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“There’s clearly been a misunderstanding. I’m exempt.”
“No one’s exempt,” Dr. Hall intones. “Not even the quartermaster.”
“Now look,” Q answers, setting his jaw as the doctor lifts his weary gaze. “You keep - you keep saying that,” he continues, with a flutter of laughter, “but it simply isn’t true. If you’ll check my records -”
“I have your records.”
“Then you’ll see that due to the nature of my work, I’m no longer required to complete a full physical evaluation. Unless I’m about to be assigned to the field,” he says with a snort, amused and dismissive both.
“Maybe you are,” shrugs Dr. Hall. The words pale the already pallid quartermaster. Q blinks wide, his words broken into bits of stammered displeasure before finally crumbling to dust. Dr. Hall’s brow remains arched as he makes a mark on his file. “I was given instruction by M that everyone involved in the double-oh program is required to go through a full evaluation. That’s all I know. That’s all I need to know.”
“I’m going to go talk to M about this,” Q says. “You cannot force me to - to remove my clothes, and dress in little pants for you, and -”
“It’s for swimming, Q, it isn’t frilly panties.”
Q’s fingers curl against the sleek blue material, tightening the far too tiny strip of fabric into his fist. He glances across his shoulder to his assigned agent, his partner by force, who stands with folded arms in the doorway.
“This a private conversation, 007, and does not require your -”
He nearly manages to say it without letting his attention drift to Bond’s swim shorts.
Nearly.
“Your involvement,” he finishes.
“I wouldn’t dream of getting involved, Q,” Bond replies, making no move to adjust his position. “I’d prefer not to have my head bitten off this early in the morning.”
He, of course, has no qualms with being run through a full physical evaluation. Again. Being in peak physical condition as he is. Damn him. Q turns back to the doctor and finds the man is as indifferent as before, already turned away to tend to other matters. Q hums, helpless, and passes him to hide behind the curtain of his examination bed to change.
He makes sure to come out with his shirt and trousers on on top of the ridiculously tiny trunks. Bond, of course, remains in the doorway, looking like a modern day Adonis in his socially accepted underwear.
“Let’s get this over with, then.”
“Certainly,” Bond smiles, stepping aside to let Q pass with a gracious wave of his hand. “It’s only two laps of the pool, and we have the entire day.”
Q twitches by him, through the doorway and down the hall, past the gym and sundry rooms meant to monitor and observe. He pads out to the Olympic-sized pool kept beneath the River House, bare feet clicking against the tiles, and shivers. The scent of chlorine is dizzying. Dreadful, really. Above their heads glow bright halogens that glitter against the softly shifting waters of the pool.
“How deep is it?” Q asks, stalwartly and definitely not even a little watching Bond’s sun-bronzed skin as he enters into the quartermaster’s periphery.
“Three meters.”
“Three bloody meters,” Q exclaims. “For what purpose?”
“Scaring quartermasters,” Bond replies dryly, but his expression is genuinely soft when Q glares at him. It makes it all the harder to be genuinely infuriated with him.
“I’m not scared,” he counters. “I’m displeased. I’m put out by the fact that something that is not a requirement for my job position is being pushed upon me to participate in without my consent.”
“It’s hardly an inconvenience, Q,” Bond points out. “You’ve been exempt from the track courses and endurance evaluations.”
“But why water,” Q asks, voice weaker than he would like it to be, brows furrowed. James shrugs.
“Perhaps because the headquarters are now beneath the Thames?”
Q draws a deep breath, the urge to argue reflexive, but his lips remain parted in silence. Bond, damn him, has a point. Were something to go wrong with the pump systems, were the river to suddenly - for whatever reason - rise, Q branch could be submerged. Q presses his lips together to bite back both argument and agreement, and simply hums.
He takes a step back, and then another, gaze firmly fixed on Bond’s bottom as he stretches his arms high above his head. Palms pushed towards the ceiling, he rocks up to his toes, calves tugged tight and thighs firm. On the third step back, just as he’s settled into keen observation of the dimples at the small of Bond’s back, Q nearly collides with Dr. Hall.
