Fic: Slow Dancing In a Burning Room (8/9)
Slow Dancing In A Burning Room, 8/9
Fandom: Skyfall (James Bond)
Characters: James Bond/Q, Eve Moneypenny, Gareth Mallory, Bill Tanner, OCs
Rating: Mature. Explicit in sections; depictions of canon-typical violence.
Word-Count: ~60,000. Complete, but chapters will be posted as they are returned from beta and undergo final edits.
Notes: This fic was Brit-picked by the lovely and patient starsandgraces, who isn't even in this fandom but still put up with my badgering. I was encouraged by multiple enablers, including jou and flatbear, but all credit and gratitude goes to circ_bamboo, who held my hand, cheered me on, read over every inch of this fic, plotted endlessly with me, and is hands-down the best writing partner in crime a fangirl could ask for. THANK YOU SO MUCH, BABY, ALL THE SCONES ARE FOR YOU. ♥
Summary: Q has a past, a cat, and a dangerous new boyfriend. Two of these things keep him up nights, the other pees in a box. Espionage, plot with porn, decoy flats, suit porn, scones for the Queen, invention porn, secret identities, snark, canon-typical violence, dysfunctional flirting by dysfunctional people, and Eve Moneypenny is HBIC.
Chapter Eight. The only way out is through.
You can also read here at the AO3. Part one of this fic posted here on LJ, part two is here, part three is here, part four is here, part five is here, part six is here, and part seven is here.
Q was getting extremely sick of waking up nauseated. Three times in a week was three times too many.
He kept his eyes shut for a few moments, not trusting himself to even be able to sit up unassisted. There was a hand in his hair, he realized, and something around his throat, like some kind of choker. He was flat on his back, but he wasn’t on the floor; a couch, felt like. A couch, and…
“I think he’s awake,” said Janessa’s voice above him. “Open your eyes, boy. Look at me.”
“Give him his glasses,” said David’s voice from nearby, and then a hand was under Q’s shoulders, helping him to sit up slightly. He opened his eyes, blinking as someone slid his glasses onto his face, and then he was staring at the faces of the two people he once would have moved heaven and earth for.
He was right, as it turned out; he was laying a couch, with his head and shoulders in Janessa’s lap. He was shirtless, for some reason, and already chilly despite the warmth of Janessa’s thighs against his shoulders. David was crouched next to the couch, studying him with bright eyes, and Janessa still had her hand curled in his hair, looking down at him with an elegantly arched eyebrow. They were both in street clothes, jeans and sweaters, and looked much the same as when Q had last seen them in person.
Be patient. Don’t antagonize your kidnappers. Be aware. You will be rescued. The quartermaster of MI6 was not an asset to be lightly thrown aside. But Q had no idea how long he’d been unconscious this time, or where he was, since presumably it was a new location. There was no sign of Blake, though, for which Q was thankful; throwing a chair at someone didn’t exactly ingratiate you to them. He’d guessed it was Blake who surprised him at the farmhouse, since Thug #1 had appeared thoroughly down for the count and also Q had smashed his face in with his boot. Then it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know what had happened to the Recluse, either, and had to suppress a shiver.
“You grew your hair out again,” Q said, eyes lingering on David’s salt-and-pepper brown hair.
David smirked. “I did,” he said. “Yours has gotten awfully long, too.”
“I like it,” said Janessa, and yanked on Q’s hair, hard enough to make his eyes water. Q made a pained noise in his throat, and Janessa smiled at him, slow and wicked. “And your tattoos. Those are new.” She leaned over him, stroking her fingers lightly along his right arm, tracing his biceps with interest.
“I told you to be good, sweetheart,” said David, softly. He got up from his crouch, lifting Q’s legs and sliding onto the couch next to his wife, settling Q’s legs back across his lap, stroking a proprietary hand up Q’s thigh to his stomach, splaying his fingers there and pressing down lightly. “But you didn’t listen, and your secret agent man got away, and now we’re going to have to punish you even worse than we were.”
Q shivered. His hands weren’t bound, for a nice change, but he was exhausted, wrung-out. And while the urge to be sick was gone, he still felt like he wanted to drink about a gallon of water and then sleep for a week. “At least I deserve it,” he said after a moment. “James Bond has a great deal of blood on his hands, but he shouldn’t be your target.”
“We don’t like people touching our things,” said Janessa, her words making his stomach clench. “And his reputation for being a trouble-maker precedes him. Not the kind of thing we can ignore.”
“We should have realized you would make trouble if we weren’t there ourselves to keep an eye on you, though,” said David. “That was our mistake. Shouldn’t have underestimated our boy.” He leaned his shoulder against Janessa’s, so that Q was draped now across their laps, sitting up and leaning against the arm of the couch, his arse on the couch between Janessa’s thighs. They’d used to love to hold him like this, draped across or between them like a beloved dog or cat, a hand in his hair, petting him until he fell asleep.
At the thought of pets, Q’s hand came up to this throat, and he started a bit at the feel of leather and steel under his hand. “Oh, do you like it?” asked Janessa, grinning widely. “I thought it’d help you remember your place.”
“A collar. I see,” said Q, biting his lip. “And I’m shirtless because…?”
“I wasn’t aware we needed permission for that,” David said darkly. The hand stroking along his thigh tightened its grip, nails digging in through Q’s trousers, and Q went quiet, watching David until the violence behind his eyes had passed.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Q after a few more moments. Both David and Janessa seemed content to just sit with him, which was starting to make Q nervous. Maybe that was the idea. “Usually at this point someone puts a gun to my temple and demands I break into MI6’s servers for them.”
“Nah,” said Janessa dismissively. “No computers for you, baby. Not till we know you’ll be good. You have a long, long way to go before you get there.”
“Right now, though, I think you owe us some answers.” David raised his eyebrows at Q, who sighed, and put his face in his hands, rubbing at his temples.
“Yes, that’s entirely fair,” Q said resignedly. He swallowed, dropping his hands to his lap and staring at them, gathering his thoughts. He’d pictured this conversation so many times, what he’d say when confronted with how could you do this?
That was when he felt it. When he sagged against the couch, the slightest nudge against the inside of his hip-the poison pen was still in his fucking pants, forgotten until just now. Q took a deep breath and let it out slow, balking at even the idea of using it, but he had to act normal. “First of all, did you know that Ad-that Carolyn was pregnant?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Q saw David and Janessa exchange a glance. “We knew she’d had a baby since we went in, but not how old the girl was,” said Janessa.
“Yes, well. She found out Jonathan-uh, Christopher-had got her pregnant while you were doing that heist in Milan, and she confessed to me, and she was so frightened of you finding out and I-” Q took a deep breath, reminding himself to stay calm, to not let his voice shake so, “-I couldn’t understand why. She begged me not to tell you.” Q chewed his lip. “So I started spying on you.”
“I’m surprised it took you that long,” said David, and Q looked up at him, startled. David shrugged. “You’re smart. I knew you were going to cotton on sooner or later, but I admit I’d hoped it was gonna be later.”
“I trusted you,” said Q, clenching his hands, “when you said that I had nothing to worry about, it never even occurred to me to spy on you, I just thought you wanted alone time! As a couple! Or, fuck, I don’t know--”
“But you did check,” said Janessa. “What was it, baby? What’d you find out?”
Q groaned. “Everything,” he said helplessly. “The-the FBI agent you tortured, that ship’s crew that you had poisoned in their sleep, why would you do that-you killed so many people, and once I found one thing I couldn’t stop, it was like a train wreck.” He gritted his teeth. “I wanted so badly for it to not be true. But it wasn’t just the one incident, it was…”
“We should’ve kept a closer eye on you,” mused David. “I remember thinkin’ you seemed really off, when we came back, but I just thought you were sick. And then you picked that fight with us…” He trailed off, watching Q with an intensity that made Q’s stomach lurch from what it promised.
“I still can’t believe you turned on us,” said Janessa, and there, that was what he’d been dreading all this time, the accusation in her voice. Betrayal. “You sent us to hell, Simon, do you know what it was like?”
“What else could I have done?” cried Q. “I’m sorry that I have a fucking moral compass! And you’d never have let me go, you’d never have just let me walk away, even if that was something I could do, and I promised Agrippina and Fezzik I’d help them get out because they were scared too! We were so scared of you, I didn’t know what t-to do-”
“We loved you,” said David, and now he leaned forward, grabbing Q by the throat, his fingers digging in above the collar, making Q gasp. “I would’ve taken a bullet for you. I would have done anything for you.” He pressed his thumb into the soft tissue beneath Q’s jaw, drawing out a whimper. “But you were right to be scared, sweetheart.”
The hand in Q’s hair tightened, hard enough to make his eyes water, Janessa’s lips against his ear. “So. You called in the cavalry, gave us up so you could go free, as if you weren’t in our bed every night for a year begging us just to touch you, and now you think you’re so fuckin’ fancy ‘cause you work for the Secret Service and you have a special agent for a boyfriend.” She exhaled against his skin, her breath hot and dangerous. “But none of that matters now, baby, ‘cause we’re gonna get you right with God again.”
Q swallowed, shutting his eyes, gone cold all over with fear and the urge to shove them both away. He was trying so hard to not provoke them, but he didn’t think he could keep still if they tried to fuck him, couldn’t go that far. As if cue, David leaned in and kissed his jaw, beard scratching along Q’s chin, and Q let out a stifled whimper as David’s mouth moved up to Q’s, exhaling against Q’s lips. “Gotta make you remember who you belong to, Simon,” he murmured, and then he was kissing Q, rough and possessive.
It was now or never. Q shuddered, and in the moment of mutual distraction he dipped his hand into his pants, curling his fingers around the pen in its hidden inner pocket, nudging it out into his palm and closing his hand around it. Please don’t make me do this, he thought, and then cried out as David bit his mouth, hard enough to draw blood. He sagged as David pulled away, and there was no need to fake the way he was shaking now, or how ragged his breathing was. Q watched David lift a hand, casually wiping the blood from his mouth the way a man would wipe off whipped cream or a bit of mustard, swiping his thumb along his lower lip and smiling brilliantly at Q.
I can’t believe I loved you as much as I did. Had they really always been like this? He still found it hard to believe.
Something moved at the edge of the room; a man appeared in the door, and it was all Q could do not to vault himself over the back of the couch as he recognized their killer-for-hire Eric Temple. He was in a cheap black suit, a Parabellum Luger Mauser pistol in his shoulder holster peeking out from under the suit coat; he’d have at least three more weapons hidden on his person, by Q’s lowest estimate. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, nearly toneless. He smiled faintly at Q, and Q’s skin crawled. “Thought you should know that an MI6 vehicle has turned up on radar about three miles out. Just one agent.”
“Take care of it,” said David impatiently.
Temple cleared his throat. “It’s Eve Moneypenny,” he said. Q took a sharp breath.
David looked over at Temple then, before looking back at Q. “Your girlfriend’s turned up to save you,” he said, sounding amused. “It’s just her?”
