Chapter Text
“I like you like this.” Bond pitched his voice low, a deep bass note that seemed to caress its way onto Q’s skin. “You’re much less aggravating when your mouth is full.”
Q would have taken offence but Bond’s words held no real scorn, only mild amusement. All the same, he stopped the rapid flicker of his tongue across 007’s fraenulum and with a gorgeously filthy sucking noise slowly withdrew Bond’s cock out of his mouth.
“Well, if you’d follow procedure even half the time, I wouldn’t have to continually remind you not to damage my equipment.” Q lightly squeezed the hard length he still gripped in his left hand, as if to emphasize that his concern did not extend solely to the Walther.
Bond hummed noncommittally, reclined a bit further in his chair, then looked around the empty armoury. “So you’d rather I always followed protocol?” He glanced pointedly at Q’s workstation. It had become rather untidy last week when 007 had hoisted his quartermaster to sit on top of it and proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes using his fingers and tongue to open Q’s entrance, spreading him raw and wide, while Q panted and writhed, but patently refused to beg for release. One side of Bond’s mouth quirked up in the ghost of a smile at the memory.
“Or is it that you want to be in control of what I do out there? You giving me orders, while I move around a giant chessboard that you command?”
Q regarded Bond coolly, still on his knees and unamused. “That’s not what I said. But then, they say hearing is the first thing to go at your age.”
Bond gripped Q’s hair, just shy of too rough and pulled him closer, testing, wanting to wipe that smug look off Q’s fucking beautiful face. “Well if not that, how would you characterise our—” he paused, letting the next word come out slowly, tinted black with implication, “—arrangement?”
Q’s eyes met Bond’s as he very gradually closed the distance between them, never blinking, even as his lips brushed 007’s in a shared breath that was electric with promise. “Mutually assured destruction.”
***
It began under the surface.
Bond rather liked the new/old MI6 building. He would train in the rooms they’d converted to a gym and often he would hear the rumbling groan of the building settling, or the faint thuds and growls of the cars running overhead on the street. These noises of the building’s weariness drowned out his own grunts of exertion. One late evening, he was just getting his gym bag out of his locker when he caught movement in his left periphery. Normally, Bond was the only one who roamed this area of MI6 at this hour, other field agents preferring the sleek glass and chrome of the expensive fitness center downstreet. Thus, it was unexpected for him to have company, and he turned to see who else would choose to come down to the dungeon in this old fortress.
Q looked so different without his glasses that it almost shocked Bond when the quartermaster emerged from the corridor that led to the showers, white towel wrapped nearly double around his rail thin body. It was rather like seeing a fawn emerge from a foggy glen. Bond traced his hand down the edge of the locker door, but he did not close it, content to keep his focus on the sight in front of him. The whole scene was unexpected—Q had rarely left the center of his web in Q branch in the three months Bond had known him. When he did, he certainly didn’t have his hair plastered to his forehead, while his bare chest (smooth, and completely hairless, Bond noted with a wry smile) still teemed with rivulets of water slaloming down the visible xylophone of his ribcage. He looked like a wet puppy. Noticing the way Bond’s eyes raked up and down his form, Q stood a bit straighter but made no move to hurry or hide. He simply kept moving past Bond further down the bank of lockers. Q’s tangible calmness did not escape Bond.
“Q,” Bond greeted him with a slight tilt of his head. It was also a question.
“007.” He plodded over to a locker at the end of the bank, not meeting the agent’s gaze, but not deliberately avoiding it. Q moved with the slightly awkward grace of one who is used to being unnoticed.
“Shouldn’t you be upstairs? Outfitting me a new Aston Martin, perhaps?”
“Actually, I’m working on one of your other requests. Despite my protests, Mallory suggested I follow up on the exploding pen idea. Seems he has a sense of humor.”
Bond’s eyes sparked at the image of his frustrated quartermaster, cursing his name while trying to make him an exploding pen. He turned back to the locker so Q wouldn’t see the smile playing across his face. “So you’ve taken to living here then? Really, I’m flattered, Q, but there’s no need to work such hours on my account.”
Q huffed derisively. “Well, saving your arse is more than a full-time job, but in this case it was the pen’s mess I was cleaning up, not yours. The ink cartridge burst all over me, so I took advantage of the facilities.”
Bond finally closed the locker and turned to Q, leaning his left shoulder against the cool metal. “Don’t you usually keep a spare pile of ridiculous jumpers in the event of such a catastrophe?”
