Chapter Text
Very few individuals relished visiting Hyde Park on its fog-ridden, windy and harsh days.
If during his 'days off' James Bond chose to do just that – to bear the brash scrape of wind at his cheeks and press on through the curling fog that coated the park on the average London day – it was near-guaranteed that sooner or later a certain young man would make an appearance at Queen Elizabeth Gates, too, all swallowed up in a mocha-coloured anorak as usual. Or sometimes he'd wear that charcoal sports jacket, the one that suited his grey eyes unapologetically well.
Every time, Q would make steady strides to the same park bench and proceed to take a seat there, rain or shine. Some days he carried curry take-away (always from the same place) and sifted through it as the sun swept low between the lime trees. Others he sat for mere minutes under the downpour before rising again and meandering home in the opposite direction he'd come. Torrential conditions or worse were all that could keep him away – winter's flurries in particular left his eyeglasses practically opaque.
“Developing a routine is something I would advise even civilians against, Q,” James had said once back at HQ.
“I would advise you break your habit of following me, 007.”
Bond's spoilt-child personality often emerged around these moments. The fact remained that you couldn't have lucky number seven without several other 00s to count that high, not to mention more to bring up the rear. And Q wasn't simply James' quartermaster – he certainly was not anyone else's either, not by a long shot, but the fact remained that Q had other responsibilities.
Even when Bond had 'down time,' which routinely involved Moneypenny threatening to stick him with a house arrest bracelet/shock collar hybrid she'd fashioned herself, that didn't always mean his Generation Y counterpart was forced to surface aboveground as well. "Your lives have never been fair, 007," Eve had said. "Why start now?"
After missions like Skyfall (or like Istanbul, if James hadn't taken the initiative himself), regulation dictated both men be put out of commission for 48 hours, more if superiors saw fit; they were a package deal, a team, and if James had gone through hell Q was the one who'd scratched and clawed to retrieve him from its depths. These days M strictly interpreted 'out of commission' as off the premises, so that any stays in the hospital wing still meant enduring two days of fresh air. When he'd first explained those specifications to Bond after his return from Scotland the agent had already been in restraints due to severe night terrors; M had been saved from bodily harm purely by chance.
Of course, in retrospect Bond had been saved from causing himself much greater harm. Later that week in a visit at his bedside Moneypenny hinted that M didn't have any concrete evidence (he wouldn't find any either, she mentioned under her breath), but he sensed there were inaccuracies in Bond's records. The unspoken agreement there was that for 007, being subjected to bedrest may have been intolerable, but being reevaluated and deemed resolutely unfit for fieldwork would have been a deathblow.
“I might also advise you use the Underground after dark, Q, if you're so averse to the rising price of cab fares. You know, rather than keeping the company of a nonce or two in one of the pitch-black stretches of the park.”
“I strongly suggest you calculate my chances of such encounters occurring then compare them to the chance of an automobile accident – or a metro incident, 007. Now, that's adding probabilities there, understood? And don't forget to use the most up-to-date figures possible – I seem to recall MI6 itself has a track record with the rail system you'll have to take into account. It’s not that I’m incapable of taking the Tube, I’d really just rather not.”
Bond had sighed then, which had been... unsettling. “Consider it, will you please?”
Not once had James seen Q pull out any sort of device while he sat on that bench. Not his laptop with its glare-resistant screen protector, not the tablet that never left his elbow at headquarters, not even a flimsy e-reader.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. He'd seen Q extract his mobile from his pocket a handful of times, prompted by alerts specific to work that went off concurrently with James' own mobile as he sat across the path. Only in these moments would Q relent and catch Bond's gaze as they both stood, and he'd acknowledge the agent existed only long enough for them to synch up their footfalls; no time was wasted on discourse, this was what they did. When they were subsequently released once again from their roles in SIS, they would fall back into place. It seemingly never occurred to James that however perplexing Q's behaviour during these suspensions, his own defied reasonable or unreasonable explanations alike.