Temple shrugged. “No sign of Bond,” he said, and Q felt his heart sink; why hadn’t Moneypenny brought more reinforcements?
“Take care of it,” David said again, and Temple nodded, vanishing through the doorway.
“Recluse is the one who got you back for us,” Janessa said conversationally. She hooked her chin over Q’s shoulder, sliding both arms around his waist. “I’m actually pretty impressed, babydoll; Jared was no slouch.”
“Is he dead, then?” Q heard the question asked and realized belatedly that it was his own voice saying it. His mind was outside, straining to hear sounds of gunfire or shouts, desperately worried for Moneypenny.
“Uh huh.” David reached up and wiped some blood from Q’s mouth. “Blake’s alright, though. Pretty mad at you, but he knows better than to touch. You did the thumb-trick with the cuffs?” Q nodded; as if in response to being mentioned, his hand started to throb, a dull ache that Q knew would be with him for at least a week. “Good boy,” said David approvingly. His eyes slid past Q’s face, casting a questioning glance at Janessa. “Should we wait, do you think?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Q saw Janessa make a face. “I’m sick of waiting,” she said, and yeah, she was definitely pouting.
David grinned, and the malice in it made Q’s stomach turn over in fear. “I know, sweetheart. Me too. Okay,” he said, “Get him down on the floor.” He sat back and slid out from under Q’s legs. “Time to give you some new marks to go with all that pretty ink, Simon.”
“What-” Q tried too late to scramble to his feet, but Janessa was quicker, shoving him off her lap to crash in a tangle of limbs to the floor, planting her knee into his chest as he tried to sit up. “What are you doing,” he said wildly, oh god, oh god what were they going to do, “J-Janessa, what-”
“Shut up,” she said, and suddenly she was pulling out a knife from inside her shirt, her blonde hair falling in her face as she bent over him. “David, get some towels, honey, the blood is gonna go everywhere and I need to be able to see what I’m doing.”
“No, no, no no no no no,” Q was babbling, there was a knife at his throat and he couldn’t move, couldn’t tear his eyes away from how long and sharp that blade was, thin and dangerous like an exacto knife. “Please, oh my god Janessa, don’t-”
“We thought about cutting out your eyes,” said Janessa, the way you’d talk about deciding on lunch. She grabbed Q’s jaw with one hand, holding his face still, her fingers digging in. “So you couldn’t make more trouble. But David thought it’d be such a waste, since you’re so pretty, and I have to agree with him.”
Q sobbed, thumbed the cap off the pen, still hidden in the curl of his palm. He steeled himself to use it if he got half a chance, but if he telegraphed his movements then Janessa would know and she might stop him, and then he’d be really fucked.
“We settled on ‘slut,’” said David from the other side of the room. Q couldn’t see what he was doing, but he could hear the sounds of a cabinet being opened and closed, and saw David turn around to come back to where Janessa had Q pinned on the floor. “Right above your heart. Gonna hurt you right where you hurt us, so you’ll always carry it with you and never forget again.”
“And you know, if I get a little carried away, well…” Janessa grinned, her eyes too bright. “You’ll heal.”
The next thirty seconds were very confusing.
Gunfire exploded outside, painfully loud even from inside the house; Q could hear shouting, and then an explosion outside that rattled the walls of the room they were in. David cursed and went for a drawer, and Janessa grabbed Q’s collar and hauled him to his feet, nearly choking him in the process; his eyes were watering so badly he almost missed seeing the person come crashing through the window, thrown clean through from the other side.
It was Moneypenny. “You bastard,” she spat, rolling through the fall and getting back to her feet, ignoring the shards of glass as she dodged out of the way of the gunfire spitting through the window. Janessa dragged Q backwards, out of the line of fire, her knife at his throat, and Q couldn’t see David anymore, was too busy watching Moneypenny taking cover behind an upturned table as Eric Temple came through the window after her, his neck and shoulder smeared with blood. He had a knife in his hand; Q could only guess at where the Luger had gone.
“Eric, get out of the way,” David snapped, and Q felt his throat vaporlock when he saw that David had a gun out now and was leveling it at Moneypenny. Moneypenny pre-empted the situation by planting her hands on the ground and kicking the table with both feet, sending it smashing into Temple’s legs, and he snarled and staggered backwards, just in time for Moneypenny to brace herself on one knee and bring the Walther-PPK Q’d given her up to point directly at the Recluse’s face.
“Stay dead this time, you piece of shit,” she bit out, and shot him point-blank, the gunshot ear-splittingly loud in the small room. Temple staggered backwards, a horror of blood and gore where his face had just been, and then he dropped to the floor.
David shouted something, and Moneypenny threw herself behind the table again just in time to miss the bright spark of gunfire from David’s weapon. Q felt the knife-tip at his throat, Janessa’s arm locked tight around his chest, but his attention was on David, who was coming around the counter now with his gun still cocked. Janessa shouted something at David, but all Q could hear was ringing in his ears, and that was when Q saw a familiar solid figure step through the doorway at the far end of the room, gun aimed right at David.
Another crack of a miniature explosion split the room, another flash of light at the muzzle of James’ gun. Q heard it go off through his temporary deafness, saw David falling, felt the percussion of Janessa’s scream in his ears, accompanied by the realization that she still had a knife pressed right over his carotid artery. He acted without thinking, clicking the end of the pen to arm it before jamming the tip of it into the meat of her forearm crossed over his chest.
There were several long, agonizing moments where Q was sure she’d already slit his throat, because nothing was fucking happening. Then her arms fell away, and Q was stumbling forward as she simply toppled over behind him. He turned, his skin crawling instantly at the way Janessa was jerking and twitching, her muscles already spasming. Q dropped the pen as though it had scalded him, and then James was running over to him, gun still cocked and in hand, Moneypenny right behind him. James was saying something but Q couldn’t hear, was too busy backing frantically away from Janessa, staring in horror at the way she was clawing at her chest, having dropped the knife on the floor. She was gasping for breath, her air rattling in her throat, the spittle on her lips a terrifying purplish-red.
“Q!” James said again, nearly shouting in his ear. Moneypenny was scanning the room, her gun raised, her jaw tight.
“I’m fine, just please shoot her, oh my god.” Q swallowed, covering his mouth with his hands. James turned and aimed his gun, and Q jumped as it went off. Janessa twitched once more and then lay still.
James and Moneypenny were there, then, Moneypenny stepping to block Janessa from view as James put both arms around him, and Q found that he was shaking. “We’ve got you, Q,” murmured James into his ear. “It’s over.” Q let out a sob, pressing hard into James’ arms, eyes shut tight. Then two pairs of arms were holding him up, and Q could concentrate on just breathing, could live in the drag of air in and out of his lungs until the blood behind his eyes was gone and he could drift away.
* * * * *
Predictably, James was only partially correct; it took several long hours after that before the day was over, but from that point on it saw a marked improvement.
James had met Moneypenny at the house outside Maidstone that Janessa and David had been using as their main base, both of them there in record time. Moneypenny had got on the horn and put out a Do Not Retain order on the plates of James’ stolen car, which allowed James to break land-speed records on the trip back from Calais while Moneypenny drove like a bat out of hell down from London. Mark, in a display of grace and intelligence that Q would not have expected from a man who’d just endured having his family threatened by lunatics, had managed to find the car the Markhams fled in on CCTV in only an hour, and the rest had been a waiting game.
M had sent more agents in Moneypenny’s wake, but by the time they got there, the theatrics were already over; Moneypenny had volunteered to go in first to draw out the watchers, while James snuck around from the other side, and the two of them working together had mopped up everyone within five minutes, despite how long it had felt to Q at the time. For his part, Q wasn’t exactly sorry to have had fewer people witness his personal disaster than might have been advisable.
James cut the collar off Q’s throat while Moneypenny did another circuit of the house, making sure that all of the Markhams’ remaining lackeys were really dead. Q was sitting with James on the couch when she came back into the room with her weapon drawn, Q wearing James’ jacket, James’ arm around Q’s shoulders. Janessa’s body was by now curled on its side on the floor in a horrible parody of the foetal position, face purple and fingers curled into claws from the poison; David was where he’d fallen on the other side of the room, barely visible from where Q sat, and Temple was thankfully equally out of sight. Moneypenny took three steps into the room and stopped, staring at the tableau before her, and then wordlessly put her gun away.
“Situation has been dealt with, 007 is here and the quartermaster is safe,” she said, speaking into her comms unit. “Send a forensics and clean-up unit, there’s quite a mess.” Moneypenny exhaled, mouth quirking as she looked at James. “You might have called it in, Bond.”
“Couldn’t,” said James. “That tosser outside ripped my ear piece off, and I knew you’d have it covered anyway.”
“I want to go home,” Q interrupted, drawing their eyes to him.
“Medical first,” James said, glancing up at Moneypenny for backup.
“Hypocrite,” muttered Q.
“Bond’s right,” said Moneypenny briskly. She crouched in front of the couch, and her game-face was good, but Q could see the way her hands shook slightly when she reached out to press both of them against Q’s shins. “You’ve been poisoned at least twice today, and you need to debrief with M, but after that you’re on at least a week of mandatory leave, longer if you need it.”
James started when Moneypenny said the word “poison,” before turning to glare at Q, and Q hunched his shoulders a little. “Why the hell did you think I had that pen on me, just for fun? Adrienne met me at the bake-shop to give me an antivenin, that’s how they caught me out.”
“Why were you working on a bloody pen filled with actual poison in the first place?” demanded James.
“It wasn’t supposed to have any poison in it, I thought it was just ink when I took it out of experimental storage-!”
“Enough,” said Moneypenny sharply. “Come on, you two, I’ll drive us back; bicker in the back of the car if you must. Bond has to debrief too anyway. It’s a shame none of the idiots who did this are still alive for us to question; we’re going to have a right mess trying to sort out what happened to you in France, 007.” Q let himself be pulled off the couch and led outside, resolutely not looking at anything but Moneypenny’s back as she led them out to her car, James’ stolen vehicle having been the source of the explosion he’d heard earlier. James got in after him, and without giving Q time to protest or discuss, he pulled Q against him again, tucking Q against the broad expanse of his flank and draping an arm around Q’s shoulders. Q shut his eyes, grateful for a lover who knew when to hold and not to speak, and permitted himself to pillow his head against James.
They spent the ride back to headquarters like that, waiting at the site just long enough for the rest of the crew to arrive before Moneypenny took off for London. They stopped only once, at a small cafe just off the motorway, and there Moneypenny pressed scones and hot tea on both James and Q before getting back in the car. Q closed off by the time they arrived at headquarters, speaking no more than absolutely necessary; the interview with M was blessedly brief, with a promise of a more thorough report to come.
Medical took longer. Q knew he was being an intractable little shit, but the only people he could tolerate today were a pair of trained killers, and everyone more normal than them needed to fuck off. He was finally cleared to be taken home, after being given a painkiller for his thumb and a warning to ice the hand and not use it more than absolutely necessary, only to have to wait thirty more minutes before whatever St. Bart’s-trained idiot that was holding James up decided that MI6’s resident weapon of mass destruction was fit to leave.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Moneypenny asked, sitting with him in the lobby of the medical wing.
