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ONE
It is, at the time, a convenience. Nothing more.
Bond, entirely aware that he’s committed a cardinal sin of tailing and made eye contact with his target, is glancing with forced nonchalance around the flounce-filled upscale Picadilly tea room when he sees a familiar set of shoulders. Thin, sloped, swaddled in a bottle-greed cardigan. A nest of inky-black hair that looks more like the pelt of a wild animal than a coif favoured by one of Six’s highest-paid staff. Dreamy, cream-coloured skin.
Bond steps out of the line for the till, leaving his quarry behind, and puts his hand on Q’s shoulder. Leaning down on the opposite side, he whispers: “Play along,” in Q’s ear. Then he ducks in to press a kiss to his neck. He smells of verbena and printer toner, sweet and sour.
He rounds the table and pulls out the single available chair, white wood, twee little cushion. God, why is Q here? It’s the kind of place little girls get brought on outings in between stitching together soft toys and trying on unicorn tiaras, and middle-forties women hooked on Jane Austen stop into for elevenses. Q notably fits neither of these demographics.
“I see you didn’t order for me,” says Bond, looking down at the sole pot and mug on the small, round table. The pot has a quilted cozy on it. Of course it does. It’s only some miracle that makes it forest green tweed rather than white lace.
“Apologies,” replies Q, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. “I can be terribly forgetful like that. Occasions of all sorts just slip right out of my brain, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I noted the lack of an anniversary gift. Never mind. I’m sure you can make it up to me.” He smiles winningly and, leaning forward, snags Q’s mug. Lifting it across the table, he takes a drink. Earl Grey, naturally. Dark, rich, with the woodsy flavour of bergamot.
“Living dangerously as ever,” says Q, eyes gleaming like polished jade. He really is very ornamental, or would be if he made an effort. Someone Bond could show off on his arm, lithe body and a rather exotic face; pouty lips and gorgeous eyes. Well. In certain circles, anyway. Q is an acquired taste.
Bond returns the mug to him with a grin; Q practically snatches it from his hands. He rubs a thumb over the rim where Bond’s lips touched it, traces over the smooth porcelain several times. Like a student trying to erase a mistake; like a priest trying to wash out a sin. “You know me, addicted to the adrenaline.” says Bond. Behind Q, his quarry asks for the key to the loo and slips into the back of the shop.
Q snorts and lays the mug down on the table. He lifts the pot and pours out a trickle of tea, pointedly replacing the portion thieved by Bond. Setting the pot down he takes up the mug and drinks, a little ostentatiously. Bond watches the way his slender neck works, the bob of his Adam’s apple and the shift in shadows at the dip of his collarbones. Yes, he’s certainly attractive, once you get past the appalling taste in dress, hair, and beauty products (see: lack thereof). Bond plays back for himself the warmth of Q’s skin beneath his lips, the scent of him. Yes; very nice.
“I dread to ask what it is you’re thinking about,” says Q, once he’s put down the mug again. “But then, I suppose you wouldn’t tell me.”
Bond smiles; uneven, lips crooked. “Every man needs a secret or two.”
Q’s eyebrows spike at this frankly sententious line. “Well, quite,” he murmurs. And then, smiling at the ridiculousness of it: “So what precisely is yours, then? A longing for afternoon tea? Or a longing for rather pretentious tea houses?”
“Perhaps it’s a longing for you,” says Bond, enjoying this game. Q knows why he’s here; he must. If he’s not in Bond’s ear today then he’s on a day off, but he must see the earpiece, must know Bond is playing bloodhound today. Which means he’s simply choosing to have fun with it, Bond dropping in on his little moment of me time. “Surely you must have considered it.”
“Surely,” drawls Q, dryly. “You’re very hot and cold, James. Here one minute, gone the next. A man could get his signals crossed.”
Bond jiggles his knee, and almost upsets the flimsy table. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, as Q catches his tea before it can spill over. “Unintentional, I promise.”