Q pulled some clothes out of the locker, flashing Bond a raised eyebrow. “Just one ridiculous jumper, and it’s in the wash. But then, we can’t all have a fleet of impeccably tailored suits ready at our beck and call, 007.” He piled the clothes on the bench next to the lockers, then turned to retrieve something else. Bond watched the glide of barely there muscle across Q’s back as he turned. When he straightened, his glasses were back in place, where they belonged. The towel remained around his waist, but it dipped just slightly when he leaned forward to grab a pair of grey wool trousers out of the locker.
Watching Q’s muscles shift over the sharp corners of his bones as he moved, James was struck, not for the first time, by his thinness. He considered making a crack about keeping a spare pile of sandwiches handy rather than jumpers, but stopped. If he made a joke, he knew it would betray the sudden realisation that he wanted to touch those hard lines. Though he was hardly the poster boy for restraint, Bond didn’t want to show his hand quite so soon. Let the intrigue play out a bit longer. And he was intrigued. There was nothing soft or yielding about Q, not like a woman. That Bond should be observing with this amount of interest was a signal of future complications. But Bond was a man of the present only. And presently, he was watching Q pull a thin white vest over all of those sharp, pale lines of his chest. The few curves Q had were fascinating in contrast—the swoops and whorls of his thick mop of drying hair, the stark curve of his ribs, visible through the vest, and the jut of his hipbones peeking over the edge of the towel. Bond felt a stirring of heat pooling in his gut. The ghost of Silva’s touch on his scar came back to him, but he shoved it away, hard, leaving only a faint bitter aftertaste as he focused his attention back to the quartermaster. Not his first time, indeed.
Q missed none of this. He may not have been a field agent, but he was trained in details. He lived in the gaps between zeroes and ones, and that meant people tended to underestimate his ability to read people. They were wrong to do so. Bond’s gaze did not trouble him as he methodically began to button his light blue Oxford shirt. Q knew that Bond was dangerous—he was the very meaning of the word rogue. However, Q had not yet figured out how to decode 007. He did not yet know where the gaps were. Therefore, Q remained neutral on the outside while inside his mind whirled with interest. He gripped the white towel around his waist and paused, prepared to drop it. He glanced at Bond, with a do you mind? expression. He was not embarrassed, and he was not looking to tease or seduce, merely to observe Bond’s reaction. But Q did not know if that was a card he wanted to play yet, so he paused and waited to see just how interested Bond was.
Bond gracefully pushed off the locker he had been leaning against and took two long strides towards Q. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were dark. Q’s hands still gripped the towel, but 007’s predatory aura pinned him in place, motionless. Bond reached out and slid his hand around the base of Q’s skull, under the loose collar of the Oxford shirt, rubbing his thumb just behind his ear. As his thumb trailed along the line where Q’s jawbone ended, down to his pulse point, the rest of his fingertips caressed along Q’s hairline, until Bond slowly dragged his hand all the way down the column of Q’s throat before pulling back. Q’s skin was flushed from the shower, but he still felt the heat of Bond’s hand like a brand on his skin. It took every ounce of control Q possessed not to shudder at the heat and pressure of that touch. Bond leaned fractionally closer, holding up his hand to show Q the blurred indigo smudge on the pad of his thumb. “You missed a bit.”
Bond then sidestepped around Q and headed for the door, calling, “Don’t work too late, Q,” as he left.
Q ran a hand through his damp hair and exhaled. Oh yes, he was very interested to learn how to decode James Bond.
***
There was gunfire all around him. Typical.
He checked the flash drive was still in his inner coat pocket, turned left and rolled behind a cargo van, checking around the side for the three men he was evading.
“I said right. 007? Do we need to review the difference between your left and your right?” The voice in his ear was calm and cool, as always. In spite of their prickly beginning, Bond had quickly grown accustomed to the weight of Q’s voice in his ear over the last six months. Q was steadfast and collected on all of their missions together. Bond had soon realized that he could feel the thick presence of Q, not just on missions, but at all times, in the back of his mind, curled just at the top of his spine. It was oddly comforting.
“Better cover here.” James scanned the street and saw one of the men pursuing him dodge around an oncoming Jeep.
“I’m trying to get you to the extraction point, and there’s a blind spot in this construction site. If you make me reroute another satellite just to maintain visual—”
“Come now. You love a challenge.” Bond didn’t even sound out of breath, although Q could hear the sharp cracks of bullets passing by uncomfortably close to Bond.
“Some more than others. And keeping you alive is nothing if not challenging. Gunman behind you, second floor window.” Two sudden cracks, then Q watched the satellite feed as Bond tilted his head back and winked at the sky. Cheeky fucker.
