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It’s 11:00 a.m., well past rush hour, when Q minds the gap at Angel, and that means there's an empty seat. He folds himself into the space between a crustpunk and a woman in a conservative skirt suit and sets his briefcase on his lap. Then, with as little production as possible--so brisk it borders on shame--he takes a set of needles from inside.Some people listen to podcasts on their commutes. Q knits.It's math, really. Just lines and lines of code. Each stitch is an if:then, the pattern composed of a thousand logical outcomes feeding one into another.The physicality is also satisfying, though the combination of bad posture, days spent coding, and commutes and evenings hunched over needles and books has done a number on his wrists and now he sleeps in double braces. Still, how interesting it is to watch his own hands work as though they are components in some mechanical wonder of the Industrial Revolution. The subconscious motion of his pinkie, easing the tension when the yarn draws too tightly between needle and forefinger, could easily be replicated by a piece of clever engineering. He can imagine it done with springs and gears.Q knits because it is the closest he can come to making himself into a machine.This is not as dire as it sounds. Q takes machines as his model for many things in life: as long as they are well-designed, tuned correctly, and well-cared for, machines complete their functions perfectly every time. Given the same input, they produce the same output. They are elegant, and that elegance pleases him. He strives for it in his own existence.His life, as dictated by these ideals, is good. It is ordered, comfortable, and healthy. He has lived wildly: university was pills, powders, and unsafe sex; unchecked anxiety; deep insecurities; unhealthy coping mechanisms. But the only pill he's taken in the last five years is cyclobenzaprine, and that only on occasion. He has found healthier ways to manage his fears, in his early thirties, and a niche in which he can live comfortably. Q likes order. Q likes regularity. Q likes efficiency. Well-meaning muscle bears at the gym often give him unsolicited tips for bulking up, but he is not there for muscle: he is there to optimize his body’s functions. To make his body more efficient. Peak efficient. He views his time in Crossfit classes the same as he does modding his hardware for faster processing. He prefers his Tuesday-Thursday ashtanga yoga. More women, less posturing and insecurity, fewer protein shakes. Still, he alternates, because what one set of exercises fails to do, the other compensates for. He takes early morning classes. Leaving for work at 11:00 a.m. is not a product of sleeping late, but rather careful scheduling. Up at six, feed the cats, meditate, granola and plain yogurt for breakfast, with whatever fruit is in season--Q is meticulous about seasonality in his food, because it is the product of a larger, complex system that it is inefficient to disrupt, though in the winter he makes exceptions for vegetables grown hydroponically, as long as they are also local. Read the news, check email. At eight, either Crossfit or yoga. At nine, back to the flat for a shower and a change of clothes. News again, and emails. Then the train at eleven, because he works late but insists on maintaining work-life balance unless there is a dire need for his presence.Nine hours in the office--there is time set aside for lunch, which makes eight working hours, with dinner eaten at his desk--and he should leave at eight thirty, in time for nine o’clock home. Feed the cats again. Then two hours for household chores and reading, fifteen minutes extra in case he’s not done with a chapter, and then fifteen minutes to get ready for bed.But tonight, 007 crawls out of the smoking crater of a mission in Montenegro and catches a flight that drops him in Q’s lap right about the time he'd rather be closing up shop.“Do you have any idea how much this cost?” Q asks, holding up the charred and mangled carcass of a surveillance drone. “Do I need to remind you that Q branch is facing--”“Crippling budget cuts? I'll make sure to vote Tory in the next election. In the meantime, let me do the paperwork and I'll get out of your hair.”Q clenches his teeth. It has been drilled into the entire branch, the necessity to cut costs, stretch every pound. The proposal process for R&D has grown Byzantine. They've done their best, but the international technological arms race is not inexpensive, and their best isn't good enough for Parliament.Cuts will mean layoffs. Cuts will mean agents with outdated tech. Cuts will cost him coworkers, and may cost his coworkers their lives. Cuts mean change, and change means instability, unpredictability. Q’s least favorite things.“I'm afraid your wit is missing the mark today.” He slaps a clipboard into 007’s outstretched hand. “Rather like your anti-aircraft ordinance.”“The gun was sabotaged,” growls 007. “And you know it.”Q gives him the shrug M has often called insouciant. “I've also seen you shoot accurately under worse circumstances. I'm afraid that excuse won't fly. Next time don't waste my ammunition.”Scowling, 007 shoves the clipboard across Q’s desk. “Next time give me a gun that can't be arsed with.”Q could leave the paperwork for the morning, but he doesn’t want it hanging over his head. He gets home at ten. The cats yowl and get under his feet until he gets their tins of food in front of them. Robbed of an hour in his schedule, he does not get through the Heidegger essay in The Art of Art History he had planned on finishing. He does not sleep well that night, and it is 007’s fault.
#
M tells him personally, which is supposed to be better than getting a memo. Much in the same way his laying off ten of his people will be better done face-to-face. More respectful of their time and effort.That’s what M says, anyway. He thinks it’s much more like chewing off a limb than it needs to be. Everyone knew this was coming--better to let the axe fall quick, and cleanly. Another perceived kindness: she gives him free rein within his own department. “Keep the ones you think are going to make good,” she says. “I trust your judgement.”What she means is, she trusts him not to keep the ones he likes, just because he likes them. So, from three o’clock he’s doing the “will you just step into my office for a moment” bit with the assistant directors. Robert cries. Kavitha swears. Jun just shrugs and sighs. After that it’s the grunts, who do the real work, and then the five newest hires, who try desperately not to break down.By six he’s poured and drunk so many cups of tea that his hands are shaking and his jaw aches from the caffeinated clenching of his teeth. Everyone packs it in on time for once--nobody’s staying late after that bloodletting--and by half six he’s on his own with a predictive model he can hardly stand to look at. He has a raging caffeine headache, for one thing, and for another, Kavitha wrote the code.He’s just taken off his glasses when he hears the doors go. His heart rate spikes and, even as he tells himself that it’s absurd, he envisions an angry victim of the layoffs come back to get revenge. In his haste, he knocks his glasses to the floor.A large and man-shaped blur looms out of the shadows. Q scrambles up and barks his thigh on the edge of his desk.“Yours?” asks 007, and a flesh-colored appendage extends toward him, slowly coalescing into a hand, holding his specs. He snatches them and crams them back on his face. Usually he is more fastidious about placing them gently, a hand on each arm, to avoid misaligning his impressive prescription. Tonight he is about a hundred yards past that and still going.“What do you want?” he snaps, still standing. The blossoming bruise on his thigh has already begun to ache.Unflappable, 007 reaches for the inner pocket of his jacket and produces a slip of paper, folded in two. “An apology,” he says, offering it to Q. “For the drone.” Q stares at it.“It’s a cheque,” says 007 slowly, as if to a child.“I know.” Q grabs the paper and unfolds it. Then laughs, bitterly, at the number of zeroes. “Why don’t you just make this out to her majesty’s government?” he asks. “I don’t bloody need it. I haven’t been let go.”Bemused, 007 reaches for the cheque as if to take it back, but before he can, Q pockets it. “Though since you’ve already written it, this will make a nice unofficial addition to the branch’s upcoming round of severance payments.”“Your hands are shaking,” he says, still with that damnable half-smile.Q stuffs the offending bits of anatomy into his pockets after the unasked for cheque. “Is that all, 007?” he asks, staring at the linoleum just past the agent’s right elbow. “You can call me Bond, you know,” he says. “Or James.”Q blinks at the linoleum, and then looks up. 007 is staring at him. Or, not staring: watching, carefully. Like he’s waiting for something. Q wonders if this is how he looks through the scope of a rifle. If this is how he assesses a contact, or a conquest. To his horror, Q feels a blush climbing his neck. He does not doubt that 007 has seen it also. This makes the blush worse.“Are we quite finished here?” he asks, taking shelter behind a brisk attitude.“Are we?” The smile will not budge.“Good night, 007,” says Q, and looks at the door. He keeps looking at the door until 007 has walked out of it.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
He gets home on time, but doesn’t feel like reading. Wasp has vomited on the rug, and he steps in it. After cleaning, he tries to knit, but drops a vital stitch and has to frog three rows of intricate cables. Pear chews his yarn in half when he isn’t looking. He is tired, distracted, unsettled. Bond’s cheque is made out to him, personally. It exceeds the limit for his bank app’s remote deposit function. He will have to work a branch visit into his schedule tomorrow. Bond made the cheque out to him. This must be some catastrophic breach of etiquette. He should probably tell M. What the hell was he thinking, taking it home? What the hell was Bond thinking, giving it to him in the first place?It takes him several iterations of this train of thought to realize he is thinking of the agent not by number, but by name.
You can call me Bond, you know. Or James.
“Apology my arse,” he says out loud, to his Sheeler prints, his Kjærholm bookcase, the leggy dracaena by the window. The cats look up from their yin-yang tangle and blink. 007 was fucking with him; an expensive bait, but an effective one. And he’s falling for it.With quick, decisive motions, he pins the cheque to the refrigerator with a magnet to deal with in the morning. Resolutely, he puts the whole thing out of his mind as he exfoliates, hydrates, flosses, brushes, straps up his hands, and tucks himself into his single bed. MI6 pays well, for now, but why take up space in a London flat with a double or a queen he doesn’t need? He has taught himself to sleep peacefully: on his back, in a position ergonomically optimized to reduce the pain in his back and shoulders. Once he is staring at the ceiling in the dark, he realizes he is never going to fall asleep. Too much caffeine after three o’clock. Endless cups of over-steeped PG Tips, sharing a sympathetic pot with every person destined for the chopping block, have put him into a tooth-clenching pre-insomniac state.There is melatonin on his bedside table. He knows from experience it will not help. His brain is bound to run in circles through the wee hours.That fucking cheque. 007 and his smug smile. Permanently affixed to the corner of his mouth, it didn’t even shift for speech; all his words came out crushed, sieved through a clenched jaw. Your hands are shaking. You can call me Bond, you know. Or James. And Q had blushed, for God’s sake. What had he to be ashamed about? At which point he realizes he was not ashamed at all. Remembering the scene has made him half-hard under the sheets, as though his body knows something he has forgotten. Something Bond knew in the moment, when Q asked, are we quite finished, and Bond had asked him are we?That had not been a bait, not wholly. It had also been a question. Q prides himself on understanding the stimuli that will provoke his various responses. It is why he avoids caffeine after three. It is why he doesn’t drink in excess. THC is acceptable, even pleasant, but these days regulated stimulants are a hard no. He knows exactly what he likes in his pornography and in his partners, though lately the latter has not been much of a concern. Q likes to watch girls’ faces flush as they get off. He likes to watch skinny boys like him get pegged. Q likes to watch well-negotiated scenes with rope play and explicit consent. Q has a whole folder of feminist, genderqueer bondage porn: soft voices, shy eyes, gentle doms, high-tech toys. Yet here he is, lying in bed buzzing with unpleasant chemical energy, half-hard thinking about a musclebound misogynist whose idea of flirtation is destroying government property and distributing inappropriate largess. Bond’s not so stupid as to think the money would actually go toward branch expenses. What the hell was that cheque supposed to cover? Q’s brain provides him with several possibilities and his skin goes hot all over. After a few more furious seconds, he throws the covers back, tugs off his pyjama bottoms, and yanks open the bedside drawer, not thinking too hard about any of it. If he thinks about it, he will try to turn it into something logical. It is not that at all.There is a small cache of toys and ephemera in the drawer. Q is not ashamed of sexual pleasure, and enjoys the products of human ingenuity aimed to maximize it. He selects a stainless steel plug and a minimalist bottle of silicone lube, lies back down, and--if this is what his stressed and overcaffeinated brain is after, fine--lets himself think of 007. Bond. James. Whatever.At first, a fantasy fails to materialize. This is so far from his usual fare that he isn’t sure where to begin. So he begins with that question, are we? And tries to imagine what he might have said after, instead of goodnight.Except it doesn’t work. He can’t envision himself taking the initiative. He rolls back through the conversation, tries to pinpoint the moment his traitorous body began to blush. Those eyes are what he remembers: calculating, and very blue. Eyes that knew what they wanted, and belonged to a man who could take it if no easier path presented itself.When Q asked, Are we quite finished here, Bond could have told him no.His cock hardens instantly, and his train of thought follows.They had the desk between them but Bond moves fast--he is trained to move fast--and so in Q’s imagination Bond’s hand is on his tie and then his face is on the desk and Bond is speaking into his ear. The words still come out crushed, crowded through clenched teeth, and Q can feel hot breath and a little spit on his skin.
No, we’re not finished. Not until I’m finished with you.
In the manner of fantasy, they’re fucking without segue and Q is naked on his own desk, beneath the gazes of at least five security cameras that feed directly to the heart of MI6. He is hideously exposed and loving every moment of it. He comes, then, very hard, and makes an obscene noise. A few hard breaths later and he is cleaning up, businesslike. The clock reads half midnight. He throws away a wad of tissues and washes the plug in the bathroom sink. In the mirror, his lips are losing the pink flush of orgasm. He should not deposit that cheque.