“The table, or your issues with commitment?” quips Q, mug held in both hands. He has elegant fingers; those of an artist, or a musician. Bond can easily imagine him seated at a jet-black grand piano, those fine hands splayed across the keys. Q is a master of many talents; it’s no trouble at all to believe him adept on the instrument.
“Oh both.” His quarry exits the bathroom and hands the key back. Bond waits, seated, watching Q while tracking the woman in his peripherals. She’s heading to the exit rather than ordering. “Well, lovely to see you; I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
“I can’t wait,” says Q, quite chippy. But Bond is already slipping away from the table and out of the café, without giving him a second thought.
TWO
To Bond, an oversees trip is practically a weekly occurrence. For Queen and Country never seems to involve this country, always one of the other ones contemplating something diabolical and possibly nuclear-tinged. He speaks three languages well and a further four badly, and anyway everyone speaks English these days, often better than the English themselves. All of which to say, he’s in Antwerp, which is entirely normal, and Q is there with him, which is very much not.
It's some academic conference boasting big names in nano-computing, which is Q’s métier, and specifically in this case a recluse who has been off-grid for a decade and is associated with some Very Nasty rumours circulating online regarding things like crashing the world wide web. (Bond had thought this impossible, but it turns out it isn’t, it’s just very difficult. “Even I would need about a year to manage it,” Q admits, in the briefing room.)
All of which means they send Q to the conference, with Bond there to deliver him into the open arms of the multi-room venue, rather along the lines of a very put-upon postie. Q does not travel well.
The cocktail of drugs he takes onboard the plane leaves him placid and dopey on the other side, and it’s just as well they sent Bond along because otherwise any foreign power with an eye to collecting the head of Q-Branch – or alternately just some maniac with a taste for waifish men with absinthe-coloured eyes – could have scooped him up from Arrivals and carried him home in their SUV. He leans on Bond’s shoulder, snuffling like a dog at the collar of Bond’s jacket while the dark messy froth of his hair tickles Bond’s neck in the taxi queue. He’s entirely silent on the cab ride to the hotel, and lets Bond haul him out on the other end and up to the room as if he was on quads – which for all Bond knows he is. Certainly he collapses onto the bed without a single thought for Bond, standing in the door and staring askance at the long stretch of him, all porcelain skin and raspberry lips.
Yes, alright, Bond has a wank about it in the shower that night; he’s never claimed to be other than he is, which is more animal than human. Nature red in tooth and claw, M might have said – the old M, the one who knew his nature better than he himself.
Q, coming out of his drug-fuelled haze, is unsurprisingly cut-throat at the conference – in a polite academic kind of way. He rips through inexactitudes and flimsy cover-alls like data pending. “If you haven’t completed the analyses, you oughtn’t to be crowing about the results,” is typical of the tacks he takes. Bond, who has been on the receiving end of Q’s fierce tongue when it comes to the matter of unreturned equipment, quite enjoys seeing him unleashed on others. Like a greyhound taken off his lead and let free to run – rather joyous, in a way, but with intense clarity of purpose. He hands out (fake) business cards and collects them in return, slipping them into a sleeve which Bond supposes he will bin at the end of the assignment. Paradise lost.
It turns out to be quite unlike Arcadia, though, in the final hour when Q manages to finagle an invite to their target’s suite to discuss quantum effects and related design issues – Bond is unclear whether this is a euphemism but Q proceeds happily upstairs in his cheap Topman suit and wearing a wire. Which is how Bond knows that, almost immediately, a fight erupts in the suite.
He breaks down the door to find Q in a corner, a bloody smear over his raised fist, and a grunt levelling a Glock G28 at him. He swivels to fire at Bond the moment he breaks the door in, misses, and doesn’t get a chance for a second shot. Their target is lying on the ground, a bruise on his mouth. Bond collects the Glock, holsters his own Walther, and kicks their target in the head; he falls limp. Only then does he turn to Q, who is dabbing his handkerchief against a cut on his knuckles.
“I would have prioritized returning my equipment if I’d known you had a right hook on you,” says Bond, taking his hand to look at it. Lightly bruised, cut on his victim’s teeth. Just a nick, hardly bleeding. He lifts it to his mouth, intending to wet the wound, and ends up kissing Q’s knuckles in the instant before he yanks his hand away.
