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“It’s alright, you know. If there have to be others. If you have to, well…”
“I don’t,” Bond says in a tone that is final. “There are other methods besides guns and sex. I can be quite creative, you know,” He smiles, turning on his side and propping up his head with his hand.
“Yes, I’ve gathered that.”
Bond trails his fingers down the neverending length of Q’s spine and looks at his moving hand pensively. It's sun-damaged, rough with scars and calloused with use, the opposite of the pale, silky skin beneath it. “No-one’s ever demanded I whore myself out for Queen and Country. The job is shit most of the time, so I’ve had fun where I can. It’s an efficient way of getting intel, but it’s never the only way to get into a locked room.”
Q hums. “I’d still much rather you cosy up to some oil heiress to get the job done than come home riddled with bullet holes.”
Bond hesitates before replying. “It’s not what it seems, most of the time. You’re playing a part, but there’s a bit of yourself in the room every time. There has to be, because the best lie is truth.” He strokes his thumb over a high cheekbone, feeling the slight roughness of the stubble beneath his palm. “I don’t want to lend out the parts of myself that belong to you. There are things worse than bullets.”
“Oh,” breathes Q. His eyes turn glassy, and Bond can feel the heat of a blush bloom across the cheek he’s touching. “Do you know that’s probably the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me?”
Bond lifts an eyebrow. “What, that they didn’t want to sleep with anybody else? Your bar for romance is subterranean, Q.” Q tries to reward him with a slap to the chest, but Bond catches his hand before it can make contact. He rolls them over until he’s got Q pinned beneath him. “I’d be more than willing to raise it a little.”
—
Turkey, again.
In general, he tries not to let his memories tarnish whole countries, but it’s hard here. Along the coast prowls a black dog, reminding him of ghosts he’s not so much set aside as run away from. He feels the heat of midday on the wall he’s scaling and wishes forcefully that Eve had shot him in some other country, somewhere that wasn’t such a boon for international espionage. Australia, perhaps. No-one ever got up to anything much in Australia.
Yet here he is, in Turkey, hauling himself up a building to place a bug in the shoddy apartment of one of his target’s henchmen. It’s a fancy little thing from Q Branch, deceptively unassuming as most of the tech is now.
“You needn’t work too hard, Bond,” calls Tanner, through the comms. “Aliyev has a mistress. No doubt she’d respond well to your usual methods.”
Ah, yes, the mistress. Bond’s lip curls in wry amusement. Five foot seven, slight, blonde, and a rabid social climber. He’s spotted her during no fewer than three previous missions, clinging to the arm of some arms dealer or another. Even if he hadn’t been keeping promises to Q, she’s a bad idea. Some days, it’s best not to be remembered.
“Is that an order?”
“Merely a suggestion, we’re an intelligence agency, not a brothel,” says Tanner, mildly. “I’m simply pointing out your options.”
“Thank you. I think I’ll decide my options for myself.” Bond forces back a grunt as he makes it through the apartment window. The job takes no longer than ten minutes and all he is left with afterwards is a vague tightness in his shoulders and thighs. It's no worse than a day at the gym or a wild night in someone’s bed.
On the drive to his next location, he smiles more than he doesn't.
—
“They drowned her in motor oil. Covered her in it and left her in my hotel room.”
The second he speaks it all out loud, he wishes he hadn’t. Q looks green with nausea. An elegant hand trembles against his mouth. “Oh, god.”
“I haven’t…since I’ve stopped fucking people on the job, none of them have died.”
“James, it wasn’t—”
—your fault. Except Bond has never quite managed to believe that.
“Don’t,” huffs Bond, not unkindly. “Don’t.” He gathers Q into his lap and buries his face into the soft, warm skin of Q’s neck. Minutes go by without a sound from either of them. Their breathing evens out into the same shared rhythm and for a perfect moment, Bond even manages to forget the constant, all-consuming fear that this might one day be taken from him.
—
M hands him a file labelled Top Secret and Bond itches to read the contents. He has always enjoyed the fresh scent of a new job.
“I want this done quietly, Bond. No pyrotechnics. Bates has a wife, introduces herself as Coco Ryder to most,” M pauses, repressing whatever quip is on the tip of his tongue, and Bond thinks with amusement this is why I could never be a bureaucrat. “Seems your type. He’s playing at a poker tournament in the evening, which should give you a few hours to get in and out of his hotel room.”
He takes the file with him to Q Branch, and watches, amused, as Q tries to hide his reaction to the name Coco Ryder in front of Tanner. He doesn’t really succeed in keeping his derisive snort to himself, but then neither does Tanner.
Sixteen hours later, Bond enters a hotel in Aruba. It takes him less than five minutes to locate the fifth floor sprinklers and force an override. The deluge forces the floor’s occupants out of their rooms, in various states of undress, and Bond waits behind a staff entrance door until he sees Coco leave her husband’s room for the hotel stairs. Dressed in a pink silk dress, she has a bare face and un-styled hair. Beautiful, thinks Bond. She strikes him as the type of woman who seems forever effervescent, even away from a captivated audience and getting pelted by the hotel sprinklers. Undoubtedly, she would have distracted more than a few men around the casino tables. Bond takes a second to imagine the spectacle of her dipping low and pressing a kiss to her husband's cheek before hopping silently over to the hotel door and squeezing in before it closes.