#
At yoga the next morning, Rosie tells him he looks tired.“Out late?” she asks, as they unroll their mats.“Couldn’t sleep,” he says. Not quite true. He caught three hours in the end and skipped meditation in favor of the snooze button. Some of the sleeplessness was due to caffeine. Some of it was embarrassment. “Oh, I have terrible insomnia sometimes too. Have you tried melatonin?” she asks. “Or valerian. Valerian is great.”He thanks her, tightly, and her smile has an edge that says she noticed. They both get into balasana a bit early, and stay that way until class begins. Q has a hard time emptying his thoughts in shavasana. His shoulders are tense, his jaw aches, and every time he thinks about last night he hates himself a little. Every time he thinks about what he has to do at work today, adrenaline floods through his veins.Except when he gets to MI6, 007’s cheque folded in his breast pocket, 007 is in Odessa, attempting to extract a British-Ukrainian journalist who’s come into some vital intelligence concerning Russia’s digital warfare capabilities. Russia very much does not want him extracted. The cheque remains in Q’s pocket. He does not mention it to M. He writes up an EOD report, after handing off the Odessa situation to the night shift. It is only two hours later, there. When he does a final check of the surveillance, it seems Bond is busily infiltrating the hotel room of someone very blonde who may or may not be a supermodel.If she survives the next forty-eight hours, Q will be very surprised. His money is on the plucky UN aide who has been largely ineffectual at assisting the journalist through traditional channels, but has stuck around long enough to become perilously embroiled in MI6’s plot. And 007’s fickle affections. She’ll probably make it through to the end of this debacle, though her happy ending will be somewhat short-lived once 007 is recalled to London.“At least it’s not Barbados,” says M, when he hands in his report. “Or even South America. It’d be weeks before we got him back if the weather was any good.”Q leaves her office without mentioning the cheque. He doesn’t sleep well that night either, or the next. He masturbates twice more, trying to think of anything other than the man busily engaged in endangering women for his own pleasure and Her Majesty’s gain nearly two thousand miles away.Except it always comes back to that. And why? Because Bond knew what Q wanted before Q understood himself. Which is simultaneously terrifying and intriguing. It makes him furious. How dare that shoot-first ape read him so fast and with such precision? The possibility also scares him. Is he so transparent? Can he be analyzed so swiftly by anyone with eyes? And what do they see, that he’s missing? How many lies does Q tell to himself on a daily basis about what he thinks and feels?For someone who values objectivity so much, this uncertainty about his own is intolerable.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
In yoga, on Thursday, Rosie actually looks concerned.“I know you don’t want to hear it,” she says, “but are you all right? You look like shit.”“I feel like shit,” says Q, unrolling his mat. “Girl problems?” asks Rosie. Then, reconsidering, “Boy problems? Work problems?”“Pick two,” says Q, and lies down. His eyes burn with exhaustion. The instructor tells them that it’s time to begin, and when he rolls over he barely holds in a groan. When he doesn’t sleep a full night it puts his shoulders in knots, which aggravates his wrists, which makes him absolutely dread typing. Forget knitting at all. His work is made into misery and he’s robbed of a coping mechanism. To make matters worse, he skipped mediation again this morning, and had no yogurt in the fridge. All he’s eaten is a chalky protein bar. After yoga, he finds he is also out of shaving soap. Then his coffee filter breaks and leaves a sludgy mess in the bottom of his cup. There are no seats on the tube.By the time he arrives in the office, he is in an apocalyptically foul temper, and very near to tears. He does not like to be upset, and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. The more rattled he is, the more rattled he becomes. And it is certainly rattling to find 007 waiting for him in Q branch, badly scorched attache case under one arm.“My office,” he snaps. “Now.”007 only follows orders when it suits him, so the fact that he jumps to with the responsive obedience of a sheepdog is even more unnerving.“Another damage report?” Q asks, not meeting the agent’s eyes. “I’m afraid I’ll need to print some more. At the rate you go through equipment we ought to write an app for your phone. Save both of us these meetings.”“It isn’t broken,” says 007, setting the case on Q’s desk. “I’m just bringing it back.”“Good, because I don’t need another one of these.” He pulls the cheque from his pocket and holds it at the end of a stiff arm. “I’m not going to deposit it. It’s a flagrant violation of several points in the employee handbook and you can bloody well take it back.”Bond looks at him for a long moment, bemused, and then takes the slip of paper from his hands and puts it away inside his jacket with the practiced motion of someone used to pocketing large sums of money. Q hates that he finds this callous disregard for cash so sexy.“Do you ever take that stick out of your arse?” Bond asks, and he’s smiling again, god damn him, which is no excuse for what Q says next.“Why?” Driven by fury, he finally looks up: straight into those blue screen of death, stop-all-processing eyes. “Is there something else you’d rather put in?”Bond is speechless for a second, blinking slowly as if to buy time, and it gives Q a modicum of pride in the midst of his mortification. Then Bond makes a deep, soft sound it takes Q a few beats to place as laughter. Once he does, he feels another blush rise and drops his gaze to the scorched case in front of him.“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was inappropriate. If you’ll just wait a moment I’ll get those forms and--”“I told you.” There’s still laughter in his voice. “It isn’t broken.”“Right, well.. this still requires a sign-off on the return, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll have Andrea bring you the forms in a few--”He has moved to the door and reached for the handle, to usher 007 out. Before he finishes his sentence, before the latch releases, Bond puts a hand on his wrist and stops him.His palm is hot and dry, the fingers slightly swollen--cirrhotic edema, maybe, from all those martinis. Or maybe he’s just been firing too many guns in the cold. He doesn’t hold Q’s wrist, though he could. Q imagines it: the tight vice of those fingers closing on his bones. He swallows, audibly.“Q,” says Bond, and the way he chews his words makes it sound like a real name, not a letter.“Yes, 007?” By contrast, the call sign has never sounded colder.“Would you like me to?”He feels every muscle in the core of his body, from his throat to his arsehole, constrict in one sinuous motion. Where Bond’s hand is light on his wrist, Q’s grip on the doorknob is sweaty and strangling. “Jesus Christ,” is all he manages.Bond’s laughter is subaudible: it is a vibration. It reminds Q of several of the gadgets in his bedside drawer. “Is that a yes?”The roots of his hair feel hot and he knows he has gone bright red. If he can hear his own breathing, then Bond can too.He is using the agent’s name, again.“I think it’s a yes,” says Bond, and Q waits for his next move, skin tingling. But he only makes a little tch sound and pulls his hand from Q’s wrist.Q is confused, angry with Bond and with himself, until he comes to and sees the agent shaking his head, straightening one cufflink, that half-smile still in place. “Young men these days. At least let me take you to dinner, first.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Q refuses--politely--and works from home the next day. Nobody asks why. Who wants to be in the office when it feels so empty? He cheats a little--all right he cheats a lot--and spends the morning putting in a grocery order and even running to the corner for coffee. He tidies, and plays with the cats, and tinkers with the specs for a new earpiece. He briefly fantasizes about including a small electrical shock capability, to discipline wayward agents by way of a zap to the sensitive skin inside their ears.He blushes, thinking about 007’s sensitive...anywhere, and minimizes the screen in favor of his time entry sheet. At seven or so--another cheat--he closes up shop and changes out of sweatpants into real clothes: a soft gray Muji turtleneck, black jeans, black Chelsea boots. The kind of thing he’d never quite wear to the office, even on a Friday. Though there are groceries in the house now, he takes himself out for dinner, because he’s had a hard week and deserves a treat. The earlier rain has given way to a lovely purple dusk, misty but not cold. The last of sunset turns the clouds above the green garden rosey. A bus splashes by Sadler’s Wells, where the Pina Bausch show is ending next week and he still hasn’t seen it. He sets a reminder on his smartwatch to look at tickets tomorrow.At The Gate he sits at the bar, which feels less conspicuous when dining alone. The dinner rush is in full swing anyway, and it’s the only place where there’s a seat. He is just settling in with his miso aubergines when he feels a cool brush of air on the back of his neck, above the lip of his sweater. At first he doesn’t think about it--people have been coming in and out since he sat down, and the draft is refreshing, not unpleasant--but just as he lifts his fork a shadow in his peripheral vision resolves into a man in a dark blue windbreaker leaning in to put one elbow on the bar.The man, of course, is Bond.He doesn’t exactly look at Q, but keeps his eyes moving over the room as if armed thugs could burst from beneath the tables at any moment. Q, who often eats at The Gate, has never seen this happen and doubts it ever will. Then again, he’s never seen 007 at The Gate either.“Bond?” he squawks, then clears his throat. “What the hell are you doing here?” “You sound like M.” 007 laughs. “I’m taking you to dinner.” Q sets his fork down, picks up his wine glass, and makes a significant quantity of off-dry riesling disappear.“Oh,” says the woman to his left, noticing Bond leaning at the end of the bar. “We’re just leaving, if you’d like the seat.”“No, really--” Q begins, but 007 has already moved smoothly behind him to pull the woman’s stool out so she can exit more gracefully. She smiles and her date looks thunderous.When they have gone, and the bartender has wiped down the surface in the empty space, 007 climbs up the stool and settles onto it, like a jaguar settling itself on an improbably small tree limb. The sharp edges of the stool press into the muscles of his arse; too many squats to fit properly into chairs. At which point Q realizes he is staring at Bond’s arse and returns his attention to his aubergines and wine.“Gin martini,” says Bond, when the bartender asks. “Shaken, not--”“For Christ’s sake.” Q puts down his fork. “This isn’t Monte Carlo.” Unspoken: that Q is not a supermodel or a UN aide, to be so blithely swept off of his feet.Bond’s smile curls up in the corner of his mouth like a cat, unlikely to be dislodged any time soon. “Well, what are you drinking?”“The riesling.”“We’ll have a bottle of that,” says Bond, and the bartender nods and disappears to fetch it. In the interval before she returns, with a dewy chilled bottle and an extra glass, Q tries to summon up anything to say. He fails. Bond watches him in silent amusement, occasionally dropping those glacial eyes to toy with his napkin, or raising them to the mirror above the bar to check the room at their backs. When the wine is poured, Bond lifts his glass and says, “cheers.”Q realizes his mouth is hanging slightly open. He shuts it with a snap and picks up his wine, fumbling because condensation has gathered on the crystal, not because his palms are sweating. “This is…” he starts, and then stammers, and tries again. “You’ve got some nerve.”Even as he drinks, Bond doesn’t lose his smile. “You still sound like M.”“She bloody trained me. And she’d say the same thing if I told her what you’ve been getting up to.”“Will you?” asks Bond. Q, who had expected a blithe “you won’t,” is thrown. The tone of this isn’t worried though; only curious. Cocksure, yes, but still asking questions. Keeping the conversation open.“Look,” says Q, putting his hands flat to either side of his plate. “I don’t know what you’re trying here, but you can bloody well stop it. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was inappropriate, but I apologized, and if we could just leave it here--”“Have you had a chance to look at the menu?” asks the bartender, pushing a flyaway out of her face with the tender side of her wrist, hand cocked back to keep it clean.“The crispy tofu followed by the curry, please.” As far as Q is aware, Bond has not so much glanced at the menu in front of him, which the waitress now whisks away.“I was just going to have a small plate,” he says, piqued. He is halfway through his aubergines.“Well,” says Bond, swirling his wine. “I suppose if you do want to ‘just leave it here,’ you can walk out the door once you've finished. But I was planning on dessert.”Q’s face goes hot with a blush, up to the roots of his hair. For a moment, he stares helplessly at Bond, knowing he’s gone red. Then he turns abruptly away, only to see his embarrassing expression in the mirror above the bar.Bond laughs--Q feels the vibration in the air more than hears it--and refills both their glasses.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