“Incredibly unsanitary,” says Q, sounding scandalized. And then, lower, “Did you kill him?”
Clearly this question is meant of their target; the grunt is most definitely deceased. Bond looks down at him. “Just unconscious,” he says.
“Good. Good.” Q lets out a shivery breath, some of the exactitude slipping from his shoulders. He falls back against the wall, holding his injured hand tight to his chest, and for an instant looks much younger and more innocent than he is. Wide, emerald eyes, bloodless cheeks. His long fingers are crushed together, nailbeds blue. It’s not cold in the room but right now his body is prioritizing his chest and brain, red blood pumping hot in a tight circuit to keep him ready to react. His face is the colour of shadows on snow.
“Hold it together Q,” he says.
“I’m fine,” lies Q, not very convincingly. His eyes fall to the grunt’s corpse, blood soaking into the carpet, and his mouth tightens like a loose-stitched seam pulled taut. “So very fine,” he says, thinly. And then: “How are we getting out of here, exactly? I would very much like to be somewhere else.”
Bond considers the options. The permutations where Q is helpful are vastly in the minority. “I want you to go to checkpoint beta and wait for me there. I’ll handle everything here. Can you do that? Q?”
Q looks up at him. He’s still holding his hand stiffly, unnaturally, to his chest. Bond reaches out and lifts it. Smooths it for him between his warm palms, and taps just lightly on the back. “We’ll have you back in London in no time, drinking tea at your favourite prissy parlour. Okay?”
For a moment Q stands there, looking down at their linked hands. Then he carefully withdraws his, and nods. “Alright,” he says. “Alright, 007. I’ll see you there.”
“You can do this, Q,” says Bond.
Q looks up, mouth pinched, eyes shadowed. “Oh,” he says, making an effort at unaffected. “I’m well aware.”
When Bond rolls up at checkpoint beta two hours later, having disposed of their target on a covert transport back to the UK, it’s to find Q sitting on a bench drinking from a disposable cup and reading a copy of La Libre Belgique. “Are we fleeing for our lives?” he asks, crossing his legs with laconic ease.
“Not currently,” replies Bond, hands alongside his hips – a naval career cured him early of the atrocious habit of pocketing them. “Why? Would you like to be?”
Q takes a final sip of his cup, then rises, folding the newspaper with all the aplomb of a businessman riding the morning train into the City. “In my case, no. In your case, judging by historic frequency it seems to be something you rather enjoy. I’d hate to deprive you of your pleasures, Bond.”
Bond takes the cup from him and tosses it into a nearby recycling bin. “Not to worry,” he says. “Still plenty of time to the airport.”
Q makes a face; Bond laughs.
Everything’s alright.
THREE
Christmas in the service typically means double shifts for the agents; terrorists love to target popular holidays for larger impact. So Bond is a little surprised, this year, to be working from the office. Since Eve won’t let him near the assignments and all non-essential services (see: firing range; canteen; research desk) have been shut down to allow at least some staff the semblance of a holiday, Bond is roaming the halls in search of distraction.
He rolls into Q-branch half-expecting to find the lights off and the boffins gone, disappeared to whatever sad suburban flats they come from and doubtless playing online video games with too much item acquisition and tracking, but in fact there’s the hum of overhead fluorescents and the smell of fresh coffee. R is working in an office, cataloguing a drawer full of what Bond would confidently call dross. Beyond next door, the light is also on in Q’s office, a large room with a computer hooked up to six screens which Bond knows Q is fully capable of monitoring simultaneously. As he steps through the open lab space onto which the offices open, he notes the cheerful tinsel and fake evergreen boughs hung from the ceiling, interspaced with glass baubles. Nestled among them, like vipers among green vines, are little clumps of mistletoe.
As workplace hazards go it’s mild – no threat of melting down and eradicating half of Eastern Europe, for example – but Bond still gives it a thoughtful, wary eye, before ducking into Q’s room.
