Chapter Text
James wishes, later, that he had shot Franz. C, it turns out, is already dead, which makes testimony of his guilt more a matter of convenience for Mallory than protecting Britain from their former (briefly, thank anything and nothing) director.
Still, confirmation from the horse's mouth makes it easier for Q to dismantle the whole thing, and Mallory is M now: keeping him out of trouble for killing his superiors is possibly part of Bond’s job. It’s a moot point, regardless. Franz testifies, informally and maniacally, and he lives, and James is not so entirely out of respect for the order of things at MI-6 that he’s going to break in and do anything about it now. M’s last mission has been completed, and he has no more cause to flout her replacement.
He does not tell this—any of this—to Madeleine. She has taken his non-shooting of his erstwhile step-brother as a grand gesture of retirement, and he is uneasily reluctant to correct her. It was certainly not intended as such; nor was his choice of bridge exit. A very long day, he firmly believes, should end in the arms of a beautiful and brilliant woman, not those of medical and paperwork courtesy of Master, Quartermaster and the wheels of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, Madeleine—and possibly MI-6, if his Quartermaster’s reception and the lack of forwarded paperwork is a sign—appear to have read it all as a more symbolic sort of walking away. And perhaps, he has to consider, their willingness to let him go should tell him something. M’s last mission has been completed, and perhaps it’s time for him to move on.
*
He remembers—or admits to himself that he remembers—leaving his beach in Fethiye ten days into France by road. They don’t stop in Calais, don’t stop until they’re well west of the major routes and into the quieter coast of Rouen. They hover on the cliffs and the beaches as far as Mont Saint-Michel, where both have fond memories, then turn south by mutual but mostly unspoken agreement. She is not bothered by his always-seeing, or his security checks, or his ever-split attention. She is not as trained as he is, or as paranoid, but she is used to it. Franz was not wrong; she understands him better than perhaps any woman has but M, who was less a woman than a way of life.
They pause in the afternoons in places that are beautiful, and leave them in the late mornings; they are heading nowhere, and do not need to travel fast. They settle into the south and have excellent sex in the warm yellow sunlight, on rooftops and in fields when Bond is convincing, but mostly in beds. She is brilliant, engagingly so, far more so than he is. She is spectacularly beautiful, and hard-edged, sharp-edged, quietly unyielding. He thinks he probably loves her as much as he has anyone (as much as Tracy), since before he was himself (M was there before 007, and so was Vesper, almost, really, and he loved both with foolishness and absolution). They are in Sainte-Maxime when Bond remembers leaving the Turkish Riviera, and knows for the first time that he has lied to her, despite all his best intentions, and his careful lack of promises.
She thinks he has retired, and he knows, remembering Fethiye, that he has not. He was furious in Turkey, and presumed dead, and he lasted almost six months. His longest sojourn before that lasted six days with a very lovely woman on a really excellent yacht after a truly hellish mission. He has well passed six days, and he thinks that speaks to the honesty of his silence—he did imagine, truly, that he might stay for her. But he is neither angry nor presumed dead, and he wonders which will call him home first: some overt disaster on the news, as it did in Fethiye, or just the itch in his blood. He lied to M too, he remembers, only now. She thought he had gone for good as well. Of course, she knew that would only happen with a bullet, not a choice.
*
She is pleased when he suggests Barcelona—the Riviera is only so much diversion—and less pleased when his route markers over the mountains veer from vistas to scars of a series of old encounters with the ETA. It is not altogether intentional—he isn’t looking for trouble. Is just seemed obvious, when plotting a course across the border, to flirt with the tangles of separatist hideouts rather than take a more direct route or follow the tourist trap of the train. They have a dozen languages between them, but neither of them speak much Basque. When they reach Barcelona, the long way around, he buys her an exorbitant assortment of flowers at the market, and she laughs, and rolls her eyes, and kisses him, and never stops looking worried.
She never stops again, really. They have been thoroughly enjoying Barcelona for almost two weeks when she tells him to go home. She’s not angry, not really, though she has been, now and then. He thinks he would have lasted a good while longer, tried months yet, for her sake. Maybe six months, once more. Probably not.
He has been unofficially retired six weeks when he drives back into MI-6.
*
Q is surprised. Q has not known him very long, and this is maybe James’ favourite thing about him: he persists in being surprised.