“Without question,” Q said, not looking up from his hands in his lap. “But I’m not leaving without James.”
Moneypenny said nothing, just brushed her knuckles against his shoulder. Q kept his hands where they were, laced together in his lap. Normally he’d have his mobile out, or a tablet, something, anything to keep him occupied. But all his internal processes had shut down, and it was all he could do to manage basic conversation. He was grateful that Moneypenny had forced something with calories in it on him, since by now it had been easily eight hours since his last proper meal.
The door at the end of the hallway opened, and James strode in, looking as ill-tempered as Q had ever seen him. “Finally,” said Moneypenny, sitting up and swinging her long legs out from under her. “I thought perhaps they were trying to re-create your genome.”
“Bloody close to it,” he said, walking up to where Q still sat. Q looked up at him, and James’ face softened, doing something painful to Q’s insides. There was still a conversation he and James needed to have, but Q honestly wasn’t sure how soon he’d be able to get through it.
“Do you boys need a ride home?” Moneypenny asked carefully. She and James were both looking at Q now, and Q had to fight the sudden urge to simply crawl under the seat to hide.
It must have shown in his face, because James said, “No, my car is still in the lot, I can get us back to Q’s flat.” Q relaxed a little bit, and stood up, mutely pulling Moneypenny into a hug.
“Text me if you need anything,” she murmured into his ear.
“I will,” he promised. He found he actually meant it, too.
Nothing more was said between them till James got him all the way home, and Q paused in front of the keypad in his fake kitchen, blinking, having to strain to remember what the new password would be after nearly a week out of his own flat. “God, today feels like it took a month,” he muttered.
“To be fair, you spent quite a lot of it unconscious, from what I hear,” said James. He had stayed close by Q, not quite close enough to call it hovering, and if he was uncomfortable he wasn’t letting on.
“I also spent a lot of it vomiting, though thankfully I don’t remember much of that.” Q punched in the number code, shutting his eyes briefly, and as the wall pulled back to allow them entrance, a small white blur flew down the stairs, yowling at the top of her lungs. “Yes, yes, I’m home, hello.” Q bent down, scooping up his whining cat, finding a sudden lump in his throat as she wriggled in his arms, pawing at his chest and maowing plaintively. “I know, I’m the worst owner ever, I left you all alone with only Moneypants to come visit you.”
He felt a hand at the small of his back, James gently nudging him up the stairs. Q let himself be guided into the safety of his own flat, still carrying Carly, who had settled against Q’s chest and started purring like a miniature car engine. James steered Q down the hall to the bedroom and sat him on the couch, and then sat down next to him, the leather creaking as they sank into it.
James looked at him, his gaze steady, his arm draped along the back of the couch. “Please say you aren’t about to ask me something complicated,” Q said.
James’ mouth quirked. “Just tell me what you need,” he said. His voice was so gentle. Q would almost have preferred more shouting; this tenderness would break him.
He took a deep breath. “I need,” he said, “to sleep for a week. And a metric tonne of paracetamol. And a pint-no, two pints of orange juice, the kind with bits, and I should probably eat something but the only thing I want is cheesy toast and I haven’t got any fucking food in the flat-” He just kept going, the words pouring out of him in a rush, his voice brittle in his ears, “-and I know it’s a lot to ask for but I really, really don’t want to be alone-”
“Q,” cut in James, reaching out to cup his face, “it’s fine. Really.”
Q swallowed. “Okay,” he said helplessly.
“I’m going to call for delivery,” said James. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He got up off the couch and disappeared down the hallway. Q curled up where James left him, cradling Carly against his chest and shutting his eyes to nuzzle her soft white fur.
He was still there five minutes later when the couch dipped again, James settling carefully next to him. He let James lift his head to lay it against James’ thigh, James stroking his fingers through Q’s unkempt hair, before his hand came to rest on the back of Q’s neck, thumb rubbing his nape.
“He’ll be here in thirty minutes or so.” Q made noise of assent in the back of his throat. “Now, I have a question; one grunt for yes, two for no.”
Q snorted, rolling over till he was laying on his back and looking up at James. James smiled down at him, and something in Q’s chest loosened a little; if James could still look at him like that, maybe he hadn’t totally fucked everything.
“Let me get this straight,” said James. “You poisoned yourself with synthetic snake venom that wasn’t supposed to be in the pen in the first place, but managed to get Adrienne to meet you with the antivenin before suffering any lasting effects; you were chloroformed by a pair of thugs-for-hire and spent a few hours being sick everywhere, and then managed get out of handcuffs by dislocating your thumb; you then proceeded to subdue both men despite being viciously ill, and instead of getting the hell out of dodge, you hacked into MI6’s secure servers from a remote location, saved my life, Mark’s family’s lives, and Mark’s career, right before getting yourself kidnapped again.” He paused. “Are you me?”
Q was startled into a laugh, which actually hurt, both physically and in other ways. “Well, I don’t have your knack for awful one-liners, for starters.”
“I was talking about your atrocious disregard for your personal welfare, actually,” said James.
Q opened his mouth, intent on something about a pot and a kettle, then shut it again as he realized James had beaten him to the punch; James smiled lopsidedly as he saw the realization play out across Q’s face. “Somewhere Moneypants is saying that we deserve each other,” Q noted instead, and got the satisfaction of James’ laughter.
“Something like that,” James murmured. Q smiled and shut his eyes, enjoying the feel of James’s fingers carding through his hair, Carly napping contentedly on his chest. They sat there on the couch like that till James’ mobile went off twenty-something minutes later, by which time Q had nearly fallen asleep with his head still in James’ lap.
He roused himself long enough to be surprised when James came back upstairs with three bags, two from Tesco and one from the delivery place he’d ordered from, explained with a calm “It’s amazing what a delivery jockey will do for a few extra quid.” Q got his cheesy toast and orange juice, eaten in his pyjamas at his own goddamn table, and then James dragged him to bed when Q nearly passed out with his face on his empty plate, submitting to taking a few paracetamol before collapsing.
* * * * *
Q woke some unknown number of hours later with a raging need to piss. He staggered out of bed, leaving James still asleep, and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom to relieve himself, and then was hit by the back-to-back realizations that his mouth tasted like something had died in it and that he was in desperate need of a shower. The one was an easy fix, the other a bit more time-consuming. Q normally wasn’t given to showering at 3 am, but once he’d thought about everything that was still on his skin from the past 24 hours, he couldn’t bring himself to crawl back in bed without a thorough scrubbing.
Twenty minutes later, cleaner in body if not necessarily in soul, he returned to the bedroom to find James sitting up in the dark with his back against the headboard. “Was wondering if I’d woken you,” Q said.
“I’m a light sleeper,” said James mildly. He was watching Q with an unreadable expression on his face.
Q crawled back under the covers, finding himself suddenly shy. He’d been so exhausted when they’d come home earlier, rubbed so raw by the events of the day, that he’d barely been able to parse the conversation still hanging unsaid between them, waiting to be had. He hesitated, and James opened his arms, giving him the invitation he needed. Q scooted in close, wrapping his arms around James’ broad shoulders and pressing his face to James’ neck, grateful for the warmth and the dark.
“Did you shower earlier?” he asked after a moment. “You don’t smell half as awful as you ought to.”
He felt James smile against his temple. “I did,” he said. “You were already asleep.”
“Ah.” Q went quiet. Unsurprisingly, he was now totally awake, and just hearing the tone of James’ voice told him that his partner was equally alert. Q chewed his lip, gathering himself; James’ hand came up to palm the back of Q’s neck, and Q shut his eyes.
“When we came home,” he said finally, “you asked me what I needed.”
“I did.” James’ voice was neutral; Q found himself grateful for the space to think, to find what he wanted to say. Q sighed.
“I need…” Q’s voice shook a little. He tightened his jaw and tried again. “I want to tell you-everything. I’m so tired of keeping secrets from you, especially these ones, it’s been so exhausting. And I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. I wish I had, I was just…” He trailed off, opening his eyes to stare into the darkness. “I was scared. Okay, I was bloody terrified. But what I need is to know if… You still want to hear me tell you this. If you still want to be here at all.”
Maybe it was too soon for this conversation. Maybe it wasn’t soon enough. Q didn’t know anymore, but whatever James’ answer, all the cards were on the table, now.
James pulled back when Q asked that, enough so that Q could see his expression. James cupped the side of Q’s face in one hand, and even after the number of times they’d been intimate, it was still hard for Q to be looked at the way James was looking at him right now, as though he were at once the most precious and frustrating thing in the world.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I do. I rather want to lock you up somewhere that you won’t ever be at risk of poisoning or stabbing or murderous people coming after you, even though I know that’s not practical.” His mouth twitched; Q wanted to kiss him so badly then he thought he might explode, but he kept calm somehow. “But I do need you to tell me everything, Q. Even the parts you think I don’t want to hear. I can’t-go through this kind of revelation again. I can’t find these things out after you’ve been put in danger because of things you didn’t tell me.”
Q nodded, his chest tight. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t leave anything out.”
“Good.” James found Q’s hand, and raised it to his lips, kissing the backs of Q’s knuckles. Q leaned in and returned the kiss, with interest, and they did nothing much else for several minutes while Q reacquainted himself with how James Bond tasted.
“I’m sorry for being so callous,” James said eventually. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with some care; Q kept silent, not wanting to interrupt. “I’m-not good with feeling powerless. I shouldn’t have taken off again so soon. Or made you listen to all that.” So he’d known Q was listening, then. Q wasn’t that surprised.
“Quite the temper-tantrum for a man starting on his fifth decade,” Q noted, and smiled when James rolled his eyes. “It’s... I can’t blame you that much; it was a hell of a bomb to drop on you. I didn’t help by telling you to get lost.”
James nodded slightly. “I want all of you, you know,” he said, voice soft. “Simon, and Elliot, and William, however many names you have lying around. Or locked away out of sight.” Q smiled, and James smiled back, pulling Q closer again. “I wish I could have saved you from having to go through today,” James said very softly, into Q’s hair.
Q exhaled slowly. “Yes, it’s-not an experience I had wanted to have in common with you,” he said quietly. “But I should have known they would never stop until they found me.”
“You seem to inspire that in people,” said James, and Q found he had something in his eyes, having to blink rapidly to clear them. “Amongst other things.”
“I don’t give much of a shit, as long as I inspire them in you,” said Q.
“I wondered if I was competing with Eve for awhile, honestly,” said James after a moment, and Q let out a startled laugh. “Don’t laugh, you can hardly blame me.”
“No, I suppose you’re right.” Q cradled James’ hand in his, rubbing James’ knuckles against his own face: hands that had broken so many bones, endured and caused so much damage. “We had a-uh, a thing, right when we first met, but it was awkward and a terrible idea and I am thankful every day that we agreed to just move on, because she’s been a godsend.” He exhaled slowly. “She has only recently come round to the idea of you and me shagging, she was not keen on it at all.”
