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“I didn’t know you could play.”
Q’s mindless, meandering piano tune comes to a halt. He withdraws his fingers from the keys and looks up to see James Bond’s broad silhouette standing in the door, complete with a cold martini in hand. The glass is fogged. Its twist of lemon is coiled, snake-like and dangerous, at the bottom of the glass.
“Yes, well,” replies Q. “There’s plenty you don’t know about me.”
“Evidently.”
Behind Bond, the annual British Intelligence gala is in full swing. Waiters swan past with drinks. Cabinet ministers strike up conversations with shadowy defence personnel, thinking themselves — erroneously, in Q’s opinion — equal to the task. Dinner is long past, and the gala is entering the tipsy hour where people draw a bit closer to each other, look at each other a bit more brightly, become a bit more complimentary about each others’ gowns and suits.
In truth, it’s the hour where Q needs a bit of respite from all the frippery and faff. That would be true even if he hadn’t had the week he’s had. Now, it’s more true than ever.
Fortunately, the nice thing about these Intelligence galas is that they’re always held somewhere with a surplus of extra rooms. There is always a hidden nook or cranny to have a private conversation in. There is always a door that can be closed. No one is ever short of a place to hide for five minutes.
At last year’s gala, Q foiled a cyberattack from the depths of the cloakroom, shielded by expensive peacoats.
Tonight, he’s happened upon a little music room. The walls are wrapped in bookcases, which are stuffed with music biographies and compositions. Its wooden floor is polished to the point of reflection. The room’s floor-to-ceiling window would normally provide plenty of sun, but at this hour, the only scant beam of light in the place comes from the antique floor lamp next to the piano.
Bond must be having a conniption about the safety risks. Lots of glass. Minimal lighting. Plenty of room for secret conversations and secret assassins alike.
How fortunate for everyone, then, that there’s now a rather bold assassin in the doorway.
Bond stalks over to him. And ‘stalk’ is the word. There’s no other way to describe it. He is, and will remain, Q suspects, a predator in the world of men. But his face is benign enough — jovial, even — and the alcohol has relaxed the frequently-clenched muscles of his face.
“Passed your last grade exam when you were eight, did you?” teases Bond.
“Twelve, actually.”
“Christ, so you came out of the womb playing Chopin.”
“Hardly.” Q smiles despite himself. “But I was relentlessly stubborn. Wanted to be better at everything than everyone.”
Bond huffs in laughter, then confesses that he’d run out of his grade three exam and never looked back. Q asks if that was before he was kicked out of Eton for that incident with the maid, and Bond tells him he shouldn’t listen so closely to rumour. That it may well have been a butler.
Q looks back down to the piano keys. Old friends, they are. He hasn’t been at this in a while; he’s been too preoccupied with the keys of his mechanical keyboard and the switches of his modular synths.
Thankfully, returning to the traditional old beast before him is like riding a bicycle. He begins, again, to play.
Bond watches him for a while. Then, after perching his martini on top of the piano, he takes a seat next to Q. Q shuffles over to leave some scant space between them, but the piano bench isn’t very wide, and he can feel Bond’s warmth coming through his perfectly-tailored dinner jacket. So too can he feel the edge of Bond’s holster at his elbow. That, at least, is a safe enough subject for a low-lit room and close company.
“I see you’ve managed to replace the gun you lost,” remarks Q. “How anyone could stand to assign you another after Friday’s display of wilful destruction—“
“I’d call it necessary deployment.”
“You deploy a bullet, Bond, not a gun.”
“I was out of bullets. The gun was the next best thing.” Bond turns to him and quirks an eyebrow. “Are you arguing with me through song now?”
It’s only when Bond draws his attention to the music that Q notices exactly what he’s playing. Gershwin’s Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. It would be an amusing realisation on any other day. Tonight, it twists his stomach into knots.
A love song. Of all things. There were, Q reasoned, far too many of them in the world.
“I didn’t mean for you to stop,” says Bond.
“Quite all right. I’ve been away from the party long enough. I should…”
Q clears his throat. He begins to stand, but is stopped by Bond’s hand landing warm and gentle on his knee.
“Q, I owe you an apology.”
“You owe me nothing of the sort.”
