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It strikes Q as more than a little ironic that MI6, broker of wars between independent nations big and small, interceder in conflicts megalomaniacal and righteous both, should have decided to implement a pronouns-in-bio policy. Sure, they have to do something to restore their public image after getting blown up rather embarrassingly, but couldn't they just invest in a striking new headquarters on the River Thames?
Doesn’t it all just sum up the state of the world in 2014, he thinks. Blow up whoever you like, permanently depose whichever democratically elected leader you fancy, and you’ll be next in line for a commendation, but Heaven forbid you might not format your email signature correctly, and suddenly you’re being threatened with a reprimand by Susan Cooper, she/her, from HR.
Still, empty gesture though it is on the part of management, it does also happen to coincide rather nicely with Q’s own recent New Year’s Resolution to make life easier for himself in any way possible, and by his own rudimentary calculations, not having to gently correct some well-meaning underling on the matter of uninvited neopronouns twice weekly will save him at least 10 minutes each day, which means that he can fit approximately three more cups of tea into his weekly schedule, which really isn’t something to be sniffed at.
So, despite his own well-documented trepidation about passing even a scrap of his personal information into the sweaty, grasping hands of Big Data, Q opens up his email settings without so much as a sigh of protest, types the requisite information into the bottom of his email signature, and presses save. Job done. Further questions neither required, nor invited.
Except, of course, that’s not what happens at all.
Afternoon has long given up the ghost and ceded territory to the evening. It’s not even four o’clock, and already it’s so utterly dark outside that Q feels jetlagged in his own office. It’s probably for the best that the aforementioned office doesn’t have any windows. At least with the constant, clinical white of the overhead strip-lights, you can fairly easily convince yourself that it’s still a decent hour, and you haven’t already wasted half your day trying to work out why M’s keyboard keeps typing in Mandarin.
As it is, Q only knows that it’s past lunchtime because the resident eldritch crockery-hound of MI6 has already come by to collect the five empty mugs that have been propagating novel ecosystems at the edge of Q’s desk. Ergo: it’s late, and by all rights Q should be thinking about going home before too long.
Except that Q works in a thankless job in the upper echelons of the British government, so he’s currently thinking primarily about whether he should just apply for permission to build himself some sort of granny annex in the basement of Q Branch and submit to the inevitable. He has fourteen forms to complete before 5pm, so that 006’s equipment can be signed off and taken out of consignment ready for the big Paris mission. There are sixty-three emails currently flashing red in his inbox, two of which look like they might be from Debenhams, meaning that his poor, long-suffering neighbour has probably just taken delivery of yet another pair of pyjamas that inevitably won’t even fit. To top it all off, Eve keeps sending him links to hot single men in his area via an encrypted chat she’s coerced him into routing into the office intranet, and it’s taking all of his willpower not to remotely shut down her computer.
Which means that he jumps a solid inch out of his chair when Bond clears his throat about two feet from his ear.
“Bond,” says Q, heart still racing. He checks that his chat window with Eve is closed, and surreptitiously turns his screen away. All the better to give Bond his full, undivided attention, not that he ever deserves or merits it. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Let me guess, something has exploded that oughtn’t to have exploded, or something that ought to have exploded has failed to do so in a timely fashion, and somehow that’s my problem, ten minutes before my official clocking out time.”
Bond stares at him, and Q feels himself grow hot under the collar. Having Bond’s full attention has always felt a little bit like stretching yourself out very thinly across a microscope slide. Months of doing whatever it is they’re doing haven’t lessened the effect even slightly.
“Nothing has exploded,” Bond says, eventually. He’s wearing the navy suit that Q helped pick out for the Moscow mission last year, although he seems to have had the fibreoptic seams removed from the lapels, which probably shouldn’t make Q’s stomach do the quaint little flip that it does, because Q isn’t a 12 year old girl, but that’s just his life these days, such as it is.
“Good.” Q clears his throat. “So, how may I be of assistance? Do let me know. Any time you like,” he adds, because he really doesn’t have all day, not least because most of the day has already been consigned to the great dustbin of time.
A moment passes. Q briefly considers opening up his chat with Eve and asking her to drag Bond out of his office, and only decides against it because that would mean revealing to Eve that Bond has his door code, and that would mean revealing—
Well. Everything else, mostly.
“Your email,” says Bond, eventually.
Something pings at the back of Q’s skull, but he can’t quite work out what it is. He’s emailed Bond three times today already, for his sins. The first was a reminder to return his modified Walther PPK so that Q can check the taser setting. The second was a reminder to read the first reminder. The third was an addendum to the reminder, informing Bond that any equipment he didn’t return would be taken out of his pay cheque. Q had experimented with a serif font in that email, just for the hell of it, but still, it seems a little strange that Bond should take quite such umbrage as to turn up here.
“What about it?”
“Your email signature,” says Bond. “I thought it was a typo at first, but then it turned up in the subsequent two, and I realised you’d put it there on purpose. When I compared it with one of M’s charming missives, I found that I had rather more questions than answers. He-slash-they.”