“I don’t blame her,” murmured James, and he smiled. “I’m quite glad to hear that she’s no longer out for my neck, though, I must say.”
“You underestimated her for a long time,” said Q. “From what I recall, for awhile there you seemed to think she’d left field work because she got tired of having runs in her hose.”
“She did shoot me,” James pointed out. “And I wasn’t exactly at my best when she and I were getting to know each other, I might have spat in the Virgin’s face for how pleasant I was feeling most of the time.” He sounded vaguely put out. Q kissed the corner of his mouth by way of acknowledgment.
“Well, I’m just glad I’ve got someone to strap me back together if you ever don’t come home.” He hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out all the same, and James’ hand stilled for just a moment on Q’s arm before sliding up to cup his face again.
“I’m like a bad penny,” James murmured in his deep voice, and even in the dim light Q could see the shadow of his smile. “I always come back.”
Q laughed, because the alternative was to cry, and he’d had about enough of that today. “Fine,” he said, sliding both arms around James’ neck again. “Just-do that, then. Say that you’ll return to me, and I’ll give you no more reasons to not want to.”
James gathered him close, and kissed him, slow and deep. “Deal,” he said softly, against Q’s mouth.
He knew it was a promise that both would them would find hard to keep, but for the moment at least, it didn’t matter. After all, their versions of “trying harder” was a damn sight better than most people would ever get to in their lives.
* * * * *
The next seven days were like coming out of a long illness, rediscovering all sorts of muscles and behaviors that belonged to people who were not in the habit of fearing daily for their lives. It took almost a full 48 hours before Q managed to actually remember that he didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to keep checking on whether or not another of his decoy flats had been broken into. The relief winded him every time, and more than once James came up behind him and surprised him out of a daze, arms sliding around Q’s waist and a chin hooked over Q’s shoulder as Q stared into space.
“Sorry, are you not a fan of distant brooding?” Q asked lightly, when James caught him at it yet again while in the kitchen supposedly making tea. He covered James’ arms with his own, leaning back against him. Light streamed in through the kitchen windows, a crisp, bright morning outside that was probably still well below freezing. The cold snap this year was making him reconsider his preference for running outside; he’d have to buy some more insulated training clothes.
“I gold-medaled in brooding, I’ll have you know.” James kissed his ear. “I have a hunch that you won’t find anything you like by staring into the middle distance, is all.” He paused, and then added, slightly more seriously, “I can leave if you want me to.”
Q’s smile was faint, but real. “No, don’t. It’s-you’re right, I think.” Even through their clothes, Q could feel the comforting heat of James’ overactive metabolism. Q reached up, dragging fingers lightly through James’ hair, feeling the shape of his skull. “I may still need to go stare at the wall for a bit in the reading room, but I like having you here. If it’s all the same to you.”
James smiled against the edge of Q’s jawbone. “Good to know that when they retire me from the service, I’ll still be able to find work as your watch-dog.”
“Oh, I’m sure I can find a few uses for the world’s most dangerous man,” said Q lightly. He turned around in James’ arms, sliding his own around James’ neck, resting their foreheads together, heedless of the slight dig of his glasses into the bridge of his nose. “Until you get bored, anyway.”
“Not happening,” murmured James. Q thought he’d never get tired of staring into the impossible spring blue of James’ eyes, but how he’d ever thought them cold, he didn’t know. Maybe he just hadn’t seen how warm they could be.
It wasn’t a mistake he would make twice.
* * * * *
James wound up staying with him the entire time. They made one trip out the day after they arrived to go to James’ flat, just to collect a few changes of clothes and say hello to Margaret, and they did stop by Tesco on the way home, but aside from that Q lived in his pyjamas and he and James didn’t leave the building.
Moneypenny and Tanner both stayed in touch, sending them text and and email updates as the incident investigation proceeded. (All the text updates went to James’ mobile, as Q’s had been recovered from the street he’d first been taken from and was now waiting for him at work.) Q had initially thought to avoid everything and everyone until returning to work, but found it difficult to resist whenever he heard James’ mobile chime. James would give him a knowing smirk or just pretend not to hear it, and then Q would have to resort to something drastic like putting Carly on his head and nicking it off him, or just hacking into the mobile from his computer.
(The second time he did that, Q wound up thrashing around on the bed and howling in protest as James pinned him down and tickled him until tears ran down his face, which was totally fucking unfair on James’ part; not everyone could just turn off being ticklish like 007 apparently could. Bastard.)
The investigation at first turned up maddeningly dry, but bit by bit, the details trickled in. Probing some names and numbers found in a mobile at the Markhams’ house turned up the warden who’d been bribed to quietly release the two criminals and then alter the records to show a fake transfer; Interpol found the man now living in a small but expensive cottage outside Paris. Q’s suspicion that the virus hack a few months back was the work of the Markhams was vindicated when Tessa and Mark followed the trail of bank transactions to one of Albert Moaveni’s black hat associates, who’d apparently been paid per diem for his work and told as little as possible about what, specifically, the Markhams wanted. He’d simply used the virus to brute-force download as much of MI6’s internal data as possible, and then sent everything he’d acquired to the Markhams on a 500 GB hard-drive.
No wonder they’d taken so long to find him, Q mused, stretched out on the couch with his laptop, nestled against James’ sturdy form, “Alien” playing on the TV. They must have had to comb through all the records themselves, sorting out what was relevant and what wasn’t.
“You watch this to relax,” James said. He sounded extremely dubious. Q looked up; Sigourney Weaver was busy screaming and running from the alien queen on-screen.
“Absolutely,” said Q. “This and Jurassic Park. Watching someone else have a day thousands of times worse than mine, what’s not to love.”
“You’ve got me there,” said James. “I’ll skip the aliens and stick to being shot at, thanks.”
“You’d make quite the intrepid space-farer, I’d wager…” Q trailed off, scrolling through the attachments Moneypenny had sent to his email, and sucked in a sharp breath as the next few images finished loading.
He must have tensed up, though he didn’t mean to. “What?” James peered over his shoulder. “What are those?”
Q swallowed, his eyes suddenly stinging. “Things they found at the house that J-the Markhams were staying in. I think they were meant for me.” He stared at the screen, flicking numbly through the pictures of newly-purchased men’s clothing, a small stack of mathematics texts, a fucking Wii, still in its unopened box…
“This from the people who were preparing to carve nasty words onto your person when we arrived,” said James. His voice was dark. Q shuddered, wiping angrily at his face. This hurt so much more than it should; it had been five years, why was he still so affected? He flashed on the mental image of Janessa curled on the ground, the look frozen on her face when she’d died, and made a noise in his throat.
“The fucking-nerve of them, I can’t even…” James’ arm came around him, holding him tight, and Q drew in a shaky breath. “They were always like that,” he said after a moment, managing to sound a little more collected. “They thought getting people to do what they wanted was just a matter of how hard you were trying. Makes me wonder if I ever really knew them at all.”
Q shook his head, shutting the computer and leaning over to set it on the table in front of the couch, and while he was up James twisted around behind him on the couch so that when Q sat back down he was between James’ thighs, James’ chest against his back. “How would you feel about having Moneypants come over for dinner tonight or tomorrow?” Q asked quietly. He leaned back against James, the warm weight of him grounding him, helping ease the dissonance in his skin.
“So long as you don’t expect me to put on a suit for the occasion, that sounds fine.” Q rolled his eyes but grinned anyway at the dry humor in James’ voice.
“No, that’s fine. I just…” Q took a deep breath and shut his eyes. “I figured it would be easier to tell you both everything at the same time, is all,” he said.
James sat up a little straighter, and Q felt the soft exhale against his neck. “If that’s what you want to do, then that’s what we’ll do,” James said after a moment. “But only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” Q said. “I want it to be over with. I’m tired of-of all of this hanging over my head. I’m tired of holding you both at arm’s length and I just want to get it off my chest.”
James’ arms tightened around him, James nuzzling into Q’s neck and kissing over his nape. “Then I’ll ask her to come over straight away,” he murmured, and Q covered James’ arms with his own and squeezed.
* * * * *
Moneypenny agreed to come over that same night, of course. Q had suspected she was chomping at the bit to come check on him visually, and was staying away mainly out of respect for Q and James needing time to work things out between them. So they made pasta again, with bread and salad and a bottle of wine, and they sat and had an amazingly light-hearted dinner in which Q laughed more than he had thought remotely possible after the past two weeks, and then they all went into Q’s bedroom and sat down on the couch. Q sat between them, his legs across Moneypenny’s lap, his shoulders pillowed against James’ chest, Carly inviting herself to come sit in Q’s lap. He always ended up like this, somehow, but with Moneypants and James it felt perfectly natural.
It took hours. Q spent a lot of it staring at the window as he talked, and Moneypenny and James just listened. He told them about how it started (New York with its lights) and how he got in too deep to go home (San Francisco, with its endless sky and fog), and he told them how it felt to be young and in love with the world at your feet. He told them about David’s laugh, and the fall of Janessa’s hair, and how it felt to fall asleep every night between two people who’d promised him the world and then went out and stained their hands red with blood to get it for him, and how little he’d known of exactly how deep and dark their madness was.
He told them about meeting Fezzik and Agrippina, how they’d become part of his family, and about fleeing to Europe when things went sour; he told them about the horror of discovering the truth, and the misery of having all his worst fears proven true to him when he’d tried to confront his lovers. He told them about contacting M, about the eight days where he’d had to drug himself to get to sleep at night so as not to arouse Janessa and David’s suspicions, his pure terror at the chance of being discovered. When he got to the part where he said good-bye to his partners for the last time before sending them to the job during which they’d be arrested, he couldn’t stop himself from breaking down, but to his great gratitude neither Moneypenny nor James tried to stop him from continuing; they just held him until he’d calmed down enough to keep talking.
He told them about the hoops MI6 had made him jump through, the new lives that he and Fezzik and Agrippina had had to commit to after the letter the Markhams sent Q. His father’s death, the years of contract work and isolation, the hobbies he picked up to keep himself occupied. He told them everything and left nothing out.
Finally, finally, after he’d scraped his insides raw and poured every last bit of himself out for them to judge, there was nothing left to tell. The room went silent; a glance at the clock revealed it to be past midnight. James sat up first, enveloping Q in one of his rib-crushing hugs and kissing his neck. “Thank you for telling us, Q,” he murmured into Q’s ear.
Q swallowed thickly, his throat sore from how much he’d talked. Moneypenny sat up then too, crawling over until she was wedged against James’ side and could wrap her arms around Q from the other side, pressing her face to his hair. “Guess what,” she said into his hair. Q grunted. “You’re still our boffin.”
He cracked a grin at that, and raised his hands, resting one each against James’ arm and Moneypenny’s arm. “Looks like you’re stuck with me, then,” he said creakily.
“I’m sure we’ll bear up under the pressure somehow,” said James, and Moneypenny squeezed Q’s arm.
Eric Temple (The Recluse) as played by Robert Carlyle, aka "I'm Not Actually Insane, I Just Play Psychopaths Repeatedly In Films And Television."
