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Like his sisters, he appears in a time of death, a time of war. He is told of his new role the day before James Bond’s funeral.
::
The world is a wash of colour, threads drifting and tangling. He doesn’t touch them, never has; even as a small child, the riot of shades bursting from around the outstretched fingers of his mum had felt sacred, different to the toys he was meant to play with. Different colours, as different from the colour of the everyday world as Technicolor to black and white. The colours don’t matter much and he’s long since stopped assigning them any particular meaning; if he were to dedicate his life to nothing else, he could perhaps see each one’s place in the grand tapestry and the work around him, but there are more important things to do.
Most strings fade into the air a few inches out, stretched taut by distance and destiny, but as the ends draw together, the full line becomes visible: fat loops of aubergine holding a man and his wife together tight at the wrist; vibrant blue, but fragile and wispy, as a woman pushes her mother’s wheelchair through the gallery. His own strings are severed, all but one: Thursday last, he’d felt it, the little loop drawing snug around the smallest finger of his left hand where none had been before. Claret red, vivid and bloody. Today it is insistent—a memory he hasn’t formed yet tied like a promise around his hand. He follows it and knows this man will be important.
He sinks onto the bench.
“Always makes me a bit melancholy—”
It doesn’t matter what he says here; the connection draws taut, hums with promise. They talk. He does his job, and the great pattern weaves around them.
::
Q isn’t actually prescient. He doesn’t see the future, not in images and words and that sort of thing. He didn’t know—couldn’t have known—except that doesn’t make things any easier for him. The thread that ties him to Silva is thin, tenuous at best, a thread of potential and barely more than a single fiber wide; it snaps as soon as Bond disappears into the tunnels beneath Six, because Q will never be Silva. It snaps, and yet he chases it through the warp and weft of the story, traces it with an expert hand until it reaches the next scene, and.
He’s not psychic. Sometimes someone leaving looks like someone dying. Sometimes someone dying looks like they’ve moved to another part of the story. M’s thread is gone, though, tied off in a firm knot, anchored and solid and immovable, just as she was. For a solid week after, Q watches that thin red loop around his littlest finger and expects it to fade, to snap. It doesn’t. He takes that only as what it is: the universe is not done yet, not finished with his connection to James Bond.
::
“You’re secretly someone’s gran, aren’t you?” The question is wry, just this side of tentative, almost as if Bond is beginning to learn his place again.
And it’s not embarrassing to be caught out, lap full of balled yarn and hands occupied; 003 is in the middle of a slow patch within his mission, and they’ve all got to do something. He doesn’t trust himself to solder but his hands are restless, and by now socks are just the perfect kind of mindless that he can lose himself in the garter stitch that stretches up from the toe in even, flat lines. He’s been idly wondering whether he’ll turn the heel or leave it a tube, and frankly, Bond catching him knitting isn’t even the most embarrassing thing to happen since lunch, much less the humiliation Bond seems to think it might be for him.
“Tea.” His needles don’t even skip—stab, lift, loop, slide, repeat, and he could do this in his sleep if he wanted to.
“Beg pardon?”
“There’s a ticket price for mocking my knitting,” Q explains. Yes, he thinks he’ll turn the heel after all, but there are a few more rows to go—“Tea. I’m out. Fetch more and I’ll let you make as much fun as you like, I promise.” It has nothing to do with the fact he’s been in place these last eight hours and then another eight hours before, or that doesn’t quite trust himself to stand after a double spent hunched over his keyboard looking for 003’s thread in the snarl of intrigue he’s tangled in. Bond makes a thoughtful sound and leaves; when he returns Q has begun turning the heel and Bond has scrubbed the dried dregs of leaves from the mug he’d abandoned before. The tea is steaming and fresh, and while Q’s busy adding sugared lemon slices from the stash he keeps in the only locked drawer in his desk, Bond is reviewing the sock.
“There’s no seam at the toe,” Bond says, and it’s so far from the things Q’s half-expected him to say that for a moment he’s confused, shaken out of the script he’s been writing for them.
“There wouldn’t be, when you knit from the toe up. It’s one of the better parts of this pattern.”