“Sprinklers? Hardly subtle, 007.”
At the sound of the suppressed smile in his Quartermaster’s voice, his mental image of Ms Ryder seems to go up in smoke, replaced by a much more potent memory of Q smirking behind a mug of tea.
“Now, now. I never question your methods.”
“You’d have to understand my methods to question them,” retorts Q, voice as crisp as ever.
When he hands a pristine hard drive to Q thirty-six hours later, his thanks is a wide, beaming smile and the delightful sight of Q moving around his work station with full, burning curiosity. It’s a battle to drag himself to M’s office on time for a debrief.
M flips through the transcripts of the mission. “I did specify quiet, did I not, 007?”
“I avoided pyrotechnics, Sir.”
The title is as much an afterthought as ever.
Mallory gives him an inscrutable look. “Let’s not pretend it couldn’t have been quieter.”
Bond spares a thought for the women who have washed up on white-sand beaches and in garish hotel rooms, tortured and murdered in hideous ways. He thinks too about the look on Q’s face when he’s heartbroken. It's a look Bond has seen only once, after he walked away with Madeleine and a DB5, and it's one he never wants to put there again.
“Sometimes the quiet ways end up being the loudest.”
—
“Do you ever get tired of it?” Q asks, as they are both lying on the floor in front of Q’s fireplace, legless from too much food and booze.
“Sometimes. It’s not the women. At least, not all of them. It’s what we reduce them to — tools for our own end.” Bond turns his head to face Q’s and he is rewarded with startling green eyes up close. “You don’t get to know anyone as a real person. Half of them aren’t real people anyway.”
“Did you ever try? Getting to know someone, that is.”
“Once.” Thinking of an underwater cage and a striking red dress, Bond suddenly feels all the crags in his face and all the twinges of hurt in his body. “It didn’t work out.”
—
“I’m noticing a pattern here, 007.”
M glances down to the file on his latest target; a curvy brunette whose bubbly image belies her danger and cruelty. Bond had killed three of her nastiest colleagues to get to her, though he’d been strongly advised to use quieter, more intimate infiltration methods. Bond hardly feels bad about it; they’d been into human trafficking and were likely to die in an ensuing explosion anyway.
“If you have a problem with my methods, just say so.” Bond takes a moment to straighten in his chair before adding, “Sir.”
“It’s your body count that concerns me, Bond. There are other ways to achieve the same outcome. Forgive me for any embarrassment I’m about to cause, but I said once that this was a young man’s game, and I stand by it. If you need pharmaceutical help for certain…parameters…of the job, our medical staff are very discreet.”
It is a Herculean task for Bond to keep his features schooled into nonchalance. “I was once assured this was an intelligence agency, not a brothel.”
M sighs and stands to pour himself another drink. God knows the poor bastard must need it.
“Don’t be willfully obtuse. You’ve made an entire career out of ignoring the official line on things. Why stop now?”
“Perhaps it’s because the unofficial orders have suddenly become rather official.” He doesn’t wait for a response before he stands up and straightens his tie. “If that’s all, Sir?”
“For now,” M turns to look him in the eye. “The ageing process happens to us all, Bond. It needn't be an indignity.”
“Good thing I feel perfectly dignified, then,” Bond says, striding out of M’s office and leaving the door wide open. The whole situation leaves him in a bloody good mood. His smile to Moneypenny on the way out is wide and genuine, and it drags a surprised laugh out of her.
When he enters Q’s flat half an hour later, the scent of a heavy beef stew makes his mouth water. Q gives him a smile that seems to suffuse the whole room, as well as Bond himself, with warmth.
“How did it go with Mallory?”
“Oh, you’ll like this,” Bond grins. He wraps himself around the familiar form of Q’s back and receives a hot, open-mouthed kiss against his jaw in return. “He tried to give me a talk about the little blue pill.”
An aborted choking sound comes from Q’s throat. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“Our medical staff are very discreet, apparently.”
“Oh, God. He’s your boss! He’s my boss! I won’t be able to look him in the eye ever again.” Q closes the lid on the simmering pot in front of him and tries, unsuccessfully, to bat Bond’s hands away from the top of his trousers. “No, no, that’s it,” he laughs, slightly hysterical. “You’ll have to go back to shagging daftly-named women again, lest he turn up in Q Branch requesting I make some sort of libido-enhancing prophylactic.”
“As long as I’m the test subject,” Bond murmurs, peppering kisses up Q's neck.
Q groans at that, though it’s closer to a moan, really. This thing between them is not new, and yet they are still both drawn to each other like a match to kindling. Perhaps it’s due to all the time they spend apart, but Bond prefers to think it’s just them; two people so compatible and genuinely fond of each other that they cannot resist the pull of sex and intimacy on any given day.