The penny drops.
“Ah,” says Q.
To Bond’s credit, he has the good grace to look entirely stoic about it. His face is a mask, devoid of any hint of an expression whatsoever. It doesn’t look like he’s particularly relishing the conversation, which is frankly fascinating, given that he’s the one who’s brought it up.
“You could Google it, you know,” says Q.
“I did. And then I read through four pages of some godforsaken forum, and understood even less than I did before.” Bond shifts his weight from one foot to the other; on anyone else, Q might assume it was a gesture of emotional discomfort, but this is James Bond, and more than likely than not, he’s just trying to conceal a gunshot wound to the knee. “Which is why I came here. I wanted you to tell me. I wanted—” He pauses, and stands almost imperceptibly straighter, staring ahead. “I wanted you to make me understand.”
Fat chance of that, thinks Q. Like he can make Bond do anything at all. Least of all this.
It’s all just so bloody typical of MI6. It’s taken him and Bond the better part of a year to get their act together. Eleven sodding months of furtive glances. Of Q’s stomach twisting into some kind of primordial knot every time he hears Bond breathing in carefully considered rapture over his earpiece. More than twice, Q had actually lowered himself to allowing his fingertips to trail suggestively over the pulse point in Bond’s wrist when he handed him his equipment. Christ, it had been awful. It had been like living in the first scene of a low budget romantic drama, or worse, a soap opera. And then finally, finally, Bond had taken the initiative after a mission that almost went spectacularly tits-up in explosive fashion, pushed Q up against the wall of some filthy alley half a mile from headquarters, and ravished him so thoroughly that Q had been about five seconds from telling Bond his real name.
Ever since then, they’ve been rubbing along rather wonderfully, often literally, and frequently at lunchtime. Q has lost count of the number of shirt buttons he’s lost. He’s taken to keeping a travel-sized embroidery kit in the top drawer of his desk. Three nights in a row, he’s dreamt of that thing Bond does with his tongue. It’s all been utterly ridiculous. It’s unprofessional beyond belief. It’s just about perfect.
And now, thanks to one pointless email policy from some random idiot in HR who’s taken a seminar a bit too seriously, it’s all about to come crashing to an end.
He sighs, thinks: fuck it. Takes a deep breath in. Throws himself over the precipice.
“About five years ago, I realised that ‘he’ wasn’t quite right,” he says. He rubs the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and thinks fervently of the time this conversation will be over. “Not all the time. Most of the time, it’s all right. I don’t even think about it most days. But sometimes, it just feels a bit like I’m wearing the wrong sized shoes. Or—no, more like I’ve got my shoes on the wrong feet. Like the OS has updated without me realising, and suddenly the font has changed, and I can still read everything, but it doesn’t look quite the same. And then I need something more—expansive, I suppose. Something that just stretches a little further than he. So, that’s what the they is for. It opens up another possibility, should I need it. Not that I do, most days.”
He trails off, reckoning that the damage is probably just about done, and steels himself for the inevitable. It’s how it always goes, after all. The strange little silence, the frown, the questions, and then, after a handful of attempts to understand, the giving up. The tacit agreement never to speak of it again.
Bond isn’t cruel, Q knows that, but he’s—well. He’s Bond. Biceps and nice suits. Simple things, simple pleasures. More than once, Q has suspected him of harbouring a secret fondness for rugby. He drinks whisky because he likes it.
All of which is to say that Bond is a man’s man, even in the ways he likes Q, and there’s no point in either of them pretending otherwise.
“Right,” says Bond slowly, after several tortuous moments. “I see.”
“You don’t see at all,” sighs Q.
“No, afraid not.” Bond offers a rueful smile. “Old dog, new tricks, and all that. I fear HR may haul me in for a flogging. I may not be fit for Chile next week after they’re through with me.”
“You don’t even have an email signature,” points out Q, charitably ignoring the fact that the tricks aren’t that new at all, actually. “What’s HR going to do? Sit you down and make you introduce yourself with your pronouns? Give you a badge to wear undercover, so that the next human trafficker they send you off to murder doesn’t misgender you before you snap his neck? ‘The name’s Bond. James Bond. He/him.’ I think you’ll be fine, Bond. Don’t worry about it.”
Oh, the privilege of not worrying about it, he thinks. Men like Bond will never quite understand. Q at 16, surrounded by the giggling popular girls, all convinced that he wanted to be one of them because he let his hair grow just a little too long over the summer. Q at 21, holding his tongue when a well-meaning brother-in-law bought him a gym membership for his birthday, so that people didn’t get the wrong idea, whatever that might have been, and whatever was supposed to be so wrong about it. Q at 29, wondering why it sometimes felt as though his skin was itching beneath the membrane; at 30, realising that this wasn’t the case for everyone else after all; at 31, discovering that a few miraculous shifts in language could settle it.