“No exit, I’m afraid.”
“I wasn’t trying to exit,” Q murmurs, quickly pressing the backs of his fingers to his crimson cheek. “You go first, 007.”
“Must I?” The agent sighs, sending a grin over his shoulder to both doctor and quartermaster. The former sighs and adjusts his glasses. The latter tries not to choke on his own spit.
“Easier than your usual, 007,” Dr. Hall tells him, tone bored. “Two laps of the pool in your choice of form, then free floating for ten minutes.”
“That’s almost insulting,” James points out. “A test any child in primary school could pass without a hitch.”
“Then you should have no trouble,” Dr. Hall tells him. “Nor you, Q.”
Before the quartermaster can answer, Bond does a running dive into the pool, entering it with nary a splash and remaining underwater until he’s halfway down the lane. When he surfaces it’s with a quiet gasp before he continues the length of the pool in a smooth freestyle, arms strong and legs working.
Q comes closer, step by wary step. There’s no water on the tile from where Bond leapt, his entry perfectly practiced, his body sleek and aerodynamic. His arms seem to pull the water beneath himself, feet moving swiftly but leaving hardly more than a ripple from their motion. Q licks his lips apart and watches as Bond’s form becomes smaller and smaller, and then disappears against the far wall.
When he emerges once more, he’s halfway done with the return.
Q crouches, arms folded, absently fingering the open cuffs of his shirt. He waits until Bond is just close enough that he’ll dive again to touch the wall, and with a grin, Q shouts, “Move it, 007!”
Perhaps to be difficult, perhaps to simply allow Q the full view of his infuriatingly gorgeous body sweeping through the water, Bond takes his time surfacing the next time. Half a lap is done in a languid slide, body turning and twisting in the water as muscles bunch in Bond’s back and down to his ass and thighs.
He knows he’s bloody handsome. He knows he’s being watched, the smug prick.
On his return, however, 007 slices through the water like a torpedo, finishing so quickly Q barely has time to blink before he’s at the starting end of the pool once more.
The agent sinks beneath the water against the wall and surfaces on his back this time, arms and legs splayed and brow up as he blinks water from his eyes. “And thus my lengths are completed,” he tells him, not even breathless, goddamn him. “Now I’ve ten minutes to float as I wish. So long as I don’t sink or lose myself I will have passed this painfully difficult requirement.”
“And while he does that, you may begin your lengths,” Dr. Hall tells Q, turning to watch him over the rims of his glasses. “Take the lane over, so you’ve no obstacles.”
Q tenses as if to stand, but his legs feel locked, planted to the ground. He wonders wildly if he could claim a medical condition, though that would not exactly help him pass his physical. He wonders if he could simply lie down on the tile until his body withers to dust and he joins the pale grey grout.
“Good thing they allowed all day for this,” Bond murmurs, smile spreading as he’s hushed by Dr. Hall.
Gaze narrowed at Bond - at his firm chest and its pale dusting of hair, at his flat stomach holding water in the hollows between hard muscle - Q stands and steps away. His hands are shaking as he works open the buttons of his shirt, leaving it over his shoulders as he works his trousers open instead. They pool around his feet and he tugs the hem of his shirt down to cover his bottom, held snug in navy blue nylon. His throat aches when he swallows.
All he's got to do is pull the water under him, and kick his feet, and push his body from one side of the pool to the other. Even a child could pass this test, as Bond said. Even a damned dog could do it.
Which means that Q can do it.
Q can do bloody anything.
He shoulders out of his shirt, pretending admirably that he doesn't tangle a hand in his sleeve, and he drops it to the floor atop his trousers. He hooks his thumbs into the legs of the swim briefs, attempting to make them a little longer, risking revealing more of the dark trail of hair that runs from his navel downward. Maybe he should show it off a little. It's damn near the only hair on his torso entirely.
Not like Bond.
James bloody Bond with his chest hair.