It’s always warm in here, smelling of hot plastic and dust and black tea. A mellow kind of atmosphere, in direct opposition to the often fraught situations Q finds himself guiding 00s through on the regular. Today though there’s no livestream piped through the audio system, no operative navigating a potentially world-ending threat. Just Q typing away at something. It is, by Bond’s watch, 3:30pm on Christmas Eve.
“Surely even quartermasters get holidays,” says Bond, stepping along to join Q behind his long desk, populated by two keyboards, a mouse, and a large mug which at the moment appears to be empty.
Q looks up, and the corners of his eyes crinkle, just lightly, with a tired kind of appreciation. Bond’s trained to notice the little things. Like the way his mouth softens, like the way he turns towards Bond, shoulders opening in welcome. “They do when there isn’t an active op in Azerbaijan threatening to go pear-shaped,” he replies.
“In which case, extra shifts?”
“In which case, all leave cancelled until further notice,” says Q. He sounds more deflated than Bond would have imagined he would be when threatened with endless hours plugged in to Six’s mainframe.
“Plans?” he asks. “Family in town?”
It occurs to Bond, suddenly, that he’s never seen Q’s file. He often finds himself snooping in the HR archives when new staff join the team, particularly ones he’s likely to work alongside of. In Q’s case, his competence had been so easily apparent from day one that Bond just never questioned it. Him. Q.
Q takes in a breath and leans back, stretching his spine. His thin ribcage presses outwards against the pull-over he’s wearing today, a Nordic-looking pattern of white fletches radiating outwards from the neckline on dark blue wool. It’s reminiscent of tarot cards, the haloes of arrows and crosses circling the more eminent characters. Denoting strength, power, holiness. Bond smiles.
“No plans,” says Q. “But I was looking forward to spending some time with my sister. She’s home from uni in France, and at that age where she’s liable to forget she has a brother at all if not presented with him on a regular timetable. You almost met her once,” he adds, lifting his head.
“Did I?” It seems unlikely.
“You may recall assaulting me in a Picadilly tea shop?” teases Q, eyes dancing.
“Assault is such a tricky word,” replies Bond, picking up on his tone. “It was pure self-preservation.”
Q snorts and taps a key; one of the windows changes from a Word document to a camera feed. “That’s what they all say. In any case. It now seems that I will likely not be wishing her a Joyeux Noël.” His accent is perfect, the words tumbling easily off his tongue without hesitation.
“I’m sorry, Q.”
Q shrugs. “Vagaries of the service. We’re all used to them, aren’t we Bond?”
It’s the fact that he doesn’t, really, look distressed. Doesn’t look crushed, or dispirited. He looks merely accustomed to being let down, to having his personal life trod upon, trampled underfoot by Six and its never-ending needs.
Without warning, Bond leans in close. Close enough that he can smell Q’s soap – verbena again, a note of citrus and grass. Q doesn’t move but he does suck in a breath, eyes wide, surprised but shining. Bond snags his cup from the far side of the desk, and straightens. “Let’s go get you some tea at least,” he says. “Compliments of the season.”
“I already participated in the office secret Santa; I’ve been quite adequately appreciated,” he says, but his tone is wavering, not his usual strict self. Ready to be persuaded.
“With you, tea isn’t a nicety. It’s important. Routine. Family. Or am I wrong?”
Q looks at him, his gaze bright behind his specs. “And which are you, I wonder, 007,” he replies, not answering the question.
“I’ll leave that for you to decide. Come along!” Bond tosses the cup in the air and catches it, earning an aggrieved yelp from Q. He leads him out across the main lab, down the hall and into the kitchen where there’s a coffee machine that also produces piping hot water. Bond raids the cupboards until he finds the tea – English breakfast, Earl Grey, jasmine, camomile. “Pick your poison,” he says, gesturing grandly. Q rolls his eyes and scoops up a sachet of jasmine, tossing it to Bond who snatches it out of the air easily. He drops it in the mug and pours in the boiling-hot water, until it’s a centimetre below the lip.
Q reaches for it, and Bond lifts it instead and makes for the door. “I’ve got it. Wouldn’t want you to spill and scald yourself.”
