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Q checked his watch with an irritated sigh. Eight pm and he was still in the office. A mountain of paperwork lay looming at the end of his desk, and he still had a dozen time-sensitive emails he needed to send.
Espionage never slept, apparently, and so neither did Q.
Not that his office was a terrible place to spend an evening. He’d set up an automated system so the motion-sensitive overhead lights switched off after a certain hour. That same system timed the lamps around the room to switch on simultaneously, creating a pleasantly warm atmosphere that was even warmer for having his cats around. It was as close as he could make it to his home office, down to the Chesterfield couch and the board games stacked neatly in the corner.
Behind him, the cats trilled in joint admonishment.
“Yes, yes, I know. One more hour, then I’m shutting up shop whether M likes it or not.”
“If M doesn’t like the idea of you going home on time,” started a deep voice from the doorway, “why isn’t he here to enforce his own rules?”
Q looked up to see James Bond leaning casually against the doorjamb. His suit — charcoal today, with a lovely blue shirt — was still pristine, with its pocket square in place and the trousers still sporting a precise crease down the front. Q never knew how the agents did it. His own clothes were a state, though that was surely the result of doing about ten times the work today than any agent did outside the field.
“Because he has an assistant who does his paperwork for him. God forbid the other department heads ever ask for the same.” Q eyed the small pile of manila folders in Bond’s arm. “Don’t tell me if those are for me. I don’t want to know.”
“They’re not for you.”
Bond dragged a seat over from the corner of Q’s office and threw his files on Q’s desk. The resulting puff of air had a hint of Bond’s aftershave in it, something moody and exotic, which made the rest of the room seem duller and dustier than usual.
“I saw the lights on,” Bond continued. “Thought you might like some company. Tell me to piss off if you don’t.”
Q’s brow furrowed for a moment. He was here late more often than not. Seeing a light on should have been of no surprise to a passing agent. They were, after all, the reason he was here so much of the time, filling out missing equipment forms and editing the spreadsheet that held the details of his ever-dwindling department budget.
With a blank expression, Bond nodded his head toward the custom-made clock on Q’s wall. In glaring blue letters, it displayed the time in a dozen different timezones, but it was the date at the top that caught Q’s eye. One look at it made his stomach lurch.
It was Christmas Eve.
Trust Bond to sniff out a vulnerability and stalk after it.
The staff in Q’s department learned their lesson long ago about mentioning any sort of celebration to Q. They had a tree up, of course; he wasn’t about to inflict misery on a whole department simply because he hated the holidays. The last time anyone approached him to ask about his plans for Christmas was a year ago. The poor man had been a junior engineer — very new — and he’d received such a tongue-lashing that the story still got brought up at most social events. None of it made Q feel any better, of course. In fact, he’d felt horrid in the aftermath and resolved to try to be much nicer about it the next time. But the next time never came. Q heard on the grapevine that his staff’s commitment to silence was down to R, who gave all the new starters a quiet warning in advance.
Privately, he was deeply grateful to her for that.
Q chanced a look at Bond. He looked perfectly relaxed in Q’s armchair, but there was a tension about him, the sort Q was used to seeing in some meetings with Mallory where Bond wasn’t sure he’d get his way. One of his hands ran down the length of his tie, straightening it. The other rested just next to his paperwork, ready to gather it up again should he be rebuffed from Q Branch.
Clearly, Bond hadn’t been paying as much attention as usual. If there was one truth about Q’s life at the moment, it was this: he would never send Bond packing. Completely inadvisably, and contrary to all good sense Q had generally, he’d developed a fondness for Bond. However hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to shake it. Some days it felt far deeper than fondness, too, though Q was loathe to put any other name to it.
“Company would be lovely,” said Q. “Though, I do actually have to get some work done.”
Bond relaxed slightly. “So do I.”
As it turned out, Bond was an excellent partner for desk work. If Q had been worried about the loudness of the man’s usual magnetism, he needn’t have been. Bond was as efficient and diligent tonight as he was in the field, even if, occasionally, Q heard him swear under his breath or scrawl particularly hard on a bit of paper. It was no less disruptive than Q’s grumbling at the errors in his department’s designs for a new surveillance drone. They were uncharacteristic mistakes, though Q supposed the season got to everyone, for better or worse. It had been a long year, particularly for Q Branch.