“But how exactly is one supposed to know it would be he-slash-him?” says Bond. “It all seems rather complicated. I’m starting to think it might have been easier to just remain legally dead. In a purely bureaucratic sense, of course.”
“Oh, come on,” says Q. “You’re you. It’s not complicated at all.”
“But you see, I don’t understand,” says Bond. “And if I don’t understand it, then I can’t use it. And if I can’t use it, then someone else inevitably will.”
“There’s nothing to use,” says Q. “You’re a man. Top of the proverbial food chain, and all that. Go home, sit down, put your feet up on whatever strange antique footstool you’ve bought on MI6’s budget, and stop worrying about it.”
“And how do you know that there’s nothing to use?”
Q purses his lips. “Well, aren’t you a man?”
“Aren’t you?”
It’s a funny sort of question. The sort of question that demands a neat, pleasant answer; a simple yes or no, wrapped up tidily and deposited in the correctly labelled column, done and dusted, no further interrogation required.
“Yes and no,” says Q, as honestly as he can manage. “I mean, what is a man, first of all?”
Bond raises an eyebrow. “I thought you’d have passed O Level Biology, Q.”
“They phased those out when I was six years old,” snaps Q. “Although you’ll be delighted to know that I did indeed excel at all flavours of Science GCSE. But no, what I mean is—look, outside of what you think is the obvious, define a man. Don’t just say someone with a cock and balls. It’s beneath you.”
If looks could kill, Q suspects he’d probably be onto the rigor mortis stage by now.
“The male of the species,” returns Bond, after a moment or two. “Is that not sufficient?”
“Sometimes,” says Q. “And sometimes not. Sometimes, a man is someone who identifies with whatever society says that a man is. Sometimes, it’s someone who hears the word ‘man’ and feels all right with it. If you’re a proponent of Mulan theory, it’s someone who’s as swift as a coursing river. It isn’t just one thing. There’s maleness, and there’s masculinity, and there’s being a man, and sometimes they’re all the same thing, and sometimes they overlap in the middle, and sometimes they live on entirely separate continents, and they’re not even penpals.”
He can physically watch Bond process everything. It’s oddly fascinating, like staring into the insides of a computer.
“One can, in fact, be entirely masculine and yet not a man. One might wear a dress and be very happy in one’s manhood. And one might be entirely content with masculinity as a concept, but also open to other ways of expression. Femininity, for example. Androgyny. Other long words.”
Bond nods slowly. “And if not a man,” he asks, “then what might one be?”
“Christ knows, Bond. Tired, mostly.” He sighs. “So, there you go. That’s Gender Theory 101.”
What a pointless discussion. He knows all too well that Bond is probably going to forget all about it in about half an hour. Although, hey, he hasn’t walked off in shock and horror at Q’s pesky pronoun revelation, so that’s a pleasant surprise. New tricks indeed.
“You know, sex is a weapon,” says Bond, mouth quirked strangely. “I suppose it hadn’t occurred to me that gender might be… something else.”
“Gender is everything and nothing,” says Q. “Don’t even worry about it, 007. Worry about Santiago.”
The mission briefing doesn’t end until after midnight. It should, by all rights, be illegal. Not for the first time, Q wonders why those in espionage haven’t unionised yet. When he looks at his face in the washroom mirror, in the cold striplighting, he looks at least twelve years older than he did this morning. He splashes some freezing water on his face, thinks about switching to a more intensive brand of moisturiser, then weighs up the cost of that versus treating Hamlet to some premium cat food, decides that his skin can suffer for another few weeks, and goes home.
It’s a long journey back on the Tube, and it gives Q ample time to think. Ordinarily, he’d pass the time with something easy, like trying to beat his own personal record in the Fibonacci sequence, or contemplating dimensionless physical constants, or hacking into Candy Crush and ruining Eve’s high score. Today, though, it’s Bond who occupies his thoughts, and not in an entirely welcome way, if Q is honest with himself. Not that he’s usually averse to thinking about Bond. He’s not so deep in denial that he’d pretend otherwise.
Fancy it, though. Bond with a he/him pronoun badge, blue of course. Bond proudly proclaiming himself an ally to the gender diverse. Bond, in one of his £800 tailored suits, his bespoke cologne, contemplating the nuances of masculinity, perusing the latest volume of Judith Butler. Perish the thought. His head would probably explode.
Metaphorically, of course.
Probably.
“Do you think,” hisses Q, neatening the hem of his cardigan and smoothing his hair back into some sort of semblance of a style, “that you could be any louder? I’m not quite sure they heard you in Vietnam.”
Bond hums. It’s very dark in the supply closet, given that the vast quantity of cleaning equipment has no eyes, and MI6 is on a budget squeeze, but Q would bet money on it that he doesn’t even have a hair out of place.
“I’m sure I could try,” he offers. “I’d hate for them to feel left out.”
“Yes, yes, very funny,” says Q. “Your dedication to international and carnal relations alike is admirable.”