By the time Q takes the last bite of his tart, he has sailed beyond an acceptable level of intoxication. He doesn't like to be drunk, with his brain running at seventy five percent speed and his mouth at one hundred and ten. It is such a reversal from what he is used to. Even at university he was much more apt to take stimulants, which at least ramped his brain up past the speed of speech. As it is, tonight, he hears himself say, “you know, your arse doesn't really fit on that chair,” before he realizes he has decided to say it. Bond’s unmovable half-smile doesn’t grow--it only intensifies.It's pathetic, really, but his usual indulgence is a single glass of wine and half a bottle has pushed him well past his limit. Even now, there is half a glass of tokaji at his elbow he doesn’t remember asking for. Bond, it must have been, who also insisted Q order dessert, and then betrayed him by asking only for a sherry and watching as he ate. Like he was a...a peepshow.“Sorry,” says Q, licking the last bite from his spoon. “Did you want some?” He means it to come out with a hostile edge but instead it sounds like flirting.“I’ll just have this bit,” says Bond, and before Q can flinch away, Bond’s finger is at the corner of his mouth. It comes away dusted with a few stray sugar crystals, which Bond puts gently to the tip of his tongue. It is a strangely delicate gesture, for such a thug. Q swallows, because his imagination has run away with him and left his throat dry. He drinks the last of the tokaji to wet it and then says, unsteadily, “You know, I live around the corner.”“Yes,” says Bond, which in retrospect Q should have seen coming. It’s strange bringing someone home. He hasn’t, in so long. It breaks up his habits, upsets his sleep schedule. On one memorable occasion, the cats stopped using the litter tray. Nor has he gone home with anyone else, in a while. He just hasn’t made room for it in his routine.Normally he doesn’t notice that his apartment is small. He’s not a very big man. But Bond is solid through the shoulders and wide across his chest and thighs. He has to maneuver carefully not to knock things off the coffee table or the bookcase. As he wanders cavalierly into the kitchen and hunts for a glass, he throws into stark relief something Q has almost forgotten: the refrigerator here is three-quarter size.“Sorry,” he says, scrambling after his guest. “I should have offered. There's filtered water in the fridge.”Unconcerned, Bond fills one of the good glasses from the tap. He drains it, watching Q over the rim.It's a good idea, hydrating. Q’s mouth is dry and his throat is tight. Oh, and he's definitely drunk. But he stands frozen at the entrance to the kitchen, staring at 007 leaning against his sink. At least he always does the dishes before work. “You knit,” says Bond, and Q remembers there's half a cardigan on the coffee table, needles tucked neatly into a ball of two-ply olive tweed.“A bit,” he says.“And you have cats.” They aren't in evidence but there are their dishes on the ground, just inside the kitchen doorway. A few dry kibble crumbs dot the tile nearby. Q is painfully aware the combination of “knitting” and “cats” makes him seem like a lady pensioner, and goes on the offensive. “Listen, are we going to fuck, or what?”Bond shrugs. His stupid windbreaker crackles with the movement. “You brought me home,” he says. “What did you have in mind?”Certainly not this. “Take off your jacket at least.”He does, and Q goes to hang it up on the tree beside the door. He imagines breath on the back of his neck; turning to find Bond close behind him; his heat and weight and solidity.Instead, when he's finished he finds Bond is lingering at the threshold to the kitchen with a second glass of water. One of his eyebrows is up and he's watching Q expectantly.“What?” he asks“Is there anything else you'd like me to take off?”Q’s face must convey at least a modicum of his mingled frustration and confusion, because Bond goes on. “It's just you’re such a little martinet. I thought you'd like the chance to boss me around.”But he doesn't. It isn't what he wants at all.“Cat got your tongue?” Bond pushes away from the door and this is more like it. He isn't exactly stalking, but there's something focused in the way he advances.Q swallows, scratchy and parched, and realizes he never did have a glass of water himself.“You're such a damned puzzle,” Bond says, coming closer. His voice is low and soft, and he moves slowly. Q has the absurd thought he'd be good with Wasp and Pear, who can be skittish around strangers. “Go on. Why don't you tell me what you want?”It's the gentle condescension of it, the patronizing kindness, that undoes him. Like he's being ridiculous, flighty, needs someone to make decisions for him. Or drag them out of him inch by painful inch. There are other ways to dominate, outside of whips and leather.“I suppose,” he says, and falters. God, this is humiliating. And while he is into whips and leather and apparently meathheads with soft voices and stupid, stuck-on smirks, humiliation isn’t one of his kinks. “I...I want you to break me like you break all of my toys.”Bond snorts, and loses all the ground he'd gained. Q realizes he has been doing it all on accident, by luck. This fact makes him despair, but also drives him wild. Bond gets it right without trying, and the consequence is that he doesn’t know how to try. “Well of course it sounds silly when I say it like...like this!” Q gestures at his turtleneck, his boots, the fact of him standing fully clothed in the middle of his own living room detailing his frankly lurid and ridiculous sexual desires in a brisk professional tone. In his porn, some cute little sub would say it while they fluttered their eyelashes during foreplay. They might even say please. They would outline their dirty fantasy for a chubby girl with braids and a riding crop, and she would smile and tell them how good they were and how she was going to do exactly what they wanted. The thought makes Q feel faintly nauseous. When he imagines it with Bond...it’s the kind of stuff he wouldn’t say unless he was already sweating bullets with two fingers up his arse. It should happen without discussion, without consent, entirely on instinct. In fact, “I shouldn’t even be saying it at all. I’d prefer if you said it to me.” While you gag me, or cover my mouth with your hand.He is going to have to start a new porn folder. Suddenly his old one feels inadequate. A compromise. Self righteous and performatively ethical. Who the hell is he performing for?The thought goes straight to his groin.“Oh,” says Bond, and is it Q’s imagination or does his voice have a quaver in it? His posture changes, only slightly: no longer louche and lazy, he lets his weight fall back on his heels. It makes him seem a few inches taller. It gives him the height to look down on Q properly, to consider him. But his eyes don’t change. At first Q believes Bond hasn’t really bought into it. But then he realizes the expression is one of sharp observation, and the deep divot between Bond’s eyebrows isn’t flirtatious skepticism, but an indicator that something is going on behind those error-blue eyes: a string of careful calculations based on what he’s seeing.Q curses himself for his nervous bossiness, for any indication he has given that he might want anything other than what he does. Bond does this in the field all the time: an endless series of split-second decisions based on observable data in mutable situations. But usually--eighty one percent of the time, a notably higher ratio than most of his peers--he makes the right decisions. Well, Q is used to being statistically improbable in any number of ways. He can roll with this punch. And anyway, Bond is course-correcting admirably. He has crowded into Q’s space: pushed him into the wall of the alcove by the coat rack and limited his field of vision to peripheral blue nylon, a clear plastic umbrella handle, and the broad expanse of Bond’s chest and shoulders. Obliquely backlit, his face is cast in craggy chiaroscuro and the color of his eyes is lost: they are black now, with glints of light caught in their corners. Or maybe that isn’t the backlight. Maybe that’s arousal.Bond leans in and puts deliberate hands to the wall, one on each side of Q’s waist. Trapped between his arms, Q can feel the heat coming off his skin. “Before I break your toys,” Bond says, crushing the words between his teeth, “I usually get to put them through their paces.”
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Bond is in no rush, though there is a brutal efficiency to his motions that makes Q feel like an object; A firearm in the middle of a field stripping. It is not a disagreeable feeling to be taken apart so swiftly and professionally. He kisses Q first, which is unexpected. It is open-mouthed, tastes of sherry, and presses the back of Q’s skull into the wall. The kiss is as thorough as Bond’s reconnaissance, when he bothers with any, and leaves Q sagging between those thick arms. Bond smells like citrus and geraniums--clean and sharp, green, a little spicy. His jaw is smooth, Q realizes. The scent is his aftershave.The sound of a zipper brings Q’s attention sharply downward, and he realizes that the only thing holding him up is Bond’s knee between his thighs. He can feel the cheeks of his arse spread across the muscles just above Bond’s kneecap. It’s his zipper, and Bond’s knuckles graze the swell of him where his cock fights to be free of his jeans. The fabric of his boxer briefs chafes against the sensitive skin.“Fuck,” says Q, ineloquent with arousal.Bond presses him more closely to the wall, forearm like steel rebar across Q’s chest. Q feels his feet rising from the floor. Stretching, he can just touch the floor with his toes. “You’re small.” Bond says it like he’s found a hundred quid in the pocket of an old jacket. “Well that’s hardly a revelation, is it?” Q strives for his usual sour but only sounds out of breath.Bond slips his free hand under the hem of Q’s jumper and sweeps it up across the taught expanse of Q’s belly. The pass of Bond’s hand pulls the jumper with it, reveals a ladder of ribs and Q’s left nipple. “Don’t talk back,” says Bond, and pinches it.In a more negotiated scene, Q might have clammed up. But the rules here are unspoken, if they exist at all, and he wants Bond to hurt him like that again. “You know me,” he says, with strangled flippancy. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”Bond moves so fast he leaves Q breathless, sprawled across the sofa with his legs over the arm and his head in the gap between two cushions. Only in retrospect does he realize Bond has thrown him. Standing at Q’s feet, Bond is watching with amusement as Q reorients himself. “Q,” he says, once he was Q’s eyes on him, “Shut up.”The jingle of metal, like a Pavlovian bell, makes Q’s mouth start to water. Bond slips his belt from its loops but keeps it wrapped around his knuckles. It dimples the swollen skin of his fingers and turns them red. Q wants to bite them, feel the give of hot flesh under his teeth, his mouth filled up. He wants Bond to fuck his mouth with that hand. Blushing to the roots of his hair, he closes his eyes and turns his head away.The blow is soft but surprising--a cupped palm and loose fingers against his cheek, the kind of thing a gentleman in an old movie would do to rouse a lady from a faint. “No,” says Bond, “You look at me.” It is almost but not quite the kind of thing Q has heard him say over comms, to people he’s extracting information from one way or another. Just like the slap is almost but not quite violent. Q is never going to be able to listen to Bond interrogate someone again, not in front of the office. Not unless he’s got his lap hidden under a desk.“What do you weigh? About ten stone?” Bond strips off Q’s turtleneck and sits back to look at him. “I really could break you.” To emphasize his point, he lets the length of the belt fall free from his fist. Q thinks for a moment he’s going to hesitate, play it out for the element of anticipation. Instead he hits a sweet spot--after the initial realization has faded, but before Q is ready for a blow to fall. The leather cracks across his chest with exacting aim and startling power, audibly cutting the air as it snaps back into Bond’s grip.“Shit” says Q, reaction delayed, back arching off the cushions. He grinds into nothing--Bond’s weight is across his thighs, damnably close but not close enough. The aftermath of the impact tingles. Bond should have asked. Bond should check in. This is bad, and Q should not be enjoying it so much. “I said--” Bond cracks him again, twice, to emphasize each word: “Shut. Up.” Then he flings the belt aside. It slides across the bleached hardwood and fetches up somewhere under the bookcase. Q’s chest burns, blooming red. He exhales, loudly, and touches the hot skin where Bond’s belt struck him.Normally he wouldn’t move so fast, or be ready for the strap so quickly. But he has been thinking about this for days. He has wanted it, he thinks, for longer. He was ready--more than ready--long before James took hold of his wrist in the office and asked would you like me to?.“That’s better.” Bond puts the pad of his thumb to Q’s lower lip. Q realizes his mouth is hanging open and he is breathing in sharp, audible gasps. Bond’s thumb is salty, and it makes the tender skin inside Q’s lip itch, and then burn. Q presses his tongue across Bond’s thumb and feels the scrape of his nail, tastes the sweat and the lingering flavor of soy sauce and maple syrup. He pinched a piece of tofu from Q’s plate and ate it, earlier. Q had tried not to watch him lick his fingers clean.Now Bond is smiling at him--his eyes narrowed to icy chips nestled in soft crow’s feet, crooked mouth framed on one side by a line like an open bracket. His smile is an unfinished parenthetical, insinuating everything that might come after.Looking at the lines on James’s face, Q wonders briefly how old he is, and then remembers that he’s seen the file a dozen times. There is something permanently boyish and irresponsible about Bond which had made the number seem unreasonable, easily consigned to the rubbish bin of useless trivia in the back of Q’s brain.Those deep, dry lines cast his age in sharp relief, just as they define the planes of his face in a play of shadow and light. Q’s cock twitches, hard, because 007 is a daddy.He closes his mouth on Bond’s thumb and sucks, hard. An offer. A preview. A pleasure in itself. The hollow of his cheeks, the salt and suction, make him hungry. He hasn’t sucked cock in a long time. He hasn’t touched someone in a long time, not like this. The taste of skin gets him drunker than the wine.Bond presses the pad of his thumb to the hard edges of Q’s teeth, and forces his mouth open. Pulls out messily and swipes spit across Q’s cheek. Q expects to hear another zipper--Bond’s--but instead it’s his own trousers that go, in a single elegant rush. No one has ever gotten his clothes off him with such efficiency. His boxer briefs follow them onto the floor. In the bright light of the living room, Q’s body glows pale and vulnerable, every vein visible beneath through the thinness of his skin.Bond, still fully clothed, sits back and considers him. Q closes his eyes, and this time Bond doesn’t slap him. Q understands: he doesn’t need to be looked at now. He’s the one doing the looking, and Q--naked, pinned, cock heavy and hard--doesn’t need to be reminded. He can’t forget even with his eyes shut that Bond is sizing him up like a butcher assessing a side of lamb.Then, exactly like he is a piece of meat, Bond lifts him bodily and hauls him off the sofa. Because Bond is a professional, he obviously used the short walk from the front door to the kitchen to case the place--he knows exactly where the bedroom is, and flings Q into the small bed at an angle, so his head hangs off the edge. Level with the bottom of 007’s fly.Right. This is much better than the sofa.At this angle, Q’s throat stretches and his breath comes just a little too shallow. Blood rushes to his head and his eyes feel tight. The edges of everything go crisp, the contrast dialed up. It’s too much, and he shuts his eyes again. It’s a surprise--but not a surprise--the feel the hot head of Bond’s cock against his lips. His heartbeat is pounding in his ears so hard he didn’t hear the zipper after all. Q has to tilt his head back farther to get a good angle. He feels the heat of skin against his ears and realizes with a shock that Bond has pushed his trousers down. Why should that shock him? Only that it feels a little too vulnerable, a little too trusting. It feels a little queerer than Q would have given Bond credit for. Briefly he feels disappointed. He had wanted to be used, and Bond’s bare thighs for a moment make him feel less so.Then he opens his eyes and sees the fold at the back of Bond’s scrotum, pulled to a deep channel by the weight of what’s inside. Q follows that line up over the tight pink skin of his perineum to his hole. Whatever shameful fantasy he had about Bond keeping his pants on evaporates instantly. He opens his mouth wider, gets sloppy, gets the bridge of his nose into that velvety groove between Bond’s balls. His eyes begin to water, his nose to run. He grabs two handfuls of Bond’s arse and squeezes, digging in his nails.Bond grunts and Q feels the muscles in his thighs quiver. Pleased with himself, Q flexes his tongue against Bond’s cock and pulls the cheeks of Bond’s arse apart, stretching the ring of delicate skin there, teasing Bond the way he likes to be teased. Would Bond let him? Lick, or finger-fuck? Q wouldn’t have thought it, five minutes ago. The bed flexes underneath him and he feels Bond’s weight shift forward. It doesn’t click for him until four blunt fingers burn a track down his belly and