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He doesn’t know he’s at the door until he’s knocking on it. He’s being impolite about this — all of it. He’s impatient. Out of character. He hopes Bond hasn’t got a woman over. He ought to have considered that sooner because, much like the way he’s treating this door, he won’t have it in him to be polite to her, to pretend as if he’s—
“Q.”
Q freezes, hand still poised to keep slamming his fist into sturdy, unyielding wood.
“I—”
“Christ, it’s three in the morning.”
Bond pockets something. A gun, going by the shadow of it in his lovely robe.
“Yes, I know, I—” Q lowers his hand, touches the opening of his coat. There’s a funny sound for a moment; his fingernails rattling against the metal of a button. They don’t still until Bond folds his own hand around Q’s fingers. “I know.”
“Never mind. You’re freezing. Come in.”
Q lets himself be manhandled into a seat, all the while watching specks of dust fly around in the light of the street lamp outside. Behind the orange haze, there are white terraces as far as the eye can see. The nape of Q’s coat is wet, and so is his face, but it’s not, he realises, because it’s raining outside. His hair then. The shower. He’d taken a shower and he hadn’t dried off properly. It must be why he’s so cold. After all, he’d made sure the shower was scalding, hadn’t he? Even knowing the November weather wouldn’t be kind to his pink and tingling skin.
But the shock of cold was good. Enlivening. Something to prove he could still feel and react the right way.
His clothes are sticking humid wet to his skin now, warmed again by Bond’s central heating. It’s good Q’s still wearing his coat. He can only imagine the state of Bond’s expensive couch without it.
Bond presses a drink into his hand and holds it there until Q’s hand has enough energy to grasp it on his own. It’s a heavy whisky. Full of peat that Q can hardly taste, but it goes down well. The second sip better than the first, and the third better again. The fourth numbs him in an extremely pleasant way.
From beside him, Bond’s voice comes firm and dispassionate. “Were you taken?”
“No.”
“Are you injured?”
Q shifts. “No.”
“Are you hurt?”
Q looks down into his empty glass, then over to the bottle that promises a refill, but Bond whisks it out of reach.
“Not until you answer my question.”
Bond is less dispassionate now. It’s a change Q can’t at all deal well with. As Bond’s voice cracks around Q’s name, an ugly fissure opens up in Q’s chest.
“Please,” Q puts his hand out for the bottle. “Please, just—”
“Show me where you’re hurt.”
Bond promises to be gentle. Not to push too hard. To take things as slowly as Q needs to, and it’s all far too much like—
It’s going to feel so good, darling. So, so good.
“Just pour me another drink, 007.”
“I will. I will, but first I need to know if—”
“I assure you, all my parts are shipshape.” Rather too much for his liking. Q clears his throat. “Now, if you’d be so kind…”
Q makes another grab for the bottle, and Bond lets him away with it this time. He has to lean right into Bond’s chest to grasp it, and it should be confronting, shouldn’t it? That daring maleness; that uniquely omnipresent sensuality that comes attached to Bond; the wide gap in his robe that implies nudity — hadn’t Bond joked once that he didn’t wear pyjamas to bed?; the smell of old cologne and sweat and gunpowder still clinging to him from their practice session in the range earlier.
God. That shooting session.
It seems forever ago, as does the lightness Q felt during it, during the two hours of his day where the banter flew just as fast as the bullets and everything had hit its target. He ought never to have abandoned Bond there in the bowels of MI6. He ought to have kept shooting, to have listened to himself. Instead, he’d left to go on a date with a man who voted Labour, played the cello and abhorred violence in films.
“I don’t want to ask this,” Bond admits.
“Then don’t.”
Insubordinate to the last, he does. In an unbearable voice, he asks if Q’s date ended badly. Not for the first time, Q finds himself thankful for Bond’s tendency towards good old-fashioned understatement.
The view in front of Q blurs. He can no longer see the names of the spines in Bond’s interminable book collection, which is piled over every available surface in this dreary flat: on the floor, on the tables, on the armchair and below the TV as a makeshift stand. There’s a new wetness on Q’s face. This time it’s not from his hair.
He doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t have to. Bond is there, pulling Q in, taking away his empty glass and providing a shoulder — skin and silk — for Q’s mortifying panic to soak into. It goes on. On and on. Wet heat, snot, and an awful gasping sound that Q has never once made before. He’s too hot. He’s too cold. He’s definitely drunk. He’s not injured or sore but he’s — he can’t even look at the skin of his own hands, so he focuses on what he can look at. What he can feel. What he can always rely on even in the worst, most stressful moments of his days.
And that’s Bond. Or rather, it's James. Unshakeable, loyal, kind, human James. Perhaps they’re one and the same.
Q counts like breath the things worth counting. The trembling lip at his hairline, the broad, steady arm around his back, and the outline of a gun beneath his hand, tucked into a dressing gown pocket.
Then, wrung out, he falls asleep grasping the silencer.