“Who says chivalry is dead?” murmurs Q, tone sardonic. He shuffles after Bond back down the hall and through the lab. They pass R’s open door – her back to them, typing away at something. Bond stops a meter before Q’s office and turns, smoothly so that the water doesn’t even ripple.
“What –” begins Q, stopping abruptly, nearly ploughing right into Bond. Bond raises his eyebrows, and looks up. Above them a little ball of mistletoe berries hangs, snow white amongst green sprigs. “You cannot be serious,” says Q.
“If all I had for the holidays was a secret Santa parcel, I’d be looking for more,” murmurs Bond, smiling.
“And so you fancy yourself in the role of Father Christmas? Really, Bond –”
“Really, Q,” he replies, and sees Q’s smile, the laughter in his eyes, the lightening of the shadows on his face. “You deserve some fun.”
“Is that what you are? I thought you were more in the line of a pox.”
“I’ll let you decide.” Bond leans forward and places a light kiss on the corner of Q’s mouth. For an instant Q holds still, as the ocean seems to hold itself unmoving in the instant that the tide washes up fully on the shore before it pulls away. Then, like the sea, he is moving – because Q is never not moving, never not shifting/twitching/talking – to fit their mouths together more comfortably. His lips are soft, warm, like Spanish sunshine. He tastes of clementines.
Then he leans back, and lifts his tea lightly from Bond’s hand. “Happy Christmas, James,” he says, his smile small, simple. Unadorned by his usual stark sharpness.
He steps into his office, out of Bond’s view, and is gone.
FOUR
Bond isn’t expecting to play deliveryman for Q again, but Eve collars him at the New Year’s party and tells him it would be best if someone saw the quartermaster home, ideally before he empties his wallet matching 005 on shots of Belvedere vodka.
If it were anyone else, Bond would let them ruin their bank balance and their liver trying to drink Martin under the table. But it’s Q, his sable hair luminously black under the overhead halogens, the colour of the darkest depths of the ocean, of raven feathers and coal. Q whose ears are flushed a delicate sunset pink, whose mouth is wet, whose eyes are growing glassy. Q who he feels he would fight for, bare-fisted and bare-chested, like a Roman gladiator with an iron sword, and isn’t that a horrible thought?
So he rolls up beside the stool where Q’s perched, owl-like, blinking behind his dark glasses, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Time for us to be going, I think,” he says, more for Q’s benefit than Martin’s. Martin is fifteen years younger than Bond, has no pains in his knees and no broken teeth, and can drink all night and still tumble out of bed for a 20km run at six the next morning. Bond hates him with all the sour vigour of an aging agent. He has absolutely no qualms about ruining his fun.
“James, we’re in the middle of something here,” objects the boy, of course.
“Take a rain check.” Bond says it politely, because they are colleagues and this is a work event. But not that politely, because they’re also two men scrapping over the same prize, and only one is going to come out on top.
It’s going to be him.
“Bond,” says Q, looking up at him. “Where did you come from? Purgatory?”
“No, Whitehall.”
“Oh,” says Q. “Much worse.”
“Indeed. Let’s go.”
Q appears to consider this. “Did I win?” he asks, with boyish interest.
“You didn’t lose.”
This seems to be enough for Q, who tips himself off his stool and nearly falls before Bond catches his weight. “Yes, definitely time to go,” he says. Martin is complaining again but Eve’s appeared to read him the riot act and Bond leaves her to have her fun while he drags Q first to the coat check, and then outside. It’s one a.m. on January 1st, and there are plenty of people on the street but absolutely no cabs. Bond bundles Q onto a bus, even while he lifts his wallet and checks his driving license for his address. Richmond. Wonderful.
Q’s a sleepy drunk, apparently, but there are worse things (like flats in Richmond). Bond lets him sag over his shoulder, shaggy mane tickling Bond’s back, and thinks of Antwerp. Of Q huddled against him, hands to his chest, wide-eyed and white-faced. Of how quickly he had pulled himself together, professional in the face of death. Of how he had snuffled against Bond’s throat like a puppy, something gangly and cuddly. The bus hits a bump and Q rolls against him, limp, pliant. Bond catches hold of him to keep him in his seat and just… holds on.