His pulse is still hammering something awful, and there’s a twinge starting in his lower spine from where Bond picked him up and shoved him into the back of the door. It’s been a very pleasant 20 minutes, all things considered, but the euphoria is starting to wear off, and the clarification that they’ve just spent the better part of half an hour thoroughly despoiling MI6 property is starting to sink in.
It’s just. Despite what Q would like to think about himself—that he’s reasonably intelligent, that he has a modicum of shame, that he’s not entirely unfamiliar with the concept of dignity—he’s not immune. One raised eyebrow from Bond, the suggestion of the strength contained in that truly marvelous body of his, and Q really is putty for the moulding. There really is something to be said about shagging someone who can bodily heft Q to where he wants him without so much as breaking a sweat.
God, he’d have laughed himself silly a year ago at his current self. You knew nothing, he tells Past Q. Nothing at all.
Q clicks off the kettle, pours the hot water into his the sole two clean cups he can find in the cupboard, and relaxes minutely at the hiss of the teabag. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t countenance anything other than loose leaf on a Saturday afternoon, but he’s just spent 72 hours in the office trying to fend off a cyberattack that turned out to be a terrifyingly elaborate 4Chan raid, and quite frankly the thought of washing up a teapot is anathema to Q right now. So, Twinings it is. It’s Lady Grey, though. He’s not completely lost his mind.
Tea made, he carries both cups over to the living room, places one on the coffee table, then flops down onto the couch, artfully managing not to spill a drop, and reaches for his latest knitting project, just for something to occupy his hands.
As if on queue, the bedroom door opens, and in saunters Bond, freshly showered, towel slung loosely around his hips—oh God, that’s Q’s best towel, his mum would be mortified—and pleasantly damp. It’s sort of hilarious; there’s an air of the bohemian about post-coital Bond, all loose-limbed and easy in his body, as though he’d be more at home in some sort of velvet dressing robe adorned with little tassels, or perhaps a kimono of the finest silk available on the black market. Q thinks Bond would probably have a conniption if he said anything to that effect, though, and besides, the towel is hardly offensive to the eye.
Bond takes the seat next to Q, notices the tea, and offers a grateful smile. He’s almost capable of good manners, on occasion.
The two of them sit in silence for a few minutes, and it’s all so pleasant that it makes Q ache. Domesticity should sit uneasily on the two of them—Q is far too neurotic for it, and Bond is Bond—but it quite simply doesn’t, and he’s not really sure what to make of that.
“You never said,” says Bond, once he’s almost half finished with his tea. He doesn’t need to elaborate.
Q shrugs, and looks down at the half-finished knitting on his lap. It’s ostensibly the beginnings of a scarf, but he’s dropped so many stitches in the middle and gained so many at the edges that it’ll probably turn out more like an avant-garde muffler. Perhaps he’ll give it to Hamlet. She’s been after something new to chew on, ever since she finally succeeded in destroying the cashmere cardigan Q’s mother bought him for his 30th.
“It’s not really a thing,” he replies. “Most of the time, anyway. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.”
“Still. You could have said.” Bond shifts over minutely, and Q remains very still indeed. “I wouldn’t have understood. I don’t understand. But I would have tried. I probably would have ballsed it up, but I’d have tried, even so.”
“You’re not ballsing it up,” sighs Q. “It’s fine. Forget about it.”
“I'll have to take your word for it. Perhaps you could spare a few more?”
This is precisely why he’d never brought it up before, he wants to say. Because it always becomes a thing. It’s fine when it’s a thing inside the primordial murk of his own brain, but the moment you tell anyone new that, hello, sometimes you just don’t quite resonate with all the nuances of the way your flesh suit is perceived, it’s just awkwardness and embarrassment all the way down.
“I am not having this conversation while you’re wearing a towel.”
Bond raises an eyebrow. “I could remove the towel.”
“You and I both know that we’re not going to have any sort of conversation if you remove the towel,” points out Q.
Bond removes the towel anyway.
“There are days,” says Bond, half into his pillow and half into the curve of Q’s shoulder, and then nothing.
And Q leaves it at that, because there sure are.
Bond crouches low behind what remains of the British embassy in Santiago. Above him, the roar of a drone slices overhead. His breath comes short and quick in Q’s ear, and if Q grips the handles of his chair any more tightly, something is going to break, and it might just be his fingers.
Everything was going so well, up until about ten minutes ago, when MI6’s contact in Chile had revealed himself to be a double agent, and blown up everything within a 30ft radius. It’s only thanks to Bond’s uncanny ability to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time that he survived at all; had he been meeting with their contact like he was supposed to be, he’d have been killed in an instant.
And so now there’s a coup, and Bond is right in the sodding middle of it, and if he moves even a muscle, he’ll be spotted, and that’ll be it, Q will have to sit here and watch, and then he’ll have no choice but to book the next available flight to Santiago and murder Bond all over again for being so bloody reckless.