”Hear me out anyway. If I’d known you were seeing someone…”
“You would have carried on regardless, I’m sure. And it kept us both alive, didn’t it?”
“It did,” agrees Bond. He strokes his thumb over a ticklish spot on Q’s knee.
However intent Q might be on forgetting it all is a moot point. His intent vanishes in a flash, and with a blush high in his cheeks, he recalls the weekend previous.
Though, to say he recalls it is perhaps misleading. Can a man really recall something he’s scarcely stopped thinking of all week? The memories are top-of-mind; Q hasn’t far to reach for them at all. They’ve been there in every passing mention of Bond’s name this week. In every conversation they’ve had through a headset and an earpiece. They’re in the space between two bodies now, lingering heavily in the middle of a worn-in piano bench.
Sun. The blazing blue Aegean Sea. Bond’s famed eyes, rarer and nothing at all like the water behind them.
Adrenaline, a chase, and a kiss.
He and Bond had been in the field. That was a state of order Q only tolerated because it promised an all expenses-paid weekend in Santorini.
(A holiday was a difficult dream for a Quartermaster to realise.)
It hadn’t taken long for blood to stain Santorini’s white walls. Within hours of Q landing on the island, he’d found himself hurrying through winding cobbled paths, dodging cars, tour groups and holidaymakers trying to enjoy their spritzes, all in the name of avoiding Spectre’s henchmen. Q had run from Spectre more than once in the last few years, but it never got easier, and it felt particularly strange to be doing it under the galling light of the sun. The men of the shadows were getting bold, operating in broad daylight.
During the chase, Q remembers Santorini feeling tiny; unbearably small and claustrophobic. It seemed an easy place to get lost in and a difficult place to hide. It was, in his opinion, no place to outrun a man. So it came as a relief to see Bond waiting casually around a corner, his arm poised to haul Q into a shaded alcove.
It was less of a relief when Bond pinned him up against the alcove’s wall, shoved his hands in his hair and kissed him senseless.
An evasive manoeuvre, Bond called it afterwards. Q had accused Bond of trying to placate him with Star Trek references, while Bond denied having ever watched five minutes of that trivial nonsense. And that was that. Once they were back to arguing, everything went back to normal.
Q went back to normal. Except in the ways he didn’t.
Because it wasn’t nothing, being kissed by Bond. It had unlocked something within him, feelings he’d been guarding so secretly he hardly knew he’d been holding onto them. He wondered — spent days wondering, in fact — whether Bond would have resorted to a kiss had Q been another of his field partners. Felix Leiter, for instance. Or 009. He suspected Bond would have just handed them a spare gun.
It was that very train of thought that sent Q ‘round the bend. He turned the kiss over and over in his head. Analysed it from every possible vantage point, from unflattering and hopeful angles alike. In Bond’s arms, he’d leaned in. He’d made a sound, too, to which he was sure Bond made a sound in return. Q had shut his eyes. Why he’d done that was beyond him, especially since he must have known well that Bond’s were wide open, looking for approaching muscle. The kiss had lasted. It had slowed naturally, hanging between them before the work resumed.
Sometimes Q’s body was a mystery to him. His heart, too, to say nothing of Bond’s. It all remained a mystery in the days following.
Because, had the kiss been the only unexpected thing about his week, Q might well still be in the ballroom chatting to Tanner over a salmon blini or five. But the kiss had infected everything. It had wormed its way into Q’s core processes, destroying everything in its path.
He’d had a date scheduled for the Wednesday night with a man called Ciaran who – well, if he wasn’t strictly a boyfriend, had an exceeding amount of potential. Or he’d seemed promising, anyway, until Bond’s skilled mouth had intervened and faded poor Ciaran to dust. In a lovely wine bar in Greenwich, Q had spent several hours during that date weighing up all sorts of pros and cons. He’d tried to conjure up the spark he’d felt in their previous encounters; that spark of new romance, the warm surprise of interest in another man’s eyes, the optimistic, overwrought dreaming of a life too far down the line.
In the end, it was a hopeless exercise.
Ciaran had a stable, well-paying job, a love of cats, an excellent collection of board games and a deep appreciation of modern art. He had a lush, exceedingly tuggable head of hair. He had cheerful eyes and clever words, and he hadn’t, to Q’s knowledge, ever killed anyone. He was even good in bed; so good that Q could have forgiven him a slip in the latter point. After all, Q had ended a few lives himself.
