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The sirens are shrill, klaxons piercing, designed to be enough to jolt Q out of a dead sleep. It works. To his credit, he’s only stupid with sleep for a few seconds before the solid smack of adrenaline catches him up between the shoulder blades and shoves him out of bed, headset on and fingers dialing without even the slightest quiver as he pulls up the tracking programme. Heart rate: elevated; body temperature: high; breath: fast, shallow. Pain response. “Bond,” Q mutters into the headset. “Bond. Double-oh Seven, do you read?”
The other end of the line is silent, strikingly so. The mics must be off; Q sends a mild jolt to them to see if Bond is capable of responding. He is, and powerfully so—Bond’s low, muffled swearing filters in through the padded earpieces of Q’s headset and Q all but sighs in relief. “Q, what the hell?” Bond demands.
“Are you quite alright, Double-oh Seven?” Q asks him, as drolly as he can. There’s still a nervous spike of concern there, still the high pitch of worry, but he smoothes it with as much British cynicism as he can. “It’s only my systems thought you were dying, you see.”
There’s a beat. Bond’s seen through his ruse; when he speaks, his voice is unusually gentle, at least compared to the moment before. “Nightmare. That’s all.”
Q flushes. Dialing back the sensitivity of the monitors, he licks his lips to speak. “My apologies. I’ve set the thresholds higher. Do try not to actually die tonight, Bond, and we’ll recalibrate in the morning.”
Bond doesn’t respond. He’s already turned his mic off and gone to sleep, presumably, but Q can’t sleep after that, just sits at his computer and looks up the typical physiological response to nightmares, jotting notes.
The new settings work well for a bit. Bond doesn’t have any more nightmares and Q finally manages not to expect the monitor to spring to a cacophony of life just as he drifts off, which is of course why it does, startling Q into hummingbird-hearted fear that leaves a copper taste on the back of his tongue. Same signature as before: all systems strained, this time accompanied by elevated levels of lactic acid and adrenaline—muscle fatigue, basically, and Q activates Bond’s subdermal mic remotely rather than put him in a position in which he may speak and alert any attackers to its presence.
“Oh, god.” The voice is high, sweet. Female. Appreciative. Bond’s grunts fill Q’s ear and his skin goes hot. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
It’s the damnedest thing: he can’t turn the mic off now, not without giving Bond an unpleasant jolt; he hopes Bond was too busy to notice the mic coming live in the first place. He listens to Bond giving it to his guest for a few more seconds before the heat radiating off his face threatens to melt the plastic covers of the headphones. Even from the desktop, the tinny sound of Bond’s orgasm wafts up like cologne, subtle and lingering. When he’s sure Bond’s no longer occupied, he slips the headset on again.
“—Q? Q, you nasty little voyeur, I do know you’re listening,” Bond is murmuring in his ears as soon as he gets the pads over them. Despite the words, his tone is fond, familiar.
“Actually, as soon as I realised what I was hearing, I put the headset on the table. I apologise for the intrusion,” Q tells him sincerely. “I’d no idea you were entertaining company.”
“It’s getting so a man can’t get off in the privacy of his own home these days,” Bond says, mostly to himself, and Q thinks back to the nightmare that was—apparently wasn’t a nightmare? He flushes to the tips of his toes.
“I assure you I’m not trying to listen in on you wanking, Bond,” Q says, voice snippish with embarrassment. “I calibrated the systems for a normal response to a nightmare, not for you tugging one off at the wrist.”
Bond is silent, but Q’s system registers several hitches in his breathing: he’s laughing at him. “I apologise for the deception, then, Quartermaster. How can I make it up to you?”
Which is, of course, how they end up in the privacy of Q’s personal weapons testing lab. It’s the smallest of the labs, the most private, with a cot in the corner that Q uses, himself, when the shifts get too long and the weights on his eyes too much to support. It’s got a station set up with the monitoring system, which makes it more useful than the other options, but it means he has to stay in the room while Bond—he tugs at his cuffs again, resolutely rolling his shoulders.
“Any time you like, Bond,” he offers. It’s awkward, even though he’s listening through the headset to things happening in the room with him.
He can hear the moment Bond begins. It’s quiet, the whisper of his fingers in the buttons of his shirt, and Q shivers with the forced intimacy of it. He can hear it better than he could if he were next to Bond, sliding his fingers beneath the placket of crisp cotton to coax the buttons from their holes with quick, delicate fingers. His breath escapes him in a whoosh, and on the screen, Bond’s catches. Q can hear the moment his shirt’s undone and he lets it drop to the cot.
Next are the trousers, but he doesn’t hear the telltale rasp of a zip just yet; instead, it’s the slide of fingertips against skin and Bond’s heart rate goes up, his breathing losing depth. Bond lets out a gusty breath and it’s like Q can feel it along the line of his back, making him arch. The catch of Bond’s fingers releasing the first button on his trousers sounds strained, as if—Q gulps—as if he’s already hard, pressing at the front of his trousers eagerly.
“Alright there, Q?” Bond asks quietly, and Q flinches. “Steady on.”
It’s easy for Bond to say—there’s no one wanking behind him, and certainly not an attractive agent for whom he has developed strange, protective feelings for. Q nods, watching as Bond’s concern drifts off the screen, dissolving into the acid pit of his arousal again. He hears the moment Bond takes it out, and for a brief, eternal second Q fights with himself, both hands knuckle-white around his self-control to keep from turning to watch that first slick stroke. He wins by a hair and still feels he’s lost.