On the single occasion Bond had witnessed Q take a call that was decidedly not matched by echoes in his own pocket, it’d been far more of a learning experience than Q probably would have liked. The way he had pursed his lips at the sight of the mobile’s screen, eyes glassy with something bitter like defeat... Q had waited until a rise in foot traffic could carry him away, barely hiding amongst the coats and jackets. James had exercised unfamiliar restraint, knowing such a transparent opportunity was much more likely indicative of a distracted surrender; it was not the arch invitation to follow that James envisioned receiving at times.
One May afternoon shortly after Bond had returned from a fortnight undercover unearthing the Peruvian cartel responsible for kidnapping three British expatriates in the past year, the secret agent sat on a bench of his own, legs sprawled in front of him to let the weak warmth of sunlight blossom in the dark twilled material of his trousers. After not one but two intensive physical examinations, the extent of his injuries was deemed limited to a busted ankle, a long but shallow knife wound along his left bicep – “Off by a mile,” James had smirked as he toyed with the mugs on Q's desk, eyes absent of focus – and a gash above his brow that remained a vibrant scarlet under the stitches, noticeable even from meters away.
Q had been told that James had passed every last physical and psychological appraisal he went through (like property, like an asset, like a depreciating investment, like a bleeding Aston Martin). But Tanner had passed along stats that outlined the amount of ammunition Bond had used (of the SIS' provisions alone, as they didn’t even know what other weapons had been discharged), as well as the transcript of Bond's psychological evaluation with everything but numbers and strategic explanations blacked out.
At best, the quartermaster could try and convince himself he was being handed such documents as a messenger; the ammunitions record would be needed upstairs to be accounted for with finance, the copy of the evaluation for Q to pass on to his subordinates in order to assess tactical efficiency, their weaponry's strengths and shortcomings. But Tanner knew how to use a scanner (though he still preferred the fax, the perverse bastard) and furthermore he knew Q wasn't being paid to act as anyone's personal assistant.
With stealth that really wasn't remotely necessary, Q had added the papers to the disarray inside his satchel as he packed up for his days-long 'holiday,' destined to consist of neither rest nor relaxation, it seemed, this time around. He had no reason to believe his own position was on the line, really. But a dim trembling in his gut agreed that it seemed it would no longer be considered an unrecoverable loss to MI6 if 007 was deemed redundant – and yet, in that imagined situation Q could only articulately describe his own work as seeming to matter much less.
So there Q sat in that damned charcoal coat with its sleeves that were just a millimetre too long for comfort, across from the man whose termination, as it were, it suddenly seemed Q's job to prevent. And to further complicate the succession of thoughts firing in his mind, Q truly could not decide whether he felt this task existed as part of his vocation or of his calling, so to speak. He could not help but wonder what had caused those two to feel like such crucially disparate things.
“I cannot help but be curious,” Bond had opened once, “as to what draws you to that location above all others.” After the single attempt he’d made weeks before at taking a seat alongside his quartermaster under a light February snowfall, which had been thwarted by a look made only icier by the thinning of Q’s pale lips, James had since kept all such queries to office hours.
“I distinctly recall your bragging ‘there is nothing James Bond cannot do,'” Q had parried. “Knowing you’re a man who holds his own word to a high standard, I suggest you try harder to tamp down that curiosity.”
What James had wanted to ask was why a thousand other things. Setting had never held much weight in his mind: just because he studied at Cambridge didn’t mean the academia wasn’t comprised of twats, just because he’d awoken in Dubai didn’t mean he couldn’t fall asleep in The Hague, just because he was given a more spacious office didn’t mean he’d be inclined to spend any more time in it, and just because he came from some place didn’t mean he would ever want to go back.
So the very last question that came to his mind – and thus, the one he felt pushed to ask – was Why there? He’d have much preferred Why the bloody hell do you smoke Café Crèmes? Why an indoors profession? Why no umbrella? Why green curry, not red or yellow? Why not that phone call? Why no gadgets? Why not me?
But clearly Q did not feel the same way. Setting was of the utmost importance to the man who relied on CCTV and satellite nav resources, who had calculatedly seated them before The Fighting Temeraire for their first rendezvous, who ordered the same curry from the same place (that sat amongst a row of identical curry places), who always sat at the same confounded bench in Hyde Park for no discernable reason whatsoever.