curl into his pubic hair. The sharp jerk makes him start and yelp, opening his mouth wider around Bond’s cock. Given an inch Bond takes a mile. Q’s can’t get a breath until Bond pulls back. Just as he’s gasping for air, Bond’s hand slides lower still and tightens his grip around Q, gives a couple of expert strokes. Q is thinking, sure, all right, this is still within a range of Oxbridge boathouse behaviors, something a burly rower might do to the coxswain, if only in a particular kind of porn. He is still trying to make some kind of excuse for Bond when the other man lifts one foot to the bed frame for leverage and closes his lips over the head of Q’s cock.It is such a surprise Q loses his rhythm and chokes. Unthinking, he slaps at Bond’s hip. The other man pauses and Q takes a moment to pant around the slick saltiness of Bond still in his mouth. There is a bitter ghost of precum at the back of his throat. When Q cautiously closes his mouth again, slowly lets his hands relax, Bond begins again. Not quickly, not rough. He doesn’t need to bully anymore, or manhandle--where could Q possibly go? How could he fight? He’s stuck under eighty kilos of sweating muscle with a cock in his mouth and a mouth around his cock. It’s better than shibari, better than latex--he can’t move an inch. But Bond can, and he does: Inch by agonizing, velvet inch.Q’s hips buck, but Bond holds them down. He won’t let Q push it in any faster than he’s willing to take it. And it turns out, he can take it. Q is a gagging mess when he sucks cock, and loves it, but 007 is professional--the muscles of his throat go smooth and pliable and the flat of his tongue slides along the top of Q’s cock until his teeth just graze the base: a sharp reminder of Q’s vulnerability. Q whines, fists clenching, and strains against the force of Bond’s grip on his thighs. Bond pumps into his face and the message is clear as if he had spoken: I said shut up. Q goes limp underneath him, lets his face be fucked, and moans. Once it’s clear he’ll lie back and be good, Bond starts to use a hand on him, and after a few seconds of that his mind is gone--it’s all just taste and spit and smell and the wires in his brain crossing until he feels like he’s sucking his own cock, fucking his own face. He’s still furiously clutching the glorious meat of Bond’s perfect arse and the view is just getting better the closer he gets to coming. Without thinking about it much he’s let his thumbs slip along the curves where Bond’s thighs and buttocks meet, and now they are poised to slide across the sensitive spot behind his balls, move a little higher and—Bond makes an inarticulate sound around Q’s cock and jerks his hips, not so much away from Q’s touch as deeper into his mouth. He clenches around the first knuckle of Q’s right thumb and takes Q deep into his throat. Q thinks Bond is going to finish, and he is so focused on anticipating the spill of it that when Bond cups a rough hand around his balls and sucks him deep, his own orgasm surprises him. Before he really understands what’s happening he’s coming down the back of Bond’s throat and Bond is swallowing and Q is mortified. Bond mouth makes a lewd, slick sound as he slips up the softening length of Q’s oversensitive cock. He plants his palm in the center of Q’s chest and it slides in the sweat gathered where their bodies had been pressed together. The pressure of it so near the soft, vulnerable expanse of his stomach makes his skin go tight from groin to nipples. Spent and sloppy and still turned on, he lets his chin fall back so Bond can fuck his mouth and throat until he comes.Q chokes on it, when it happens. His eyes sting. It is not elegant, it’s pitiful and messy. Bond waits a little too long to pull out, and when he does Q coughs and splutters. His face is slick with tears and sweat and snot and come, and without his glasses, which fell off somewhere along the way, everything further than a foot is hazy. He doesn’t want to imagine the way that Bond is looking at him right now, because he can’t imagine its any way he’d want to be looked at.Except--Bond’s thumb is on his lips. A swift, hot pressure that tastes of salt. That one touch sends a zip of pleasure through Q that is not merely physical. He whines and sinks into the bed, head hanging.“You’re a bit of a mess,” says Bond, and wipes his thumb clean across the grid of his abdomen. It leaves a shining streak behind. “Where’s your bathroom?”
#
While Bond showers, Q panics. A sort of muted, distant panic that fails to penetrate his post-coital buzz. It only hits him fully when he hears the water shut off. He goes still on the bed like a stiff corpse and listens to Bond shuffle in the dark for his trousers.“I’m not asleep,” says Q. He is gratified to see Bond’s silhouette freeze for a moment. “Doing a runner?”A long moment of silence passes, in which they stare at each other. Q can only tell Bond is watching him by the glitter of light in his eyes, where they reflect the halogen blue of the streetlamp outside Q’s bedroom window. Usually he closes those curtains--total darkness is conducive to a higher quality of sleep.Bond zips up. “I’ll see you in the office,” he says. Not with malice or discomfort, but amusement. And then he’s gone. The front door opens and shuts. Q hears the faint patter of one of the cats jumping down from the bookcase, and then the flat goes quiet.Well, what did Q expect? A cuddle? Bond cooking breakfast in the morning? He is embarrassed about his own disappointment, and resolves to harden his heart next time.The real blow falls when he realizes: next time might not come.
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In the morning, Q hits snooze. He skips yoga. He strips his sheets and takes a long shower, so hot it turns him pink. The cats are disturbed by this change in routine. Meowing plaintively, they threaten to trip him as he navigates the kitchen. Irritated and desperate to get them out from underfoot, Q begins to pitch pieces of their kibble across the living room. It is one of their favorite games, which he is loath to play. There is always the resultant cleanup of pieces that they miss, or do not deign to chase. If he is less than thorough he will end up crunching salmon pellets underfoot. And when they slide underneath the furniture--Pear goes skidding, frantic to catch a kibble before it disappears under the bookcase. She crawls in after it and Q hears an odd metallic thud. Pear scrabbles a little longer, occasioning more thuds, and finally crunches down on the kibble. Setting aside his yogurt, Q gets down on hands and knees and peers into the space underneath his boxed set of Jean Prouvé monographs.Pear’s eyes gleam manically. She is crouched behind a coiled silhouette. He reaches for it--gets a swat for his trouble--and pulls out a man’s brown leather belt. Simple silver buckle. Neither new nor well worn. It is nondescript, not particularly wide or cheekily narrow. In fact, it is exactly the same width as the faint spattered stripes of broken capillaries that criss-cross Q’s chest beneath his shirt.The edges bite Q’s palm: he has made an angry fist. Briefly, he considers pitching Bond’s belt into the rubbish bin, but discards the idea as juvenile. Still, what should he do with it? He can’t very well take it to work; the whole place is so closely surveilled he can’t imagine making a discreet handoff. His security team has engineered a system that makes such a thing impossible.Usually one returned this kind of thing at the next date. Or shameful liaison.A treacherous memory arises from Q’s tragic teenage past. Seventeen and infatuated with his French conversation partner, he had begun to leave things at Guy’s flat. It began innocently—he really had forgotten his pocket dictionary. Fetching it mid-week earned him an extra twenty minutes of face-time, and he met Guy’s mother too, which seemed promising. Next he left a notebook. Then a scarf. Guy caught on of course, and eventually he left his virginity there as well.He looks down at the belt and feels embarrassed even to have linked the two circumstances. Bond did not leave his belt here to wrangle another invite. He left it here because his trousers are tailored so perfectly they render belts superfluous accessories. He didn’t even think to look for it, he was so keen to make his exit.Q nearly does chuck it in the bin, then. Only grudgingly does he coil it up and place it neatly in his satchel. He can arrange for a convenient glitch in surveillance. Blame it on budget cuts and layoffs, tell the higher ups his security team is stretched too thin. It wouldn’t be a lie.
#
He does not have time to make arrangements for anything when he gets to the office. Russia is feeling frisky and Q spends the morning marshaling his skeleton crew to repel a vicious attack on the email server of the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He wonders about the Ukrainian journalist, the UN aide, how safe they might have been after 007 returned to River House. But that mission is over. MI6’s duty has been discharged.Someone brings him coffee, which he drinks without noticing whether it is any good—uncharacteristic. It is several hours past lunch time when he finally escapes to scarf down one of the mediocre cellophane-wrapped sandwiches from the Q-branch canteen. One could wish the sandwiches associated with one’s code name were of slightly higher quality, but at this juncture, Q reflects, one truly doesn't care. At least the cress hasn’t gone slimy. He opens his satchel in search of some Paracetamol and finds instead an even bigger headache.It’s too bad Bond doesn’t mysteriously appear on command. Q could really do without the summoning bit. Still, needs must. He sends a curt message over the proprietary app he’s built to mimic Slack—silly GIFs and all—without any of the former’s security flaws. Bond arrives fifteen minutes outside of Q’s specified time box but that's within Q's fault tolerance, so he hasn't allowed himself to work up a real head of steam yet.“You rang?” says Bond, and it is a kind of injustice that such a bulky man can lean against the doorframe with such grace. Bond is like a polymer: slippery liquid solidifying at the application of force. The horrible blue windbreaker has been replaced with appropriate office attire, or what was appropriate office attire twenty years ago. No one in Q branch wears a suit these days. Whatever they do upstairs is none of his business.“Prototype for you to test,” says Q, pulling the belt from his satchel. The lie is for the cameras. If not for Russia, he’d have spent the morning setting up a nice little loop of himself sitting at his desk doing nothing very interesting. As it is, he’s stuck play-acting.Bond’s eyes slide up the coil of leather and lock with Q’s. “What does it do?”“Holds up your trousers,” he says, and slaps it down on the desk, palm spread across it. The buckle cracks ominously and he anticipates a nasty chip out of the glass. “I’ve been thinking, perhaps you need help with that.” Dangerous, though there’s deniability: double-Os do what they have to, but everyone in the service knows Bond’s a bit of a whore. Still, why should Q be taking him to task? That’s more M’s line. Well. Doesn’t Q have to listen in on all of it? A man has his limits. Bond smiles, that damned little smile he grinds between his teeth, and reaches out to take the belt. Without thinking, much, Q tightens his grip on the leather. Bond gets a little furrow between invisible blond brows. Despite the cameras, despite the little scenario he’s concocted, Q is irrationally tempted to close his fist on the leather. He is perilously angry, all of a sudden. Angry and ashamed. “And I suppose,” says Bond, giving the belt a minute tug, “that you would know?”Frustrated with his own lack of discipline, Q lets his grip go slack. The leather slithers out from underneath his hand. Bond holds his gaze, unflinching, and winds the length of the belt around his knuckles: once, twice, the buckle curled inside his fist. He makes a small circle with his thumb around one of the holes, then pulls the thing mercilessly tight so a long tail hangs free, stiff cordovan bobbing lewdly between them.The last bite of cress sandwich has become stuck in Q’s dry throat. He swallows desperately, aware of his prominent Adam’s apple sliding sharply underneath his skin. The anger is still there, it is. But how can he pick it apart from the other panicked, prickling heat beneath his skin?There is still the desk between them, a minimalist barricade strewn with pens, a crumpled paper napkin, an empty coffee cup. The distance is small. The glass desk top makes it feel fragile. Bond is watching him with that expression of assessment once again. The eye contact is so intense Q almost jumps when Bond breaks it, looking down.“Your tie is crooked,” he says, and leans across the gulf to wrap thick fingers around the object of his scrutiny. Q exhales, involuntary and too fast. The other night’s tawdry office fantasy returns to him with breathtaking clarity. He feels the impersonal gaze of the cameras as a physical pressure, as though he is sinking into deep water, liable to be crushed.Q’s cock gives a traitorous twitch against the cold edge of his desk. There is a slight pressure on his windpipe: Bond’s grip tightening on the slippery length of knit silk Q has conveniently put around his own neck. He realizes that Bond is not straightening it, but rather pulling subtly down, toward the glass. A suggestion. An invitation. Perhaps a threat.He wants to give in. There is a whine building in the back of his throat. His shoulders bow forward, his lips part. He even closes his eyes, and breathes in the dark with his pulse in his ears.Then he slaps Bond’s hand away and says tightly “Are you bloody mad?”The furrow between Bond’s eyebrows disappears, and suddenly he’s offhand and suave. Like a channel changing. “Maybe. But I know how to tie a decent four in hand.”He is better at maintaining a façade than Q could ever hope to be. Even his proposition played out, on the surface, like a cheeky bit of bullying. Q is the one who is fumbling here. He gathers himself, smoothing his shirtfront with a sweating palm. “I’ll thank you to keep your hands to yourself, 007.”A leonine rumble of amusement. “Will you?”That is straying too close to the truth, and Q snaps back: “In this office, yes.” Then realizes what he has said.Bond has too, and grins. “You’re only in it nine hours a day."“Perhaps I should start working overtime.” Bravely, Q leaves the barricade of his desk to wrench open his office door. He hopes his half-mast erection is not obvious on the security monitors. “Were you just leaving, then?”Bond doesn’t budge. “I hadn’t planned on it. I cleared an hour.”“For God’s sake, why?”“Usually you talk a lot more.”That stings, and he realizes he was hoping for something that implied optimism. His subconscious has even helpfully supplied him with a couple of scathing put downs. But Bond has delivered a brutal pre-emptive strike.Aiming to retake lost ground, Q says: “You, however, have managed to manhandle and insult me in under five minutes. Excuse me if I don’t commend your efficiency.” “I could have kept on longer,” says Bond. “You know.” There is weight in those words Q tries not to dwell on. “But M’s been on and on about cutbacks, and time is money. Speaking of--” he inclines his head toward Q’s wrist, where his smart watch is lit up with an alert.Sadler’s Wells Pina tix, it says. Q reads it, feels Bond reading it, and shoves his hand deep into the pocket of his blazer. “Right,” he says, not daring to look up. “You know where the lift is. See yourself out.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