On the screen, Bond flinches as another round whizzes past him and takes out a chunk of the wall behind him.
“Bit close, that one,” he says, tone impossibly light, given the circumstances. “Q, I don’t suppose you could find me a route back inside? I’m not sure I’m too fond of the way they’re shooting at me. Might have to teach them a lesson.”
Christ, but he’s an idiot. “I’m not doing anything of the sort. You need to get out of there, 007. I’ve got backup less than 5 minutes away. Don’t get yourself killed.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Q. Not on your shift.” There’s a brief gap in the relentless gunfire, and Bond takes the opportunity to fire off a couple of his own rounds, then he pulls back the gun, shakes it, and growls in frustration. “Bollocks. Q, it’s jammed.”
Well, shit. “So get out of there!”
“I’m not going to let them escape. I’ll think of something, Q, just give me a minute.”
Q bites back a genuine hiss of frustration. “Jesus Christ, 007, backup is en route, just get out, before it’s too late!”
He doesn’t, of course. Instead, he counts to three, throws the gun to the ground, and charges out into the fray, armed with nothing but a pocket knife he’d apparently hidden in his sock. Q watches, quietly fuming, as Bond dispatches four gunmen with a blade approximately the same length as his little finger, and then watches as the fifth gunman aims his weapon squarely at Bond’s temple, and fires.
Q peers down the hallway, where two hilariously stereotypical doctors in lab coats and grey trousers are currently comparing notes on Bond’s recovery. Somewhere, a few rooms away, he’s being put through his paces. Apparently, being shot in the head with a taser and walking it off is a rather fascinating case for medical science. It’s all Medical has been talking about for days. Q thinks they should try Candy Crush instead. It’s a lot less morbid.
He could go and visit Bond, he supposes. He’s technically his handler, or something like it. Something unnameable, a strange diagonal line in the chain of command. No-one would question it. But then he’d have to look Bond in the eye, and then he would remember how it had felt to watch the other man pull his gun, and fire. The seconds of not knowing that it wasn’t a bullet. Before he’d realised that it was Bond’s own gun. Q’s own modification. It could so easily have been another gun. For a second, it was.
And then Q would have to murder Bond for putting him through it, so really, it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t visit.
He proffers his most benevolent smile to the two doctors as they walk past, pretending that he’s simply intrigued by the fire safety poster on the wall, and then, once they’re safely out of sight, he turns on his heel and flees.
What is a man? A man is a bullet. The gun. The finger that presses the trigger; the inhalation of breath, the exhale. Fighting stance, feet apart, fists up. A bruise staining the orbit. Blood ties and spit. Sweat and bone and breaking. Taking it and taking it and dishing it out so that you don’t have to take it any more. Pretending that you could take it forever. Reloading the gun. Aiming it again. And again. And again.
A man is a weapon. A man is a soldier. A man is collateral. And so is Bond.
So is Bond.
It hurts a little, when he thinks about it.
But then, why think about it? Clearly, Bond doesn’t.
So why should Q?
“For what it’s worth,” says Q, as Bond pulls his trousers back on, “there is, in fact, a difference between being a big, manly man, and being a twat.”
Bond pauses, and looks up at Q with a frown. “Pardon?”
And sure, perhaps Q could have picked his moment a little better, but he’s frankly still absolutely fuming, and two hours of extremely strenuous physical activity have only made him angrier, if anything, because this is what Bond was so happy to throw away for the sake of bravado, for the sake of not giving in, and what the fuck is the point in that?
“You don’t actually have to prove anything,” Q says. “You’re a 00 agent. You have a licence to kill. We’re all well aware that you’re a big, macho man. Perhaps you’d consider proving it by not trying to get yourself sodding murdered every other week.”
“I’m not proving anything,” says Bond. “I’m doing my bloody job.”
“You can’t do your job from beyond the fucking grave,” argues Q.
Bond sighs, and sits back down on the bed. Q is well aware that he probably looks like a stroppy teenager right now, arms folded on top of his knees, but he doesn’t have the wherewithal to give a single, solitary shit about that.
“This is about the he-slash-they,” says Bond.
“It is not about the he-slash-they,” retorts Q. “Firstly, it’s not called the he-slash-they, you tit, it’s called a pronoun. And this really, really isn’t about anything other than me wishing that maybe you’d consider the fact that I might not actually enjoy watching you get your fucking brains blown out in high definition at 4pm on a Thursday.”
“Is there a time of day you’d prefer?”
Q glares at him so furiously that his left eye starts twitching.
“I… apologise,” says Bond, after a moment or two. “Not for making the decision I made. It all turned out all right—”
“You got shot in the temple.”
“With a taser,” Bond corrects him. “And it was deeply unpleasant, but I did manage to stop an international smuggling ring in the 30 seconds before I got shot in the temple, so on balance, perhaps it was necessary after all.”
“Do you have any idea how utterly insane that sentence is?” snaps Q. “I’d sorted backup! It was just around the corner! All you had to do was wait. It wasn’t fucking necessary.”