He wakes Q at Waterloo and drags him across the platform to the next departing train. It’s on the tracks, doors open, and he finds them another seat and tucks Q into the corner; it smells of upholstery cleaner and spilt beer.
“Bond?”
He looks at Q, leant up against the wall of the train car, tall and tight as an owl. He’s just a little flushed from his nap in the bus, a dusting of rose petal on his cheeks. His mop of hair is an unbrushed disaster and his collar is askew; he looks like he was dragged through a hedge backwards.
“Yes?”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you home.”
Q considers this. “How do you know where I live?”
“I lifted your driving license. Don’t worry; I returned it.”
“Oh.” Q goes quiet, contemplative. His chin sinks down in his coat and he chews a little bit at his lower lip. “Are you coming home with me?”
God, this man. “No, Q. I’m just dropping you off.”
“You could, you know. I wouldn’t mind. I don’t think… mnn, no. Wouldn’t mind.” He nods, conclusively.
“I appreciate that, but I’m just dropping you off.”
Q closes his eyes. “Mmkay,” he murmurs, and drops back into a doze.
He sleeps through the ten or so stops to Richmond; he would have slept all the way to Kingston if Bond hadn’t been here. As it is he jerks up when Bond shakes him, blinking, shadows beneath his eyes. He clambers to his feet, bumps into the seat, the wall, Bond, and then another wall, on his way out the train.
Outside it’s frigid, the cold sinking in beneath Bond’s cuffs and collar. Q, inured to the chill by 80 proof Belvedere, walks along beside him. He tries once to topple off the platform, which requires Bond to tuck their arms together like a pair of nineteenth-century gents strolling for the steam engine. An image only slightly ruined by the enormous piece of graffiti opposite which reads WANKERS.
“Bond?”
They’re out of the station now, walking down the high street. Bond checked the address on a map by the front door.
“Yes?”
“Are you lonely?”
Normally, Bond would give any number of easy answers deflecting the question. There’s not a chink in his armour, and he’s used to these types of inquiries from targets, and from one-night stands.
Here, now, on the cold January streets of Richmond with Q’s arm tucked in his, lying – even deflecting – just feels so suddenly tiresome. “Mostly not,” he says. “I’m used to being solitary.”
“You make it sound like a prison sentence,” says Q.
“Well. Are you?”
“Mm. No. Except when I am. Then, yes.”
Bond inclines his head. “And which is it now?” he asks, breath fogging. It’s just gone 2 now, and the streets are almost empty. Would be completely empty, on any night other than January 1st. A Peugeot drives by burning oil, the exhaust blue-tinted and reeking. Somewhere behind the nearest row of buildings a fox yips.
Q looks at him as if he’s mad. “Not alone, now,” he says, acidly. He tugs on the link of their arms, his elbow through Bond’s.
“I suppose not,” agrees Bond. “Not exactly a lasting connection, though.”
“Lasting connection. Your voice in my ear. Your breath. Your heartbeat, pinging. You carry me with you around the world, James. I carry you in my head.”
Bond’s breath stutters in his chest and he coughs, cold air prickling at his lungs. “That’s not – wise,” he manages, eventually, clearing his throat. “Q. I’m not a – a pen pal, to be cherished and kept close.”
“Oh? Then what?” Q turns to look up at him, eyes narrow beneath the lamplight. “You’re a plague? A pestilence, for us to send forth unto our enemies? Hardly that. You have a head, and a heart, just like the rest of us. Maybe bigger. Hm?” he laughs, just a quiet bark not all that different from the yip of the foxes. Loquacious, suddenly, in his cups.
“You’re very drunk,” Bond informs him.
“Just a little,” says Q.
They’re almost at his flat, now. Bond sees him inside his building and up to the second floor. On the doorstep he slips his arm from Q’s; the quartermaster makes a small sound of disappointment and turns to him. Head tilted upwards, eyes seaglass-green. “Kiss me,” he says.