He does wipe the footage, of course. It’s damage control--someone no doubt saw the whole thing, watching live--but he’s worked in intelligence long enough to know that damage control is about ninety percent of the job. Hopefully the security guard had better things to pay attention to than a little spat in Q branch. And he buys a ticket to the Pina Bausch show, because he is damned if he’s going to let a stray glance of Bond’s dissuade him from an evening with Tanztheater Wuppertal.It is a double billing: Café Müller and The Rite of Spring. He is more excited for the first--the second seems a little tacky somehow. Too popular. Maybe that makes him a snob. Whatever. He settles down in his seat, pleased with himself, and smooths his program across his knees. The elderly couple to his right smile, delighted to see him here, which is one of the perks of being a fresh-faced patron of the arts. He is smiling back, preparing to make chit-chat, when someone sits in the previously empty seat to his left. The elderly couple’s eyes sweep upward, and their smiles grow expansive, inclusive, indulgent. Q’s stomach sinks, suddenly dense. Like a black hole has opened up behind his ribs and is drawing all his sophisticated self-satisfaction to a finer and finer point until it is concentrated somewhere in the hollow of his pelvis, transformed by pressure into something far less elevated.“Hello,” says Bond. The chair squeaks as he shifts to lean on the flimsy armrest that separates them.Q gives the elderly couple an apologetic little shrug, which plays neatly into Bond’s narrative, but the atmosphere of the theatre is not conducive to a scene. Besides, Q started playing a charming cultured young person the minute he walked in, and even now he is loath to break character. His own performance is half the fun of any excursion to the concert hall or theatre, and there is a perverse pleasure in using Bond as a prop. Especially since, like a skilled improv actor, Bond has provided the perfect opportunity for Q to say, yes, and.And Q realizes, horribly, that he is prepared to do so. Has been since he bought the tickets. Orwell said the best way to keep a secret is to hide it even from yourself, and Q is a bloody star at it. Otherwise he wouldn’t be working in military intelligence.“A text might have been nice,” Q says, casting a critical look at Bond. The critical look also gives him a moment to assess: a dark jacket and an open white collar, a tan throat textured by age and too much sun. Stubble: he has dressed up, barely, but he has not shaved. “I was starting to think you’d miss the curtain.”Q is showing off for the elderly couple; they will expect him to nag his handsome butch boyfriend who hasn’t tried hard enough. He is also, in a far-off corner of his mind, listening to Bond say, you’re such a little martinet and thinking, how far can I push it? and how soon will he snap? and worst, he won’t snap, now or ever; you know he won’t and you don’t want him to. He is thinking about being professionally, efficiently broken apart.Unconcerned, Bond lifts one heavy shoulder. His jacket strains. “I hear the second half is better.”
#
At the interval, the old couple clears out quickly—to the loo or to the bar—and Q drops his façade.“What the fuck?” he says. He is more aggrieved than curious. There is no real question here: merely an expression of disgust. With himself as much as with Bond.Bond smiles. Appallingly, Q goes weak at the sight. He shores up his defenses and says, “i suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’ll admit I was expecting a chance encounter in the lobby and not the fucking next seat over. How did you manage it?” He is imagining surveillance at the theatre doors. The bribing of an usher. The incapacitation of a hapless modern dance aficionado.“I rang them up,” says Bond. “Said my friend had a ticket and I’d agreed to meet him but hadn’t got his seat number. The box office was very obliging.”The implications hit Q’s body just before they reach his brain, so that he feels the full flood of an adrenal reaction before he quite understands why.“You know my name?” He might have shouted, but per the demands of a public space he packs it all into a furious squeak.Bond grins at that, and leans across the arm rest, encroaching into Q’s personal space. Q catches a whiff of geraniums. “Yes. And you know mine.”“Well you don’t exactly make a secret of it,” says Q. “But keeping secrets is my bloody job.”“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” says Bond. “We’re all entitled to a little human frailty.”Because Q’s id is a traitor, it helpfully supplies a reading of this statement in which it is Bond’s job to be hard on Q, and Bond who is entitled to Q’s human frailty. His superego is filled with righteous indignation, because no, Q is not entitled to frailty; frailty is indicative of an error, a misjudgment, a poorly calibrated system.His ego, attempting to split the difference, shorts out in a frustrated storm of sparks. He stands abruptly and stalks off to take a piss. The line is long. In the end, it’s he who almost misses the curtain.
#
He is dismayed to find that he enjoys the second half more. Or perhaps “enjoy” is not exactly the right word.Café Müller was a satisfyingly metronomic piece, a marvelous overlay of pattern on pattern on pattern, predictable as clockwork and as precise when it struck its noons, midnights, and quarter hours. Q had taken great delight in predicting how and when each repetitive pattern would intersect.The Rite of Spring is unlike it in every possible way.The stage is covered in dirt--this is the famous thing about the piece. Q had thought it was a gimmick. It is not. He can smell it, rich in the back of his throat. The women who scurry onto the stage are naked underneath their flimsy slips and their breasts are obvious, almost embarrassing. He is shocked when one dancer claws her hem up the front of her body to reveal a dark smudge of pubic hair, indistinct from the front of the balcony. He wonders if that is even legal in London.He chastises himself for prudishness, but he is shaken.More women enter. A red silk scrap flutters through the air, snatched by woman after woman and pressed between their legs. Obscene grasping, grunting, slapping of their thighs. Over and over the women frame their groins with desperate, open palms. Here, they seem to say, beating with the music. Here, put it here.The company moves in a mass, a herd of animals picking up on small, sometimes unreadable signals and magnifying them until every body moves according to instinct, to some unconscious response buried deep in the dark parts of their brains. Randomly, dancers break from the group, execute frantic choreography at odds with the mob.And then the men enter.He is not ignorant of the narrative of the The Rite of Spring, or of the audience’s violent reaction on its premiere. But he’s always thought the riot was a quaint illustration of a massive cultural shift. Now he is faced with the possibility that there is something intrinsically upsetting about the ballet, even in the oily bassoon and the fingernail scrape of the strings.It is not just the music or the story that upsets him--it is the way the dancers enact it and more, the fact that Bausch conceived this adaptation and put it into practice. The dancers’ movements are desperate, frenzied, and while there is fear there is also hunger. There is the uncertainty and shame that exists between the two. There is the uncertainty and shame of the audience, which he can feel building around him and within him like the charge in the air before a storm.What truly upsets him is that he wants to see more. Wants to see how it ends. Even though he knows he shouldn’t.When the dancers file out for a bow, he can see the streaks of sweat slicing runnels through the dirt smeared across their skin. The soil onstage was no gimmick, but a tangible measure of exertion and a nod to a more metaphoric stain.Q realizes he has made fists in the fabric of trousers and they are crumpled, damp with sweat. Belatedly, he remembers to applaud.“Stunning,” says Bond, when the last applause die away. He pitches it just a little too loud, and at first Q wonders why. Then the pensioners beside him crack wide grins and their eye contact with Bond effectively straps Q into his seat.“You know, we saw it back in the seventies,” says the lady. “Back when it was quite avant-garde. But we’ve always been very open-minded, haven’t we, George?”“Excuse me,” says Q, and stands abruptly. The pensioners startle, but Bond just grins and moves his knees out of the way so Q can pass. The aisle is narrow and he’s flustered; his calves brush Bond’s shins. He trips over his own feet, just enough to stagger and catch himself on the next row of seats. Bent over like this, his arse is probably level with Bond’s nose. With his mouth, to put a finer point on it. Blushing furiously, Q collects himself and stalks toward the lights of the lobby.Once there, he observes in himself a small disappointment: Bond has not beaten him out of the theatre. Ridiculous, from standpoints both practical and psychological. He squashes the misplaced pang and collects his coat from the cloakroom.He is halfway down the block, hunched against a damp wind that tosses the trees along Rosebery, when Bond falls into step beside him.“So the pensioners didn’t fall prey to your charms?” Q asks, caustic.“On the contrary,” says Bond. “I think they’ve put me in their will. And tried to warn me off seeing anyone too much younger than I am.”“I supposed it didn’t stick.”The low laugh, a considering kind of pause. “You’re touchy tonight.”“I’m always touchy,” says Q. “Tonight, I am livid.”Bond stops walking and Q, like a dog on a leash, walks three more steps and is brought up short. “You’re really angry,” says Bond, amused (unforgivable) and wondering (horribly, endearing).Q makes a strangled noise, feeling like the frustrated teenager he no doubt resembles. Why can’t he just keep his bloody cool? He works so hard to stay put together all the time and now he’s growling in the middle of the street about to have a row. “You can’t just come into my office and...and…”“Straighten your tie?” asks Bond. His hand makes an abortive movement. In the unforgiving glare of the streetlamp, Q sees Bond see him notice it. They both take a breath.“They’re looking for a reason to lose personnel,” says Q. “I had to gut my department last week. You think they wouldn’t replace me with someone who’ll take two thirds my pay? One half? Someone who isn’t half as good? That’ll get people killed? People like you?”It isn’t something Q realized he was worrying about--a malicious subroutine that has been running for days, quietly destabilizing him. “If anyone’s going to get grilled for misconduct,” says Bond, “I expect I’m due for it.”And he’ll come out of it smelling like a fucking rose. He always does. Meanwhile, Q will spend the rest of his tenure at MI6 dodging snide comments and knowing looks, scrabbling for a trace of the tenuous authority he presently commands.“Why me?” he asks, and he means it to sound like a demand but instead it sounds like he is going to cry. Stupid reedy voice. He isn’t sure whether it’s a plea to the universe or a pointed question for Bond specifically.“Well,” says Bond, who is arrogant enough to answer for the universe, if that’s who Q was asking, “I like a challenge.”He tosses it off like a bit of flirtation, but the truth of it strikes home. Bond is always sticking his dick in where he shouldn’t: married women, mistresses of hostile actors, the hostile actors themselves. Always out risking his neck for a non-mission-critical shag. Like Jack and the golden bloody goose, he gets off on nicking things out from under the noses of people who would happily kill him for it. Or put him through a mortifying, protracted review and sack him at the end of it.The hell of it is, he never wants the goose once he’s got it. He just likes to steal.“You’ve got some nerve,” says Q. “You’d have fucked me in that office, wouldn’t you?” And despite everything, the image sizzles through him, neurons firing at cross-purposes: Wrong, bad, no and want.“You had the cameras off,” says Bond.“No I bloody didn’t.” He has the satisfaction of seeing Bond blanch: an unguarded moment of blank shock before the practiced half-smile reappears. “I was a bit busy doing my job.”He is not going to play this game. He is not going to be a notch in 007’s bedpost, his dignity wagered against Bond’s wit. Bond doesn’t always win these bets; Q has seen the fallout on live feeds.“I’m not a toy,” says Q, realizing too late it’s a bit on the nose. All those crushed gadgets, ruined weapons, totaled cars. But the words have been said, and he means them. “And if that’s all you want, you can check out a whole case of them tomorrow.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
He does, in fact: to take along to Nicaragua. At the sign out, Q is sour as a lemon and Bond has really dialed up the charm. To the outside observer they probably look like caricatures of themselves. Q fervently wishes to be anywhere but here. Bond makes innuendos about the equipment. They each neatly avoid eye contact; Q becomes very familiar with the soft edge of Bond’s right eyebrow, where the pale hair diffuses across the ridge of bone. And then he’s gone, packed into a plane across the Atlantic. Q takes the afternoon off but finds himself at loose ends. He’s almost glad to return to the office around dinnertime, just as Bond’s plane is touching down. Sanchan has ordered takeaway, Q pulls out his latest half-finished cardigan, and the bare bones team settles in for a long night of watching comms.Q would not normally knit on the job--it doesn’t reinforce the image of eerily capable wunderkind he has worked so hard to cultivate. But the only people left in Q branch don’t need to be told he knows what he’s doing, and in comparison to the imagined scenario of a misconduct investigation centered on his relationship with Bond, knitting a jumper seems like a minor embarrassment.After several rounds of hand-to-hand fighting on the tarmac and a car chase that leaves a broad swathe of Managua’s streets in disarray, Bond jogs up the steps of the Iranian ambassador’s house, where a party is in full swing. Within fifteen minutes, he has flirted with a beautiful woman who turns out to be the unhappy wife of the crooked cultural attaché suspected of brokering deals between a radical opposition group and an arms dealer who happens to be prominent member of Spectre. He has also had a brief but hair-raising tête-à-tête with the attaché himself. Ten minutes after that, he’s in the ambassador’s darkened office with the attaché’s wife, and Q is preparing himself mentally and physically for what usually follows. So is Mrs. Attaché.The office door is not quite closed. The murmur of the crowd downstairs comes through on the comms—Q’s tech is very sensitive. The camera shows the shimmer of fine hairs where a sharply angled sliver of golden light illuminates Mrs. Attaché’s broad cheekbone, sparkles in one dark eye. She is leaning back against the ambassador’s desk, her satin gown draping across the ridges of her hipbones.“It seems you have a knack for getting into places you are not supposed to go,” says Mrs. Attaché, sultry. Q rolls his eyes.Bond steps closer, and she comes into even sharper focus. She is not wearing a bra. “It isn’t your office either,” says Bond.She smiles, looking down without breaking eye contact. It draws attention to her décolletage. “Perhaps we have something in common.”Bond steps further into her personal space, so that he can reach past her and lift a report from the desk. It isn’t important to the mission--Q can see the cover page, it’s about the effect of climate change on Iranian agriculture--but he’s only using it as a prop so he can get close, box her in.