Mallory has not, in fact, known him very long either, but is not surprised at all. He says, ‘Welcome back, 007,’ and ‘Check in with medical this afternoon,’ and ‘Agent Moneypenny handled most of your paperwork on SPECTRE, but you’ll find it flagged for you to fill in the gaps’. MI-6, it would seem, had not watched him walk away. Only Madeleine, Q and himself had been blind enough to see that.
*
He misses Madeleine, genuinely, but he’s not cruel enough to call her. That moment is gone, as it should have been weeks ago, when she had the good sense to walk away and the poor fortune to run into Franz.
Instead, he goes in search of the car. Q Branch has, in Bond’s absence, returned to at least a semblance of its former business. It no longer looks, for instance, like their teenage Quartermaster has locked himself in a basement in a fit of pique (Q is, of course, not at all teenaged, but this is another of James’ favourite things about him: he is very easy to torment).
The car is beautiful, as always; the car is beautiful even when it is in thousands of tiny pieces, though more-so when it isn’t. Q appears to have had one of his minions paint out the scuffs sustained crossing the Pyrenees, which is almost touching. She’s a beautiful vehicle, and she deserves to be taken care of.
He tells Q this when he approaches, returned from some other part of his maze and addressing James’ name as a question, “007?” Q laughs in his odd, unattractive way at the not-quite thanks, and counters, “You brought something back to me in tact, Bond. Call it positive reinforcement.”
“I did try to get her blown up by Basque separatists.”
Q blinks once. “The ETA is barely violent these days, especially so far east, and both you and the car have GPS. I know perfectly well you were miles clear of any possible trouble.”
By the time James gets his head around this—quickly, but not quickly enough—Q is jogging awkwardly toward two minions at a bench against the far wall. James suspects he should be irritated that his Quartermaster stalked him on possible-retirement, but he’s been subject to MI-6 a long time, and Q has trusted him above and beyond the call of duty, more than once.
He leaves his car in capable hands, and sets to wandering Q Branch in search of toys to appropriate while its master is otherwise occupied.
*
He is sent to Osaka in search of an off-the-grid, unnetworked computer, or, rather, of the drive inside. Q explains this to him at a level of comprehension more suitable to a sixth form dropout. James almost protests offense, but suspects that almost anyone is so far below Q’s own level of comprehension that he honestly can’t tell the difference between addressing a sixteen-year-old and a reasonably intelligent, highly trained MI-6 operative. Also, Q’s experience with double-Os has been heavily weighted toward 009 and 003, who James would generally prefer not to address at all. He can hardly be blamed for underestimating.
Q is in his ear for most of Osaka, and confirms what the days around M’s death had suggested: Q is good at this, at home-front support, as good as he is with the tech. He was the right hire, which is not really a surprise—he was M’s hire. Of course he’s right.
Osaka is both completely run of the mill—smooth but not too smooth, mission accomplished with a little collateral, none of it human, and three enemy kills—and profoundly strange. It is his first actual mission, sanctioned by a living commander and supported by MI-6, since he brought Silva back from China. He’s spent almost nine of the past ten months dead, grounded or on leave, and the remainder on assignments of a deeply personal nature—deeply personal to M, more than himself, but he is aware that the difference became negligible long ago. His last run of the mill mission ended with him presumed dead but he’s not bothered by that. It’s almost a year past, ancient history. He’s collected a plenitude of near death experiences over the years and he doesn’t dwell on them.
He doesn’t know why it all feels strange, and it chafes at him like sand in his socks. Finally, three days in, Q murmurs, “I run missions very slightly differently to my predecessors, 007. All the agents felt it, only the rest got over it a year ago. In that time you’ve had four days’ experience with me to adjust. You’ll get used to it.”
James hadn’t noticed a difference, consciously, but he does now, the little things—when there is and is not someone in his ear; the order in which information is given; even, broadly, the way the mission is framed—and the strangeness is gone. No more sand in his socks. M would roll her eyes.
*
He doesn’t report to Q when he leaves Mallory’s office. He delivers the Osaka drive to a less-than-impressed minion in the outer offices, but keeps his gear in favour of a note inviting Q to retrieve it himself:
Gun in working order, gear in
intended number of pieces.
Calls for celebration.
My flat, 8pm.
He arrives at his flat around six, to find a note under his door:
No points for keeping it in tact
if you don’t give it back.
My office, 8am.
James bins the note, pours a little scotch, and spends a moment trying to recall whether it’s the first time anyone’s refused an invitation. Even Moneypenny shows up. He decides there was a mark in Italy, years ago, poor judgement on his part: she’d hated her husband as much as he’d guessed, but was more Catholic than he’d counted on. Heavy jewels, plunging neckline, probably beautiful but not a memorable face, and he’s fairly certain he did get as far as asking, and he’s fairly certain she never came around. Little matter.