Fandom: Skyfall (James Bond)
Characters: James Bond/Q, Eve Moneypenny, Gareth Mallory, Bill Tanner, OCs
Rating: Mature. Explicit in sections; depictions of canon-typical violence.
Word-Count: ~60,000. Complete, but chapters will be posted as they are returned from beta and undergo final edits.
Notes: This fic was Brit-picked by the lovely and patient starsandgraces, who isn't even in this fandom but still put up with my badgering. I was encouraged by multiple enablers, including jou and flatbear, but all credit and gratitude goes to circ_bamboo, who held my hand, cheered me on, read over every inch of this fic, plotted endlessly with me, and is hands-down the best writing partner in crime a fangirl could ask for. THANK YOU SO MUCH, BABY, ALL THE SCONES ARE FOR YOU. ♥
Summary: Q has a past, a cat, and a dangerous new boyfriend. Two of these things keep him up nights, the other pees in a box. Espionage, plot with porn, decoy flats, suit porn, scones for the Queen, invention porn, secret identities, snark, canon-typical violence, dysfunctional flirting by dysfunctional people, and Eve Moneypenny is HBIC.
Chapter Eight. The only way out is through.
You can also read here at the AO3. Part one of this fic posted here on LJ, part two is here, part three is here, part four is here, part five is here, part six is here, and part seven is here.
Q was getting extremely sick of waking up nauseated. Three times in a week was three times too many.
He kept his eyes shut for a few moments, not trusting himself to even be able to sit up unassisted. There was a hand in his hair, he realized, and something around his throat, like some kind of choker. He was flat on his back, but he wasn’t on the floor; a couch, felt like. A couch, and…
“I think he’s awake,” said Janessa’s voice above him. “Open your eyes, boy. Look at me.”
“Give him his glasses,” said David’s voice from nearby, and then a hand was under Q’s shoulders, helping him to sit up slightly. He opened his eyes, blinking as someone slid his glasses onto his face, and then he was staring at the faces of the two people he once would have moved heaven and earth for.
He was right, as it turned out; he was laying a couch, with his head and shoulders in Janessa’s lap. He was shirtless, for some reason, and already chilly despite the warmth of Janessa’s thighs against his shoulders. David was crouched next to the couch, studying him with bright eyes, and Janessa still had her hand curled in his hair, looking down at him with an elegantly arched eyebrow. They were both in street clothes, jeans and sweaters, and looked much the same as when Q had last seen them in person.
Be patient. Don’t antagonize your kidnappers. Be aware. You will be rescued. The quartermaster of MI6 was not an asset to be lightly thrown aside. But Q had no idea how long he’d been unconscious this time, or where he was, since presumably it was a new location. There was no sign of Blake, though, for which Q was thankful; throwing a chair at someone didn’t exactly ingratiate you to them. He’d guessed it was Blake who surprised him at the farmhouse, since Thug #1 had appeared thoroughly down for the count and also Q had smashed his face in with his boot. Then it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know what had happened to the Recluse, either, and had to suppress a shiver.
“You grew your hair out again,” Q said, eyes lingering on David’s salt-and-pepper brown hair.
David smirked. “I did,” he said. “Yours has gotten awfully long, too.”
“I like it,” said Janessa, and yanked on Q’s hair, hard enough to make his eyes water. Q made a pained noise in his throat, and Janessa smiled at him, slow and wicked. “And your tattoos. Those are new.” She leaned over him, stroking her fingers lightly along his right arm, tracing his biceps with interest.
“I told you to be good, sweetheart,” said David, softly. He got up from his crouch, lifting Q’s legs and sliding onto the couch next to his wife, settling Q’s legs back across his lap, stroking a proprietary hand up Q’s thigh to his stomach, splaying his fingers there and pressing down lightly. “But you didn’t listen, and your secret agent man got away, and now we’re going to have to punish you even worse than we were.”
Q shivered. His hands weren’t bound, for a nice change, but he was exhausted, wrung-out. And while the urge to be sick was gone, he still felt like he wanted to drink about a gallon of water and then sleep for a week. “At least I deserve it,” he said after a moment. “James Bond has a great deal of blood on his hands, but he shouldn’t be your target.”
“We don’t like people touching our things,” said Janessa, her words making his stomach clench. “And his reputation for being a trouble-maker precedes him. Not the kind of thing we can ignore.”
“We should have realized you would make trouble if we weren’t there ourselves to keep an eye on you, though,” said David. “That was our mistake. Shouldn’t have underestimated our boy.” He leaned his shoulder against Janessa’s, so that Q was draped now across their laps, sitting up and leaning against the arm of the couch, his arse on the couch between Janessa’s thighs. They’d used to love to hold him like this, draped across or between them like a beloved dog or cat, a hand in his hair, petting him until he fell asleep.
At the thought of pets, Q’s hand came up to this throat, and he started a bit at the feel of leather and steel under his hand. “Oh, do you like it?” asked Janessa, grinning widely. “I thought it’d help you remember your place.”
“A collar. I see,” said Q, biting his lip. “And I’m shirtless because…?”
“I wasn’t aware we needed permission for that,” David said darkly. The hand stroking along his thigh tightened its grip, nails digging in through Q’s trousers, and Q went quiet, watching David until the violence behind his eyes had passed.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Q after a few more moments. Both David and Janessa seemed content to just sit with him, which was starting to make Q nervous. Maybe that was the idea. “Usually at this point someone puts a gun to my temple and demands I break into MI6’s servers for them.”
“Nah,” said Janessa dismissively. “No computers for you, baby. Not till we know you’ll be good. You have a long, long way to go before you get there.”
“Right now, though, I think you owe us some answers.” David raised his eyebrows at Q, who sighed, and put his face in his hands, rubbing at his temples.
“Yes, that’s entirely fair,” Q said resignedly. He swallowed, dropping his hands to his lap and staring at them, gathering his thoughts. He’d pictured this conversation so many times, what he’d say when confronted with how could you do this?
That was when he felt it. When he sagged against the couch, the slightest nudge against the inside of his hip-the poison pen was still in his fucking pants, forgotten until just now. Q took a deep breath and let it out slow, balking at even the idea of using it, but he had to act normal. “First of all, did you know that Ad-that Carolyn was pregnant?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Q saw David and Janessa exchange a glance. “We knew she’d had a baby since we went in, but not how old the girl was,” said Janessa.
“Yes, well. She found out Jonathan-uh, Christopher-had got her pregnant while you were doing that heist in Milan, and she confessed to me, and she was so frightened of you finding out and I-” Q took a deep breath, reminding himself to stay calm, to not let his voice shake so, “-I couldn’t understand why. She begged me not to tell you.” Q chewed his lip. “So I started spying on you.”
“I’m surprised it took you that long,” said David, and Q looked up at him, startled. David shrugged. “You’re smart. I knew you were going to cotton on sooner or later, but I admit I’d hoped it was gonna be later.”
“I trusted you,” said Q, clenching his hands, “when you said that I had nothing to worry about, it never even occurred to me to spy on you, I just thought you wanted alone time! As a couple! Or, fuck, I don’t know--”
“But you did check,” said Janessa. “What was it, baby? What’d you find out?”
Q groaned. “Everything,” he said helplessly. “The-the FBI agent you tortured, that ship’s crew that you had poisoned in their sleep, why would you do that-you killed so many people, and once I found one thing I couldn’t stop, it was like a train wreck.” He gritted his teeth. “I wanted so badly for it to not be true. But it wasn’t just the one incident, it was…”
“We should’ve kept a closer eye on you,” mused David. “I remember thinkin’ you seemed really off, when we came back, but I just thought you were sick. And then you picked that fight with us…” He trailed off, watching Q with an intensity that made Q’s stomach lurch from what it promised.
“I still can’t believe you turned on us,” said Janessa, and there, that was what he’d been dreading all this time, the accusation in her voice. Betrayal. “You sent us to hell, Simon, do you know what it was like?”
“What else could I have done?” cried Q. “I’m sorry that I have a fucking moral compass! And you’d never have let me go, you’d never have just let me walk away, even if that was something I could do, and I promised Agrippina and Fezzik I’d help them get out because they were scared too! We were so scared of you, I didn’t know what t-to do-”
“We loved you,” said David, and now he leaned forward, grabbing Q by the throat, his fingers digging in above the collar, making Q gasp. “I would’ve taken a bullet for you. I would have done anything for you.” He pressed his thumb into the soft tissue beneath Q’s jaw, drawing out a whimper. “But you were right to be scared, sweetheart.”
The hand in Q’s hair tightened, hard enough to make his eyes water, Janessa’s lips against his ear. “So. You called in the cavalry, gave us up so you could go free, as if you weren’t in our bed every night for a year begging us just to touch you, and now you think you’re so fuckin’ fancy ‘cause you work for the Secret Service and you have a special agent for a boyfriend.” She exhaled against his skin, her breath hot and dangerous. “But none of that matters now, baby, ‘cause we’re gonna get you right with God again.”
Q swallowed, shutting his eyes, gone cold all over with fear and the urge to shove them both away. He was trying so hard to not provoke them, but he didn’t think he could keep still if they tried to fuck him, couldn’t go that far. As if cue, David leaned in and kissed his jaw, beard scratching along Q’s chin, and Q let out a stifled whimper as David’s mouth moved up to Q’s, exhaling against Q’s lips. “Gotta make you remember who you belong to, Simon,” he murmured, and then he was kissing Q, rough and possessive.
It was now or never. Q shuddered, and in the moment of mutual distraction he dipped his hand into his pants, curling his fingers around the pen in its hidden inner pocket, nudging it out into his palm and closing his hand around it. Please don’t make me do this, he thought, and then cried out as David bit his mouth, hard enough to draw blood. He sagged as David pulled away, and there was no need to fake the way he was shaking now, or how ragged his breathing was. Q watched David lift a hand, casually wiping the blood from his mouth the way a man would wipe off whipped cream or a bit of mustard, swiping his thumb along his lower lip and smiling brilliantly at Q.
I can’t believe I loved you as much as I did. Had they really always been like this? He still found it hard to believe.
Something moved at the edge of the room; a man appeared in the door, and it was all Q could do not to vault himself over the back of the couch as he recognized their killer-for-hire Eric Temple. He was in a cheap black suit, a Parabellum Luger Mauser pistol in his shoulder holster peeking out from under the suit coat; he’d have at least three more weapons hidden on his person, by Q’s lowest estimate. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, nearly toneless. He smiled faintly at Q, and Q’s skin crawled. “Thought you should know that an MI6 vehicle has turned up on radar about three miles out. Just one agent.”
“Take care of it,” said David impatiently.
Temple cleared his throat. “It’s Eve Moneypenny,” he said. Q took a sharp breath.
David looked over at Temple then, before looking back at Q. “Your girlfriend’s turned up to save you,” he said, sounding amused. “It’s just her?”
Temple shrugged. “No sign of Bond,” he said, and Q felt his heart sink; why hadn’t Moneypenny brought more reinforcements?
