Chapter Text
It begins with the dream; then the groggy awareness that the dream is just a dream, and you are waking up now.
The darkness fades, resolving into muted red, light shining beyond your eyelids. You don’t lift them just yet though. First the rest of your senses return: the soft cotton of sheets beneath your fingers; the unpleasant taste of long sleep and no toothpaste; the sounds of regularly beeping machines and far-away footsteps; the unmistakeable antiseptic smell of a hospital.
Slowly, Q’s eyes flutter open.
Overhead lies nothing but white. Hospital ceilings aren’t really designed for interest, only for something functional yet soothing. Instinctively he wants to scribble over it. His arms are slow to respond though, and after all, the ceiling is so far away. He sighs, shifting slightly, flexing his fingers to experience the reassurance that they’re there, the same with his toes. The world is drowsy, possibly drug-softened, definitely in need of artificial focus. When he manages to turn his head to the right, he finds his glasses at the ready. They feel oddly heavy as they settle on his nose, but he’s distracted by the window’s view of what is and always shall be undeniably London. Big Ben looks inserted by CGI, it looks so perfect. Crying at his city would be unbelievably stupid, so Q swallows back the lump in his throat and just watches.
“You look like death.”
Q’s head snaps around.
Sitting – no, why just sit when there are so many adjectives for you to hoard, so great an impression to be made by your own arrogant existence – lounging in the chair by his bed, wearing both his trademark suit and his trademark smirk, James Bond meets his eyes with what to the inexperienced might seem like simple amusement.
However, if there is one thing Q can say that he has gained from this entire mess, it is experience.
James isn’t happy. There’s still too much in his life for him to be truly happy. But there’s still a life there, still drink and guns and girls, still Q in a hospital bed to be mocked, still England, and if he isn’t happy, he’s at least content.
The word doesn’t sit well in Q’s head at first: content. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because to apply such a word to Bond feels instinctively as if it should be a mistake. There’s a mild softening around the edges, a hint of genuine warmth in the smile, a spark in the eyes doesn’t seem so faked, some hint of taking pleasure in something other than death or sex. (Q wonders if he’s excluded from either of the two.) The performance is second-nature, but perhaps for the first time in a while there’s a trace of something genuine lying beneath the surface. Something gloriously alive.
Q says, “I can’t believe you actually went for that line.”
“Then you obviously don’t know me as well as you think.”
Truth be told, Q now knows James far better than he ever might have liked. He wonders whether James is aware of that and playing the part regardless; wonders just what James remembers.
The questions itch in his mind, on his tongue, but he can’t; he won’t. (Not yet.)
“What happened?”
“I saved you,” James informs him, with considerable relish. “I activated the beacon, and carried you until I ran into Eve. It wasn’t all that far, actually.” He pauses, a pause instead of commenting on that first long walk, losing their way on purpose. James says nothing about it. “Congratulations, by the way. Simultaneous exhaustion, starvation and dehydration. The doctors want to know what you’ve been doing for the last month.”
“A month?” Q exclaims. James nods.
“I told them it was classified.”
Weakly, Q comments, “I just bet you did.” It’s hard not to drink in the sight of him, all the colours restored, all that life. The ghost of him already seems like a nightmare. All of it does, here, so close to London’s sunlight.
“You can have this back, by the way.” James holds up a thick rectangle of a book, then deposits it in Q’s lap. Q stares at the curling corners, the tea stained spine, the cracked and faded image of the Grey Wizard bustling down a dirt track reminiscent of the English countryside.
Ignoring the IV as the hindrance it is, he carefully, reverently thumbs through the pages. The tear on page 84, the places where it falls open if he leaves it… “How?” The last time he saw this, it was in the backpack swallowed up whole by the darkness.
“If I had to guess, I’d say a present.” Dismissing Q’s disbelief, James confesses, “I gave up during the appendices, I’m afraid.”
Q struggles to recall where James had been before. How long has he been out? “It’s okay,” he says faintly, as if from a very long way away. “Most people do.”
He doesn’t last for long. Obligingly Bond prepares him for what questions he might receive, with regard to the official explanations and the rumours at large, until Q’s eyes start to droop and sleep takes him again.
A kiss brushes against his forehead. He doesn’t know where waking ends and dreaming begins.
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“You’re not okay, are you?”
To be fair to her, Eve did observe a good number of the formalities first – bringing flowers, offering to smuggle in takeaway, the usual. It’s just that this is the first thing she says which isn’t by the book, and is uttered whilst looking him right in the eye. In other words, it’s clearly the first thing that actually matters.
“I almost starved to death,” he points out, “I doubt anybody would think otherwise.”