“You’re awful. Dinner will burn,” Q complains, though even as he says it, he is turning off the hob.
“Then let’s order in. I’ve got a sudden urge to prove my virility.” He bites at a spot below Q’s ear, and he knows by the way Q turns boneless that he’s won.
—
“I always thought I’d retire when this happened.” Bond says, apropos of nothing, as they’re sitting on Q’s couch one evening.
“Hm?” Q asks, looking up from his classic science fiction book. It has a hideous cover, even now Bond can’t restrain a side eye at it. “When what happened?
“If I ever fell for someone again.” At his admission, Q’s eyes soften. “I didn’t think I could have this and be in the field.”
Vesper had been deeply afraid of the realities of his job. He'd never minded giving it up for her. After all, he had experienced fear too, in that room with Le Chiffre, tied to a chair and getting his manhood beaten bloody. That mission had been an awful job, but he’d been too green to realise it wasn’t the norm. He could have — would have — walked away then, happy and ignorant of all the good he could do as an agent if he's kept at it. The same sentiment had not been true on the second go-round. His time with Madeleine had been soured by boredom and a thousand what-ifs.
“Do you want to retire?” asks Q.
“I’ll have to, soon.” The thought is no longer as repulsive as it had once been. He knows the tenderness of nights like this awaits him after the job is done. He’ll get to watch Q spread blueprints over the kitchen table and mindlessly eat a bag of sweets as he reads over them. The difference is that he can do all of it now, and Q will still be in his ear when he's away, waiting for him to come home. It’s a cliche, but he feels less of an orphan to the world when he knows what he’s coming back to. “But no, not now. Do you want me to?”
Q laces their hands together. “I want you to do what makes you happy.”
—
Of course, when Bond does give up the field, there’s a fucking retirement party. The standard thing, apparently, when one retires from the agency. He had argued that he was a Double-0 and the usual case hardly applied, but Moneypenny had insisted with unrestrained glee.
“Go on, you’ve got to make a speech,” she smiles, after Mallory finishes the series of thinly-veiled insults masquerading as his own speech.
“I bloody well do not.”
“You bloody well do! You’re the first Double-0 to ever retire, you’ve got to set some sort of standard.”
Bond dislikes being the centre of attention. He is a man of the shadows, and he cannot remember the last time he actually got up in front of a crowd to say something worthy of hearing. No doubt it’s a memory worth the heavy suppression it’s been burdened with.
He cobbles together some bullshit about honour and Queen and Country and forgets what he’s said as soon as it’s out of his mouth. It must be a half-decent speech, though, because he manages to get the kind of raucous applause that only happens in England after several very strong drinks. In all honesty, he’s too busy looking at Q to appreciate it properly. The Quartermaster is beaming, his eyes watering with happy tears and his cheeks flushed the colour of strawberries. Sod it, thinks Bond. He grasps Q’s hand and pulls him close, taking his drink from him and placing it on a table well out of reach.
“Oh, hello,” laughs Q.
“Hello,” smiles Bond. He takes Q’s face between his hands, feeling the dampness of tears and the warmth of too many drinks, and kisses him like they’re the only people in the room. He can hear half their audience go quiet with shock, while the other half whoop and whistle so loud that people in the street must hear it.
Q is breathing heavily when they part. His expression is soft with affection, the way it is when it’s just the two of them. Bond fights a possessive urge to hide it from the rest of the bar.
“Is this another attempt to prove your virility, then?” Q teases.
“I thought my first attempt was more than successful,” Bond replies, grinning when he hears a rare giggle. He presses a kiss to Q’s unkempt mop of hair and admits, softly, “I was sick of keeping secrets. You don’t deserve to be hidden away.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Gareth Mallory nearly drop his drink. Bond turns and tips his glass, giving the man a roguish wink.
—
“Sir, you don’t think…” Tanner trails off, wide eyed.
“No, the Quartermaster is a shocking liar.”
Bond has forgotten them now, in favour of paying attention to Q. The Quartermaster blushes red, laughing into Bond’s shoulder and smiling wider than Mallory has ever seen him smile (even after last month’s doubling of the Q Branch budget). He feels suddenly like he’s intruding on something very private, and it is then he knows for certain that whatever is between the Quartermaster and his retired agent isn't a new thing. It’s been under everyone's nose the whole time and he — the head of Britain’s house of international espionage — has missed the biggest bit of workplace gossip for years.
“Surely…” Tanner trails off again, watching the beaming smile on Moneypenny’s face. “Eve, for heaven’s sake, tell me you didn’t know about this.”
“I didn’t know about this,” she replies.
“You’re lying.”
“If you say so,” she says, smoothly, moving off to congratulate Bond, grabbing a new glass of champagne en-route.
The next time a waiter comes around to ask if he requires a drink, Mallory thinks about a conversation involving a little blue pill and orders a whole bottle of scotch.