“Take care of it,” David said again, and Temple nodded, vanishing through the doorway.
“Recluse is the one who got you back for us,” Janessa said conversationally. She hooked her chin over Q’s shoulder, sliding both arms around his waist. “I’m actually pretty impressed, babydoll; Jared was no slouch.”
“Is he dead, then?” Q heard the question asked and realized belatedly that it was his own voice saying it. His mind was outside, straining to hear sounds of gunfire or shouts, desperately worried for Moneypenny.
“Uh huh.” David reached up and wiped some blood from Q’s mouth. “Blake’s alright, though. Pretty mad at you, but he knows better than to touch. You did the thumb-trick with the cuffs?” Q nodded; as if in response to being mentioned, his hand started to throb, a dull ache that Q knew would be with him for at least a week. “Good boy,” said David approvingly. His eyes slid past Q’s face, casting a questioning glance at Janessa. “Should we wait, do you think?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Q saw Janessa make a face. “I’m sick of waiting,” she said, and yeah, she was definitely pouting.
David grinned, and the malice in it made Q’s stomach turn over in fear. “I know, sweetheart. Me too. Okay,” he said, “Get him down on the floor.” He sat back and slid out from under Q’s legs. “Time to give you some new marks to go with all that pretty ink, Simon.”
“What-” Q tried too late to scramble to his feet, but Janessa was quicker, shoving him off her lap to crash in a tangle of limbs to the floor, planting her knee into his chest as he tried to sit up. “What are you doing,” he said wildly, oh god, oh god what were they going to do, “J-Janessa, what-”
“Shut up,” she said, and suddenly she was pulling out a knife from inside her shirt, her blonde hair falling in her face as she bent over him. “David, get some towels, honey, the blood is gonna go everywhere and I need to be able to see what I’m doing.”
“No, no, no no no no no,” Q was babbling, there was a knife at his throat and he couldn’t move, couldn’t tear his eyes away from how long and sharp that blade was, thin and dangerous like an exacto knife. “Please, oh my god Janessa, don’t-”
“We thought about cutting out your eyes,” said Janessa, the way you’d talk about deciding on lunch. She grabbed Q’s jaw with one hand, holding his face still, her fingers digging in. “So you couldn’t make more trouble. But David thought it’d be such a waste, since you’re so pretty, and I have to agree with him.”
Q sobbed, thumbed the cap off the pen, still hidden in the curl of his palm. He steeled himself to use it if he got half a chance, but if he telegraphed his movements then Janessa would know and she might stop him, and then he’d be really fucked.
“We settled on ‘slut,’” said David from the other side of the room. Q couldn’t see what he was doing, but he could hear the sounds of a cabinet being opened and closed, and saw David turn around to come back to where Janessa had Q pinned on the floor. “Right above your heart. Gonna hurt you right where you hurt us, so you’ll always carry it with you and never forget again.”
“And you know, if I get a little carried away, well…” Janessa grinned, her eyes too bright. “You’ll heal.”
The next thirty seconds were very confusing.
Gunfire exploded outside, painfully loud even from inside the house; Q could hear shouting, and then an explosion outside that rattled the walls of the room they were in. David cursed and went for a drawer, and Janessa grabbed Q’s collar and hauled him to his feet, nearly choking him in the process; his eyes were watering so badly he almost missed seeing the person come crashing through the window, thrown clean through from the other side.
It was Moneypenny. “You bastard,” she spat, rolling through the fall and getting back to her feet, ignoring the shards of glass as she dodged out of the way of the gunfire spitting through the window. Janessa dragged Q backwards, out of the line of fire, her knife at his throat, and Q couldn’t see David anymore, was too busy watching Moneypenny taking cover behind an upturned table as Eric Temple came through the window after her, his neck and shoulder smeared with blood. He had a knife in his hand; Q could only guess at where the Luger had gone.
“Eric, get out of the way,” David snapped, and Q felt his throat vaporlock when he saw that David had a gun out now and was leveling it at Moneypenny. Moneypenny pre-empted the situation by planting her hands on the ground and kicking the table with both feet, sending it smashing into Temple’s legs, and he snarled and staggered backwards, just in time for Moneypenny to brace herself on one knee and bring the Walther-PPK Q’d given her up to point directly at the Recluse’s face.
“Stay dead this time, you piece of shit,” she bit out, and shot him point-blank, the gunshot ear-splittingly loud in the small room. Temple staggered backwards, a horror of blood and gore where his face had just been, and then he dropped to the floor.
David shouted something, and Moneypenny threw herself behind the table again just in time to miss the bright spark of gunfire from David’s weapon. Q felt the knife-tip at his throat, Janessa’s arm locked tight around his chest, but his attention was on David, who was coming around the counter now with his gun still cocked. Janessa shouted something at David, but all Q could hear was ringing in his ears, and that was when Q saw a familiar solid figure step through the doorway at the far end of the room, gun aimed right at David.
Another crack of a miniature explosion split the room, another flash of light at the muzzle of James’ gun. Q heard it go off through his temporary deafness, saw David falling, felt the percussion of Janessa’s scream in his ears, accompanied by the realization that she still had a knife pressed right over his carotid artery. He acted without thinking, clicking the end of the pen to arm it before jamming the tip of it into the meat of her forearm crossed over his chest.
There were several long, agonizing moments where Q was sure she’d already slit his throat, because nothing was fucking happening. Then her arms fell away, and Q was stumbling forward as she simply toppled over behind him. He turned, his skin crawling instantly at the way Janessa was jerking and twitching, her muscles already spasming. Q dropped the pen as though it had scalded him, and then James was running over to him, gun still cocked and in hand, Moneypenny right behind him. James was saying something but Q couldn’t hear, was too busy backing frantically away from Janessa, staring in horror at the way she was clawing at her chest, having dropped the knife on the floor. She was gasping for breath, her air rattling in her throat, the spittle on her lips a terrifying purplish-red.
“Q!” James said again, nearly shouting in his ear. Moneypenny was scanning the room, her gun raised, her jaw tight.
“I’m fine, just please shoot her, oh my god.” Q swallowed, covering his mouth with his hands. James turned and aimed his gun, and Q jumped as it went off. Janessa twitched once more and then lay still.
James and Moneypenny were there, then, Moneypenny stepping to block Janessa from view as James put both arms around him, and Q found that he was shaking. “We’ve got you, Q,” murmured James into his ear. “It’s over.” Q let out a sob, pressing hard into James’ arms, eyes shut tight. Then two pairs of arms were holding him up, and Q could concentrate on just breathing, could live in the drag of air in and out of his lungs until the blood behind his eyes was gone and he could drift away.
* * * * *
Predictably, James was only partially correct; it took several long hours after that before the day was over, but from that point on it saw a marked improvement.
James had met Moneypenny at the house outside Maidstone that Janessa and David had been using as their main base, both of them there in record time. Moneypenny had got on the horn and put out a Do Not Retain order on the plates of James’ stolen car, which allowed James to break land-speed records on the trip back from Calais while Moneypenny drove like a bat out of hell down from London. Mark, in a display of grace and intelligence that Q would not have expected from a man who’d just endured having his family threatened by lunatics, had managed to find the car the Markhams fled in on CCTV in only an hour, and the rest had been a waiting game.
M had sent more agents in Moneypenny’s wake, but by the time they got there, the theatrics were already over; Moneypenny had volunteered to go in first to draw out the watchers, while James snuck around from the other side, and the two of them working together had mopped up everyone within five minutes, despite how long it had felt to Q at the time. For his part, Q wasn’t exactly sorry to have had fewer people witness his personal disaster than might have been advisable.
James cut the collar off Q’s throat while Moneypenny did another circuit of the house, making sure that all of the Markhams’ remaining lackeys were really dead. Q was sitting with James on the couch when she came back into the room with her weapon drawn, Q wearing James’ jacket, James’ arm around Q’s shoulders. Janessa’s body was by now curled on its side on the floor in a horrible parody of the foetal position, face purple and fingers curled into claws from the poison; David was where he’d fallen on the other side of the room, barely visible from where Q sat, and Temple was thankfully equally out of sight. Moneypenny took three steps into the room and stopped, staring at the tableau before her, and then wordlessly put her gun away.
“Situation has been dealt with, 007 is here and the quartermaster is safe,” she said, speaking into her comms unit. “Send a forensics and clean-up unit, there’s quite a mess.” Moneypenny exhaled, mouth quirking as she looked at James. “You might have called it in, Bond.”
“Couldn’t,” said James. “That tosser outside ripped my ear piece off, and I knew you’d have it covered anyway.”
“I want to go home,” Q interrupted, drawing their eyes to him.
“Medical first,” James said, glancing up at Moneypenny for backup.
“Hypocrite,” muttered Q.
“Bond’s right,” said Moneypenny briskly. She crouched in front of the couch, and her game-face was good, but Q could see the way her hands shook slightly when she reached out to press both of them against Q’s shins. “You’ve been poisoned at least twice today, and you need to debrief with M, but after that you’re on at least a week of mandatory leave, longer if you need it.”
James started when Moneypenny said the word “poison,” before turning to glare at Q, and Q hunched his shoulders a little. “Why the hell did you think I had that pen on me, just for fun? Adrienne met me at the bake-shop to give me an antivenin, that’s how they caught me out.”
“Why were you working on a bloody pen filled with actual poison in the first place?” demanded James.
“It wasn’t supposed to have any poison in it, I thought it was just ink when I took it out of experimental storage-!”
“Enough,” said Moneypenny sharply. “Come on, you two, I’ll drive us back; bicker in the back of the car if you must. Bond has to debrief too anyway. It’s a shame none of the idiots who did this are still alive for us to question; we’re going to have a right mess trying to sort out what happened to you in France, 007.” Q let himself be pulled off the couch and led outside, resolutely not looking at anything but Moneypenny’s back as she led them out to her car, James’ stolen vehicle having been the source of the explosion he’d heard earlier. James got in after him, and without giving Q time to protest or discuss, he pulled Q against him again, tucking Q against the broad expanse of his flank and draping an arm around Q’s shoulders. Q shut his eyes, grateful for a lover who knew when to hold and not to speak, and permitted himself to pillow his head against James.
They spent the ride back to headquarters like that, waiting at the site just long enough for the rest of the crew to arrive before Moneypenny took off for London. They stopped only once, at a small cafe just off the motorway, and there Moneypenny pressed scones and hot tea on both James and Q before getting back in the car. Q closed off by the time they arrived at headquarters, speaking no more than absolutely necessary; the interview with M was blessedly brief, with a promise of a more thorough report to come.
Medical took longer. Q knew he was being an intractable little shit, but the only people he could tolerate today were a pair of trained killers, and everyone more normal than them needed to fuck off. He was finally cleared to be taken home, after being given a painkiller for his thumb and a warning to ice the hand and not use it more than absolutely necessary, only to have to wait thirty more minutes before whatever St. Bart’s-trained idiot that was holding James up decided that MI6’s resident weapon of mass destruction was fit to leave.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Moneypenny asked, sitting with him in the lobby of the medical wing.