It likely felt even longer for Bond.
First, there was Spectre, then Dr Swann, then, inexplicably, Bond’s post-Dr Swann reappearance at MI6, which was never explained but became one of the most talked-about bits of gossip around the office. Q couldn’t imagine living Bond’s life. All that running into danger, throwing one’s body time and time again at the cause. He suspected Bond loved and hated it in equal measure, but — and for all their differences, Q could empathise with Bond on this — he seemed drawn back to it over and over. Like a moth to a flame, dancing and flying, he was constantly playing a terrible game that could turn him right to ash.
Then, amongst all that, to be fodder for the rumour mill. Heaven forbid. Q would probably resort to alcoholism too.
Q’s eyes were looping tiredly over the same page of a supplies form when Bond next spoke. Having fallen so heavily into his thoughts, it made Q jump.
“Hello there.”
Q put his pen down and watched with amusement as his eldest cat, dressed in a maroon jumper, sniffed at Bond from his place on the desk. Bond held out a hand, waiting patiently until little Basil butted his head against it and leaned into his palm. At that, Bond’s face underwent a sort of spasm.
“Bit like touching your balls, isn’t it?”
Q sighed. He should have known not to expect profundity from Bond at this hour.
“You wouldn’t know what my balls feel like,” countered Q. While Bond huffed a laugh at that, Basil jerked his head back in a motion that seemed terribly offended. “Oh, don’t listen to him, darling. You know very well you’re more peachy than scrotal.”
“Do you often involve your cats in conversations about your balls?”
“More often than you’d think. They have a terrible habit of trodding where they shouldn’t.”
That drew a wince, but it didn’t deter Bond from trying to win over the cats, one of whom couldn’t be tempted away from lazing in the cat tree. Bond didn’t seem offended, and he persisted with Basil until the cat was a little vibrating motor under his hand, flopping over onto Bond’s paperwork and showing it the same disdain and disrespect Bond had been showing it all evening. Q should have considered such behaviour traitorous, but perhaps there were a few last vestiges of Christmas spirit left in him because he found it all rather charming.
For the first time in a long time, Q felt a hint of the familiar, bone-deep warmth he used to feel at this end of the year. With a bittersweet pang, he recalled the hand-knitted Christmas jumpers he used to wrap up his cats in. Little elf costumes and name-personalised turtlenecks. They’d always look so endearingly silly, especially when Q had the patience to dress them in reindeer antlers that matched. Those jumpers were tucked away in a rarely-used cupboard now, along with a carol-singing clock that used to be his mother's and tree lights that hadn’t sparkled in a while.
“I used to love Christmas, you know,” Q confessed, hardly registering the words as they came out of his mouth. “The cats and I had a different jumper for each one of the twelve days. I used to wear a ridiculous reindeer beanie that lit up.”
Bond didn’t reply right away. He likely knew the whole story, given how woefully archaic MI6 was about maintaining paper documentation for everything, staff files included. Bond had probably looked Q up the very first chance he got. He certainly seemed to get the measure of Q quickly enough.
There were a lot of dates listed in Q’s file, but none so loud as the one listed next to his parents’ names, just to the right of that word written in capital letters. DECEASED, as of the twenty-third of December, two thousand and eleven. Just months after that, Q saw his department get blown up, was promoted to Quartermaster, and watched as Raoul Silva ripped through his systems like a scalpel through a vein. It had been both the best and the worst twelve months of Q’s life. To this day, he can’t believe he managed to power through it. It was a focus on the work that did it, he supposed, the same thing that had always helped him power through things that shook him to the very core.
That same year, Q found out the hard way that though the anniversary was exactly as unpleasant as he suspected it would be, the days after it were worse. His colleagues and friends became brighter and happier, in the same way Q used to before his parents’ accident. He couldn’t seem to summon the energy for it anymore. Worst of all, he hated how bitter it made him. He’d always been a realist. A pragmatist. Someone who saw dark as well as light in the world. What he’d never been was a cynic. He’d never been bitter, not until now, and he wore those colours awfully.
