silence for too long.
Bond finally stirs. "It's alright, Q," he says gently, and worse, means it. "Let's blame it on the painkillers, hm?" He tries to move, offers them both a friendly way out, but Q's weight stays pinned atop him. Those blue eyes search his face.
"I want you," Q relents, softly.
"But?"
"But what? But we shouldn't? But we can't? But it's a terrible idea? None of those things have ever meant anything to you, James, and they won't start now," Q smiles, pained. "There's a decently long list of reasons why we shouldn't do this." Q knows—he's written them all out before. "It's just. . . I can't seem remember of any of them right this moment."
Bond's smile shows a tiny hint of his teeth, and Q's heart thumps pitifully into his stomach.
"Then maybe, until you remember. . ."
007 would sweep him up and kiss him and have him sprawled on the floor with his jumper bunched around his ribs, but Q is learning, gradually, and does not tense, or bolt, or throw the gesture back in his face. James takes Q's hand in his own. A hand decorated by callouses and scars; a hand that has taken the last breath of tyrants, pulled the trigger on would-be dictators; a hand that, with profound gentleness, pulls Q's fingers to his lips, where he kisses each of his fingertips as though Q is the most delicate thing in the world.
Q cannot fathom why the thought of this scared him so terribly. Even with Bond's lips on his skin, nothing feels different. The earth has not shifted out from under them. The world has not stopped. For better or worse, they are not now different people.
The rain goes on.
Bond's mouth finds Q's neck. His jaw, then, and the soft patch of skin below his ear.
Something burns. It could be the sausage. It could be Q's house. It could be all of London.
"James," he says.
"I know," he answers, without letting go.
"James," he tries again.
"Q," he's answered, their lips dangerously close.
And there it is, Q thinks, aching. His why not spelled out in a gauzy haze of white smoke drifting above their heads.
For a moment too long, they're both too content to let the world burn.