Bond goes over to Q’s dresser and pulls out a clean white shirt. Q hadn’t even realised he’d put them there.
“I don’t know what you want me to say. I did what I thought was best. It worked. I came back.” He reaches out, and Q flinches away. Bond pulls back his hand, as though stung, and Q is dimly aware that he’s being a bit of an arsehole, but he did almost watch Bond get turned into Brussels pâté not two weeks ago, so he thinks he’s owed a bit of a snit.
“I want you to say that you understand the issue,” says Q.
“I understand the issue,” says Bond.
“Which is?”
“That you don’t agree with my decisions in the field.”
Q might just pull his hair out. “That you keep trying to get yourself killed, just so that you don’t have to put your tail between your legs. No matter what I think of it. That’s the fucking issue.”
“Right,” says Bond. “Right. I’ll bear that in mind, next time I’m getting shot at. Thank you for the professional advice.”
Q doesn’t throw a cushion at the door after Bond leaves, but it’s a very close thing.
“Are you quite sure?” asks M.
Q nods, and fidgets with the sleeve of his cardigan. There’s a loose thread that he’s been dying to pull on all morning.
“Entirely. Not permanently, mind you. It’s just that I’m worried that next time I have to supervise one of Bond’s missions, I’ll actually end up directing him into the firing line out of spite, and I’m fairly sure you’d fire me if I did that. To prevent my career stalling, I think it’s best if R takes over for the foreseeable.”
“Yes, Bond does tend to have that effect on people.” M sighs, and nods. “All right. But you’ll be supervising R for the first two weeks. Bond will run roughshod over them if not.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He can feel Eve’s eyes on him from the back of the room. When he leaves, he looks over at her, and she winks.
Bond isn’t smirking this time when he wordlessly hands Q the empty holster. Q takes it from him, resisting the urge to flinch away. It feels like grave goods. Spoils from some distant tomb. On another day, he might try and reach for Bond’s hand, but his own feel bloody, and he doesn’t want to share the stain. Not any more than he already has. Tonight won’t be a night for sleeping much, he knows.
“The gun is still in situ,” says Bond, watching as Q packs the holster away inside the metal case in which he’d first delivered it to Bond, gun slotted into it.
Q nods, curt. “Understood.”
And he does understand. In situ. What Bond won’t say: the gun is still halfway across the world, cold metal turning colder in the hand of the woman who’d killed her own father to protect Bond, and then herself. It should have been impossible—Q had tested the palmprint functionality himself, and he’d not been able to make it fire—but for whatever reason, call it a fluke or a curse, she’d been able to pull the trigger twice. Her aim had been perfect. In another life, she’d have made a better agent than most of them.
It had saved Bond’s life, of course, and by extension at least four nations bordering Russia, but the cost is written into his face. There are lines etched into his brow that weren’t there when Q watched him board the plane six days ago.
He looks at Bond then, properly this time. Takes him all in. The crisp neatness of the shirt collar, all starched parallel lines. Suit jacket tailored, seams neatly stitched, cut to best show the body he’s honed over all his long years at MI6’s disposal. Not a hair out of place. Which is a little ironic, given that the last time Q saw him, the bruised and bloody mess of him was escaping a burning building, framed by the silver square of Q’s screen, and Q had dug his fingernails so tightly into the meat of his palm that he’d drawn blood himself.
If they were anywhere else—which they’re not, so there’s no real point in thinking about it—Q would risk it. He’d offer the comfort that Bond won’t ask for, would quite honestly rather die than ask for. Q knows this because he has, on more than one occasion, witnessed Bond performing minor surgery on himself with dental floss and scotch tape. He’s not so stupid that he doesn’t know exactly why Bond has a tendency to disappear for six months at a time after a mission wraps up with a body count in the dozens, and then gets blindingly drunk on some Caribbean island every night for weeks on end.
But then, in all honesty, are they ever anywhere else, in any way that matters?
There are days, Q thinks. If there’s ever a fucking day, it’s this one.
“You’re allowed to feel however you feel about it,” he says.
What crosses Bond’s face then looks closer to panic than Q has ever seen. Christ, he’s watched Bond blow up embassies, jump off buildings, slash the throat of a globally feared assassin from behind with a broken biro, without so much as flinching. Who knew that all it would take to unnerve him was the suggestion that he might, under certain circumstances, consider expressing an emotion other than bravado?
“Noted,” says Bond. “Thank you, Q.”
“If you wanted to talk about it—”
“Thank you, Q,” says Bond, and they don’t talk about it at all. Of course.
Eve hands Q back the intelligence file from the Santiago mission, and perches on the edge of his desk. She’s wearing an impossibly structured yellow dress today, which can mean one of two things: either she’s finally plucked up the courage to ask out Remy in Accounts, or she’s about to try and sweet talk Q into handing over the password for M’s computer yet again, so that she can do horrible things with his calendar. For some reason, she seems convinced that wearing bright primary colours short-circuits the decision-making centre of Q’s brain, like he’s some sort of parrot. He’s not about to dissuade her of the notion. It’s quite nice to see some colour in the place other than the red of the blood smeared across the assorted cameras of the global spy network.
