Work Text:
FAO: Q-branch.
I appreciate that it is a few short weeks away from Christmas. However, the next person who attempts to place mistletoe in my general vicinity will find their equipment mutilated by viruses which will mysteriously survive any and all attempts to be removed, and will probably outlive your grandchildren.
A side note – nobody is allowed new equipment until the new year due to budgeting. If your equipment therefore gets irretrievably damaged – or infected – it is not my problem.
Q
---
“You are working far too hard,” Bond drawled from Q’s doorway. Q took a steadying, calming breath, and another sip of tea. He was the epitome of tranquillity to most onlookers, barring the slightly messy hair that spoke of having a hand run through it one too many times.
“I have several active agents, on several somewhat precarious missions,” Q said flatly, eyes scanning the screen in front of him, intermittently typing, making notes in an open A5 notebook. “What is it you want? I don’t have anything for you, your next mission briefing isn’t for a couple of days.”
“I have another mission?” Bond said, with amused interest. Q looked up quickly, grimacing slightly; he certainly shouldn’t have released that information without clearance.
“Perhaps. Once again Bond, what is it you want that you can’t beat out of one of my subordinates?” Q asked, looking hurriedly away from Bond to focus his attention on the screen in front of him.
Bond closed the door. Q looked at Bond, and the closed door, with nothing short of alarm. He was very silent for a moment. “…Bond?”
“Step away from the computer for two minutes,” Bond asked, his expression intense. Q felt bizarrely paralysed for a moment.
“I have to keep an eye on what’s…”
“And I assume your ‘subordinates’ are capable of doing just that?” Bond interjected quickly. Q’s eyebrows knotted. Bond attempted an encouraging smile, which was quite honestly frightening.
“Is this important?” Q asked reluctantly.
“Life or death,” Bond assured him. Q somehow guessed that it wasn’t. But the missions were being closely monitored, and would survive his absence for two minutes or so. Assuming this was two minutes. In any case, curiosity dictated Q’s action; he spent his life curious, it was how he ended up as quartermaster, after all.
“Andy, can you watch 002 for a few minutes?” Q asked into an intercom system, after rattling off a series of command codes into a secondary keypad. The affirmative response came through a moment later. “Good, contact me immediately if anything untoward happens.”
Q cut communications, and leaned back, facing Bond. “Take a seat.”
“I’d rather stand,” Bond replied easily. Q gave a slightly affected shrug.
“Whatever suits,” he replied lightly. He watched with calculated ease as Bond worked his way around Q’s desk, keeping his legs crossed, fingers knitted together and resting in his lap.
Bond leant against the desk, looking down at Q, who was by now heading out of alarmed and into the realms of actively frightened. “You’re presumably working through Christmas?”
“…Yes,” Q managed, mouth feeling bizarrely dry. “We both know ‘holiday’ is a bit of an absurd concept here.”
“When will you be free?” Bond asked dispassionately. Q thought for a moment.
“I’ll be here for a little while yet, but I was hoping to get some sleep sometime tomorrow morning. Why?”
“I would like to take you out for Christmas drinks,” Bond asked. Q opened his mouth, took a breath. Closed his mouth. Exhaled. Tried again.
“You… want to take me out for a drink?” Q asked uncertainly. Bond gave a small smirk.
“You and I. Drinks, plural, but in general yes,” he acceded. “So. When will you be free?”
“Bond, what is this in aid of?”
“Fun. Enjoyment. I’m guessing you Q-branch lot don’t get much of that,” Bond said, smirk graduating into a grin. Q rolled his eyes, his lips a thin line.
“Bond, is this all you’ve called me away from my work to ask? Christmas drinks?!” Q asked, voice turning dangerously angry. This was utterly unprofessional. No matter how fond he was of Bond, and admittedly he was, it was ridiculous to take him away from monitoring a mission for something so inane.
“You never look at your email unless it contains ‘urgent’ in the title,” Bond pointed out, mostly correctly. Bond somehow managed to miss the anger bubbling directly under the surface of Q’s skin, threatening to split out and engulf any idiot who happened to be in the way.
“Bond. I am responsible for several people’s lives right now. I do have the time, nor the inclination, to discuss minutiae,” he said, in the calm, contained tone of somebody who was angrier than they could express. It was a little unusual, Q mused, as he felt his temper begin to fray. Bond was mocking him, removing him from his job to mock him about Christmas drinks and what sounded perilously close to a date. The relatively small flicker of flame was being blown gradually into a damn firestorm.
He wondered if Bond had spotted his attraction. He was supposed to be legendarily good at seduction, after all. Bond had spotted his interest, and was now taking his opportunity to freely mock, as he always did. Q felt upset rise under the anger, and allowed it free reign, anger suddenly cascading out of him towards an unusually hapless Bond.