"Frilly panties might have been a better fit," Bond laughs, and though Q resists the urge to try covering himself, he can't restrain a furious blush. He hands his glasses off to Dr. Hall and blinks bleary at the water before him.
"Spoken like someone who's worn them," snorts Q. "If you can bloody do this, Bond, I certainly can."
It is an unfortunate choice of last words as Q drops into the pool, and does not surface again.
The splash is spectacular enough that it takes both the doctor and the agent several seconds to notice this. Bond continues to float on his back, though he cranes his neck to see if he can find the clever little quartermaster beneath him, perhaps deliberately swimming up to grab and upturn him in the water.
But he doesn’t come up. He’s not beneath Bond, he’s not further down the pool than the point at which he so gracelessly entered it. The agent lowers his feet beneath the water and treads it beneath strong arms instead.
“He knows he has to swim the laps, doesn’t he?”
“He took the page from me to read the instructions himself,” Dr. Hall replies. “Unsurprisingly.”
“Huh.” James regards the unmoving wavering lump beneath the water and narrows his eyes. “He’s not coming up.”
“I’m not going in,” Dr. Hall points out, and James shoots him an amused look.
“Funny how the enforcers are always exempt,” he says.
“You’ve another nine minutes to hold a dead float, 007.”
“So fail me,” James tells him, and then without a word he sinks beneath the water to retrieve his wayward pointman.
He blinks against the chlorine burn and turns, angling downward towards the dark squirming mass at the bottom. A few lazy undulations of his body, arms pushing the water behind him, bring him near enough that he can see what he assumes to be an attempt at swimming. It’s a poor mimicry, and panicked. Q manages to push up from the bottom but his arms move out of sync and his legs flail unwieldy.
Q can’t swim.
He can’t bloody swim and he jumped in anyway, to a three-meter deep pool, just to prove a point.
He’s exceptional.
Bond catches him by the elbow, and pushes hard from his heels when they reach the pool floor. Using his free arm and his legs to bring them upward, Q stops struggling and instead just clings to Bond, arms around his neck and legs around his waist. When they surface, Q gasps a little too soon, taking in a mouthful of chlorinated water that he sputters and heaves out again. Choking, swallowing down air and pool water alike, he breathes.
He’s bloody breathing.
And it’s only because of Bond.
The agent manages him to the side of the pool and heaves him up over the edge of it, supporting the quartermaster’s bottom so he doesn’t flail himself back into the water. The young man is gasping air and shaking, pale and wide-eyed and not at all the proud and lovely thing Bond has for so many weeks now been flirting with.
He looks a bit like a drowned puppy.
“Congratulations,” Dr. Hall enunciates from nearby. “You’ve both successfully failed a piss-easy physical.”
“Excellent,” Bond tells him, smiling as he wipes a hand down his face, his other still keeping Q from falling back in. “Mind taking him to recover while I clean up here?”
Q’s stomach heaves with a particularly unpleasant noise, and a worse taste welling hot in his throat. He hunches his shoulders, fingers curling against the tile, and he loses not only the remains of his breakfast but an inordinate amount of pool water. It burns, his eyes welling at the pain and humiliation and fear alike, and he tries to wipe away the spit and snot and tears with the back of his hand.
“Failed spectacularly,” Dr. Hall remarks, as Bond turns his eyes away from the quartermaster to not make his embarrassment worse.
He doesn’t think less of Q for this. He thinks he’s bloody brave and more charming than he has any right to be, especially snotting all over his hand. So they failed. Bond can’t imagine M as being particularly displeased that it was done to save her quartermaster.
“I thought I was going to die,” Q whispers, wide-eyed. “I’ve gone blind, I -”
He startles violently when Dr. Hall produces his glasses, and pulling his lips between his teeth, Q accepts them with a wan smile that quickly falters to nothing. He’s helped to his feet, handed a towel that he pulls unsteadily around his shoulders. With uneven steps he follows Dr. Hall towards the door, but stops beside it to glance back towards Bond.