“Do you think he’s overcompensating?” she asks, apropos of absolutely nothing. “Bond, I mean.”
Q splutters, and almost drops the file. “Overcompensating? For what?”
“Oh, not that, Q, honestly.” She regards him with a look that makes him feel about ten years old, which is a bit rich, really. “Not everything is about penis size. I mean, he has nothing to worry about on that front anyway, but I was talking about that.” She gestures down at the dossier, at where the psych report M had ordered as part of Bond’s recovery is, in theory, securely filed away. “M was livid when he found out Bond had ignored a direct command to retreat. You wouldn’t believe the emails he sent.”
Q would absolutely believe them, having been the recipient of at least half. What he can’t believe is that M is any way surprised about Bond’s recent conduct. After all, Bond has never heard an order he can’t defy. Bond loves commands. He’s particularly fond of the sound they make as he sprints past them.
“I’m quite sure he’s just showing off,” says Q.
“Exactly,” says Eve, knowingly. “Overcompensating.”
Q frowns. “I don’t follow.”
“That’s because you’re a man,” says Eve.
“Well,” says Q. “I’m not sure that’s it.”
“Then maybe it’s because you’ve been secretly shagging him for six months. You’ve got honeymoon goggles on.”
Q feels his face turn puce. “I don’t think that’s it, either. I mean, I’m not even—there are no goggles! That’s a ridiculous thing to say, Eve, and I resent it, both as your friend and as a person with taste. That you would assume I’d shag Bond—”
“It’s not an insult,” she says, shrugging. “I’ve shagged Bond. It was great. I’d shag him again, if he was up for it, but he seems a bit preoccupied of late.” She stares at him, and he feels himself wilt like a rose under a heat lamp. “I’m not being funny, Q, but did you honestly think I didn’t know? You’ve started wearing matching socks.”
“Spurious assumptions about my personal life aside,” says Q, still smarting, “what do you mean he’s overcompensating?”
Eve sighs. “Oh, you know. He’s not just 007, is he? He’s Bond. That’s a lot to live up to, don’t you think? I know it drove me a bit mad, back when I was in the field, and I was just plain old Eve Moneypenny. I didn’t have half the known world trembling in fear of me, and the other half desperate to get in my pants. It’s not so much about saving face with Bond, I don’t think. It’s more about making sure he’s showing the right one.”
Realisation smacks Q in the face like a bucket of cold water. Christ, how could he have been so fucking stupid?
It’s not just Bond being Bond. It’s Bond trying to be Bond. It’s Bond living up to what Bond is supposed to be. What people expect of him. Of course Bond wanted to understand. He’s spent his entire adult life being forced into an ever-shrinking box of increasingly toxic masculinity, hasn’t he? He might not understand it in quite that way, but it’s the truth nonetheless.
Jesus Christ. It’s drag.
“Eve,” says Q. “Eve, has anyone ever told you that you’re a genius?”
She sniffs. “Once or twice, yes. Mostly, they just try and tell me how to work the coffee machine.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Q. “They should just start drinking tea instead.”
“And that’s why we get along so fabulously,” says Eve. “That and our similar taste in men.”
Years of wasted field training mean that Eve dodges the thwack Q aims at her with the dossier, but no-one can blame him for trying.
Bond stares at the kitchen table as though it’s suddenly turned into the Cheshire Cat and posed him riddles three.
Q looks down at his crossword, so intently that he half fears he might burn a hole through the page. 17 across, 4 letters, a feeling of positive expectation. From where she’s nestled on Q’s shins, Hamlet digs a single claw into his ankle.
“Those came for you this morning,” says Q, still staring at 3 down. 5 letters, a fool.
Bond’s tone is disbelieving. “For me? To your flat?”
Ah. Q hadn’t really thought of that.
He sighs. “Fret not, your whereabouts haven’t leaked. I ordered them, all right? Mea culpa.”
“Q,” says Bond, very quietly, and then nothing else.
There’s a pause. Q can hear the tap running, then the rustle of an enormous floral bouquet being deposited into a vase. Except that Q didn’t think that far ahead, and doesn’t actually own a vase, so God only knows what Bond has repurposed instead. Probably a tagine.
“I was under the impression,” says Q, “that when one has offended one’s paramour, it behoves one to make amends in a botanical manner. I acted like a tit, hence the impromptu horticulture.”
“You bought me flowers,” says Bond, still sounding a bit like he’s translating the entire conversation into another language in his head. “Why?”
Q looks up at him at last. Tagine held aloft, stuffed full of blisteringly white carnations, Bond’s face wears the expression of the truly baffled.
“I just said.” Q clears his throat. “I’ve been a bellend. It’s an apology.”