Bond noted that things were not perhaps happening according to his usual plan. Women were so much easier, in his experience, and he had yet to find a woman that matched Q’s intellect. He was usually able to make a few well-placed comments, and people fell at his feet.
He had less experience with men. Other than several curious encounters in his youth, he hadn’t indulged his interest very far. Homophobia was still rife in the world, and he had never quite managed to handle his own feelings on the matter. Homosexuality, bisexuality, was something that happened to other people.
Yet he couldn’t deny an attraction to Q. Intelligent and extremely good-looking, sharp and witty, dry sarcasm that appealed to Bond’s own humour, their easy repartee an important factor in the success of several recent missions. He had decided he would try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, after all. He placed his own self-identity issues to one side, and tried to seduce Q as he would any other woman.
He was thrown out of Q’s office unceremoniously, Q disproportionately livid, Bond making every effort to deny that he was somewhat shaken by his inability to appeal to Q, the sharp sting of rejection pulsing hot and red in the back of his skull.
He retreated to lick his wounds, and wait for another opportunity.
---
Q was exhausted. He hated to admit it, but he was running on fumes. He hadn’t slept properly in fifty-one hours, and had been working non-stop since a nightmare erupted on two missions simultaneously.
Bond had just returned from his quick job in the Middle East, when their informant was massacred. 001, who was in the area with another two back-up agents, had to step in, trying to cover more than one mission brief; time was of the essence, and by the time Bond had been flown back, they would lose everything.
Q had been masterminding everything, single-handedly. Trying to do fourteen things at once, and avoid more people dying. He had not been overwhelmingly successful. One of the other agents, and six civilians, had been killed. They had retrieved the information and found their leak, but the death toll had been high.
It was six days before Christmas.
He walked to the tube station in a bleary haze, somehow missing that it was half three in the morning, and the tubes had long since stopped running. He looked at the gated entrance, and let out an audible moan. The stairs he had just gone down looked incomprehensibly steep. He took a steadying breath, and started to trek up the stairs heavily, each step taking an unreasonable amount of effort.
The black car pulled up next to him when he reached the top, and the door opened. “Q, get in the car.”
Q discovered that exhaustion could evaporate in the face of sheer adrenaline. Every nerve went on hyper-alert as he spun to face whoever was in the car, hand travelling to his customised Browning. It was always intelligent to be armed.
Bond just raised an eyebrow at him. Q felt the adrenaline flood away from him again as fast as it had appeared, replaced with the utter exhaustion from before. He felt incredibly nauseous, suddenly, and the ground was coming up to meet him.
He fell. He didn’t pass out, that was unfair, he merely lost balance and had to carefully prop himself up on a rapidly blinking streetlight. Bond rolled his eyes properly. “Come on,” he coaxed, shifting himself out of the car to take Q’s arm.
Q roughly shook him off. “I’m fine, I’ll find a cab.”
“There aren’t many around here, I have a car and a nearby flat,” Bond told him. “You can stay tonight, and stagger home when there are any tubes running.”
“I’m going home, Bond. Leave me alone,” Q mumbled. Fuck the world was spinning fast. “I’m gonna…”
“I have no doubt,” Bond said, and Q could have sworn his voice was somehow softer, like a round ball, like a hedgehog that retracted its spikes, like calm water after a frenzied storm, like analogies that were rapidly slipping out of his grasp, and when exactly had he ended up in a car?
Bond let Q cling to him for support as he bundled the younger man into a lift to his third-floor flat. The man was asleep on his feet. It wasn’t exactly surprising, after several exceptionally high-intensity days, and absolutely no sleep. It was a wonder he was still standing, to be quite honest.
Q was past the point of coherency. Bond led him into his room, pulling down the duvet and letting Q collapse in a muddle of limbs in the centre of the bed. Bond pulled the duvet up, tucking it over Q’s shoulders and gently removing his glasses in an intimate gesture, plagued by the uncomfortable feeling that he had done nothing to earn this right, to be able to see Q so vulnerable.
He listened a moment to Q’s steady, regular breath. The relaxed, tension-free expression, serenity encapsulated.
Bond slapped himself. This was not useful. Attraction was not useful, and certainly not to another man. This was not who he was. He was James Bond, the eternal womaniser, devastating and lethal. He had spent enough of his life cloaking various aspects of who he really was, beyond James Bond; another part would not make a difference. And in any case, Q didn’t want him. His mid-life sexuality crisis would have to remain on indefinite hold.
He shut the door on Q, and went to set himself up on the couch.
---
Q slept for seventeen solid hours, meaning it was early evening when he stumbled into Bond’s kitchen to seek out whatever smelt so good.