Bond hums thoughtfully, and Q takes a long drink of his tea to keep himself from marveling aloud that he’s discussing fibercraft with James Bond. “Isn’t it easier just to buy socks already made?” Bond will say next, and Q will say, “Oh, no, I already had the wool lying around,” and Q may very well actually die if he ends up discussing last month’s sale at Loop like he actually is someone’s gran.
“This colour is intriguing,” Bond says instead, and Q replies:
“Oh, no, I already—” Q stops, thrown again. “That is, I—yeah, I saw it at Loop and liked it. I figured I’d hold it until I figured out what to do with it. It’s a really nice alpaca, and it was going for a song.” He could strangle himself, he really could. Bond’s lip curls in an expression that’s closer to gentle amusement than the mockery he’s expecting, but there’s still laughter in it, and Q is quite certain he’s seen a horror movie once about killer grannies, so he knows what damage a knitting needle to the eye could do. Would it hurt, though, and would Bond suss out his intentions if he removed his glasses first?
“You live in Islington, then?” Again, not what Bond is supposed to say. Q blinks at him, perplexed. “Isn’t that a bit dear?”
“I had a Help to Buy,” Q tells him, then firmly: “Anyway.”
Bond backs up, smile still genial. “Anyway, socks.” It’s a neat change of subject, more appreciated for the apology embedded in its lack of grace. “Have you made many?”
“I've been Knitting for Victory,” Q tells him drily. “I’ve made a dozen pairs or so by now.”
“All for yourself?” And here’s where another person might angle for a free pair. Most of the people who’ve known about Q’s hobby have done it; he can’t even blame Bond for—“Surely the cats all have wee little jumpers,” Bond continues without even a hint of expectation, and Q pauses again. Again he feels off-kilter. Again Bond bucks his expectations. He grins, shaking his head.
“They wouldn’t wear them if I did. They’re wild, bad creatures. A jumper might offend their fuzzy dignity too much to be borne.”
Bond’s laughter at that is genuine, freer than Q might have expected. Later in bed, he plays that laugh over in his head. It’s intriguing, and Bond has been the only one he can recall in a long time not to laugh at him. In his mind’s eye, Q feels for a twist of red that isn’t tangible, weighs its empty heft across the palm of his hand. He could imagine it’s thicker, and even though he knows the colours are meaningless, he imagines it crimson in the dark. He falls asleep smiling.
::
He saves Bond. Bond saves the world. It’s what they do.
::
“You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”
“I do, but—”
“It’s safe. I’ll be safe; the gun will be safe. I swear it, Q.”
Q will never know why he asks. He asks anyway: “What’s in it for me?”
There’s a blanket in progress draped over the back of his chair and Bond pauses, touching the fanned edges of the old shale stitch, extra loops punching delicate seashell shapes through the lacy fabric. “Destiny,” whispers the world, the dry rustling of threads weaving around them, and Q knows he’ll say yes. Knew it already, before those sharp blue eyes flick to him, pin him in place suddenly calculating and opaque.
“I’ll take you to dinner, a treat.” Bond says, and Q’s soul splits.
“Don’t patronise me,” he wants to say, and “How did you know?” as well. His cheeks give him away and he ducks his chin, turns his back, pretends to think about it. When his blush isn’t quite so violent, he turns back, frown fixed firm. “Don’t toy with me,” he wants to plead. Instead:
“You’d better not be lying. I want it back in one piece.” He lets Bond think he means the gun.
In the end, Bond and the expensive prototype go to Mexico City. In the end, only one of them comes back. Q isn’t surprised which.
::
It occurs to him at some point when he sits clutching his wrist and watching the loop that’s snared him that he needs to protect himself. It’s a weaver’s spell, something old and silly and potent, and he’s watching the news as he casts on: one hundred stitches as his screen details an explosion in Mexico City. It’s a spell that comes from his sisters, a spell that comes from the days when it took bone to move the threads into the correct patterns, the right shapes. Q is a speedy knitter; it will only take him one and a half, perhaps two months to finish. He has nowhere near enough time and he knows it.
