Chapter Text
“Your dad is very pretty,” Bond told the sphynx cat stretched out next to him on the floor. Bond frowned. “Handsome,” he corrected. And then again: “He’s both, actually.”
Bond rolled onto his stomach, resting his head on one of the couch cushions that were currently strewn all over the floor. He slowly reached out a hand toward the cat, Benny, who was wearing a fuzzy purple jumper with bright green musical notes embroidered on it. “I think I’d just like to…pat you on your little belly.”
Benny slowly pulled back a paw, claws at the ready.
“For god’s sake, Bond, don’t fall for the belly lure, it’s the oldest trick in the book.” Q snatched Bond’s hand out of the way and pushed it back toward him, before pulling out his mobile and dialing Moneypenny.
“He’s deteriorating,” he said into the phone. “How soon can you get here?”
FOUR HOURS EARLIER
Q was late.
It wasn’t particularly unusual, in and of itself. As a person, left to his own devices, Q was unfailingly punctual; as the Quartermaster of MI6, he was so consistently pulled in different directions that it was remarkable that he ever arrived anywhere at all. Nor was this appointment especially time-sensitive—Bond was back from Prague with his Walther, his passport, and half of a charred satellite phone to return, and he wasn’t in much of a hurry for Q to find out about the latter.
Bond took advantage of the delay to wander around Q Branch, keeping an eye out for any interesting prototypes. For all Q’s pointed comments about Bond’s track record with his tech in the field, he seemed to trust Bond’s opinion implicitly in the labs, and gave him relatively free rein to suggest modifications or improvements to works in progress. More and more often, of late, if he timed his appearance in Q Branch just right, he could finagle an invitation from Q to stay and look at blueprints over takeaway and cooling cups of coffee or tea. He wouldn’t mind doing it again, given a plausible reason to make the offer, particularly if it would take Q’s mind off the satellite phone.
By a quarter past the hour, Q still hadn’t appeared, and Bond had gone in search of something to eat. It was common knowledge that Q Branch had the best snacks in all of MI6, and Bond hadn’t eaten anything since a packet of pretzels on the plane. The breakroom was disappointingly picked over, but midway through one of the nearby labs, he spotted a plate of brownies left out to cool.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, helping himself to one of the bigger squares. Just as he was brushing the crumbs from his fingers, however, Q burst into the room.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he was saying, dropping the stack of folders he was carrying with an alarming lack of care, spilling their contents onto the counter. “Surely he wasn’t such an idiot as to—ROBRECHTS!!!” Q shouted. “R, go find Robrechts, now. I think the bloody idiot left his drugged brownies out, and Bond’s just eaten one.”
Within moments, R was pulling the unfortunate Robrechts into the room. He was a tall, scrawny man with blonde hair and a blonde beard, pale and made paler by the scene unfolding in front him. Bond half expected Q to start shouting again, but Q was almost glacially calm. On balance, Bond found it more frightening.
“Robrechts,” Q asked, “Do these have your experimental serum in them?”
“Yes, sir,” Robrechts said. “But as you can see, they’re labeled—“
“With a sign that says ‘do not eat,’” Q cut in. “The same as the notes that people put on their food in the breakroom, to try to stop people nicking it. That’s as good as waving a red flag at a bull, to a 00. And as you can see, 007 has already eaten one. Is it just the one, Bond?”
When Bond nodded, Q continued. “Does each brownie have a full dose?”
“Yes,” Robrechts said.
Q pushed a pad of paper toward him. “I ought to fire you, given how careless you’ve been,” Q said. “As it is, you’re suspended for two weeks. But first, you’re going to write down every possible side effect, however unlikely, that 007 might experience from your improperly labeled prototypes. You’re going to list every detail you know about the formula, from how long it’s likely to last, to how we can tell when it’s completely worn off. You’re going to go do that now, and have it back to me in five minutes. And then you’re going to spend the entirety of your two-week suspension thinking about how to create an antidote. And so help me, if 007 has so much as a mildly upset stomach on top of the other symptoms, you’re going to be out of a job.”
“Yes, sir,” Robrechts said, swallowing. “I’ll be right back, sir.” He took the paper and backed out of the room.
“I take it these aren’t lethal,” Bond said finally, looking from Q to R.