Then again, it hadn’t been very long. Two years had passed, though they were two years that may as well have been decades. Even so, he could still remember what his parents’ home smelled like on Christmas Eve. It was as if he’d walked in there mere hours ago. Grief was the strangest thing that way. He could still smell the smoke of the crackling fire, the pine of the tree, the brandy-laden fruit, the bread sauce, the cranberry sauce and the stuffing. And all of it blanketed by the heavy, spiced sweetness of mulled wine and cider.
Thirty-one years with those smells and two without. Q doesn’t know whether he’ll ever be strong enough to make mulled wine at home again.
“We had a gamekeeper,” said Bond, interrupting Q’s meandering thoughts. His voice was low and quiet. “At Skyfall. His late wife used to send me a Christmas jumper every year.”
“Did you ever wear them?”
“Wasn’t much point. I was the only boy my age who stayed at boarding school over the holidays.”
Notably, that wasn’t a denial. Q felt a rush of sentimentality for that lonely, sandy-haired boy whose parents had been taken from him too young. He felt an even fiercer one for the grown man in front of him now.
“I see.”
Suddenly quite overcome, and quite uncomfortable, Q turned back to his paperwork. Bond didn’t need this, least of all at this time of year when his own pain must be desperately acute. His parents might have been his first losses, but they weren’t the only ones. Q couldn’t imagine what the season must be like for someone like Bond, having lost so much at every turn his life took.
The words on the paper in front of Q seemed to swim aimlessly, and he struggled to make sense of his handwriting. It wasn’t clear to him where he’d left off before he and Bond started talking, and remembering seemed horribly difficult. The whole thing was giving him a headache, though that was possibly also down to the effort of keeping his tears at bay. The pressure behind his eyes was hot and immediate and utterly humiliating. Hand trembling, Q dragged a new form over, hoping the blank slate would help. It didn’t. As he made a poor attempt at filling it out, his mind persisted in subjecting him to an awful vortex of memory, sucking him down and down and—
“Here,” came Bond’s voice. It was kind but firm, a call for Q to stop looking at his bloody paperwork for a moment.
A heavy crystal tumbler landed in front of him, filled nearly halfway with whisky. With some alarm, Q realised he must have been caught up in his emotions longer than he’d thought. He suspected the glasses — and possibly the whisky, too — were from Mallory’s stash. The bottle lay half-empty between them where Basil was sniffing curiously at it.
Blinking rapidly, Q tried to shake off his mood and looked up. Bond was seated precisely as he was before, holding a glass in his own hand. His eyes were soft and crinkled at the edges as they took Q in, but they held no pity. For that, Q was exceedingly grateful.
He took an improperly large sip of his drink, given the whisky was probably an extortionately priced one, and relished the smooth burn in his throat.
“Hoping to teach me some terrible coping mechanisms, 007?”
Bond smiled, though it seemed a little more dull than usual. “Just having a drink with a friend.”
That sentimentality which had plagued Q earlier returned in full force. In his grief and bitterness, he’d forgotten that Bond ought to be somewhere else by now as well. At home or out at a bar somewhere. Perhaps like Q, he disliked the idea of both for how lonely they were. He and Bond weren’t the closest of friends, but he knew enough about the man to know he disliked being at home in his sparse and depressing flat. Q didn’t imagine it got any less depressing at Christmas time.
Bond probably knew that going out was also a disaster waiting to happen. The city’s lights and decorations only reminded Q how much he used to love walking amongst all of it. People, tipsy on drink and the relentless merriness of the season, would yell seasonal greetings at him. On one occasion last year, he’d nearly slapped a drunk woman who’d tried to hug him because he looked like an elf. It was unbearable—all of it. The residential streets were the worst for how they offered glimpses into homes far happier than his own.
MI6 would never be an ideal place to spend a holiday evening, but it was more predictable and safe than what lay outside. Besides, there were distractions aplenty. Bond might have been looking for one when he’d stayed past five. He might have been looking for another when he knocked on Q’s door.
Well, if he wanted a distraction, Q would give him one, whichever sort he wanted. Maybe they’d both benefit from it in the end.
With a rueful smile, Q clinked their glasses together. “To company, then.”
Bond tipped his glass toward Q, and his eyes, which so often skewered Q with inquisitiveness, now held none of their usual sharpness. They shone warm, fond, and heavy in the light of Q’s desk lamp.
“To company.”