He woke up in an unfamiliar place with very little recollection of how he had got there. Usually this would be cause for some degree of panic. He only ever slept at home. Waking up in an unfamiliar location meant he must have been kidnapped. He sighed at the ceiling, pleasantly surprised by the very comfortable and spacious bed, and the fact that he was still clothed. Nastier options were therefore eliminated. Excellent.
He decided on balance that his kidnappers were being rather nice about things, and he should give them the benefit of the doubt before shooting them. He could smell cooking meat and onions, dimly noting that he was absolutely ravenous.
“Bond?” he asked stupidly, on walking into the kitchen. Really, of all the agents to go rogue, he should have suspected Bond. But still, kidnapping him seemed a little unnecessary.
“How did you sleep?” Bond asked neutrally. Q gave a nod, which Bond apparently took as some form of positive response. “Hungry?” he asked, snorting slightly when Q merely nodded, rendered speechless.
It transpired that Bond could cook, which was more than a little bit of surprise. “I’m an undercover agent; I spend time on my own, or with people, it’s not that surprising,” he told Q, who was still in the range of mute nodding. He wasn’t especially talkative to begin with, unless it was technology or work based. Bond kept up a gentle dialogue, allowing the room to fall silent at moments, a relaxed, calm evening.
“Thank you,” Q said, with a strange smile that Bond couldn’t place. “I should go home, I’ve lost a day of work…”
“You aren’t working tonight. Just get some more rest, and see what happens tomorrow. Christmas is a shit time, we need you fully functional,” Bond said with a flippant shrug.
It was true; a lot of activity happened around Christmas for MI6, groups taking advantage of a celebration to attempt various acts of terrorism. The same occurred on other notable religious dates, as well as July 7th and September 11th, given that they were anniversaries as far as terrorists were concerned. Q needed to be ready for the days around Christmas.
Q nodded, and Bond wondered at the sudden flitting expression of disappointment that he couldn’t quite place. The man was a bloody enigma. Intelligent beyond conception, beyond reason, able to carefully construct facades in mere moments and hide behind them. Bond couldn’t shake the impression that Q was trying to tell him something, some oblique comment or implication, and for the life of him couldn’t tell what. He was used to women who batted eyelashes and draped. Q did not drape. Bond was completely lost.
“Good evening, Bond,” Q said quietly, and walked from his apartment.
---
Christmas Eve was a complete nightmare.
“We have three active terrorist threats and about seven inactive, four agents in various postings around the world that I’m attempting to monitor, M is run off his feet, half my department are calling in sick for spurious reasons, and I haven’t had any tea in about four hours,” Q explained in a single breath. “I need you in the field for the next few days, it’s a London cell, I have your customary radio and earpieces. The gun is one you can trash, but I’d prefer you not to. This is about diplomacy, not shooting people’s heads off.”
“I have a cover story?” Bond asked. Q handed him a folder.
“Read. Memorise. You have two hours, I’m setting up a meet with the cell leader in Canary Wharf. I need to know when and where, and preferably how they’re sourcing the materials,” Q explained in another torrent of words. Bond nodded.
“Thank you, Q.”
“Be careful, 007,” Q replied, with a type of quicksilver intensity that bore into Bond’s brain. Bond nodded, picked up the folder, and left.
---
Christmas Day was arguably worse.
Nobody in Q-branch had slept, every single person who had attempted to call in sick had been literally picked up from their homes (barring Mark, a programmer, who had requested Christmas Day off over eighteen months ago). Q was running ragged once again, but remembering to eat given that 007 kept reminding him.
“Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen,” he noted ironically, when midnight struck.
Everything seemed threatened at various stages, including the Queen at one particularly unpleasant stage. 002, 005, 007 and 008 were all still on active missions. 002’s came to a close in the early hours of the morning, thankfully, and 008 was mostly on recon, so not too high-intensity.
Bond had somehow managed to end up shooting people. Q wasn’t quite sure how he always managed to end up shooting people.
Either way, they prevented several major threats to British security, so the day was mostly deemed a success.
---
Boxing Day was a hell specifically designed for Q, or so it seemed.
Q had fallen asleep, at just gone midnight, in a side-room in Q-branch that he had appropriated specifically so he could sleep without leaving the office. He was woken up at three to be told that MI6, MI5, and army servers were all undergoing simultaneous attacks.
Q had no time to make himself look presentable. He had spare clothing in MI6 usually, but this time, he just strode into Q-branch in a rumpled shirt and trousers, hair sticking up in every conceivable direction, jaw set in a hard line.
It wasn’t quite in his pyjamas. But Q certainly managed to do more for national security on a laptop, at three in the morning, than several agents had managed all week. This was the threat they had been guarding again, without realising. Everything else had been distractions, and the offensive had now begun; Q retaliated with calculated ease, eyes flashing, brain working faster than anybody could keep up.