Q sighed, running a hand through his hair for what was probably the hundredth time that day, if the way it was standing on end was any indication. “No, they’re not lethal. But they’re not without effect, either. In some respects, they’re not dissimilar to a pot brownie. You’re going to be a bit relaxed, and probably rather peckish, starting within the next couple of hours.”
“And?” Bond prompted.
Q rubbed at his forehead. “And—well. I’m afraid you’re about to become extremely honest.”
Truth serum brownies, Bond mused as Q disarmed his security system and opened the door to his house. It wasn’t a bad idea, and it might well come in handy in the field, someday. Q had seemed anything but intrigued at the prospect of having an inadvertent test subject, however. While they’d waited for Robrechts to bring back his list of potential side effects, Q had grilled Bond about where he might feel most comfortable spending the next 24 hours.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” he’d said. “You’ll almost certainly be fine, but they’re not out of final testing, and I want someone with you just in case you have an odd reaction. But listen, Bond, you’re probably going to talk about any number of things. It’s not just that you won’t really be able to lie, if someone asks you a direct question. But you might also be prone to—I don’t know, I suppose we’d call it oversharing, in the absence of a more technical term. And you should be with someone you feel comfortable sharing with, if it comes to it. I could call Moneypenny, if you like. Or Tanner. He’s just gone home, but I can get him back, if—“
Bond had stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Will I be a danger?” Bond asked. “To myself, or to anyone else?”
“No,” Q promised. “You won’t be. In danger of eating too many snacks, maybe, but that’s all.”
Bond made his decision. “Then I’d prefer to go with you.”
“Are you certain?” Q had asked.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He might have chosen differently, back when they’d first met. For a time, Bond had been wary of all the knowledge at Q’s fingertips, of all the ways Q might flay him open with a keystroke and dissect his history like a particularly unfortunate corpse. He had the technical skills to access any of Bond’s files, certainly, no matter how many layers of security they were locked behind, and the sort of instinctive curiosity—he didn’t dare call it nosiness—that Bond had imagined would override any inhibitions against looking into the agents he managed in the field. But then one day, a few months ago, he’d been in a meeting in Mallory’s office, alongside Moneypenny, Tanner, Q, and 004, discussing a plan to take down a weapons trafficking ring that was spreading across Europe. Q had pulled out a map and started indicating what agents might be sent where, when Mallory interrupted. “009 can go instead. I’m not sending 007 to Venice,” he’d said. Everyone in the room, including Bond, had gone still, except for Q, who’d simply blinked owlishly up at Mallory and asked why not.
“It’s fine,” Bond had interjected, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I’ll go to Budapest.” Q had nodded, and moved the conversation along without any further questions.
Even after that, Q hadn’t checked Bond’s files. Bond had brought it up himself, instead, during one of their evenings in the lab, when the coffee had given way to makeshift gin and tonics in Q’s tea mugs. Q had listened, and told Bond how sorry he was, and then he’d let Bond change the subject, all with a straightforwardness that an outsider might mistake for a lack of emotion, but which Bond knew by then to be part and parcel of a kindness that was as quiet as it was deeply felt. Q didn’t dissemble; he didn’t flatter, or mislead. He simply listened, and where he could, given the barest opening, he helped.
No, the decision had seemed easy enough, back at Q Branch. It was only now, stepping over the threshold into Q’s home, that Bond began to realize the depth of his miscalculation.
“Make yourself at home,” Q was saying. He put his shoes on a rack by the door and took off his blazer, pulling his jumper over his head. As he did so, the button-down shirt underneath came untucked, revealing a strip of skin just above his waistband.
Bond’s mouth went dry. He shouldn’t stare. There was a reason he shouldn’t stare. He just couldn’t remember what it was at the moment.
“Bond?” Q asked. “Are you all right? You’ve gone a bit—” He moved closer, reaching up to place a cool hand on Bond’s forehead.
And that was the crux of the problem right there, wasn’t it, the entire reason why going home with the person he trusted more than anyone else in the world had actually been a bloody stupid idea that was probably going to ruin his life: Q’s hands.