His television isn’t actually attached to any network, and his only DVD is ten seconds long and in a box with charred photographs, yellowed papers. He doesn’t have any real books. James sits in his single chair, sips his scotch, toasts the world’s ugliest china bulldog, and considers his next move.
*
Q Branch is already buzzing by 8am. It’s more or less buzzing most times of day; it’s always early evening somewhere in the world. But it’s properly busy when James makes it in, long since full to brimming again after its short quiet, hiding from the new regime; after its shorter stillness, when C had managed to fire almost everyone but Q. Probably Q was fired as well. Mortgage or not, James strongly suspects his presence has little to do with his pay check.
Q is expecting him, though James knows he doesn’t monitor his surveillance. Q only ever expects him when he’s been told to come. It’s another of his favourite things about him.
Q is wearing his funny brown suit, which is a lot less funny than the cardigans he wore when James met him. Moneypenny says it was M, needing him taken seriously at hearings. James personally suspects that it hasn’t worked. Wrapped in wool, he looked like a joke, but absurd enough in these halls to be some sort of alien intelligence. Now, almost well suited, narrow hips and colourful tie, he looks brilliant but still a lifetime too young for his station. It will be decades before his appearance speaks for him like his work does. James keeps these thoughts to himself, because it’s not his place, and because the suits are an improvement in all other respects. He likes soft well enough, but he prefers sharp. His quartermaster has the most remarkably long, long legs.
Q’s expression is mild—almost always—but there’s a little apprehension. He’s not quite sure what 007 is playing at, James thinks.
He raises an eyebrow. “Do you have something for me, Bond?”
James hands over his case—gun, compact explosive, two remaining grenades and a device for the disruption of magnetic fields all in tact—without argument. Q responds best to a little cooperation. “Thought I might lure you from your cats for an evening.”
“Why?”
“Need there be a reason?”
“Contrary to reputation, Bond, you aren’t one for entirely wanton destruction.”
James gives that an eyebrow.
Q sort of huffs, quietly. “The only person you’ve had to your flat is Ms Moneypenny.”
“Which puts you in excellent company.”
Q frowns, pauses with his fingertips on the docile grenades, then turns to face Bond, shifting half a step closer in the motion. There isn’t the edge of panic that was there in Switzerland, but a similar sense that Q is bracing himself, and the same deep, unconscious sincerity. “I may be entirely mistaken, Bond, but in case I’m not. I avoid casual sex with colleagues. I’m afraid I’m not as skilled as most agents at balancing the personal and the professional in that respect. If your intentions are—in that direction, you’re wasting your time.”
The eye contact holds for another beat, and then Q sort of nods minutely, and turns back to his work. James nods too, equanimous. “Fair enough.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
It’s an odd conversation, but James is becoming used to odd conversations with Q. He thinks it might be one of his favourite things about him. Besides, he has at least a moderate self-awareness. He knows he likes the ones who don’t come right away. He’s not even opposed to a long-ish game. His interest has been acknowledged. Q will appear in his bed out of nowhere soon enough.
*
Q does not appear in his bed out of nowhere, or at all. Q gets on with his job, continues to flirt at precisely the low level he has almost since they met, and demonstrates no awareness that any sort of game is in motion. It is possible that James has missed his window, he thinks. There was a moment, after they met, after Q broke orders for him, when the flirting would have peaked, spurred by adrenaline and its aftermath, and it all would have fallen into place. He wasn't in the mood, at the time, and now it's impossible to start over. It's always tricky, finding a way in for Act II.
Nonetheless, James wants him, which doesn’t happen often: his interest is rarely piqued, in recent decades, and when it is, he has what he wants and forgets about it. He doesn’t look for sex much outside of work. He’s more physically fit than most twenty-year-olds, but sexually he’s still an aging man. His libido, the physical side of it all, is well-satisfied in the field, and he’s seduced enough models and trophy wives to sate most curiosities. He’s fucked men for the job too, but in a fraction of the numbers. It’s not that, though; he could pick up a skinny, pretty young man in a bar somewhere, if he wanted to. It’s just Q.
It’s just a want, a trifle, and James ignores it.
He almost calls Madeleine one night, too early to sleep in the midst of a week un-deployed, lonely for someone else’s nostalgia for the same places, for light arguments about vodka, and casual brilliance and someone to see through his bravado. She made her position clear, though, and he calls Q instead.