“Not that,” she says irritably, flapping her hand to dismiss his brush with death. Being a field agent does that to you, he’s noticed, and it’s the kind of thing that sticks. “I mean up here,” she clarifies, reaching out to tap elegantly crafted nails against his forehead.
There had been a debriefing, of course, from both sides. Needless to say, Q Branch have been asking a great deal of questions, and performing a great deal of illegal hacking. Q feels a great swell of pride for his department. It means a lot when the head of MI6 has to go down there to threaten them all personally. Through much negotiation – and Q fears to ask what sort of things had to be promised, how long Eve had to fight for him – apparently his ‘unique status’ (“It’s not like they want to talk about it any more than you do,” Eve confides) will remain a state secret, for no-one’s eyes but those with the highest clearance. Apparently, the introduction of gods onto the playing field will only upset things. Better to keep Q where they can see him, should any relevant occasions arise. In that conclusion, Q can practically smell M, and he never thought he’d be so grateful for a leader so inured to politics.
Now, he asks, “Do you think it’s possible to come back without leaving a bit of yourself behind?”
“You’re not talking about Bond, are you?”
“He wanted me to stay.” Q doesn’t specify who. “I wasn’t really tempted then, but now I’m not so sure I didn’t say yes without realising. The world doesn’t seem right: greyer, like – like down there. Something’s itching right beneath my skin and the light’s too bright and I keep thinking that I don’t belong here anymore.”
Eve gives this some thought; then whaps him around the head, with great affection. “Of course you belong here,” she assures him, seemingly friendly but with the hard edge of steel beneath.
It’s not a real conclusion, but for now, he lets it go. For her.
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James isn’t as prone to seizing opportunities as you might think. At least, that’s one way of interpreting what happens next. The other is that Bond is very prone indeed to running away, often, and at length.
Q’s recovery from almost dying is slow and annoying and boring and largely defined by the distinct absence of a certain agent. Admittedly that’s not entirely due to James skulking around everywhere that isn’t, well, there. They both still have these things loosely described as ‘jobs’ and Q is the only one of them with sufficient physical symptoms to be ordered home (not that he’s in much of a state to do more than crawl in, and Eve is on the prowl in any case). In fact, if anything James’ better adjusted emotionally than he has been since he started working as a professional assassin, even if there’s no official psych eval to establish that in writing.
All the same, when he’s glaring at the ceiling and twitching because Eve won’t even give him a fucking computer, just books (not even on a Kindle, he has yet to hack into MI6 with paper), Q finds it very easy to resent him.
The day he’s finally released stands out as one of the best of his life. Obviously Q Branch knew he was coming, and Q’s more than a little touched by the horrendously bright streamers and cheap Doctor Who banners and the party hats Jez forces onto anyone foolish enough to wander into their midst. Gerty ceremoniously leads him to the computer wired in at the front of the room; Katy, beaming broadly, presents him with a mug of Earl Grey.
After she’s walked away, Q finds that she also slipped a schematic for what looks like a very economical device indeed for inserting explosives inside an everyday Biro.
He’s home.
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His house is too quiet. Eve agreed to feed the cats, yet apparently many felt so betrayed by his absence that they resigned themselves to cutting him out of their daily or weekly rounds.
Heidegger, of all of them, is there waiting for him when he tries to open the door. There really is something a little supernatural about that cat.
When they start to return, in dribs and drabs, it’s much like the first time he walks through Hyde Park: as pleased as he is to see them, he can’t help but wonder why they’re here. (He hasn’t braved the Tube once, since getting back. Thankfully, at the moment it’s still warm enough to walk.)
Worse is when he realises, a couple of weeks later, why the flat still doesn’t feel like home. It takes Stelmaria’s levelled glare through his window for the penny to drop.
“I don’t miss having a home invader,” he informs her, after deactivating the lasers long enough for her to enter. “His habit of watching me sleep was deeply creepy and nobody can tell me otherwise.”
Stelmaria swans off haughtily into the kitchen, tail erect. It’s at this point that he admits to himself that his need to lie to himself has extended to attempting defences around cats, and this is always a danger sign.
Elsewhere he walks the streets of London in the sunlight; feeds the crows on the roof of HQ; visits the Tower of London and listens to the panic when the ravens try to follow him home. Here and there, he seeks out something of a settling.
Eventually, he admits that no settling will present itself without at least the facsimile of an ending.
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It doesn’t really matter where Bond goes in London; it never has. Q is never short of eyes to find him. There is, he accepts now, an equal amount of creepiness between them. That’s what the world of espionage does to you, ignoring all the rest.
Bond answers the invitation, after just long enough to make it clear that he does not wait at Q’s beck and call. When Q opens the door to him, he is painfully wary, all that contentment of earlier withdrawn in suspicion and foreboding. Q pours him a glass of proper scotch and makes a cup of tea for himself, and all the while James says nothing.
