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“Christ,” Q groaned, in the panic of a morning rush. “Where the hell is my phone?”
Beside him in bed, with a pillow bunched under his head, looking every inch the layabout, Bond smirked. “Well, you were so quick to shed your clothes last night, darling—”
Q held out a hand to shush him. He was disastrously hungover. He didn’t need to be subjected to this sort of insubordination at seven in the morning.
“If you have something useful to say, say it. Otherwise, be quiet.”
Bond tutted. While he sat up, he subjected Q to a lecture on manners. Perhaps Q had been born too late for elocution lessons to be the done thing in his childhood, he said, but that was no excuse for a lack of common courtesy, especially towards a man who only last night had acquiesced to every filthy thought—
Q stopped listening. He rummaged around in his bedside drawer.
“— to call it?”
“Hm?”
Bond let out a huff of amusement. “Your phone. Shall I call it for you?”
“Oh, yes. Fine. Thank you.”
It would be fair to say that Q wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. Perhaps if he hadn’t missed his alarm or drunk quite so much gin last night—martinis were never a good decision, least of all ones made by James Bond—he might have taken precautions. As it were, he was bleary-eyed, a bit stressed and, frankly, exhausted from a long night of Bond pummelling him into the mattress.
Without warning, Bond pressed the call button on his phone.
La la la-la la la la—
“Oh, shit,” said Q. The ringtone came blasting from his rumpled suit, which had landed in the doorway sometime last night. Hours ago. Hours and hours and hours—
Q made a beeline for it, stumbling over the bedsheets and then himself.
“Q.”
His hand delved into the wrong trouser pocket. “Oh, balls!”
—hide your diamonds, hide your exes—
“Q.”
The other pocket was empty, too. Q nearly tore his jacket apart searching. Its two external pockets contained a pen, three folded post-it-notes, an Oyster card, the key to his work desk and an errant Percy Pig. But no phone.
I’m a Prada handbag—
No, his phone was in an internal pocket (the second one he checked, naturally — when did anything ever go smoothly in a crisis?), and Q grasped at it with the desperation of a found-out mistress, declining the call with a quick couple of taps on its side button.
“What was that I just heard?” asked Bond, seeming far more awake than he’d been five minutes ago. “A naughty elf?”
Q winced. His headache was suddenly the least painful thing in the room.
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
“Oh,” replied Bond with a dangerous glint in his eye. “I think I do.”