He was set up in the centre of Q-branch. Most of Q-branch ended up just watching Q work. It was entrancing. Lines of code materialised at breathtaking speed, images and shapes plotted, programmes flashing and loading. He didn’t speak, hadn’t spoken a single word since waking up.
Hushed silence fell across Q-branch, broken only by the insistent rhythm of Q’s typing.
Three hours passed.
Three hours and twenty-two minutes later, Q sat back from the computer. He took a deep breath. He typed a couple more lines, scanned through the final few lines of coding, gave a satisfied hum. He looked about his desk, spinning in his chair to face the assembled members of Q-branch and associated MI6 intelligence personnel.
“Can somebody get me a decent cup of Earl Grey?” he asked lightly.
---
Q finished what he was doing in his office in the late afternoon, and finally decided it was about time he went home and got some sleep. He had a handful of presents from various friends around MI6 he could open, hadn’t got round to buying a tree or decorating much. He probably had a curry in the freezer somewhere.
“I hear today was a success,” intoned a voice from the door. Q’s lips twitched in a smile.
“Overall, I would agree with that assessment,” he said, still smiling. Very few people were able to make him smile like that, as though he had forgotten his job and his tiredness and his usual half-flippant intelligences, and just let him be. It was something about Bond’s tone; the strange balance between dispassion and care, the slight pride, the way he acted as though he expected nothing less.
Q finished packing his bag, a brown satchel Bond couldn’t help but snort at. Q slung it over his shoulder, heading towards the door where Bond waited for him. “Whatever you need today, Bond, you can ask tomorrow.”
Q tried to walk past him, arrested by Bond’s hand on his arm. They stood in the too-crowded doorway for a moment, Q’s expression warily disinterested, Bond’s a complete neutral. The pair could spent eternities in a staring contest, neither willing to make any move. Bond had tried once, and was still recovering from the experience.
Q wet his lips slightly, selecting words with utmost care, his smile carefully calculated. “I believe you owe me a drink.”
“Drinks. Plural,” Bond corrected, with his customary sideways smirk. Q was unreadable, but Bond couldn’t fail to take that as a positive. He watched Q for a moment, struck by the complete mystery of the man, somebody Bond couldn’t begin to read despite making his living off reading people.
“Plural, yes,” Q echoed after a moment. Oh, but the boy could play the game. Bond somehow didn’t doubt that his every action was carefully designed, leaving it almost impossible to glean what he actually wanted. “… Ah, Miss Moneypenny.”
“I’m still Eve,” she retorted, bringing her hand from behind her back and reached above the pair’s heads. Neither had a moment to respond before the mistletoe was dangling above them, Eve standing back with a triumphant grin.
Q’s jaw took on that dangerously angry set. Bond’s eyes sought Eve’s in an expression that spoke of every painful thing he would do to her before killing her. Everybody in Q-branch held their breath.
Q levelled his gaze at 007, an unspoken question. Bond’s livid expression softened fractionally. Q, just for the slightest of moments, looked intensely vulnerable. Bond imagined Q’s life, overly intelligent, quiet, reserved and brilliant. He had probably been humiliated in situations like this in the past, and no matter how well he handled it – and he handled it beautifully – Bond was aware that he was on shaky ground.
At the end of it all, this was what he was good at. He reached out a hand, cupping Q’s face, watching the shallow catch of breath through slightly parted lips. Q’s eyebrow raised slightly, trying to reconstruct his façade.
Bond just leaned forward and kissed him.
Q’s body sang under his hands, vibrating with tangible suppressed energy. Bond may not be able to seduce Q verbally, he was truly expert with the physical. He knew where to move, when, the places to touch and catch, how to make everything happen in a fraction of a moment before they parted again, and Q took a strange snatch of air and Bond watched him, nervous for the first time in years.
“Drinks?” Q mumbled breathlessly. Bond’s expression quirked slightly, still aware that Miss Moneypenny was watched with ill-disguised amusement, and the rest of Q-branch were pretending to be very, very busy with minimal success.
“Drinks,” Bond confirmed. Q gave a delightfully shy smile, and with as much dignity as the pair could scrape together, walked out of MI6 HQ to find somewhere quiet for the frequently-mentioned drinks.
---
FAO: Q-branch.
While I’m certain that it is a point of interest and amusement for many, I am aware of the circulating footage of what is apparently now widely known as ‘the mistletoe incident’.
Please refer to Miss Moneypenny for full details of what will happen to your equipment if I find you in possession of, or responsible for further circulation, of the afore-mentioned footage.
Q
A small addendum: I am now in a relationship with Agent 007. Please refer any/all further queries on the matter directly to him. Please note you do so at your own risk.