The agent has hoisted himself up now as well, sitting on his hip at the edge of the pool as he reaches for his own towel. He doesn’t cover up though - he uses it to clean up the mess Q made on the side of the pool. No complaints, no snarky remarks, just doing the job he said he would do.
Then Q is led out, more embarrassed than he was before.
Dr. Hall proclaims nothing at all wrong with him but panic, a slightly sore throat and a headache. He’s allowed the day to recover, if he wishes, and he helplessly nods as the curtains are drawn and he is left alone. Something in the room beeps, over and over. His heart hits a far swifter tempo.
Q has never in his life felt so humiliated. It looked so simple when Bond did it, a matter of basic physics that Q could do the math for in his sleep. But hydrodynamics don’t explain the fear that gripped him as soon as he hit the water. Gravitational pull doesn’t explain the terror that tugged his limbs in every direction, grasping for a surface he couldn’t find nor see.
And it was Bond that found him. Bond that dragged his sorry carcass from the bottom of the pool. Bond who saw him shaking sick with panic.
Bond who Q has been attempting to put in his place for weeks, and whose motions towards flirtation he’s summarily cut short.
Quickly smearing away the tears that heat his cheeks, unbidden, Q forces himself to draw a breath. He parts his lips to call for Hall to bring him paper and a pen so he can tender his bloody resignation, just as there’s a knock against the door.
“Who is it,” he whispers, wary.
“Bond,” comes the reply, and Q wonders if it would be better or worse if he threw up again. How much more face could he lose, surely, if he did? He’s damn near close. “I’m just bringing you your clothes,” he continues. “I know you’re on bedrest, I have no intention of interrupting.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Q says, through the door, because he’s already been found to be beneath the skill of primary school children. Why not really seal the deal and act like one, too? “I’m resigning.”
There’s a long pause, long enough that Q wonders if he’s left.
“You’d still need clothes for that.”
Q snorts, and it burns when he does. He reaches for a tissue to hold to his nose and mutters for Bond to come in.
The door opens quietly and just as quietly shuts behind him as the agent makes his way in. Beneath the curtain, Q can see his polished shoes make their way towards the only chair in the room and stop before it. A soft ‘flumph’ as his clothes are laid against it, and the agent turns to go.
But he doesn’t quite make it to the door.
“You’re bloody daft to resign,” James tells him softly. “If anyone should it’s Hall. Hypocrite can’t swim if his life depended on it.”
“He’s doing his job. He couldn’t very well falsify a report, could he?”
“He could make more notes than, ‘Abject failure’ and ‘Refusal to obey instruction’. It’s rather an extenuating circumstance, don’t you agree?”
“You saw his notes?”
“I might have hazarded a glance,” Bond says with a sly smile, “when the paperwork happened to flutter open as I passed.”
Q folds his fingers against his mouth, tissue held tight, and he waits for his smile to wane before he speaks again. “The test was to verify whether or not we were capable of swimming,” he says softly. “Likely, as you said, to ensure we could escape successfully should something happen with the river. You succeeded, despite how Hall is going to frame it. I didn’t.”
“So?”
“So?” Q asks, laughing aghast, his voice made coarse from chlorine and bile. “So by those standards, I’ve no business being here.”
“Bollocks,” Bond laughs, and it feels so warm that Q is thankful beyond words for the curtain between them. He knows he’s blushing. “These tunnels have withstood world wars, Q, and very few people know they even exist. The chances of you needing to ever use your attempts at swimming are highly unlikely.”
There’s a shuffle as Bond removes his jacket and hangs it on the doorknob.
“And I’ll just know not to invite you on a date to the beach. It’s a win-win really,” he adds.
Q’s breath hitches a little, but he hopes the hand pressed against his mouth muffles it. He hopes that it muffles the remark that immediately follows, instinctive as breathing, that he wouldn’t mind watching Bond at the beach, though. No. No, no. This is merely adding further embarrassment to an already unprofessional day.