“I’m impressed,” he comments from the kitchen, deliberately keeping it casual. “Most people would have turned at run at the words ‘we need to talk’.”
“I’m not most people,” comes the reply, and Q can’t help but smile to himself and murmur, “No, you’re not, are you?”
Stelmaria has resumed her throne on James’ lap, purring contentedly under his attention. “She missed you,” Q tells him, setting the glasses down on the table. “I was surprised she even came back.”
He hadn’t meant to introduce the subject in that manner. However, from the way James’ hand stills, avoiding it will mean avoiding it forever.
“I’m just saying, 007,” he says all in a rush, all exasperated forced calm, deriving nothing but savage enjoyment from seeing Bond flinch at the reversion to number, “that first I made you immortal, which you never so much as thanked me for, and then I did everything in my power to make you not immortal, including going to the fucking Underworld, meeting my estranged and unexpectedly mythological father, dragging your soul back from death, almost starving to death – I’m saying that I think I have done an awful lot for you lately.”
“What’s your point?”
Q can feel his eye not so much twitching as full-on vibrating as a small explosion of pure white-hot incoherent rage sweeps over him. “‘What’s my point’?” he repeats in a low hiss through gritted teeth.
“Do you want gratitude?”
“I want to know what the hell you have done for me that makes you think this is anything but one-sided, because I am telling you, 007, I am getting very, very tired of doing all of the work here. At first it was fine – I’m your Quartermaster, it was my fault, all of that – but increasingly I can’t help but reflect that I keep giving and giving and you just take and, again, I almost died saving you.”
Bond’s face reveals nothing. He doesn’t want to give anything away, and Q thinks, That’s the bloody point. The moment they start edging towards something real, Bond shuts down, content to wait it out. All he ever says is no and there’s only so long you can keep asking.
“I’m not saying we can go back to the start,” Q admits wearily, suddenly feeling very tired, “but if you’re not, well, interested,” might as well say it aloud, or as close to it as he’ll manage, “I can keep it professional – probably still more than you, “ a quirk of a smile that might be involuntary and might be performance, stop it James it hurts, “or I can assign someone else to you. But I am done saving you when you never do anything to help.”
He falls silent; lets his eyes fall shut. Only half of that was a lie, which he reckons is pretty good.
He doesn’t trust himself not to save Bond again. That’s the fucking problem.
Then, finally, Bond gives him a different kind of answer.
“I chose to come back.”
Frowning in bewilderment, Q opens his eyes again and blinks up at Bond. “Sorry?”
Bond is looking at him steadily, in a way that suggests he’s making a point of meeting Q’s eyes, of maintaining contact, of not avoiding anything. “You asked what I did for you. I followed you.
“You didn’t bring me back; I followed you home.”
Q’s mind is usually a wild mess of thoughts and equations, the only respite confused static. This is the first time in oh so long that all of it – all the noise, all the thoughts, all the facts and theories and idle curiosities – it all just stops. For a moment, or possibly two, he isn’t thinking anything at all.
“Idiot.”
It’s only after those moments that he realises his face is still moving, independent of any conscious input. From the feel of things, it’s twitching through several options, both his eyes and his mouth attempting to express some sort of reaction despite losing contact with the organ usually in charge of such things.
He looks ridiculous. He knows this because, in spite of making such grand statements and with such an intense focus, it seems Bond can’t help but smile. The tit.
Q can’t help but smile back.
“I hate you,” Q announces, beaming widely.
James’ teeth are stupidly white. “I’m aware of the fact.”
“Absolutely, completely, and utterly.”
“Likewise.”
“Unbelievably, colossally, stupendously.”
“Q…”
“Tremendously, stupefyingly, terrifyingly…”
“Are you alright?”
Q is laughing and looks like a madman. He tries to stifle it with a hand over his own mouth, only muffled giggles sound infinitely worse. It feels like a decidedly crazy kind of happy, with neither reaction possibly being appropriate, yet both feeling so very right.
“Yes, I’m – Sorry, I – What I’m trying – ”
“Q,” James says slowly, carefully, taking hold of both of Q’s hands like he’s about to do himself an injury, “you sound lost for words. I’ve never heard you sound like this before.”
“Good thing you stuck around,” Q points out. “All these new experiences you would have missed.” He cocks his head on one side and grins up at him. “So, home? This is home, is it? Or MI6? London?”
“I’m not sure it’s safe to answer that question right now. For either of us.”
Q nods. “Don’t worry. I know.” Quite what he knows, he couldn’t actually say. There’s an awful lot bubbling up, and it’ll take some rational headspace to figure it all out. After all, James isn’t the only one who could be answering the question.