“Careful where you put your hands,” she says. “My husband is a very jealous man, with very dangerous friends.”There is a weighty pause. In a moment, Bond is going to make a quip. He is going to lift his hand to trace the curve of Mrs. Attaché's body beneath her dress, and then Q branch will all sit through it like they always do, recording the biochemical data associated with Bond's coital interlude.Q knows he should not do this, but he has been doing a lot of things lately that he isn't supposed to do. Why break a streak? "Go on, Mr. Bond," he says, lips close to the mic. "You like a challenge, don't you?"Everyone in the branch can see Bond’s heart rate, his cortisol levels, the readouts of a dozen gyroscopes. Sanchan scrambles upright, out of a slouch not supported by his ergonomic chair. Treasure swears and slops coffee over her knuckles, scrambling for her keyboard.“Tox screen isn’t showing anything yet,” says An, and Eric is saying, “Surveillance isn’t showing shit, no hostiles, nothing.”Q, who is the only one with a direct line to Bond’s earpiece, remains silent. His only concession to surprise is the pause of his needles in their rhythm, the silence in the wake of the slip, click, slide.“Boss,” says Sanchan.Q shrugs, painfully nonchalant. “Stand by, I suppose.”They all settle slowly back into their seats, expressions wary. Sanchan picks at his carton of Chinese without enthusiasm, splitting skeptical attention between his monitors and Q.Bond’s heart rate has returned to normal and the spike of cortisol is slowly ebbing from his bloodstream. If Mrs. Attaché has noticed anything, it is merely Bond’s intriguing disregard. She leans closer. The sensors across Bond’s chest show pressure and heat. He looks down and the lens cameras give a view of soft breasts pressed perilously against the low neckline of her dress. Sanchan slurps a noodle, disinterested. Q’s team is made up of professionals.“But I think you are very dangerous also,” says Mrs. Attaché.Bond lets the papers fall to the desk and steps back. “Only when I need to be.”“You will,” she says, “if he finds you here.”The way she says it, she does not mean the office, or the papers.“He won’t,” says Bond. And the way he says it, he does not mean he will be swift or clever or just in time. The way he says it means he is turning, and walking out the door.
#
From there, the mission is a massive cock-up. Beyond the usual spanners thrown into the works, Bond seems uncharacteristically distracted, and makes several key errors that end in a harrowing standoff at the summit of Momotombo, and the grisly demise of the crooked attaché in its fiery crater. They get no useful information about his Spectre contacts. In the midst of the literally and figuratively smoldering wreckage, Bond slips off comms and goes silent, though uncharacteristically solo. The Attaché’s wife has fled the country in the nick of time, and the embassy secretary who succeeded her saw sense and kept Bond at a careful arm’s length. Q looks her up, after he gets all the paperwork in, and finds a few discrete Lex profiles under different aliases. He flags her for the recruiters. Good OpSec and a friend of Dorothy. MI6 could do worse, and he wouldn’t mind sharing a reporting structure.Bond keeps out of MI6’s hair for a bit. They all shed the scummy feeling of a job gone bad—by this point it’s old hat for most of them. Q gets back into the swing of things at cross fit and at yoga. He figures out a workable reorg, redistributing the lift of a much larger team more equally across the shoulders of this smaller one. Sanchan gets a promotion, and Q gets a couple of good night’s sleeps.On Monday he arrives at his usual half eleven, and finds a closed briefcase on his desk. A few bullet dents, a crunched-up corner, but still intact. Q sets down his flat white and his messenger bag and, loath to lend the situation even a whiff of the dramatic, he sets the lock to the correct combination (not the combination which detonates the small explosive hidden in the lining) and pops the lid.The Walther inside is spotless. This surprises Q less than it should—Bond takes good care of his firearms, when he doesn’t lose them or throw them at an attacker in lieu of ammunition.What is very striking is that underneath the Walther, nestled in their custom cutouts of insulating foam: a contacts case, a signet ring, a money clip.Q opens the contact case. The contact lenses are inside, intact.The only thing that’s missing from its place is the key to the custom DB5, lovingly restored by Q-branch head mechanic Chandra in the last few weeks before Q was obliged to sack her for lack of funding.Q gets out his phone and dials, movements crisp. “Hello,” says Bond.“Very nice,” says Q, resolutely unaffected. “But where’s the car?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The DB5 has one long scratch in the paint, streaked with its opponent’s colors—an automotive “you should see the other guy”—but is otherwise unscathed. It is idling on the kerb when Q leaves work.Piqued, he ignores it and heads for the tube. Bond catches him two blocks later at a cross street, having looped around.Bond leans across the front seat and opens the passenger door. “Get in.”Q hesitates just long enough to convince himself he has weighed his options, and then huffily drops the significant distance into the DB5’s low-slung passenger seat.Bond closes his fist on the gear stick and depresses the clutch. As he puts the car in first, coaxes the gas down, and eases off the clutch again, there is a quality to his movements that reminds Q of a finely tuned piece of machinery: a watch or, more accurately an elaborate wind-up. Something well oiled and complex. When Q first learned to drive he was rubbish until he took apart the transmission of his mother’s long-suffering Peugeot. Once he saw how the motion of the forks pushed the dog teeth of the collars into each gear and how his foot on the clutch held the engine apart from the lay shaft so the collars could slide easily into place, he finally understood his own place in the machinery: an assemblage of interconnected levers controlled by a complex computer, whose programming facilitated the smooth operation of many complicated parts. It is the same sensation he derives now from knitting, but watching Bond transition from first into second as he hits a straightaway, and second into third, Q realizes how much he has missed driving since he moved to London.Seen as an assemblage of levers, Bond is slickly lubricated and exceedingly powerful. He pushes into the high end of third until a changing traffic light sends him slipping into second and then neutral and gliding to a purring halt.“You’re staring,” says Bond, rubbing the heel of his palm over the curve of the gear stick. The only obscenity in the gesture, Q scolds himself, is purely down to his own associations.“It’s still running all right?” asks Q, unnecessarily.“You could put it on the showroom floor.”“And I’m supposed to be impressed?” Q crosses his arms and gives into the feeling of petulance that has been pressing his shoulders since he popped the catch on the briefcase. Bond spares a curious glance away from the road. “Pleased, anyway.”“Pleased because my equipment’s in one piece, or pleased because you spared a thought for me?” Q crosses his arms. “I wouldn’t want you not fucking attachés’ wives on my account.”Bond snaps like a spring that has finally given out under too much torque. The squeal of skin on the leather, the vibration of the blow through the steering column: For once Q’s mind lags behind his senses and he flinches before he realizes that Bond has only hit the steering wheel.“You’re such a fucking asshole, do you know that?” Bond says it to the evening sky outside the windscreen, not even looking at Q, and his voice is uncharacteristically strangled. “Beg pardon,” says Q, shocked into defensive incorrigibility. There is silence in the DB5, which is stopped at a red light. A lesbian couple push a stroller through the intersection. Bond closes his eyes, and the sharp contrast of the street lamps makes him look very tired. It fails to rouse Q’s sympathy.“I’m an asshole?” Q asks. “You’ve been bloody stalking me. And now whatever this is.” He flings his hand up to indicate the DB5 and all related tech, the cocked-up Nicaragua mission, the attaché’s disappointed wife. “What do you want, 007? Are you just after another shag, or what?”The women gain the far kerb. The light turns green. Bond puts the car in first.“You made me tell you,” says Q.The engine’s growl grows steadily higher in pitch. They corner too quickly around the bottom of a residential square. Q grasps the door handle to keep from sliding in his seat. They’re somewhere in Chelsea, a neighborhood about which Q has remained stubbornly ignorant. But this part is clear of tourists and tony shops, which doesn’t feel like Chelsea at all.“Where the hell are we going, anyway?” he asks, unable to endure the silence.In answer, Bond breaks suddenly and parallel parks at inadvisable speed. Q fears for the hatchback in front, and for whatever is behind them, but the bumpers of the DB5 keep clear and when Bond cuts the engine they sit in silence until he says:“Mine.”Q peers out the window at a quiet square lined with ghostly white plane trees and rather less spectral white flats. Old townhouses, really, crisply elegant, the first floor windows buttressed by a continuous line of black wrought iron balconies. An ambitious person could have made a circuit without ever coming down. It’s the kind of neighborhood an American production company would rope off to shoot some high-budget, historically inaccurate television show. “Stuffy,” he says. “Rude,” says Bond, and lets himself out of the car.Q sits for a moment, petulant, because following could be construed as interest, perhaps as tacit consent. Then again, he got in the car, didn’t he?A few drops of rain drip from the plane trees and spatter across the windscreen. Q knows he is being a brat. And not even the ethically kinky kind of brat. Disgusted with 007 and with himself, he pops the door on the DB5 and fights his way out of the bucket seat. It’s cold and damp and miserable, and he wishes he were home with the cats and the telly and a spicy carton of Thai takeaway.Bond pulls a key from his billfold—no ungainly carabiner for him, no keyring festooned with grocery club cards—and jogs up the walkway of the closest building. Naturally he has found front door parking.Bond opens the door and turns to look at Q, who is still loitering by the fence. “Are you coming in?” “So it is another shag,” says Q.“If you’re good.”Q’s traitorous cock twitches. “Don’t be a cunt.”Bond sighs. “Look, will you just come in the bloody house? I’d rather do this inside than in the street.”Q doesn’t know what “this” is, but supposes that he would rather find out in a private setting. In mounting the steps, he tries to project an air of my idea, not yours, the way the cats do when they finally deign to eat their second favorite wet food.Bond checks the mail while Q waits, feeling superfluous and fucked-with, and then lets himself into the ground floor flat. He does not turn on a light, nor does he offer Q so much as a glass of water. Q tries to pretend he is taking advantage of being ignored by looking around and taking the place in.The flat is stark, but not intentionally so. Not minimalist, but minimal. The bones of the place are good, and it still has the original flooring, but the walls are all painted realtor white and the furniture looks like it was left by the previous tenants: A bland sofa. An end table like an afterthought. No art on the walls. No window treatments. There are some boxes stacked in one corner, but Q doesn’t hold out much hope for their contents.“Bit spare,” he says, needling.Bond ignores him and goes to the kitchen. Q hears a cabinet open, the clink of a glass on the counter. Bond returns with a tumbler of scotch. There is not a second one for Q. Bond hitches one hip onto the dining table.“All right then,” says Q, and sits on the ugly sofa. “No more stalling. What is it you want?”Something in Bond’s posture shifts and he acquires that predatory grace, that singularity of focus. He doesn’t move from his post at the dining table, but it does feel as if the space between them has shrunk by a significant margin. “I want to—““No,” says Q, heading him off at the pass. “I mean really. What?All the games and the teasing and the bullshit, this drama with the attaché’s wife. What exactly are you after? Or is it just about the chase? Because if that’s what it is, I have no interest.”The tirade hits pause on Bond’s advance and he sits frozen in a half-hunch, holding his whiskey like it’s the wrong prop for this scene.“Go on,” says Q, a little more gently. He wants an answer more than he wants a fight.“I…” Bond shakes his head. Remembers the whiskey. Starts again. “I just spend all this time being whatever they need me to be. And the games and the bullshit…sometimes it’s the only thing I can take back: to make people want what I can give them, even if they aren’t interested at first.”“I was,” says Q, and it lands like a mistimed entrance. He winces, but owns it. “I was interested.”Bond gives him a pitying look, and Q isn’t sure he believes it. Q isn’t sure it’s true. But he feels awful, suddenly, for being so bitchy about it, even though he knows he’s well within his rights.Bond looks his age again. He’s a man who’s done too much shit for too many people, and it shows. And Q has acted just like the rest of them: had some fantasy of just what fucking 007 would be like. Never asked if it was what Bond had in mind, or might enjoy.“Fuck,” says James, and sets his whiskey on the table. “I’m tired, Q,” he says. “I’m so bloody tired of giving people what they want.”Q’s fists are balled up on his knees, sweaty in the creases of his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he says, over-formal and confused. “I didn’t realize.”Bond shrugs and polishes off his drink. “An apology puts you leagues ahead of most people, anyway.”“Do you want me to go?” asks Q.Bond closes his eyes and sighs, heavy: a tired sigh, an old dog’s sigh. His glass lands heavy on the table. He does not shrug--exhaustion or good manners—but Q can imagine the shift of muscle underneath his jacket, the weight of the movement, his shoulders like pistons rising and falling.“What do you want?” he asks, and this time it isn’t a challenge. Maybe it’s an offer. He’s also genuinely curious.Bond looks up again, the lines around his eyes crinkling. The smile is mirthless. “I don’t know. Isn’t that sad? I don’t even know.”It is hard, Q realizes now. The thing that Bond does, the observation and analysis of targets, quick decision-making in the field. No wonder he’s exhausted. Q is daunted at the idea of attempting it, but it’s that or turn tail. Would he still rather be at home with the cats? In his neatly appointed apartment surrounded by the results of his own keenly honed aesthetic? Strapped into his braces and meditating himself to sleep in the optimized position for spinal alignment?Q is a man who has worked very hard to decide what he wants. What is best for him to want. Bloody useless now. He didn’t know he wanted this, and if he can’t count on his own assessment of himself, how the hell is he supposed to trust himself about other people?Bond has not kicked him out. That’s a starting point. Bond brought the car back in one piece. That’s another. Q takes a few steps toward the dining table, toward Bond, and gets no negative reaction. No reaction at all. Bond watches him as he dares to close the distance.They do not touch. Q’s nervous gaze skitters across the space and lands on the whiskey glass. He picks it up, as if to drink, and then remembers it’s empty and stands there holding it stupidly. “Another?” he asks, covering.Bond shakes his head. Progress. Q tips the glass to get at the dregs, more showing off than after liquid courage. To give him something to do with the damn thing now that it’s in his hands. The whiskey tastes like whiskey, brown and hot and faintly saline. He doesn’t know a lot about it. He guesses it’s probably expensive.