“There’s an alley fifteen metres ahead on your right.”
“Right.”
It was late in northern Bucharest, and the half-finished construction site was deserted, populated only with shadows. Q watched the feed, expecting Bond to head towards the alley, but instead Bond broke cover, ducking into the remnants of a doorway in the crumbling office complex. Two more cracks and Q saw a man tumble from the rooftop of the building opposite.
“Bond. The alley.”
“I need to recover something.”
“There’s no time. Go back. Meet the extraction team.” Q’s voice did not waver, in pitch or in volume, but Bond could hear the unyielding force behind his words.
Q saw another gunman peek out from behind a stack of bags of concrete and barked, “Left!” but not quickly enough. The bullet caught Bond by surprise and tore through the muscle of his left arm, leaving a deep groove in his bicep that was quickly blooming blood. The grunt that was ripped out of 007 was low, a lungful of air huffed quietly between clenched teeth. Q estimated that the noise was 30% pain, 70% annoyance. Bond fired, hit, and permanently stilled the man who’d landed the shot. Still, Bond was too far from the extraction point, and if the bullet had gotten anywhere close to his brachial artery, there might not be enough time to get him to a medic.
“I’ve alerted the team that you need a medic. If you cross back now, you should be out of the other one’s line of fire. You need to leave, now.”
“Give me two minutes.”
“Dammit, Bond, I really m—” Bond took his earpiece out and put it in his inside pocket next to the flash drive. He glanced around the shelter of the doorway and spotted the spook who had landed a lucky blow to his kidney outside of the hostel where Bond had reclaimed the flash drive. He was running on a long series of thick girders, illuminated clearly in the moonlight. Bond aimed carefully—he was twenty metres out, but the pause in between heartbeats was where his instincts were the sharpest.
One shot and he was down. Another nameless casualty.
Bond put his earpiece back in as he checked his surroundings for any possible remaining mercenaries. They were all dead. He jogged to where the body had fallen, sprawled across a wheelbarrow filled with detritus. Bond’s arm was throbbing, and he knew he was bleeding an amount that bordered on worrisome. Digging through the spook’s pockets, he found what he was looking for and then headed back across the street. As he ran, he felt more than heard the chill of Q’s, “Welcome back. Are you quite done?”
***
Q was surrounded by blue light, and it should have been calming. It wasn’t.
The server room at MI6 was a thing of beauty. How could it not be? It was Q’s design and his own personal fortress below ground. He had created seventeen different safety protocols for this room alone that ensured it was the most protected place he could possibly be right now. Normally, that thought comforted him, but right now it actually angered him further, knowing that even down here he couldn’t be protected from the rage racing inside of him. He was too raw to be soothed. At least the hum of the servers partially drowned out his thoughts as he stood at the terminal in the center of the room. The chilled air that was pumping through the vents would normally have bothered him, but he was seething. Catching his reflection in the walls of bulletproof glass, he was almost ashamed at how flushed he looked, how discombobulated. He could feel the blood rushing just below the surface of his skin, scorching him from the inside out.
He knew, he knew that he had been assigned 007 as a test, a dig at his youth and his inexperience. Though MI6 had come to him—one totally innocent hack of the personnel section of the Joint Intelligence Committee was all it took to have queen and country knocking at your door—he was well aware of the flickers of surprise behind people’s eyes when he introduced himself as head of Q branch. He had more than proven himself in the last year, which is why he’d risen through the ranks so quickly, and why he had welcomed the opportunity to be the quartermaster for the most notorious of the double-ohs. He was beyond capable; he studied, he planned, he built, and he executed each mission flawlessly during his training. And yet. James Bond himself might actually be the one thing that he could not have planned for, the variable he had missed. The innuendos and winks, the unpredictable appearances in Q branch where Bond watched Q work and teased him, and fiddled with things until Q scolded him and tried (and failed) to hide his smile, even the razor-sharp cut of Bond’s suits—all of it drove Q insane.
He heard the echo of footsteps in the hallway and did not look up. He recognized the exact pressure of each footfall, felt each one like a heartbeat.
“Q.” Bond’s voice was muffled through the glass, but Q was as accustomed to its low pitch in his ear as he was to breathing.
He checked through the lines of code for the FTP servers for the hundredth time, letting the numbers wash over his mind like water. Instead of feeling refreshed, he only felt drenched and weighed down.
“Q, open the door.”
Q refused to move. He would not allow Bond to get the better of him, not down here. He took a deep breath and continued to let his fingers fly over the keys in front of him.
“I’m busy at the moment, 007.”