So instead he considers talking this out, decides that he deserves something beforehand, and frees himself from Bond’s loose grip to kiss him instead.
No doubt he could eulogise about the taste of Bond’s mouth – this fairly old-fashioned mix of lingering expensive scotch and nicotine and, although this might just be a fanciful notion, the promise of an explosion – but to be honest, what strikes him most is the sensation. Bond’s mouth is burningly hot once more, the way it should be, and especially when it opens to respond and Q fairly purrs in approval, but now this is far less desperate and rushed and Q is always glad to have it proved that it’s worth taking time over things. Not only is Bond’s tongue slow and methodical, but his hands, well, his hands aren’t pulling at his hair anymore but exploring it, drifting down to the back of Q’s neck, where he discovers he’s even more sensitive than he’d previously realised. As for Q, he’s less interested in crumpling Bond’s suit just to make a point and more in doing so as a matter of course. Even being kissed like this, his fingers find it hard to keep still, first trying out a similar basic caressing route before wandering further down, running along the silk of Bond’s tie and tracing the material around each exposed button on that crisp white shirt.
In conclusion, kissing Bond is far better when they’re not in a hurry to consult the god of death and when they’re not both either dead or Other.
Q’s fairly certain, from the thrum of energy underneath his fingertips, that Bond’s pretty much a hair’s breadth away from just throwing him to his living room floor and having him right then and there. It’s precisely why he forces himself to draw back.
A pissed-off Bond is even better when he’s looking decidedly dishevelled and you can claim credit for both states. Q can’t help but grin down at him, wayward hair flopping down across his right eye.
Reaching deep down inside himself for whatever reserves of calm detachment he might have left to calm down his voice and his heart rate for just long enough, he says, “Then again, we should maybe talk about how this is supposed to work.” On second thoughts, perhaps ‘murderous’ is not something to encourage.
“I just want to make sure, based on your previous record: are you going to resign from MI6?” Q teases. A heartbeat after the words escape, his eyes widen with horror. Why did he have to open his mouth? “I mean – fuck, no, I – ”
James catches his hand before it can start yanking at his hair as usual. He’s not smiling, but at least he doesn’t look angry, or worse, blank. “I wouldn’t do that to you.
“And, just so we’re quite clear, because you have displayed some rather unexpected possessive tendencies and I wouldn’t want to have to get someone else from Q Branch – ” he presses a kiss soothingly against Q’s hand “ – I am not going to stop sleeping around to complete a mission just because you’re jealous.”
Q closes his mouth from where he had been about to launch into a long, detailed, and primarily angry list of reasons why James being supervised by anybody except for him is the stupidest plan he’s ever heard in his life – really, he’d rather walk away from what they’re teetering on the edge of than do anything of the sort. At least James is looking at him like he understands.
“Well, obviously,” he says instead. “All I ask – and pay close attention, 007 – ” cliché as it is, he reaches out and pulls at James’ tie to tug him in closer, and the rush of warmth has nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the fact that James doesn’t fight, just lets him do it “ – all I ask is that you come home afterwards.”
James grins, close enough that Q can feel the curve against his own skin. “You know how I feel about orders,” he murmurs, more a growl than real speech.
Q objects to being carried through into his bedroom. Unfortunately it’s hard to mount a convincing argument when your opponent resorts to underhanded methods like kissing you every time you try.
Finally, as clothing begins to litter the floor – instantly Ada makes a beeline for new bedding – Q manages to kneel up on the bed and tell James (his own fault really for wearing fucking cufflinks), “By the way, I added a subsection of code to the defence parameters here.”
James’ hands still. “If this is dirty talk, I should tell you, you’re out of practice.”
Q grins slyly, undoing the right cufflink with a single flick. He’s a fast learner. “Believe it or not, I actually missed you breaking in at 2am, and I realised the only reason you don’t anymore – besides no doubt delving into angst at length elsewhere – is because you can’t survive the precautions anymore.
“So.” He picks open James’ shirt buttons one by one, careful to maintain eye contact the whole time. “They’ll let you through now.”
“Q,” James says softly, “did you give me a key to your flat?”
“I never said that.”
He likes the way James looks at him then: as if Q is a bloody marvel.
And when Q falls backwards onto the bed, James follows him down.
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Deep down in the earth, in the tunnels below Britain, there’s a man on a computer. He’s the head of Q Branch; he’s also the son of Death.
Right now, he’s talking home the man who was once immortal – who always has been, in his own way. Once this mission is over, they can get back to the far less professional side of their relationship, where they listen to each other breathe and appreciate the full wonder of it.
Q didn’t mean to do it.
But he wouldn’t have had it any other way.