“Q,” says Bond. “Put down the glass.”Only when the tumbler snaps against the table does Q realize how quickly he has jumped to obey orders. He is already failing. Shame makes him incautious, and he steps closer, into the angle of Bond’s raised leg, and leans forward to taste the same whiskey in Bond’s mouth, which opens slightly in surprise.Kissing Bond is a very different experience to being kissed by him. There is time to take stock. His lower lip is very full. The upper is thinner but sensitive underneath. Q curls his tongue against the fragile stretch of skin above Bond’s front teeth--the frenulum, he remembers. There are several in the human mouth, and another one much lower. The name comes from the Latin for “little bridle.” And Bond does jerk his head like a restive horse: surprise, from the way he draws a sudden breath. Q catches the back of his head, instinctive, and holds him still. Bond has had a haircut recently, and short hairs prickle against Q’s palm when it slides to the nape of Bond’s neck. Slowly the muscles there relax.Bond’s weight is channeled through his right leg, and his left is hitched high enough for Q’s free hand to drift without intent to the swell of his thigh, to slide higher and higher as Q kisses him more deeply and moves closer to the heat of his body. Somehow, Q finds his thumb resting in the crease of Bond’s hip, very near his fly. There is no hint of visible interest behind the zipper. Q looks up into Bond’s eyes, which are guarded and give nothing back except reflected scrutiny.“Is this what you want?” asks Q, exploratory. He slides his thumb up the curve of Bond’s iliac crest. Bond shifts, wordless, into the touch. Grateful, Q kisses him again, pressing him back onto the tabletop. Bond goes down easily, which is another affirmation; Q’s small weight would never shift him against his will.Bond hooks his left heel onto the edge of the table, and pulls his right foot up onto the single dining room chair. Q is neatly bracketed by Bond’s legs now, which limits his options to retreat or advance.Bond’s shirt is tucked into his trousers, pulled taut now that he is lying down. Q slides his hands across the fabric: heavy Oxford cloth, almost grainy in its weave. It comes out from Bond’s waistband to reveal a white undershirt, faintly damp, and underneath this finally is skin. Q flattens his palms against the plane of Bond’s stomach and feels the muscles move: an anticipatory contraction. Q has a brief flashback to Bond’s hands on his own bare stomach, the animal vulnerability concentrating into a queasy bolt of arousal that shot straight down his core to his cock.Q’s fingertips find the hard points of Bond’s nipples beneath his shirt and push it higher to expose them. “Do you want me to—“ he starts, and then just squeezes, gently at first and then pinching. Bond closes his eyes. Q can’t tell if it’s pleasure or pain or resignation or what. He grinds his teeth, embarrassed. He’s getting some things right but it still feels wrong: too tentative, too chaste. Like a game of twenty questions. Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do that?And then something clicks for Q. This shouldn’t be about what Bond wants him to do--that’s just one more way of taking away his power. Of putting power in Q’s hands that he doesn’t want. This is not about what Q could do to Bond. It’s about what Bond wants to do to him.Q straightens, and Bond is watching him again. He touches the top button of his own shirt, above the collar of his jumper. Bond tracks the movement with eyes like a fatal system error.“Do you want me naked?” asks Q.Bond considers a moment, lips parted. Q sees his tongue flex against the back of his front teeth. “Yes.”“Do you want to undress me?”Another pause, this one longer. Bond shifts on the table, crossing his arms behind his head. “No.”Q swallows, and slips his first button free.His skin prickles as he bares it--without his jumper, his shirt, his socks, his trousers, he notices that it is cold in Bond’s flat. His skin is all over goosebumps, bloodless and luminescent in the gloom. The sight of his own bare body, the knowledge that Bond is watching him, makes the blood rise across his cheeks. Makes his cock twitch and lift as he slips out of his boxer briefs. It is dark in the flat, except where the streetlights stretch long yellow fingers between the blinds.“Can you see?” asks Q. “Enough,” says Bond.Q shuts his eyes briefly, takes a breath through his nose. “Do you want to touch me?”The table creaks. When he looks again, Bond is up on one elbow. “No.”Tentative, Q reaches for himself, uncomfortable with exhibition but willing. He asked, after all. After a few tentative strokes, Bond says, “Stop,” and he does, relieved.“Come here,” says Bond. “Use your mouth. You’re good at that.”“I’m messy,” says Q.“I like a bit of mess,” says Bond.Q bites back a smart remark about broken tech and collateral damage, the frantic diplomatic cleanup occasioned by each of Bond’s own messes. He licks his bottom lip, remembering the pressure of Bond’s thumb, the rough edge of a callous, the sting of salt.There is a swell behind Bond’s zipper now. Q reaches for his belt, realizes it’s the same one he fished out from under his bookcase. He holds it in his hands for a moment too long; Bond notices.“Familiar?” he asks. Q clenches his teeth and moves to set it aside.“No,” says Bond, and Q freezes. “Put it around your neck.”He doesn’t, not immediately. And he drops the game, because this is something he might have wanted himself, and Bond knows it. This game is not about what Q wants, or it shouldn’t be. “Really?”Another pause. A long one. Then: Bond’s nod is a slight inclination of the head, the slip of yellow streetlight against his jaw. He does not repeat himself.Q pulls the end of the belt through the buckle and loops it around his throat. The buckle sits heavy and cold in the hollow of his collar bone. “All right,” says Bond. “Give it to me.”Q hands him the loose end of the belt and has to get close to keep from choking. Bond winds the strap around his fist once, pulling Q low. The belt buckle slides around to rest beneath his left ear, the hinge pinching his neck. “Go on then,” says Bond, lifting his hips. “Get it out.”He does, hands cramped beneath his neck. Bond keeps him on a short leash until his trousers are open, and only then lets up. Sparks prickle at the edge of Q’s vision, brilliant with the sudden influx of blood flow. He exhales, shaky, and Bond’s cock leaps.Bond gives a little tug on the belt--just a nudge. Q breathes in, smells soap and sweat and the fruity, yeasty scent caught in the fold of Bond’s thigh. He licks at the curve of velvety foreskin where it is pulling back from Bond’s glistening cock. He is sloppy, open-mouthed, and the sounds of his tongue and lips against the wetness and the delicate folds of Bond’s tackle make his knees weak. He sucks the head of Bond’s cock into his mouth, licks the tender stretch of skin just beneath the glans--this is that final frenulum, and Bond jerks again, but harder, and yanks on the belt by instinct. Q’s mouth falls open, shocked, and Bond’s cock bounces free and swipes spit onto his nose.“Fuck,” says Bond, and lets him go a little, to get back to work.Q does, but with a little less panache. He slips slowly down until Bond’s length is pressing against his soft palate, nudging against the nerves that say no, no more, no farther. He takes it farther. His eyes begin to water. He swallows and Bond’s grip on the belt tightens: a warning. Q backs off, settles into a slower, shallower rhythm. The loop of the belt goes slack. He is going to have a bruise on the corner of his jaw: he can already feel the ache of it when the buckle falls away.Each time he gets a little too fast, sucks Bond a little too deep, or tries to back off and play around, Bond gives him a sharp jerk to correct him. And now he understands the belt is not an acquiescence to Q’s own deviance. The belt is a control. Q is not allowed to do anything Bond doesn’t want. He can’t even ask, anymore, if Bond likes what he’s doing. Bond will tell him, and he won’t use words. As Q steadily works away, Bond’s grip grows tighter and tighter, inexorable, just as his cock gets heavier, harder. He’s going to finish, soon, and Q can’t breathe. His vision is going dark at the edges, and his weight is hanging against the leather collar to pull it even tighter. His own hard-on is thick between his legs, bobbing painfully in the chilly air. Distantly, he hears the legs of the table scraping the floor as Bond thrusts into his face. With weak fingers, he scrabbles at Bond’s thigh, tangling sweaty fingers in the wool of his trousers, clinging there like he is about to fall from a cliff.The tourniquet around his neck loosens and he rears back, starry-eyed, to suck in a shuddering breath.“Fuck me,” says Bond, staring at him with blown out eyes. “Really?” asks Q, dizzy. “I’m not...I mean, if you--”“No,” says Bond, scrambling up onto his elbows. “No, that isn’t--”“Do you want to fuck me?” Q asks, desperate. He is breathing hard, mouth wet, a string of spit streaked across his chin. “Do you want to fuck my arse?”“Jesus yes,” says Bond, and jerks the belt so Q falls against him, all limbs and angles. Their teeth clash as they kiss but Bond just pulls him closer.“But not on the bloody table,” says Bond, growling into his mouth. “I’m not seven-fucking-teen.”Q whines in response, where a laugh should have gone. Bond’s clothes are rough against his heated, naked skin. His fingers creep once more beneath the hem of Bond’s shirt, but Bond chokes him with the belt for his trouble, and then pushes him back onto the floor. “In the bed,” he says. “I’m old.”Q is a professional of a different sort, and if he’d seen a schematic of the place he would not have forgotten the layout. But he hasn’t, and he’s disoriented and unsteady on his feet, not up to estimating the location of the bedroom. Bond eases his bulk off the squealing table and catches the belt where it dangles down the center of Q’s chest.“Come on,” he says, and jerks Q after him. Q trips on his own feet, staggers, and follows Bond down a short, dark hallway. Light from the street does not penetrate this far back. There is a sodium glow from a safety light in the courtyard, but thick blackout curtains render it little more than a piano wire strung through the darkness. Q doesn’t even see the bed--he just feels it meet the back of his knees, and down he goes.He can hear Bond undressing, see his outlines thinly limned in yellow. In a few places, light ripples over the shiny stretch of a scar. Bond hisses, lifting his right arm; Q remembers a daring leap, a botched landing, Bond dangling one-armed from the landing skid of a helicopter.Q feels a sudden rush of warmth he is tempted to attribute to the reoxygenation of his brain. James, you poor bastard. Bond’s trousers slide to the floor with the heavy grace of good flannel. From the angle of his hips, he favors his left leg slightly, and Q knows the warm thing in his chest is a dangerous kind of tenderness just this side of pity.Then Bond uncaps the bottle of lube from his bedside drawer and slicks his cock and both his hands. The feelings of tenderness evaporates abruptly, burnt off by something much more urgent.Bond collapses onto the mattress beside Q as heavily as a great tower crumbling. The smell of him rises in his wake: sour and sweaty and a little bit of Q’s own spit. He is hot now that all his clothes are off, throwing off heat like a great burning wreck. His hands on Q’s hips are slippery with lube, the swollen give of them lush against Q’s sharp bones. Bond turns onto one side--the left, to favor his right arm, and Q spares half a worried thought for the bad leg--and pulls Q into the curve of his body. The swell of his cock is hot between Q’s thighs, his breath catching in the fine hair at the nape of Q’s neck. The worried thought follows the tenderness into oblivion.Bond slaps Q’s flank, and Q pulls his knee to his chest. There is no hesitation with Bond now: one of those thick, blunt fingers is inside Q already and Bond’s other hand is back on the belt, hard by the buckle, so that Q is held firmly at both ends. He realizes his eyes are closed, because he can see the bright stripe of sensation down his back, like a bowstring from skull to prostate.Bond stuffs a second finger in beside the first and Q bites down on the tail end of a thin, needy sound. Bond twists his fingers, stretching Q too fast. It feels good, in a nauseous way that verges on painful.“Can I—?” asks Bond, interrupting himself to bite Q’s neck, below the cutting edge of the leather. The way he says it is a little wondering: that he has been given the opportunity to ask. But he also sounds desperate, like if Q says no he might not listen.Q is not going to say no.“Please,” he says instead, and it means yes but it sounds piteous, almost afraid, like he is begging Bond not to. He is growing lightheaded again, drifting between the two points of intense pressure at either end of his spine. “Please, I—“Bond makes a guttural noise into the skin of Q’s neck and pulls his fingers out. Q feels the slide of them somewhere much deeper than they’ve touched: a full-body sensation, a little like a shiver. Without the pressure inside of him he feels weightless and hollow. He scrabbles at the edges of the belt with his fingertips and Bond lets him loose by a fraction of an inch. It’s enough. Just enough. And as the blood rushes back to Q’s brain again the head of Bond’s cock pushes past the resistant ring of muscle in his arse and slides deep.Q gags, partly at the sudden intensity of penetration, partly against the continued pressure of the belt. Bond lets his throat loose and puts his face into the curve of Q’s shoulder, mouthing at the straining line of his trapezius.“Shh,” says Bond, “Shh.” Then, moving his hips: “Fucking hell.”Q can hear himself making a sound like a sob that isn’t. He is very deep inside his own head, or possibly floating just outside of it. When Bond grabs a fistful of his hair, the sting of his scalp sings across the entire field of his skin. He has lost all sense of himself except sensations. He has a conception of his body only where he is pressed against Bond’s chest, held in his fist, pierced by him and stretched around him. And, of course, his own cock, which is stiff and heavy and desperate to be touched. But he is clutching the leather strap around his neck with white knuckles, less because he is afraid that Bond will pull it tight again and more because he needs something solid to hang onto.“I want…” says Bond, into the hollow between Q’s shoulder blades. The flat of his tongue paints a hot, soft stripe along Q’s spine and Q thinks it is a simple statement of truth, an admission of desire. And he thinks, It worked; and I did it and good boy, good boy. And then Bond grabs the ridge of Q’s hipbone and fucks into him, hard, and says: “I want to make you come without your hands.”Q makes a strangled sound and bucks against the rumpled duvet. Bond laughs and it’s that rumbling one, the one Q feels more than hears. Bond slides his own hand down the swell of Q’s arse and cups his balls. Q’s cock feels like it isn’t even a part of him anymore, or maybe like it’s the only part of him.