“Without question,” Q said, not looking up from his hands in his lap. “But I’m not leaving without James.”
Moneypenny said nothing, just brushed her knuckles against his shoulder. Q kept his hands where they were, laced together in his lap. Normally he’d have his mobile out, or a tablet, something, anything to keep him occupied. But all his internal processes had shut down, and it was all he could do to manage basic conversation. He was grateful that Moneypenny had forced something with calories in it on him, since by now it had been easily eight hours since his last proper meal.
The door at the end of the hallway opened, and James strode in, looking as ill-tempered as Q had ever seen him. “Finally,” said Moneypenny, sitting up and swinging her long legs out from under her. “I thought perhaps they were trying to re-create your genome.”
“Bloody close to it,” he said, walking up to where Q still sat. Q looked up at him, and James’ face softened, doing something painful to Q’s insides. There was still a conversation he and James needed to have, but Q honestly wasn’t sure how soon he’d be able to get through it.
“Do you boys need a ride home?” Moneypenny asked carefully. She and James were both looking at Q now, and Q had to fight the sudden urge to simply crawl under the seat to hide.
It must have shown in his face, because James said, “No, my car is still in the lot, I can get us back to Q’s flat.” Q relaxed a little bit, and stood up, mutely pulling Moneypenny into a hug.
“Text me if you need anything,” she murmured into his ear.
“I will,” he promised. He found he actually meant it, too.
Nothing more was said between them till James got him all the way home, and Q paused in front of the keypad in his fake kitchen, blinking, having to strain to remember what the new password would be after nearly a week out of his own flat. “God, today feels like it took a month,” he muttered.
“To be fair, you spent quite a lot of it unconscious, from what I hear,” said James. He had stayed close by Q, not quite close enough to call it hovering, and if he was uncomfortable he wasn’t letting on.
“I also spent a lot of it vomiting, though thankfully I don’t remember much of that.” Q punched in the number code, shutting his eyes briefly, and as the wall pulled back to allow them entrance, a small white blur flew down the stairs, yowling at the top of her lungs. “Yes, yes, I’m home, hello.” Q bent down, scooping up his whining cat, finding a sudden lump in his throat as she wriggled in his arms, pawing at his chest and maowing plaintively. “I know, I’m the worst owner ever, I left you all alone with only Moneypants to come visit you.”
He felt a hand at the small of his back, James gently nudging him up the stairs. Q let himself be guided into the safety of his own flat, still carrying Carly, who had settled against Q’s chest and started purring like a miniature car engine. James steered Q down the hall to the bedroom and sat him on the couch, and then sat down next to him, the leather creaking as they sank into it.
James looked at him, his gaze steady, his arm draped along the back of the couch. “Please say you aren’t about to ask me something complicated,” Q said.
James’ mouth quirked. “Just tell me what you need,” he said. His voice was so gentle. Q would almost have preferred more shouting; this tenderness would break him.
He took a deep breath. “I need,” he said, “to sleep for a week. And a metric tonne of paracetamol. And a pint-no, two pints of orange juice, the kind with bits, and I should probably eat something but the only thing I want is cheesy toast and I haven’t got any fucking food in the flat-” He just kept going, the words pouring out of him in a rush, his voice brittle in his ears, “-and I know it’s a lot to ask for but I really, really don’t want to be alone-”
“Q,” cut in James, reaching out to cup his face, “it’s fine. Really.”
Q swallowed. “Okay,” he said helplessly.
“I’m going to call for delivery,” said James. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He got up off the couch and disappeared down the hallway. Q curled up where James left him, cradling Carly against his chest and shutting his eyes to nuzzle her soft white fur.
He was still there five minutes later when the couch dipped again, James settling carefully next to him. He let James lift his head to lay it against James’ thigh, James stroking his fingers through Q’s unkempt hair, before his hand came to rest on the back of Q’s neck, thumb rubbing his nape.
“He’ll be here in thirty minutes or so.” Q made noise of assent in the back of his throat. “Now, I have a question; one grunt for yes, two for no.”
Q snorted, rolling over till he was laying on his back and looking up at James. James smiled down at him, and something in Q’s chest loosened a little; if James could still look at him like that, maybe he hadn’t totally fucked everything.
“Let me get this straight,” said James. “You poisoned yourself with synthetic snake venom that wasn’t supposed to be in the pen in the first place, but managed to get Adrienne to meet you with the antivenin before suffering any lasting effects; you were chloroformed by a pair of thugs-for-hire and spent a few hours being sick everywhere, and then managed get out of handcuffs by dislocating your thumb; you then proceeded to subdue both men despite being viciously ill, and instead of getting the hell out of dodge, you hacked into MI6’s secure servers from a remote location, saved my life, Mark’s family’s lives, and Mark’s career, right before getting yourself kidnapped again.” He paused. “Are you me?”
Q was startled into a laugh, which actually hurt, both physically and in other ways. “Well, I don’t have your knack for awful one-liners, for starters.”
“I was talking about your atrocious disregard for your personal welfare, actually,” said James.
Q opened his mouth, intent on something about a pot and a kettle, then shut it again as he realized James had beaten him to the punch; James smiled lopsidedly as he saw the realization play out across Q’s face. “Somewhere Moneypants is saying that we deserve each other,” Q noted instead, and got the satisfaction of James’ laughter.
“Something like that,” James murmured. Q smiled and shut his eyes, enjoying the feel of James’s fingers carding through his hair, Carly napping contentedly on his chest. They sat there on the couch like that till James’ mobile went off twenty-something minutes later, by which time Q had nearly fallen asleep with his head still in James’ lap.
He roused himself long enough to be surprised when James came back upstairs with three bags, two from Tesco and one from the delivery place he’d ordered from, explained with a calm “It’s amazing what a delivery jockey will do for a few extra quid.” Q got his cheesy toast and orange juice, eaten in his pyjamas at his own goddamn table, and then James dragged him to bed when Q nearly passed out with his face on his empty plate, submitting to taking a few paracetamol before collapsing.
* * * * *
Q woke some unknown number of hours later with a raging need to piss. He staggered out of bed, leaving James still asleep, and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom to relieve himself, and then was hit by the back-to-back realizations that his mouth tasted like something had died in it and that he was in desperate need of a shower. The one was an easy fix, the other a bit more time-consuming. Q normally wasn’t given to showering at 3 am, but once he’d thought about everything that was still on his skin from the past 24 hours, he couldn’t bring himself to crawl back in bed without a thorough scrubbing.
Twenty minutes later, cleaner in body if not necessarily in soul, he returned to the bedroom to find James sitting up in the dark with his back against the headboard. “Was wondering if I’d woken you,” Q said.
“I’m a light sleeper,” said James mildly. He was watching Q with an unreadable expression on his face.
Q crawled back under the covers, finding himself suddenly shy. He’d been so exhausted when they’d come home earlier, rubbed so raw by the events of the day, that he’d barely been able to parse the conversation still hanging unsaid between them, waiting to be had. He hesitated, and James opened his arms, giving him the invitation he needed. Q scooted in close, wrapping his arms around James’ broad shoulders and pressing his face to James’ neck, grateful for the warmth and the dark.
“Did you shower earlier?” he asked after a moment. “You don’t smell half as awful as you ought to.”
He felt James smile against his temple. “I did,” he said. “You were already asleep.”
“Ah.” Q went quiet. Unsurprisingly, he was now totally awake, and just hearing the tone of James’ voice told him that his partner was equally alert. Q chewed his lip, gathering himself; James’ hand came up to palm the back of Q’s neck, and Q shut his eyes.
“When we came home,” he said finally, “you asked me what I needed.”
“I did.” James’ voice was neutral; Q found himself grateful for the space to think, to find what he wanted to say. Q sighed.
“I need…” Q’s voice shook a little. He tightened his jaw and tried again. “I want to tell you-everything. I’m so tired of keeping secrets from you, especially these ones, it’s been so exhausting. And I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. I wish I had, I was just…” He trailed off, opening his eyes to stare into the darkness. “I was scared. Okay, I was bloody terrified. But what I need is to know if… You still want to hear me tell you this. If you still want to be here at all.”
Maybe it was too soon for this conversation. Maybe it wasn’t soon enough. Q didn’t know anymore, but whatever James’ answer, all the cards were on the table, now.
James pulled back when Q asked that, enough so that Q could see his expression. James cupped the side of Q’s face in one hand, and even after the number of times they’d been intimate, it was still hard for Q to be looked at the way James was looking at him right now, as though he were at once the most precious and frustrating thing in the world.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I do. I rather want to lock you up somewhere that you won’t ever be at risk of poisoning or stabbing or murderous people coming after you, even though I know that’s not practical.” His mouth twitched; Q wanted to kiss him so badly then he thought he might explode, but he kept calm somehow. “But I do need you to tell me everything, Q. Even the parts you think I don’t want to hear. I can’t-go through this kind of revelation again. I can’t find these things out after you’ve been put in danger because of things you didn’t tell me.”
Q nodded, his chest tight. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t leave anything out.”
“Good.” James found Q’s hand, and raised it to his lips, kissing the backs of Q’s knuckles. Q leaned in and returned the kiss, with interest, and they did nothing much else for several minutes while Q reacquainted himself with how James Bond tasted.
“I’m sorry for being so callous,” James said eventually. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with some care; Q kept silent, not wanting to interrupt. “I’m-not good with feeling powerless. I shouldn’t have taken off again so soon. Or made you listen to all that.” So he’d known Q was listening, then. Q wasn’t that surprised.
“Quite the temper-tantrum for a man starting on his fifth decade,” Q noted, and smiled when James rolled his eyes. “It’s... I can’t blame you that much; it was a hell of a bomb to drop on you. I didn’t help by telling you to get lost.”
James nodded slightly. “I want all of you, you know,” he said, voice soft. “Simon, and Elliot, and William, however many names you have lying around. Or locked away out of sight.” Q smiled, and James smiled back, pulling Q closer again. “I wish I could have saved you from having to go through today,” James said very softly, into Q’s hair.
Q exhaled slowly. “Yes, it’s-not an experience I had wanted to have in common with you,” he said quietly. “But I should have known they would never stop until they found me.”
“You seem to inspire that in people,” said James, and Q found he had something in his eyes, having to blink rapidly to clear them. “Amongst other things.”
“I don’t give much of a shit, as long as I inspire them in you,” said Q.
“I wondered if I was competing with Eve for awhile, honestly,” said James after a moment, and Q let out a startled laugh. “Don’t laugh, you can hardly blame me.”
“No, I suppose you’re right.” Q cradled James’ hand in his, rubbing James’ knuckles against his own face: hands that had broken so many bones, endured and caused so much damage. “We had a-uh, a thing, right when we first met, but it was awkward and a terrible idea and I am thankful every day that we agreed to just move on, because she’s been a godsend.” He exhaled slowly. “She has only recently come round to the idea of you and me shagging, she was not keen on it at all.”