He is definitely not imagining how Bond would look, in smaller shorts than the ones he wore today.
His heart is most certainly not beating faster, envisioning how he would look emerging sunlit and golden from the sea.
“I’d recommend you don’t at all, really.” It’s weak, but it’s the best he can do in such a compromised situation. “Please don’t.”
There’s a silence, and then the quiet shuffling as the jacket so recently removed is returned to broad shoulders. “Is that you speaking sincerely, or your experience this afternoon weighing in on your decision?” James asks. There’s a pause in which he allows Q to consider. “In truth, if it’s the former, I won’t complicate our relationship further by attempting to make my interest known. If it isn’t reciprocated, I will hardly be a man to force a square peg into a round hole. But… should you reconsider…”
Q doesn’t need to reconsider. He’s never stopped considering. Not since the first moment Bond sat brash and rude beside him at the art gallery, talking about bloody big boats and spots. Not since the first time he reached for a gun Q was holding and his fingers brushed his wrist. Not since the first little smile, a secret thing shared just between them.
Not since their work together began, and Q found himself sleepless, tracking Bond’s blinking beacon from half a world away.
“Please don’t,” Q says again, softly, and safely unseen behind his curtain. “Because I don’t know how I could say no if you did.”
James’ shoes squeak against the linoleum and he turns to face the bed again. Q watches them and not the shadow of the man he can see standing near. He’s fairly sure he is a moment away from hysterical giggling should James say something more. He holds his breath and closes his eyes and listens to his heart hammer in his chest.
“Then,” the agent offers carefully. “Perhaps I shan’t ask. And accept your yes with nothing being said?”
Q hopes the sound he manages sounds more affirmative than strangled, but it’s rather a bit of both. With his bottom lip between his teeth, still hot with pool chemicals, he listens to Bond’s stillness, his patience. He wonders how long he would have waited, gently prodded, never pushed, for this.
And really, after today, what does Q have to lose when it comes to compromising his career?
“Yes,” Q finally says, his laugh a hoarse rustle of pleasure. “Thank you. For that, and - you know. The other thing.”
“Saving your life.”
“That,” Q agrees.
James hums, and Q can hear the smile in it. He can’t explain why or how, but he can. He knows it’s there and he knows it’s for him. He watches the tips of James’ shoes turn towards the door again and he holds his breath.
“Where are you going?” He asks, closing his eyes immediately and regretting the slip.
“To take care of Dr. Hall’s patient, since he seems adamant to gloat in our apparent failure in today’s exercise and do nothing more. I’ll be a moment.”
He leaves the room, and leaves the door just slightly ajar. Q waits. Perhaps five minutes later, James’ shoes return and gracefully close the door with one heel hooked against it. The smell of Earl Grey floats through the room and Q groans.
James makes that lovely warm sound again, and a moment later his hand appears through the split in the curtain, offering a mug.
“I thought that might get a response,” he says, making no move to open the curtain further or look in. “I’ll join you, if you don’t mind.”
Q leans to accept the mug, folding his fingers around it and relishing the warmth, the crisp scent of bergamot, and just as much, the knowledge of who brought it to him.
“I’m still in my swim… things,” he says.
“I don’t mind,” Bond answers, amused. “I truly don’t.”
“I do,” grins Q, sliding beneath the blankets to hide himself. He presses the rim of the mug to his lips and lets it warm him, eyelids falling heavily closed. He groans, gently, and his words come in a whisper. “Please join me, 007.”
“Much obliged,” James laughs, and Q watches his feet make their way to the chair and turn as his body settles in it. One foot crosses over the other and the agent groans softly as he makes himself comfortable.
“You’re not going to believe me,” he says, “but I don’t think I have seen anything braver than you choosing the water when you knew you couldn’t keep yourself afloat.”
“It was foolish.”
“Absolutely,” James agrees. “But also entirely brave. You could have walked away, with our gentle teasing behind you, but you chose not to. I respect the fact that I had to pull you out, honestly.”