“Go on,” says Bond, giving him a roll across the palm, a gentle squeeze. “You asked me what I want and now I bloody told you.” He’s talking right in Q’s ear, maybe not even for Q. The words have a distant quality, almost meditative, like a litany. “I want to see you come. I…fucking…oh, Christ. Jesus.”
This as Q’s whole body tightens with his orgasm, the bowstring drawn taught before release. He bites down on the pillow, cotton squeaking between his teeth, jaw aching. The edges of the belt cut into his palms. His hole clenches around Bond’s cock, and Bond pushes deeper, grabs at Q’s cock even as he’s finishing, like he can’t help himself, and the rough final strokes are raw and they hurt but it’s good even if it’s too much and if Bond doesn’t come soon--
He does, like he’s trying to keep it quiet, and it sounds like he’s been stabbed. Q knows what that sounds like--he’s heard it enough times. Bond does sob, just once, and presses his forehead into the same place between Q’s shoulder blades where he has so recently pressed his tongue. He takes a shuddering breath and lets it out in a rush. The movement of the air raises goosebumps on Q’s damp skin.
Slowly, Q uncurls stiff fingers from the belt around his neck and waits to see what Bond will do next. He can feel the fluttering of Bond’s softening cock inside of him. For a long moment, they lie slotted together like spoons in a drawer, Bond catching his breath. Long enough that Q gets his brain back together, marginally, at least enough to wonder how long this game is supposed to last. Maybe they are done playing already.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks, half rising on an elbow to demonstrate that he’s willing. His voice is wrecked, crackling in his throat. In retrospect, the belt was very dangerous. He finds he does not care.
Bond snatches the tail of the offending object and pulls him back down. “No,” he says. “I want you to stay.”
#
Q is not a sound sleeper under the best of circumstances--those being alone in his own bed, double-braced, dosed with supplements after fifteen minutes of meditation. But he’s so strung out after the sex that he does drop off for a couple of hours, bracketed by the solid wall of flesh at his back.When he wakes it really is pitch dark, and he has to piss. His glasses are...somewhere. He doesn’t remember taking them off, which means they’re probably tangled in the sheets. Or maybe still on the table. He fights his way out from under the dead weight of Bond’s arm and blindly stumbles across the room. He hardly knows which way is up, but manages to find the en suite toilet by touch and stubbing his toes and dumb luck. Since Bond has slept through the manhandling of Q’s escape and the racket of his quest, Q dares to flip the light switch without shutting the door.It’s a full bath, sparklingly clean. Q takes a piss and then swishes with some mouthwash, because he is leery of sharing toothbrushes. Then, reflecting on the absurdity of this squeamishness considering Bond has just half-strangled him and unloaded up his arse, he stripes the (relatively fresh) toothbrush with some paste and cleans the fuzz out of his mouth.In the mirror, his neck is a mess of red: broken capillaries and torn skin. It will be bruised tomorrow. He runs a hand across his throat like a man testing the closeness of his shave, and shivers.A stern little voice in his head is telling him he should not have liked it all quite as much as he did--his conscience accuses him of acquiescing to Bond’s desires and sublimating his own, to fucking for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps rightly, the little voice points out that there should have been a safeword, and that a belt was not the safest toy to play at strangulation.He truly, deeply does not give a shit. Because a larger part of him is thinking back to Bond in his living room after The Gate, getting all of it right on accident until he was told to do it on purpose, and realizing that this is exactly what he wanted then, what he’s wanted all along. And Q has wanted it too.He turns away from the mirror and leans on the doorframe, tracing the light across the floor to the bed, where it falls over Bond tangled in the sheets like a chiaroscuro painting. He is dead to the world, undisturbed by the light or the flush of the toilet. The line of his body suggests a great weight, finally set down.“You silly old bugger,” says Q. “Why didn’t you just ask?”Then again, would Q have said yes? Q with his commitment to ethical practice, his carefully curated preferences. Right, wrong. Zero, one. So who’s the silly bugger, after all?He flicks off the light and shuffles back to bed. And then, despite the different mattress, the wrong number of pillows, the absence of his braces and tea and melatonin, Q falls swiftly, deeply into sleep.
#
When he wakes up, it’s well past his usual alarm. The bed is empty, and Bond has drawn the curtains back to let in the sunlight. There is a whisper of humidity in the air, and Q sees a smudge of steam on the bathroom mirror through the open door. A shower sounds divine; he is sore all over and still a bit sticky around the nether regions. The sheets, when he stirs from underneath the duvet, are absolutely ruined. His glasses, kicked to the foot of the bed, are thankfully intact.His neck has gone purple from the chin down, stippled with scabs that sting under the hot water. Behind his left ear there are two vivid blood blisters raised by Bond’s belt buckle. He runs a finger over them, rueful, unsure if he feels pissed off or pleased.There is a dressing gown on the back of the bathroom door: New and Lingwood, navy linen with white piping. Against the backdrop of the bare walls and milquetoast furniture, this bit of luxury feels incongruous. Q slips it over his shoulders--unsurprisingly, it is several sizes too big.In the kitchen, Bond is shirtless in sweatpants, tipping coffee beans into a grinder. At his elbow there is a sleek lever espresso machine and two empty demitasse cups. Like the dressing gown, Q finds these items a bit odd in the context of a flat that is otherwise aesthetically uncommitted and thin on creature comforts.Bond lifts his eyes from adjusting the grinder’s dial. “Morning,” he says.Now that they are both standing here in the clear light of day, Q has no idea how to make conversation. He opens his mouth, not quite sure what’s going to come out, and ends up saying, rather accusatory, “You didn’t use a condom.” The memory of hot water sliding through the dried come on his thighs is fresh. Thinking of it makes the hair on his arms stand up.Bond raises a ghostly eyebrow. “You’ve seen my medical records.”Q makes a face. “And I suppose you’ll say that you’ve seen mine.”Bond shoots him that crooked, half-crushed smile and presses the button to start the coffee grinder.Q should be much angrier. He isn’t. Settling against the counter, he watches Bond tamp the grounds into the filter: precise pressure, a slight twist of the wrist, and they emerge a smooth field of velvet brown. He fits the filter into the machine and slides a demitasse cup beneath the spouts, and when he pulls the lever down it is with a calculated strength and evenness of motion that reminds Q of his driving: momentarily, he has become part of the machine. Then he looks up and catches Q staring and he is very much not an assemblage of levers and gears, not even a complex computer running calculations on the likely outcomes of this scenario, but a man with wary eyes, afraid he has given something away.“What?” he asks.“That’s a very nice espresso machine,” says Q. “La Pavoni?”“Yes,” says Bond.“Was it a gift?”“No,” he is even more cautious, this time. “Why?”Q fondles the lapel of Bond’s expensive dressing gown. “Is it really true, that you don’t know what you want?”A faint blush rises across the bridge of Bond’s nose. It makes his eyes look even bluer. He hands the first cup of coffee to Q but does not start on the second. “I think,” says Q, “that it might not be.”“All right,” says Bond, and it’s not exactly an admission; just an invitation to continue.Q slips into the space between Bond and the La Pavoni, detaching the filter from the espresso machine and tapping it into the wastebasket. He doses it--the jargon comes back to him across several year’s distance, when he was considering buying one of these for himself--and tamps, mimicking Bond’s earlier motions. It’s not exactly driving an Aston Martin, but it’s a little more fiddly than knitting, and it scratches the same itch.Bond has not moved back to give him room, and is standing very close indeed. Q can feel his breath on the tender skin of his neck.“Would it be fair to say,” asks Q, over his shoulder, “that sometimes you want some things very, very badly?”Bond grabs his arse through the dressing gown and presses him to the counter. “Maybe.” His growl is performative, a little playful. “Maybe sometimes I see something in a shop window and it’s all I can bloody think about until it’s mine.”Q slots the filter snugly back into place. His cock nudges tentatively against the cabinets. “I’m not an espresso machine, Mr. Bond.”“No,” says Bond. “The espresso machine was much easier to get. And use James, won’t you?”“Are you calling me difficult?” He almost says the name, but doesn’t.“Well,” says Bond, still playing. “I do like a challenge, don’t I?” Q makes an unimpressed sound. Bond sighs into his ear, and his grip on Q’s rear loosens until he’s cupping the curve of muscle more softly. He drops the act. “It’s just so much harder with people.”“How so?” asks Q, arousal flagging slightly, but genuinely interested. He is someone who has historically also found people harder than other pursuits.Bond hesitates, chin resting on Q’s shoulder. It is an echo of last night, this position. Q leans into the bulk of him, a sort of reminder and encouragement. A way of asking, would you like to tell me?“When you want someone like that,” Bond says, “and not something, they can say no.”That awful tender feeling uncurls behind Q’s ribs again. He checks the temperature gauge on the La Pavoni, faux-casual, and feels the heat coming off the chrome.“So it’s easier,” says Bond, “it’s safer, to give them what they want. And after a while, you don’t stop to think about what you want out of it anymore. And they can always tell, and then it goes to shit anyway.” He pats Q’s rear, affectionately. “You’d better pull that shot or the grounds will burn.”Q doesn’t, yet. He picks up the second demitasse and turns it in his hands. “What if it turns out you want the same thing?”Bond plucks the cup away from him and sets it firmly underneath the spouts. “I expect there would still be some tricky details to work out.”“Lucky for you, I’m an engineer.” Q pulls the double shot like a professional, perfectly calculating the force applied to the lever and the velocity of its descent. “Working out the tricky details is my specialty.”