“007?”
“Q.”
A brief pause. “You’re home.”
“Should I not be?”
“I was afraid you’d absconded into trouble again.”
“You wound me, Q.”
There is the very faint sound of typing down the line, constant. “Do you need something?”
Bond almost answers the truth, ‘company’, but it would sound pathetic in a way that it’s not. He hums lowly instead. “Are you still at work?”
“Yes.”
He clicks his tongue, just for how he knows it will rile his quartermaster. “It’s important to sleep, Q. Eat. Enjoy yourself, even. Mental health reqs, all that. I could report you to M.”
“M was here two minutes ago. Was there a reason you called?”
“Are you busy?”
“Always. 007.”
“Someone in trouble?”
“No, but if I don’t finish decoding this, someone will be, and I’ll be pulled away before I’m finished for the fourth time today.”
“Best not disturb you, then.”
James can sort of hear Q’s expression of not-really-disbelief. Not really exasperation, either, not quite.
“Goodnight, Q.”
He hangs up before Q can ask again.
*
He could never have stuck with his sort-of retirement, James realises, five weeks back, because he didn’t love his Dr Swann for her beauty and her brilliance. Not even for those and her confidence or her honesty or her independence. He loved her, he realises, for all those things, and because she was lethal, brutal, hardened, not altogether but enough. He loves women who will kill, and do it well, when it’s ugly as well as when it’s elegant. He likes the rest a great deal, but he loved the brutality, and she didn’t. She was running from that part of herself, probably wisely, but running nonetheless.
The woman he loved was never on offer.
He thinks about inviting Eve around—Eve who is beautiful, confident, independent, and terrifically violent, and very clever, and even fairly honest, for him—but it’s because he wants to make love to her, and she has a partner now.
He watches a documentary, instead; he properly installed his TV weeks ago, when Q got sick of his boredom and threatened to send a minion to do it. It’s about the far north of the world, mostly Russian forest, and he watches it with half a bottle of scotch, and goes to bed before it’s done.
*
Q is probably the most dangerous person Bond knows.
Q knows this from the start—so does M, the one who hired him and the one who followed.
James does not know this from the start, or a year later, but he begins to know, slowly.
He knows first, before a year, well before, that Q is terrifically dangerous in cyberspace. He has only inklings of what this means, but he understands its significance. Q could destroy a man, easily, in all the trappings of life but body and mind. Mind, too, perhaps; easy enough to drive a man mad, with control of the rest. And once the mind is gone, what matter the body?
He comprehends toward a year, back at work more than a month, that Q is as dangerous as M, perhaps even as dangerous as his M was, alive. He can destroy a man himself through his keyboard, yes, but he can also build the tool that will actually tear him apart, choose a man to wield it, and execute his will as surely as if the hand were his own. M orders an execution, but Q will, if called for, decide it should be slow poison, choose the poison, build a delivery system, guide the hand. He’s in the ear of his reaper, as often as not, and often looking through a camera somewhere too. There’s fortitude in that: in being ready to choose ugliness when necessary, and being ready to see it through.
He realises, suddenly and not at all, six months back from Spain, that he adores Q—not because he is the most dangerous person he knows, but the realisations do come together. He’s picking up equipment, out to Abuja in six hours, and Q is remotely borrowing a drone that doesn’t strictly belong to him, to deliver some sort of ammunition to 004, because, as he remarks, ‘I would very much like to watch you kick Mr Armand mostly to death, then piss on him before you break his neck with your hands, but it wouldn’t be terribly professional when you can kill him from outside and avoid tipping off the rest.’
Q is terrified of airplanes, hates operating in crowds and prefers to be enthroned in his basement, but he is lethal, and not in the abstract, distant, naïve way he probably was as a teenage hacker. Q understands the same violence that James does, but with a thousand times the intellect (and a lot less physical prowess). Q knows his own worth and will stand to it; he’s beautiful and sinuous and sharp and utterly brilliant and fiercely independent; fiercely everything, anything, really, beneath the mild manners. Q is helplessly honest, utterly open and sincere, for reasons and in ways James doesn’t know at all and doubts he could comprehend.
James wants him, wants to take him away and have reckless adventures full of excess, wants to kiss him in the empty alcove off the garage, wants to fall asleep and wake up with him, another day and another and another. It’s not by any means a new feeling, but it’s not one he’s had often. It’s not, he suspects, one he’s ever had without substantial delusions about the person in front of him.