::
Bond returns on a dreary, overcast morning. To be fair, he’s already been around—Q’s had the pleasure of hearing third-hand about M’s fresh irritation at Bond’s cheek, at his smug non-answers and unwillingness to explain his purpose in Mexico City. Q half suspects it’s a punishment for him, too, at least as much as it is for Bond, when he’s told he’ll be tracking him with the Smart Blood technology. As if Q needs a computer programme to find Bond’s thread in the weaving; as if the loop around his own little finger doesn’t twinge when Bond is around, doesn’t all but shriek when Bond is in danger. He feels them in the hall and misses the moment Bond enters anyway, occupied as he is with pretending he hasn’t noticed. He still ends up staring for a long moment before speaking up.
It’s more of the usual, at least on the surface, as Q dances him around, shows him toys and tools and bites back a small, vindictive pleasure when Bond all but spasms in his chair at the injection. He can’t bite back the twitching corner of his lips, the Mona Lisa smile at Bond’s faint praise when he hears what the programme can do. He’s even less able to hide the moon-faced search for forgiveness he can feel himself turning on Bond when he explains M’s command that he be chipped like a roving dog. Never mind the fact that Q has always known where he was—he wouldn’t have hurt Bond for that information without being ordered. As usual, Bond misses the point.
He’s showing off when he shows him the car. Showing off because for just a moment he’d thought—there’d been that fleeting moment when he’d felt Bond’s eyes, just the weight of them, and thought—
That doesn’t mean he’s surprised when Bond plays him like a harp and steals it out from under him. He’s even less surprised at the way Bond manages to waltz out as though Q were the one who’s owed the other. It’s less surprising still that he’s fallen for it.
::
Another man would be angry. Angrier—Q can’t deny himself the hissing in his blood at the thought that he’s so—that Bond would—that despite how clearly he—Bond still doesn’t—or that he does, and takes advantage of it. Yet another essential bit of kit Bond takes along with him on the most dangerous missions, another Q Branch miracle he refuses to return. Exhibit A is a vintage car, Exhibit B a luxury timepiece. Exhibit C, Q’s still-beating and liminal heart, caught forever on the cusp and throbbing bloody in Bond’s fist. Yes. He’s angry, because he’s all but begged and got not a damned thing for the trouble of it.
A flight, because there’s no time otherwise. Rushing into certain danger, because James Bond is involved and Bond is a man who wears danger like a shadow, sewn tight to the soles of his feet and ever-present. Fighting his way from that danger, because he is trusted—forgotten—enough to be capable of defending himself—without anyone else to do it. Q helps, of course, because if anyone has ever had a choice in the matter it was never him. He helps, and Bond walks away, and it isn’t until he’s sitting quietly in his hotel room that he realises he’s been left again; he helps and he watches and he is missed again.
It doesn’t hurt to watch him leave with Dr Swann, in the end. It can’t hurt when he’s known it was coming. Dr Swann is the scalpel excising a wound; in its removal, the pain is healing, fleeting.
::
He keeps knitting and he doesn’t know why.
The loop stays where it is and he doesn’t know why.
::
Sometimes he dreams of Bond. They’re always pleasant, something distant and warm, and he dreams that crimson can be the colour of deep, abiding friendship—it can’t—the sort of friendship where no one feels taken advantage of or misused—it’s not. He gets a postcard once, and just that piece of paper sets his teeth on edge. Not because it’s taunting—because it is—but because of the way he’d known it was in the pile of letters before he could bend his work-weary frame to stoop and collect them. Because of the way his hand had throbbed, and then his face, and then his heart, later, as he spun it between his fingers and decided whether he wanted to throw it out or not. But who would it punish? He’d kept it, stuck to his fridge with some novelty tat magnet from his internship at the British Library. He’s kept it in pride of place until seeing it from the corner of his eye hurt, until past the time he should have put it away or got over it.
“Put it away,” he whispers under his breath.
Within the same breath: “No.”
Bone needles clack with a sound like dry twigs in autumn. He’s ribbing a cuff now, months late and foolish with hope. It should have worked by now, the spell. It hasn’t.
::
And then one day Blofeld escapes.