“I see,” says Bond, in the voice of a man who doesn’t see at all.
He sets the tagine back down on the kitchen table, and comes to sit beside Q. Hamlet, recognising Bond’s lap as the prime real estate that it is, quickly switches allegiance. Q flexes out his ankle, and deposits it swiftly across Bond’s thigh.
“I think,” says Q, reluctantly, “that it might actually be about the he-slash-they thing.”
Bond pats his ankle. “I thought it might.”
“It’s just,” says Q, and then he sighs. He feels like a proper 3 down. “Nothing’s ever bloody simple, is it? Me and my expansiveness. You and your—” He waves a hand, encompassing Bond’s clean shave, his cufflinks, the cologne. “Your you.”
“My me,” repeats Bond. “Q, are you sure you’re not allergic to those flowers?”
He might be allergic to this conversation, he admits, but he ploughs on anyway. “Unfortunately not. Look, what I’m trying to say—I thought I understood, but I didn’t. And honestly, I still don’t. Not really. But I understand that I don’t understand. Does that make sense?”
“Not a whit, I’m afraid.”
“You’re a man,” bursts Q.
Bond grins. “Astutely observed. There’s hope for you in espionage yet.”
“But that’s the thing!” cries Q. At the sound of his voice, Hamlet jumps up and runs into the study. “That doesn’t mean it’s simple! That you’re an unquestioning hunk of muscle, immune to the pressures of masculinity! It doesn’t mean that you like it!”
“Hang on,” says Bond. “An unquestioning hunk of muscle?”
“You don’t have to prove anything,” says Q.
Bond sighs, and removes his hand from Q’s ankle. “I’ve already told you, my judgement on a mission—”
“I mean here,” Q adds. “With me. I absolve you of the expectations of your gender, such as they are.”
From the study, Hamlet yowls, probably at a spider she can’t reach.
“Thanks,” says Bond.
“You’re welcome,” says Q, feeling very magnanimous indeed. “What I mean by that is that I think you’d look really great in a satin robe, or possibly velvet. If you wanted to pick one up on your next excursion to, say, Morocco, and then wear it around my flat in a haze of post-coital bliss, I’d be all for it.”
“A satin robe,” says Bond. “Q, with all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Drag!” declaims Q. “The emotional repression! The obscene bravado! The throwing yourself into death-defying missions! No-one really enjoys drinking whisky neat, Bond. No-one.”
He holds his breath. Wills Bond to get it, because it’s about as close as he can actually come to saying I understand that all gender is a performance, even yours, and perhaps you’d like to come backstage from time to time.
“I like the flowers, Q,” says Bond, at last. “I also enjoy drinking whisky neat. The… emotional repression, obscene bravado, and—what did you call them?—death defying missions, are rather more complicated, but they do also keep me alive, which, I think even you’ll agree, is to both our benefit.”
“Most of the time,” agrees Q.
“And I like getting my suits tailored,” says Bond. He pauses. “I would also be open to the robe. Provided that you don’t expect me to wear it to the office.”
“Gender is a many-splendoured thing,” says Q, sagely.
“And love, so they say.”
Q sniffs. “What a load of bollocks. Love’s a piece of piss. It's everything else that's the bloody problem.”
It’s the first good Saturday in months. Sunlight falls onto the kitchen tiles, sticky and orange as marmalade. On the radio, Donna Summer is singing about hot stuff. Q’s feeling like pretty hot stuff himself; he’s had four cups of tea already, he’s halfway through the cryptic crossword, and Bond is halfway through preparing what promises to be a pretty spectacular breakfast, feet clad in a truly stupendous pair of socks. ‘Pair’ is pushing it, really, given that one is green and one is purple, but Q isn’t one to quibble.
He’s hardly had time to do the laundry this month, so he’ll take what he can get.
Bond flips the pancake in the pan, and deposits it deftly onto the plate. It’s uncommonly round. It looks like a show pancake.
“You could use it,” says Bond, putting the plate in front of Q.
Q frowns, skewers the pancake on his fork, and shoves half of it into his mouth. “The pancake?”
Bond looks down at himself, at the purple satin robe he’s hardly taken off since he brought it back from last week’s mission to Rajasthan.
“Oh,” says Q. “The splendour.”
“The splendour,” agrees Bond.
Q chews thoughtfully on a perfect, fluffy mouthful of pancake. What had Bond said before? That someone else could use what Bond doesn’t understand. And it’s true. He could use it. Of course he could. There’s power in knowing this about Bond. That he’s just as happy in the kitchen as in the field. That he’s perfectly capable of expressing an emotion or two. That he’ll swan about Q’s flat, clad in a billowing banyan, and then get on a plane and shoot three men in the temple without blinking.
“Nope,” says Q, eventually. “I’m not sharing these pancakes with anyone.”
“I couldn't agree more,” says Bond, and he piles four more onto Q’s plate.
Such splendour, thinks Q, in love and gender both.