Probably he’s deluded now, about Q.
Still.
*
Abuja turns into Mogadishu, of course, of all the bloody awful places, and then, thankfully, into Cairo, which (like anywhere else on Earth) is vastly preferable, and then, oddly, into Tbilisi, not for any relationship with any Russians (or Georgians) but because the mark’s brother is showing at fashion week there.
He gets home in one piece, a little bruised, not all that much blood. His gear doesn’t get home in one piece, but Q should really be used to that.
He leans against Q’s work surface like he’s not in the way, and offers, “I hear you don’t enjoy casual sex. How about dinner?”
Q blinks, almost says something—James is irritatingly uncertain what—and then changes to, “What about it?”
“Would you accompany me to dinner?”
Q frowns at him, a proper frown—he’s actually annoyed, rather than merely resigned to his intransigence. “I told you I don’t mess around with colleagues, Bond. Don’t make me tell you again.”
“Who said anything about ‘messing around’?”
There’s no less honesty than ever, but the openness is gone from Q’s expression. “You want to take me to dinner as a colleague.”
“As a friend, perhaps.”
Q doesn’t look away, for a whole three seconds of silence—he doesn’t even try to work at the same time.
“Alright. I’m busy tonight. But tomorrow, if nothing comes up.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
“Stop smirking.”
“Wouldn’t dare.”
“007.”
“Yes, Q?”
“Get off my bench.”
James grins—it is not a smirk, and there is a difference—all the way back to ground level.
Terrified employees jump out of his way in the halls.
*
Q cancels dinner the following evening, but manages the day after that.
Q is not at all convinced they will have anything to talk about in a restaurant full of people without security clearance.
Bond is very good at conversation.
Dinner is delicious, they split dessert, and they split two bottles of wine, both of which go three-quarters to Bond. After dessert and bourbon, they say yes to tea, which James is not sure he’s ever done before.
When the tea is done and the waiter is on his way again, Q says, "You’re not paying my bill."
James sips the last of his real drink. “There’s your mortgage to think of.”
Q snorts.
“And your cats. I’d hate to leave them starving.”
Q rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, just barely. “This isn’t a date.”
“Of course not.”
Q appropriates the car and makes James take a cab home, because apparently a martini, nine glasses of wine and two of cognac are too much to drive. James argues that an acceptable level of inebriation for driving (and shooting, flying, gambling, parasailing, breaking and entering…) on mission should leave him more than capable at home. Q points out that 007 has no ‘acceptable level of inebriation’ on the job, and instead does almost anything regardless of any state of incapacity. Bond points out that he’d never get too drunk to do his job. Q suggests that this is only because he’s mostly too alcoholic to feel the effects. Bond suggests that this means he’s perfectly capable of driving home.
Bond is right, but Q wins anyway.
*
Bond saunters into Q Branch the following morning with a very subtle spring in his step, followed immediately by an utterly convincing sobriety as he enters Q’s lab.
Q glances up and then down again. “007.”
Bond leans into Q’s space. “The cab driver was a Chinese spy. I had to dispatch him to keep him from reporting my address. I haven’t told M yet.”
Q appears unperturbed. “Do you know how much surveillance I have on your flat?”
“I know you don’t watch it yourself.”
“I have great confidence in my staff.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t tell you about the cabbie.”
“Your car’s in the garage, Bond.”
He doesn’t look up more than a moment, but he’s smiling.
*
James Bond is not, frankly, used to putting effort into seduction outside of work, let alone doing so for more than a day or two. Nor is he entirely convinced that he wants to; he feels like he wants to, but it doesn’t seem very reasonable, and he doesn’t have a great track record with feelings.
He goes to a bar, holsters his gun at his ankle, folds his jacket over his arm. He picks up a skinny, pretty thing, pale and dark haired, a grad student in something engineering, smart but not as smart as Q, almost as pretty, sort of. Better dressed. He lies about the proximity of his flat, says he can’t wait to drive to the mark’s tiny subsidised rooms across town, procures a very nice hotel room before the boy—probably almost thirty, he should really say ‘man’—can properly argue, and makes love to him elaborately and ruthlessly. Fucks him with ankles round his shoulders. Then, when the boy’s clearly distracted by the strain on his hips, rolls off, pulls at a pliant body, presses knobbly, bare vertebrae into his chest and fucks him spooned together with legs tangled and his hands on sharp hips, bare ribs.
It’s good sex, everyone involved has a great time and in the morning, he still wants Q.