“I don’t blame her,” murmured James, and he smiled. “I’m quite glad to hear that she’s no longer out for my neck, though, I must say.”
“You underestimated her for a long time,” said Q. “From what I recall, for awhile there you seemed to think she’d left field work because she got tired of having runs in her hose.”
“She did shoot me,” James pointed out. “And I wasn’t exactly at my best when she and I were getting to know each other, I might have spat in the Virgin’s face for how pleasant I was feeling most of the time.” He sounded vaguely put out. Q kissed the corner of his mouth by way of acknowledgment.
“Well, I’m just glad I’ve got someone to strap me back together if you ever don’t come home.” He hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out all the same, and James’ hand stilled for just a moment on Q’s arm before sliding up to cup his face again.
“I’m like a bad penny,” James murmured in his deep voice, and even in the dim light Q could see the shadow of his smile. “I always come back.”
Q laughed, because the alternative was to cry, and he’d had about enough of that today. “Fine,” he said, sliding both arms around James’ neck again. “Just-do that, then. Say that you’ll return to me, and I’ll give you no more reasons to not want to.”
James gathered him close, and kissed him, slow and deep. “Deal,” he said softly, against Q’s mouth.
He knew it was a promise that both would them would find hard to keep, but for the moment at least, it didn’t matter. After all, their versions of “trying harder” was a damn sight better than most people would ever get to in their lives.
* * * * *
The next seven days were like coming out of a long illness, rediscovering all sorts of muscles and behaviors that belonged to people who were not in the habit of fearing daily for their lives. It took almost a full 48 hours before Q managed to actually remember that he didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to keep checking on whether or not another of his decoy flats had been broken into. The relief winded him every time, and more than once James came up behind him and surprised him out of a daze, arms sliding around Q’s waist and a chin hooked over Q’s shoulder as Q stared into space.
“Sorry, are you not a fan of distant brooding?” Q asked lightly, when James caught him at it yet again while in the kitchen supposedly making tea. He covered James’ arms with his own, leaning back against him. Light streamed in through the kitchen windows, a crisp, bright morning outside that was probably still well below freezing. The cold snap this year was making him reconsider his preference for running outside; he’d have to buy some more insulated training clothes.
“I gold-medaled in brooding, I’ll have you know.” James kissed his ear. “I have a hunch that you won’t find anything you like by staring into the middle distance, is all.” He paused, and then added, slightly more seriously, “I can leave if you want me to.”
Q’s smile was faint, but real. “No, don’t. It’s-you’re right, I think.” Even through their clothes, Q could feel the comforting heat of James’ overactive metabolism. Q reached up, dragging fingers lightly through James’ hair, feeling the shape of his skull. “I may still need to go stare at the wall for a bit in the reading room, but I like having you here. If it’s all the same to you.”
James smiled against the edge of Q’s jawbone. “Good to know that when they retire me from the service, I’ll still be able to find work as your watch-dog.”
“Oh, I’m sure I can find a few uses for the world’s most dangerous man,” said Q lightly. He turned around in James’ arms, sliding his own around James’ neck, resting their foreheads together, heedless of the slight dig of his glasses into the bridge of his nose. “Until you get bored, anyway.”
“Not happening,” murmured James. Q thought he’d never get tired of staring into the impossible spring blue of James’ eyes, but how he’d ever thought them cold, he didn’t know. Maybe he just hadn’t seen how warm they could be.
It wasn’t a mistake he would make twice.
* * * * *
James wound up staying with him the entire time. They made one trip out the day after they arrived to go to James’ flat, just to collect a few changes of clothes and say hello to Margaret, and they did stop by Tesco on the way home, but aside from that Q lived in his pyjamas and he and James didn’t leave the building.
Moneypenny and Tanner both stayed in touch, sending them text and and email updates as the incident investigation proceeded. (All the text updates went to James’ mobile, as Q’s had been recovered from the street he’d first been taken from and was now waiting for him at work.) Q had initially thought to avoid everything and everyone until returning to work, but found it difficult to resist whenever he heard James’ mobile chime. James would give him a knowing smirk or just pretend not to hear it, and then Q would have to resort to something drastic like putting Carly on his head and nicking it off him, or just hacking into the mobile from his computer.
(The second time he did that, Q wound up thrashing around on the bed and howling in protest as James pinned him down and tickled him until tears ran down his face, which was totally fucking unfair on James’ part; not everyone could just turn off being ticklish like 007 apparently could. Bastard.)
The investigation at first turned up maddeningly dry, but bit by bit, the details trickled in. Probing some names and numbers found in a mobile at the Markhams’ house turned up the warden who’d been bribed to quietly release the two criminals and then alter the records to show a fake transfer; Interpol found the man now living in a small but expensive cottage outside Paris. Q’s suspicion that the virus hack a few months back was the work of the Markhams was vindicated when Tessa and Mark followed the trail of bank transactions to one of Albert Moaveni’s black hat associates, who’d apparently been paid per diem for his work and told as little as possible about what, specifically, the Markhams wanted. He’d simply used the virus to brute-force download as much of MI6’s internal data as possible, and then sent everything he’d acquired to the Markhams on a 500 GB hard-drive.
No wonder they’d taken so long to find him, Q mused, stretched out on the couch with his laptop, nestled against James’ sturdy form, “Alien” playing on the TV. They must have had to comb through all the records themselves, sorting out what was relevant and what wasn’t.
“You watch this to relax,” James said. He sounded extremely dubious. Q looked up; Sigourney Weaver was busy screaming and running from the alien queen on-screen.
“Absolutely,” said Q. “This and Jurassic Park. Watching someone else have a day thousands of times worse than mine, what’s not to love.”
“You’ve got me there,” said James. “I’ll skip the aliens and stick to being shot at, thanks.”
“You’d make quite the intrepid space-farer, I’d wager…” Q trailed off, scrolling through the attachments Moneypenny had sent to his email, and sucked in a sharp breath as the next few images finished loading.
He must have tensed up, though he didn’t mean to. “What?” James peered over his shoulder. “What are those?”
Q swallowed, his eyes suddenly stinging. “Things they found at the house that J-the Markhams were staying in. I think they were meant for me.” He stared at the screen, flicking numbly through the pictures of newly-purchased men’s clothing, a small stack of mathematics texts, a fucking Wii, still in its unopened box…
“This from the people who were preparing to carve nasty words onto your person when we arrived,” said James. His voice was dark. Q shuddered, wiping angrily at his face. This hurt so much more than it should; it had been five years, why was he still so affected? He flashed on the mental image of Janessa curled on the ground, the look frozen on her face when she’d died, and made a noise in his throat.
“The fucking-nerve of them, I can’t even…” James’ arm came around him, holding him tight, and Q drew in a shaky breath. “They were always like that,” he said after a moment, managing to sound a little more collected. “They thought getting people to do what they wanted was just a matter of how hard you were trying. Makes me wonder if I ever really knew them at all.”
Q shook his head, shutting the computer and leaning over to set it on the table in front of the couch, and while he was up James twisted around behind him on the couch so that when Q sat back down he was between James’ thighs, James’ chest against his back. “How would you feel about having Moneypants come over for dinner tonight or tomorrow?” Q asked quietly. He leaned back against James, the warm weight of him grounding him, helping ease the dissonance in his skin.
“So long as you don’t expect me to put on a suit for the occasion, that sounds fine.” Q rolled his eyes but grinned anyway at the dry humor in James’ voice.
“No, that’s fine. I just…” Q took a deep breath and shut his eyes. “I figured it would be easier to tell you both everything at the same time, is all,” he said.
James sat up a little straighter, and Q felt the soft exhale against his neck. “If that’s what you want to do, then that’s what we’ll do,” James said after a moment. “But only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” Q said. “I want it to be over with. I’m tired of-of all of this hanging over my head. I’m tired of holding you both at arm’s length and I just want to get it off my chest.”
James’ arms tightened around him, James nuzzling into Q’s neck and kissing over his nape. “Then I’ll ask her to come over straight away,” he murmured, and Q covered James’ arms with his own and squeezed.
* * * * *
Moneypenny agreed to come over that same night, of course. Q had suspected she was chomping at the bit to come check on him visually, and was staying away mainly out of respect for Q and James needing time to work things out between them. So they made pasta again, with bread and salad and a bottle of wine, and they sat and had an amazingly light-hearted dinner in which Q laughed more than he had thought remotely possible after the past two weeks, and then they all went into Q’s bedroom and sat down on the couch. Q sat between them, his legs across Moneypenny’s lap, his shoulders pillowed against James’ chest, Carly inviting herself to come sit in Q’s lap. He always ended up like this, somehow, but with Moneypants and James it felt perfectly natural.
It took hours. Q spent a lot of it staring at the window as he talked, and Moneypenny and James just listened. He told them about how it started (New York with its lights) and how he got in too deep to go home (San Francisco, with its endless sky and fog), and he told them how it felt to be young and in love with the world at your feet. He told them about David’s laugh, and the fall of Janessa’s hair, and how it felt to fall asleep every night between two people who’d promised him the world and then went out and stained their hands red with blood to get it for him, and how little he’d known of exactly how deep and dark their madness was.
He told them about meeting Fezzik and Agrippina, how they’d become part of his family, and about fleeing to Europe when things went sour; he told them about the horror of discovering the truth, and the misery of having all his worst fears proven true to him when he’d tried to confront his lovers. He told them about contacting M, about the eight days where he’d had to drug himself to get to sleep at night so as not to arouse Janessa and David’s suspicions, his pure terror at the chance of being discovered. When he got to the part where he said good-bye to his partners for the last time before sending them to the job during which they’d be arrested, he couldn’t stop himself from breaking down, but to his great gratitude neither Moneypenny nor James tried to stop him from continuing; they just held him until he’d calmed down enough to keep talking.
He told them about the hoops MI6 had made him jump through, the new lives that he and Fezzik and Agrippina had had to commit to after the letter the Markhams sent Q. His father’s death, the years of contract work and isolation, the hobbies he picked up to keep himself occupied. He told them everything and left nothing out.
Finally, finally, after he’d scraped his insides raw and poured every last bit of himself out for them to judge, there was nothing left to tell. The room went silent; a glance at the clock revealed it to be past midnight. James sat up first, enveloping Q in one of his rib-crushing hugs and kissing his neck. “Thank you for telling us, Q,” he murmured into Q’s ear.
Q swallowed thickly, his throat sore from how much he’d talked. Moneypenny sat up then too, crawling over until she was wedged against James’ side and could wrap her arms around Q from the other side, pressing her face to his hair. “Guess what,” she said into his hair. Q grunted. “You’re still our boffin.”
He cracked a grin at that, and raised his hands, resting one each against James’ arm and Moneypenny’s arm. “Looks like you’re stuck with me, then,” he said creakily.
“I’m sure we’ll bear up under the pressure somehow,” said James, and Moneypenny squeezed Q’s arm.
Eric Temple (The Recluse) as played by Robert Carlyle, aka "I'm Not Actually Insane, I Just Play Psychopaths Repeatedly In Films And Television."