“It was ego, really. I thought I could do it. You made it look easy.”
“But you must have known -”
“Yes. And I did it anyway,” Q laughs, just a sigh really, profoundly tired despite having done nothing more today than argue, wear tiny pants, and nearly drown. And accept an offer for a date with his agent, though that - Q isn’t ready yet to give that thought all the energy it deserves. “Or maybe I couldn’t let you go in without me,” Q says, fighting down his smile. He manages to hide it behind his cup, sipping carefully as steam clouds his glasses.
There’s a pause, then carefully trimmed fingernails on surprisingly elegant fingers circle against the curtain by Q’s head and draw it gently back. Just enough that blue eyes meet Q’s and narrow in pleasure.
“Terrible,” James informs him, and then lets the curtain close again. “Next time I’ll seat you on my back and do laps in your name. I think we’ll both enjoy that much more.”
“On your back?” Q laughs, so suddenly that it spurs a coughing jag. He holds his hand against his mouth and has no sooner lifted his tea aloft than he finds it caught and taken by his agent, to stop him burning himself. Q coughs - laughs - both at once, all the harder, tilting towards the bed and downward. As he finds his breath again, he stretches his legs long, and watches Bond’s blue eyes narrow in a smile as he sets Q’s mug to the bedside table.
“Yes,” he decides, pulling the thin, coarse blanket up against his chin and peeking at Bond from above that and beneath a drape of drying curls, fraying wild from the pool. “I think I would enjoy that. Could you?” He licks his lips apart and hides his grin beneath the blanket. “Would you?”
“It will be either that or turning to work on my backstroke while I keep you against my chest, but that’s hardly proper before a first date - that we’re not going on,” he adds quickly, taking an innocent sip of his tea.
“We are not,” Q agrees, his smile betrayed in the muscles beneath his eyes, lifted and just visible above the blanket he’s wrapped around himself. “And learning how to swim, while valuable, would hardly be a good use of that… platonic time, anyway.”
“Hardly,” says Bond. “Except for the little pants.”
“No little pants,” grins Q. “What would be a better use of our free time together?”
“Without the little pants?”
“Yes.”
“Quartermaster, you tempt me into revealing some intimate details of an event that we have already decide will never occur. I won’t break so easily,” his agent says, taking another deliberate sip of his tea. “I would suggest something sedate, like the Savoy, perhaps, though their policy on pants is very clear.”
“I prefer a clear pants-policy,” Q says, more than a little prim as he brings his chin above the blankets, held softly fisted beneath his chin. “Not a clear pants policy, but one that makes it explicit that tiny swim shorts are not allowed.”
“You didn’t like them on me?”
“I didn’t say that,” Q murmurs, before he can stop himself. He blinks, wide-eyed, but as Bond’s smile curves wide, Q tucks a snorting laugh beneath the blankets again. When he finally recovers himself, exhausted and embarrassed far beyond any hope of regaining his reason, he sighs long. “The Savoy would be lovely.”
Bond tilts his head and lifts a brow. “So it’s decided -”
“Except that I can’t afford the Savoy,” Q continues. “I have a mortgage to pay and two cats to feed, 007.”
His answer comes by way of warm lips against his own, and soft breath puffed against his cheek. He can’t breathe back, he can’t say anything, all he can do is close his eyes and relish the feeling and hope to hell he doesn’t make an embarrassing sound like a hum or a moan or -
A whimper.
Dammit.
“There,” James murmurs, close enough still that their lips brush tickling together. “A reassurance that your cats may rest assured they will be fed, and their house paid for. I’m the one not asking you out, dear quartermaster, so I will be the one not paying for you.”
Q feels his breath leave him as suddenly as it did beneath the water. He’s falling - sinking - but into warmth rather than cold, into a far more pleasant demise than drowning. And when he reaches out, grasping from beneath his blanket to the surface to press his fingers to James’ face, he draws a breath that fills him again entirely.
“Good,” Q grins against his mouth. “You’ve already done enough today.”