There’s lube on the nightstand, and Q’d flushed dark with mortification to put it there. It’s not his own, but that doesn’t shake the memory of touching his cock where Bond is now sitting, of slicking his own fingers up and working out his tensions in the small hours of the morning when the stress sat on his chest and poked its fingers into his flesh to keep him awake. Bond had given him a sardonic look as if surprised that Q knew he might need it or amused that Q knew what lube was, much less provided a new, full bottle of it for the purposes of troubleshooting his response systems. The first fulsome stroke drags a shuddering breath from Q, and he nearly pisses himself when the klaxon starts to go off again, shrieking in the narrow confines of the room.
“Shit!” Bond swears behind him, and under the piercing wail of the alert as Q struggles to turn off the alarm, he hears the lube fall, hears Bond swearing as he picks it up and closes it with a decisive snick. In the wake of the wall of sound, the room’s silence is more hollow than before. “The fuck was that?” Bond demands.
“The alarm that tells me you’re possibly dying,” Q tells him simply. He chances a glance over his shoulder; Bond’s cock is out, gleaming and temporarily forgotten. Q flushes, turning back to the station.
“This is what—when you called to check I wasn’t dying, this is what you’d heard beforehand?” Bond asks. Q nods. Bond makes a soft sound that makes Q want to look at him. He doesn’t. “It wakes you up, doesn’t it? Each time I—?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it so loud? Christ, I thought my eardrums were going to pop.”
“So it wakes me, of course. If I slept through you dying because I didn’t hear the alarm, I’d never forgive myself.”
Bond is quiet for a moment, then: “Q.” Q glances back at him, at Bond’s hand on his cock, at the way Bond makes eye contact as he strokes himself firmly. He only barely remembers to set the tolerances for the alarm to ridiculously high as an afterthought; his fingers shake when he presses the buttons, but Bond’s smile is gently teasing.
There’s a puddle of lube in Bond’s lap from where he’d dropped the bottle. He’d been applying enough to ease the smooth glide of his fingers around his cock, but there’s enough there to leave him shining with it now. He’ll have to replace the mattress, Q thinks idly, and the sheets, too, and part of him regrets that he won’t have the opportunity to press his face into the musky vale where Bond is sitting, wanking and putting on a show.
“Come here, Q,” Bond tells him, and Q shakes his head mutely. Bond laughs, twisting his hand around the end of his cock in a move that makes Q’s throb in sympathetic pleasure. He’s fit to burst his trousers soon, he thinks, but somehow it’s more professional if he only watches, if he sits ten feet away and listens to the soft groan Bond gives through the headset as he touches himself. “Come here.”
He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t, but it’s a magnetic pull behind his navel that drags him over to the bed, that holds him still as Bond uses the hand that’s not drenched to open his trousers—though it still leaves slick, greasy marks on the fabric and Q knows he’ll never get away with wearing these back out of the room—before gentling his rampant cock free of its confines for a stroke. Q groans.
“Good boy. Take your trousers off,” Bond coaxes, and he’s in for a pound if he’s in for a penny, Q supposes, kicking the thick tweed down his legs and shimmying out of his pants before he’s standing awkward and half-dressed in the room. Bond leans back, pats his thigh, and Q straddles him, sinking onto his slick, messy lap with a sharp, needful sound.
He can feel everything, every mole and every hair and every hidden wrinkle of him as he gives a tentative rock through the slip of it. Bond sighs into his hair, cups his arse, guides his thrusting hips until their cocks are trapped between them and one of Bond’s thighs is firm and snug against his bollocks; he lets Q writhe atop him without moving much, only shifting slightly at the pinch of a pulled hair or to adjust the angle until Q is watching stars spark behind his eyelids, hips eager as Bond encourages him with a hand on his arse.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Bond is whispering, his words more feeling than sound as Bond presses them into the side of his throat between kisses. “You can do it, c’mon.”
It’s the most ridiculous pep-talk, Q thinks, even as it spurs him on until their bodies are a frictionless glide of sex and hunger. He doesn’t want to come first, doesn’t want—Bond’s cock head is hot in his fist when he reaches for it, focusing on the hottest parts where blood is thundering just below the skin. Bond comes with a startled shout, and Q wants despite all better thought to taste it, but it’s thin and gleaming with lube. Next time, Q considers, and Bond crushes his hips to his own, rubbing Q off against his skin with come and lube and sweat squished between them. Q squirms, comes wet and slippery between them, and pushes at Bond when he keeps rubbing the oversensitive flesh of Q’s spent cock with his abdomen.
“Lovely,” Bond murmurs softly, eyes post-coital and pleased with himself in an endearingly smug sort of way. Q makes a face; there’s come and lube from knees to navel, and they’ll have to shower before they’re presentable.
He’s on his way to the en suite to shower when the computer beeps—it’s captured the data necessary to make the adjustments. From here on out, he’ll only know if Bond’s getting off if he’s been invited. For the first time he considers an ethical dilemma: thank Bond for his participation or pretend to need more confirmation? He’s still lost in thought when Bond approaches him from behind.
“Got what you needed?” Bond asks.
Q can’t lie. “I’ll be able to make the adjustments tonight. Perhaps I’ll get a full night’s sleep for once?”
Bond is quiet, and Q jumps at the brush of lips along the line of his shoulders. “Sure you don’t need another sample?” Bond asks.
It’s an in. Q grins. “Well, it would only be the responsible thing to do….”