And Christ, it’s New Year’s, and Bond is lonely, and Q is Q – twisty as a corkscrew and bright as a meteor, the kind that falls to earth and wipes out entire species. Bond steps in and kisses him. It’s sloppy and wet, this time, Q eager against him. They crowd together in the doorway, Q reaching out for more.
Bond takes a step back. “Go to bed, Q,” he says, softly.
“James –”
“I’ll see you back at the office. When you’re back to being you, and I’m back to being me.”
“We’re all of us always ourselves,” says Q, which sounds both deep and hilariously shallow, and then turns and knocks his head against the door. Bond stands in the hall and watches until he unlocks the flat and makes his way inside, switching on a light.
The door closes. Q’s footsteps diminish.
Bond goes home.
FIVE
It’s not that he doesn’t want Q. It’s the fact that he manifestly wants Q that’s the problem. The fact that in his (many) solitary hours he finds himself remembering the smell of Q’s skin and the taste of vodka on his tongue. The heat of his shoulder, the bony press of his elbow against Bond’s side.
Six’s policies on workplace fraternization don’t apply to this situation, as neither Bond nor Q is in each other’s chain of command. But it’s damn stupid all the same. Bond’s job is to be a blunt instrument; Q’s is to swing him with impunity. It doesn’t work if they’re shagging each other.
Bond holds this irritating, obnoxious resolution through February. Leap year. The single extra day feels impossibly long when he spots Q in the office casually leaning his bony arse up against the kitchen counter and laughing at something 003 is saying.
March 1st, Bond is sent around to Q’s flat to see to the installation of a new security system for the quartermaster, which is ludicrous because Q is more than capable of doing it, but he begged Eve for the assignment and she got tired of him haunting her lair and relented.
Which is how he ends up holding a ladder for Q while he screws a new sensor in above his door, jumper and shirt beneath it popping up when he raises his arms to flash a narrow line of pale skin at Bond. Bond would quite like to plant his lips there, in the soft space beside Q’s bony hip, lick a wet stripe downwards.
He thinks he’s being entirely professional about it, until Q looks down at him, eyebrow raised, and says: “You don’t have to be the perfect agent all the time.”
Bond blinks.
“Or are you going to say nobody’s perfect?” suggests Q. He’s holding a screwdriver in one hand, sensor half-mounted and hanging rather precariously.
“My relationship with perfection is on-again off-again,” says Bond, at last; Q huffs a laugh at him.
“And your relationship with me? On-again off-again?”
Bond looks up at him. “It’s hardly wise,” he says, slowly.
“Oh, wisdom.” Q’s tone is dismissive. “I was a child genius. Wisdom is not all it’s cracked up to be, Bond. Trust me.” He says it the same way someone else might admit to having been on their school’s rugby team.
So Bond pushes up Q’s shirt and plasters his hand on the expanse of hot skin he finds beneath, and leaning in puts his lips to Q’s stomach. He feels as well as hears the laugh. Looking up, he rests his chin on Q’s navel. “Are you coming down?” he asks.
Q rests the screwdriver atop the ladder, and steps down. Bond meets him at the bottom, and rucks his shirt up over his head, and kisses him. All over, up and down, until Q is pink and panting and they have simply no choice but to retire to the bedroom. Where James kisses considerably more of him.
Later, they install the sensor.
Much later, they do it all over again.
PLUS ONE
Q watches James’ eyebrows quirk as he spots him in the Picadilly tea shop – this time with Emily, who was for once on time. She’s drinking Lady Grey, which Q can only think of as a Parisienne affectation.
This time his back isn’t to the 00; this time he is perfectly aware that James is coming. After all, he invited him.
Which makes him more pleased than ever that Bond chooses to cross over to their table from behind Q’s chair, arriving and bending to press a kiss to the back of Q’s neck. Emily looks delighted.
“This is James,” he says, waving him into the third chair and locking away any trace of a smile – James, damn him, seems perfectly aware. “He’s rather abrupt. James, Emily. My sister.
“Enchanté,” says James, and smiles.
END