In Bond’s experience, outside of the odd visit to medical, people mostly touched him because they wanted either to fuck him or to kill him, and sometimes both at once. It was a hazard of his profession, and, he supposed, of his personality, at least on some level. But Q was quite literally hands-on in a way the previous Quartermaster hadn’t been, and over time, Bond had grown familiar with Q’s long, elegant hands, with his dextrous fingers and blunt nails, as they fitted him with a holster or pinned a camera to the lapel of his suit. Even so, the first time Q had touched Bond during one of their dinners in Q Branch—a simple hand on his forearm as Q laughed at something Bond had said—Bond had braced himself for the touch to turn lewd, or demanding. But it hadn’t. It had just been affectionate. Friendly, even.
And because when it came to romance, Bond apparently had the same capacity for self-preservation as a dodo bird staring placidly at a boatful of Dutch sailors, before long, all he could think about was how much he wanted Q to touch him like that again. And how much he wanted to touch Q in return.
“No fever,” Q said, bringing Bond back into the present. He dropped his hand, but stayed close enough for Bond to catch a hint of his cologne. It was violet leaf and petitgrain, Bond knew—he’d bought a bottle for himself after he’d snuck a look at the one Q kept in his locker in the MI6 gym. It mostly sat unused in the back of his dresser, save for the moment of weakness when Bond had sprayed some on his scarf before leaving for the mission in Prague. Dodo bird, Bond reminded himself, moving out of arm’s reach.
“I wonder if the serum is beginning to kick in,” Q continued. “Let’s get you settled, just in case. Ah, that’s Benny, over there,” he said, pointing to a hairless cat in a purple jumper, “and that’s Jets, in the bright blue.”
“I didn’t know you were such a big fan of Sir Elton,” Bond said, crouching down to hold out his hand for Benny and Jets to sniff.
Q smiled. “Just a bit of one. ‘Your Song’ was the first real thing I learned to play on the piano, once I was any good, and I suppose it followed from there.”
“Will you play it for me sometime?”
Q leaned down, scooping up Jets and dropping a kiss on the top of his head. “I can’t imagine you’re stoned enough for that, yet.”
“Just the opposite, actually. But now that you mention it, seeing that I’m drugged and about to be entirely at your mercy, a little musical compensation wouldn’t be out of order.”
Q stiffened, and Jets squirmed in his grip, meowing to get down. “About that,” Q said, suddenly all professionalism again as he set the cat down on the back of the sofa. “I owe you an apology. Q Branch is my responsibility, and this happened on my watch. I know this will mean very little to you, now, but you have my word that nothing like this will happen again. In fact—“
“Q,” Bond reached out a hand, and then thought the better of it, shoving them both in his pockets instead. “I was making a joke, that’s all. A bad one, at that. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“But I do,” Q said. “You didn’t consent to this, James. Not to being a Q Branch test subject, nor to being at my mercy, as you so aptly put it. I don’t want to be one more person who just—takes things from you.”
“Then that would make one of you.”
“Yes, I know,” Q snapped back. “That’s rather the point.”
Q’s eyes were fierce as they held Bond’s. His hair was a disaster, he’d only managed to tuck his shirt back in halfway, and he had smudges underneath his eyes from what Bond was certain was a complete and utter disregard for healthy sleep habits. Bond didn’t think he’d seen anything half so lovely in his life.
“I’ve made this awkward,” Bond said after a moment. “But for what it’s worth, you and I both know you’ll never be that person, Q.”
“So long as you know it,” Q said, his hands still planted firmly on his hips.
“I know it,” Bond said quietly. He had known it for some time now, he thought, with a certainty as bone-deep as if Q had been the one on truth serum, and wasn’t that the thing to realize right as he was about to lose all conversational inhibitions for the rest of the night.
Q swallowed. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll just make the best of it, then, shall we? If you don’t mind picking something to watch, I’ll go see what we have to eat.”
“Already on it,” Bond said, sitting down on the couch and picking up the remote. He scrolled through the streaming options, looking for whatever was least likely to inspire the intemperate disclosure of romantic feelings. A documentary on the eradication of Guinea worm, perhaps, or—
“Here we are,” Bond said, pausing on a program that promised a look at history’s most notorious shipwrecks. That ought to do the trick. There was nothing romantic about naval disasters, or typhoons, or sailors being menaced by sharks. They could watch the show for a few hours, and then they would go to bed—separately, Bond reminded his traitorous libido—and put this whole thing behind them, and any inconvenient feelings Bond might have would remain unspoken, as all the safest things were.