Any idiot could predict Bond would return, recalcitrant and dog-faced until he’s welcomed back with open arms; Q is not the only idiot, after all. Only it takes longer than they’ve anticipated; weeks have ticked by in slow, impossibly slow tocks. Bond is not coming—he’s coming. It becomes a matter of when, not if. It has always been a matter of when.
Bond, contrary Bond, waits until they’re up to their eyebrows in post-mission cleanup to show. Past the point others may have written him off as dead or disinterested, a day late and carrying ten stone of shit in a five stone sack, Bond appears one day within Q’s locked and empty garage where his DB5 has been completed and stolen before she could be shipped to safer, less emotionally compromised storage. Q knows he’s there before he opens the door. He’s tempted to lock it instead and come back when he can deal. Fifty years sounds like a nice, round number.
“He has her.” No greeting, and Bond’s eyes are as piercing as ever, wrenching through his core.
“He hasn’t.” Q knows this with all of his soul, not least because what Blofeld has is a lovely secure prison cell and a reparation a Saudi billionaire would need help to repay. Q’s gone to visit his cat before. He wonders sometime if Blofeld is just what happens to a man who’s been exposed to James Bond.
“He does.” This time no room for argument, except that there never truly has been, has there? Q smiles faintly, the expression he knows has always made him look a little dotty and a lot smitten.
“Do you think?”
“I need a favour.”
“When don’t you.” It’s as close to bitter as he’ll let himself go. Bond smirks, because he knows he’s won. Q only ever protests when he’s about to give in. “Have you spoken with Mallory?”
No. “No.” He won’t have because—“I’m not actually back. I just.”
It takes so much to swallow back the words in his throat. “You’ve become predictable as a civilian, Bond.” It’s so tremendously disappointing.
“Have I,” Bond asks, tone dry. There could be laughter there, under the irritation. Q holds his throbbing finger and smiles, wobbly.
According to Bond’s research, it isn’t, strictly, Blofeld holding his wife. Wife—Q lets it sink in at the expense of whatever Bond has to say after that word, and when he comes back to the conversation there’s a horrifyingly understanding tilt to Bond’s lips. They’ve never talked about his crush, hopefully never will, and Bond is gentle when he lets him pretend he hasn’t slipped.
And as it turns out, Bond doesn’t even want backup, just a weapon and an in; he fully intends to walk out of Q’s office and never return, a revelation that startles Q so sharp and stinging that he knows if Bond tries it, he would never let him return. Bond’s eyes say he knows this, too.
“Let me help you,” Q asks instead, the loop so tight around his little finger that he’s afraid to look down to see it purpling, dying. Bond pauses, wets his lips. He nods.
::
Bond leaves with a gun, an earpiece, and Q’s heart in his valise, headed into danger like the last several months haven’t happened. He slips back into espionage like a frog remembering how to swim: a fumble, a flop, and then graceful kicks as he disappears into the murky currents surrounding the shambles of SPECTRE. Their first lead is a bust—sorry, Mario, your princess is in another castle—and the second a red herring. The third is a diversion, and it isn’t terribly surprising, not in the end, not if he’s honest with himself, when Q finds himself tumbled into the back seat of a black car on his way home from the shops. Man cannot live on twiglets alone, and yet if he hadn’t followed Bond’s admonishment that food was important he might not be in this situation. It says a lot about Q’s life that this isn’t the first time he’s thought those words in that precise order.
Q isn’t the important part here. He isn’t bait, isn’t there to draw Bond out and bring him home to roost. He’s here because his interference has become an inconvenience and he knows it, and that’s equal parts relief and humiliation. They shut him away in a room that isn’t dark or cold or tortuous, simply forgotten. They drag him into the hallway once and he can see her—her hair is longer, darker, her blouse and skirt pretty, and she’s no more surprised to see him than he is to see her. He’d be satisfied if her thread were blue, orange, green—an orphan like him, she has only one left like him. It’s crimson.
Their kidnappers put them back in their rooms and he hears her shouting, hears her spit at them and stays quiet as she yelps. He lies back on the cot in the corner and thinks about the little loop around his smallest finger and imagines it bleeding in the dark.