Bond simply stood, waiting. And goddammit if the silent pull of him wasn’t a tangible force that was wearing down all of his resolve. Q looked up, and in the blue glow of the server room, Bond looked so very tired. His suit was dusty and torn, and the bandaged bullet hole in his arm peeked through the ragged gape in the fabric. Earlier, Q had listened silently over the com as Bond had been given the cursory once-over from the medic with the extraction team and had his wound cleaned, listened to the steady waves of Bond’s breathing, listened to hear the pain in between each heartbeat. When the medic declared the wound non-life-threatening, Q released the breath he had been holding, and felt something come loose inside of his chest. It spread a warmth that turned into a flame, an anger that he had never felt before and which frightened him in its intensity. Now, four hours later, staring at the man who was the cause of that anger, Q willed his shaking hands to be still as he typed in the command to open the door to the room.
With a pneumatic hiss, the door opened and Bond walked in but did not approach the center terminal where Q stood. Q was still resolutely staring at him, and Bond seemed to understand that openly challenging him here would be a bad idea. He knew he was in Q’s territory now, not like the locker room, not like out in the field. Here was where Q lived. Bond had never been in the server room before, because Q had never let him in before.
“Listen, I saw the opportunity—” Bond started, but Q snorted derisively, angrily. When he spoke, the words were as chilled as the air in the server room. “Save it. I don’t care. I am your eyes and ears in the field. I am the one who watches everything, plans routes, unlocks doors, anticipates threats from thousands of miles away so that you can do your job. All I ask—all I ask is that you show me enough fucking respect to let me do mine.”
Bond cocked his head slightly, and his blue eyes, normally piercing on their own, appeared to glow in the ultramarine light. “You think I don’t respect you.”
“I think you don’t take me seriously, and I think that one day it’s going to get you killed.”
Bond opened his mouth to protest and Q was upon him in three quick strides. They stood nearly chest-to-chest and eye-to-eye and all of the rage that Q felt at the arrogance of this man, at his dismissal of Q’s instructions, and his absolute refusal to admit his own mortality, all of it radiated out of his skin. They stood so close that Q could feel the heat coming off his own body, reflected back onto him in the face of 007’s cool immovability. “Don’t. Don’t patronize me. The next time you ignore my instructions on a mission, it may not just be your arm that has a bullet through it. I am the one who has to watch it when you get hurt. I am the one who listens.” He was breathing heavily now, and his eyes darted back and forth behind his glasses, searching 007’s, trying to see if he had in any way found his way into the space between Bond’s words and his actions. But all that gazed back at him was ice and a cobalt glow.
Q broke eye contact first, and gingerly touched the torn fabric around the bullet wound, taking care not to graze the skin. He exhaled, shook his head, and headed for the door. Before he got to the threshold, he stopped and turned his head, addressing Bond a final time, so low that Bond almost didn’t hear him.
“I am responsible for you.”
***
As if the day hadn’t already been long enough, Q came home to find a stray.
He had gone home late, much later than the rest of Q Branch. They were used to his round the clock hours by now, so no one questioned his refusal to go home, and if they noticed a particular tetchiness, a tightness around his eyes, no one mentioned it. Inserting his key into the lock, he heard the click of the tumblers echo and knew right away that something was wrong. He silently took from his bag a small silver cylinder. It contained a powerful pressurized capsule which, when deployed, would release a compound of Q’s own invention that would knock out a grown man for at least two hours. Flicking on the light, hoping to surprise whoever was in the flat, he held his weapon at the ready when he heard, “Took you long enough. Don’t you have some kind of alarm for when things like this happen?”
Q sighed and stowed the weapon back in his bag. “What are you doing here?”
“I needed to return my equipment and debrief with my quartermaster.”
Bond was dressed down, jeans and a charcoal jumper. He looked different without the armour of his well-tailored suits. His edges were less sharp. Seeing the deadliest man he knew standing in his living room was a surreal image, even for Q, and this change of costume made Bond even harder to grasp.
“007, I’m really quite knackered, and I just—”
“I told you I needed to recover something.”
“And I suppose this can’t wait until we’re actually at work.” Q pinched the bridge of his nose, anticipating the answer.
Bond simply gazed at him, cool blue eyes evaluating. Testing.
Q placed his messenger bag on the long marble-topped bar in his kitchen. Bond surveyed the flat, taking in his surroundings now that the lights were on. White carpeting, clean lines, nothing opulent. Bond was expecting chrome and glass, but the flat was actually homey, if a bit bare. The few pieces of furniture were some overstuffed armchairs and dark mahogany bookshelves. Bond gravitated towards them and scanned the titles—lots of textbooks, standards like Shakespeare, and a surprising amount of poetry.
“Keats?”
Q looked up from his task of putting the kettle on. “He was singularly focused on his passion, and was able to write a great deal in his short life. Some of it’s rubbish, but some is quite…elegant.”
James quirked an eyebrow at that, but said nothing. He watched Q arrange his tea, getting his mug ready. It was methodical, patient. He moved with such quiet assuredness, as if the only action he had ever performed was making tea. Once everything was prepared and he waited for the kettle to boil, he came to lean against the bar, green eyes flashing at Bond, revealing the impatience brewing under the calm exterior.
Q’s frequency was pitched too high. He was hyperaware of every breath 007 took, of the immovable presence of him, standing in his flat, invading his space. His anger from before hadn’t entirely dissipated, but his curiosity at this version of Bond was crowding in. They’d been working together for six months now, and until this moment, Q would have said that he knew everything one could know about James Bond. He had Bond’s file memorized. He had drawn a map in his head of every scar—at least the physical ones. He knew the inside of James Bond, knew what he sounded like when he ran, when he bluffed, when he smoked, when he fucked. It came with the job. But this home invasion was blurring boundaries, and he did not know where to file it away.
Bond came forward to stand in front of Q, close enough to make Q’s heartbeat quicken slightly but not to crowd him. He pulled something out of his pocket and pressed it into Q’s hand. The brush of his fingertips across Q’s palm lingered, just a second too long, and Q took in a shuddery breath as he looked down at the object he was now holding.
It was a watch, an Omega Seamaster that Q had modified five months ago for a mission to Belize. The titanium casing was scratched and the formerly flawless black lacquer face was dulled by scorch marks. The cobalt numerals and hands could barely be seen, and the metal was scored and shredded. All in all, a tragic end for such a work of art.
Q turned the watch over in his hands, touching it with disbelieving fingers. “You told me this was destroyed in the explosion.”
“I lied.”
“Why? The heat would have damaged any of the transmitters I added, and it’s hardly worth keeping as a timepiece now.”
“I wanted to keep it.”
“Why?” Q looked up from charred face of the watch to the heated blue gaze focused on him.
“Because you made it for me.”
Q swallowed thickly. “So. You kept this. Why did you lie about it? Why are you telling me about this now?”
Bond inched marginally closer, and he was still looking at Q’s face, at Q's red lips and dark lashes juxtaposed against the strong line of his jaw. For a genius, he was being awfully thick. James had been waiting for the right moment to—well no, that wasn’t quite right. Until today, he’d mostly been trying to dismiss his interest as just a fact of his life, background noise. It was part of his routine every day, a series of threads that wound through his thoughts, whispered in his ear, appeared behind his eyelids when he was going to sleep, and all of the threads tied back to his quartermaster. But it was better to just leave it at casual flirtation. If his resurrection had taught him anything, it was that long-term connections were a liability—one he no longer thought he could bear. So he teased and he flirted, and Q let him, and it was all fine.
If he went home after a mission and thought about those pretty red lips stretched around his cock while he stroked himself furiously in the shower, what of it? He was content to leave it at that, even if Q kept encroaching further and further into his life.
But today had unraveled him. Seeing Q so angry and disappointed would have been one thing, because Bond could crank him up to a level seven rage just by losing one of his infrared camera tie clips. It was the tremble in Q’s hands when he touched his bullet wound; it was the fierce possessiveness that he had betrayed. In a room surrounded by his finest work, all Q could focus on was him. God, it had nearly made James breathless and suddenly the background noise had become a scream that could no longer be ignored. So now, here he was. Bond moved another breath closer to the brilliant man standing in front of him.
“This is what I went back for. I told you I had to recover something.” Bond was speaking in a murmur, but to Q the words felt like a punch in the gut. He looked up sharply, green eyes searching blue, trying to gather more intelligence.
“You…you nearly missed the extraction team…and got shot…so that you could get this watch back. I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do.”
James plucked the watch from Q’s grip and placed it on the bar behind him, leaning around him so that the stubble on his cheek brushed past Q’s, causing the quartermaster to shudder at the contact.
“Bond,” Q sighed into the agent’s ear, and Bond’s name was warm and heavy and perfect in his mouth.
“Call me James.”
“I think…you can’t—I think this is a bad idea.”
James pulled back so that he was looking directly at Q again, and then he smiled for the first time that day, a real smile. “No, you don’t.”
And it was that smile, that surety, which finally broke down the barrier between everything Q had been feeling all day and acceptance of what was right in front of him.