“Find us,” he whispers. There’s a childhood game like this: aluminium cans with twine stretched taut between them, giggling children and tinny secrets shared across the room. “Find me, please find me.”
No reply from the other end of the line.
::
He begs again a day later, curled around his smashed and bleeding face. Bond was meant to be here by now, and perhaps Q is bait after all or perhaps he’s a whipping boy to absorb the damage they won’t do to her, but he pleads, tugs the loose line that does not grow taut, and he doesn’t cry.
::
It’s an experiment, then, to touch the line when he knows they aren’t watching him. He hasn’t before, not really, but he can hear her sobbing through the wall for her husband and takes great fistsful, winds them the way he does the skeins of wool when the cats have got in them. He can’t think of the cats though, or the jumper quite nearly finished in his projects drawer at home. Q amuses himself by making his ball center-pull, as if he were going to knit a blanket out of his connection to Bond. Twist, wind and wind and wind, then twist and turn, but the line never loses slack. He toys with it for hours until he can’t do more than tuck this red lump of pain against his chest like a heart outside his body and whisper into it.
::
He wakes to gunshots. He wakes to the familiar sound of a one-man armageddon outside, to his little ball of emotion unspooling across the floor until the door opens and, like a bloody angel, Bond stands, confused.
“Q?”
“You found us,” he means to say. “She’s in the next room,” some petty part of him wants to correct Bond. “Bond,” he says instead, voice dry and creaking as though it’s been longer than three or four days.
“They must have moved her,” Bond replies, and just as always, he hasn’t said the thing that Q’s expected. Just as always, what he’s said is worse.
::
They take a base holed up in a filthy hotel room, and Bond paces like an angry cat while Q works, fingers trembling. They don’t sleep. Q pushes himself until he can’t see straight, until his eyelids are stinging, until his knuckles are white around the back of his chair when he stands. Strong, sugary tea saves him twice. The third time he drags himself out of his chair to make it, his knees quake and he pauses to watch the grey light of morning where it is seeping in around the curtains, to listen to the birds tell him he’s found nothing.
“Enough.”
He doesn’t recognise it—the word, the voice, the man saying it. “Pardon?” Q murmurs. The red LED on the kettle trembles under his fingertips, or else the tremor in his hand makes it appear so. Then, “If you need sleep—” Q can work quieter, can work in the toilets, can lie staring unseeing at the wall until it is time to begin again, frozen in some state between fervor and self-recrimination—
Bond stops him. “No. I’ve had enough of this. I’m not going to stand here and watch you—”
—a bolt, then, fletched with agony’s feathers—
“—as you tear yourself apart for me, Q.
“I know that you love me,” Bond says in a voice like tearing fabric, sharp and ragged and even and terrible. “You don’t have to keep proving it to me.”
Q pauses, licks his lips. “I do.” And, “I do.”
He wakes in mid-afternoon as the winter sun sets cold and grey in the window. Bond is drinking in the room’s only chair, abandoned by Q where he lies tucked under the blankets. The hand that holds his beer is beringed with loops—a man like Bond will be so important to so many people—and he’s had either enough alcohol or heartache that he doesn’t flinch when Q sidles up to him to take that hand.
Blue is a man, a gruff man in Scotland, and Q can feel him like a father. Lemon yellow carries Eve’s smile and lincoln green the faint buzz of M’s authoritative disapproval. There’s the colour of dried and flaking blood he doesn’t touch, and.
He’s never done this before, never told anyone about the threads. He has no idea if this will even work.
“Come on, then.”
::
It’s not pulling. He’s not manipulating the threads so much as lifting them to see where they lie in the grand fabric and placing them gingerly where they were. He knows Bond believes he’s lost the plot after his tales of threads that string the fated together, but he follows anyway, trust and some form of love giving him patience for Q’s breakdown as though it somehow takes precedence over Madeleine’s disappearance. Her thread doesn’t change colour, doesn’t grow thicker or thinner, but it does lead them north and north and north until Q realises just how far south they’ve been. He has an inkling where they are going, and for once it’s not because he holds the weave of the world in his hands.
Then they are in Paris; then they are in London; then they are surrounded by lakes, by castles, by the bleak Scottish Highlands and they are as far north as they can go. The country calls at him with a memory that sings in his blood as though he and his sisters have sat here for millennia, whispering to kings. It is a fated place.
The house is little, shadowed over by the rain-soaked rubble of a great house behind it; in the distance, a church. Q’s seen case photos of this place. Bond does not believe that he has not planned this, but still they sit in silence in the car until he can draw himself up to go to the door. It’s blue and red loops gone taut, now. The old man lets them in. She’s having tea in the little kitchenette.
Too small to escape their inevitable reunion, too cold out to hide by the car; Q turns where he is and could cry for a bed and a week to sleep in it. Kincaid—because there’s no one else he could be; there’s nowhere else they could be—has no idea what to do with him—what role does Q play in this drama that’s writ before them? What is his place in the story she’s given him for showing up randomly on his step? Who has she said he is? presuming, of course, that she’s said—and Q finds himself deposited in a chair that belonged to a knitter once. He can feel it, the hours of gentle rocking, the basket by his foot that hasn’t moved in a decade, just the right height to feed thread between industrious hands. There’s a fair isle blanket on the back and his hairs catch in the twisted fibers. Then there’s a blanket on his lap and a fire and he’s drifting to sleep to the sounds of their quiet shouting.
::
He wakes, once, to the sleeping cottage. The embers are low; Kincaid snores in the chair opposite. She’s paused at the window with suitcase in hand, a moon-lit faerie bride.
“I’m glad he saved you. You needed someone to save you.”
Her voice is huskier than he remembered, quiet, pondering.
“You would not have saved yourself,” she says.
She’s right, of course.
::
Bond shows him the church, the bloodstains gone but oak pews still haunted. Q sees the tattered weave of a tapestry here, shreds and knots and dangling string left to rot. It’s quite beautiful, in its own way.
“I want you to cut it.” Bond’s voice is quiet, hard, unflinching.
“No.”
Bond leaves him there.
::
Madeleine has been gone for three days, and there is no reason for them to stay. Q considers a train; Bond is going further than he is, deeper south into the continent to pack up a life that cannot exist because of who he is, who he was, who he will ever be. It’s one final escape from a woman who has no time for saving others. She cannot save Bond, though Q wonders if their midnight conversation wasn’t her trying in some way to save him. After all, Q has always excelled at protecting others. It’s nice to think that someone may have tried to rescue him for once. Bond puts him in the passenger seat of his car again, and Q’s not cut for self-preservation.
North London. It’s a tremendously long drive—it’s nothing at all, spent silently staring out the window and working a little loop of yarn around his finger. His little finger throbs. He ignores it, and Bond’s curious glance. Bond gives him curbside service, then follows him up the stairs to his flat where the cats twine around his ankles and try to kill him with their love. He can smell a week of dirty litter, his home so suddenly homey that it stings prickles along his arms. Bond stands casual in the kitchen as he feeds the cats, who fuck off in favour of food, then as he feeds the both of them on questionably fresh sandwiches. When they’ve done, Bond is still there.
“Are you going—?” Q asks, but there’s nowhere to go, really. Bond’s smile is crooked, tired, and sad.
“There’s time. She left you,”
“She left you,” Q corrects, and then, because that’s true but unkind, corrects again: “She escaped.” It isn’t any kinder, but it’s more precise.
“I knew she would one day.”
And— “Do you still want me to—?” Q offers, because he knows the pain of being tied to someone who knows you are.
“No.” Bond shakes his head, rubs at the base of his little finger as though he can feel the loop there, a gesture stolen from Q like so many other things. It’s the wrong finger; Q’s line hooks his thumb. Madeleine’s still loops his ring finger. His little finger is bare. Q smiles.
“You can stay the night if you like. Before you go back home again.”
“I haven’t anything to wear if I do,” Bond says, and it’s an invitation. “Wear nothing at all,” Q can say, and the threads would weave one way. “Then I suppose you should go” would make them warp another.
“I’ve a jumper you can keep if you want it” is a third option, one that promises a different direction.
Q isn’t prescient. He can’t see the future. He knits.