But over a glass or two of very good wine, Q faced the sinking realisation that Ciaran’s eyes weren’t blue enough. His hands were too soft; they didn’t have enough calluses. He had no smile lines around his eyes, none of those kind creases when he laughed. He didn’t know anything about wine and he didn’t read books and he took too long to decide what to order from a menu.
None of that was his fault, but Q called it off nonetheless.
All week, he’s been on the verge of regretting it. All week, he’s watched Bond dance with beautiful women and listened to him flirt with Moneypenny and seen him throw Q’s beautifully-crafted weapons into whatever ravine or sea or ditch was nearest. All week, he’s watched Bond do his job exceedingly well with a poised thumb hovering over Ciaran’s number. All week, he has been on the verge of resuming things as they were in that wine bar.
Things have so far not resumed.
The cruellest thing of all is that Q knows he hasn’t a chance in hell with Bond. They might conceivably spend a night together. A weekend, even. If Q is very lucky, they might strike up some sort of casual arrangement. Fridays at mine, Q thinks, if you’re free. If you’re not busy garrotting a man or putting your cock in someone for intel. If I’m not busy poisoning the wired guts of a Russian cyberterrorist group and ignoring my colossal sleep debt.
The long-term, however, seems an impossibility. Somewhere between a pipedream and a tried and tested cautionary tale.
“He’s a lucky man,” says Bond quietly, putting a stop to Q’s thoughts.
Q smiles ruefully. “Yes. He’s well shot of me now, so I suppose he is.”
“I can’t see that that’s true.”
“Can’t you?”
“No,” insists Bond. “Not for a moment.”
He plays a note or two on the piano, picking up the sheet music with surprising ease. Desperate for a less fraught topic of conversation, Q takes the bait.
“Grade three, you said?”
“I never said I stopped playing entirely.”
He begins to hum along to the music; a low, husky melody that invokes in Q so many reactions he hardly knows what to do with himself. Bond presses into his side, briefly, smiling when Q starts playing and humming along, thinking about eithers and neithers and potatoes and tomatoes. Bond smells of alcohol and shaving cream, and Q wonders if he has his straight razor on him, the one engraved with the initials AB. He wonders if Bond’s ever slit a man’s throat with it. Wonders if he’s ever scraped it up the side of another man’s neck and licked a soothing trail in the aftermath.
The piano slows. Bond leans in to kiss him.
It is the very opposite of the kiss in Santorini. It’s slow and luxurious, and Q has the time to appreciate the way Bond sighs and relaxes into him. The taste of vodka lands bitter on Q’s tongue and he feels drunk off it, drunk off Bond and the way he kisses like he’ll never kiss anyone again. Q slides a hand under Bond’s jacket, seeking the warmth of his waist beneath his holster.
“Wait,” says Q, dazed, against Bond’s mouth.
“Mm. What is it?”
Q blinks. He draws away and watches as Bond’s eyes turn from glassy to wary.
“I don’t think—not that this isn’t—I just…”
Bond’s hand moves to the side of Q’s neck, right over his pulse. “You’re nervous.”
“This can’t work,” Q blurts out. “You know it can’t.”
“No, I don’t know that.” Bond replaces his hand with his lips on Q’s neck. The lamp turns his silvering hair gold. “You’re making a lot of assumptions tonight. It’s not like you.”
“I’m simply being reasonable. We both know—”
“Here’s what I know,” interrupts Bond. He bites at the hinge of Q’s jaw, pulling gently with his teeth, and Q shivers. Again and again, he attacks Q’s neck as he expounds upon his point. “I know you have two cats and a mortgage. I know you play piano. I know you make the best weaponry the world over. I know you’re exceptionally kind and—“
“James—”
“—frighteningly clever. I know I’ve wanted you since the minute I met you. And I know I’ve thought of little else this week except how you tasted in Greece.”
Q swallows. “How did I taste?”
“Perfect,” answers Bond. He kisses Q again. They both keep their eyes open this time, and it sparks a feeling so intense Q wants to squirm away from it. Bond holds him still. “Like home.”
A pained laugh leaves Q’s throat. “We’re going to fight all the time.”
“We’re going to bicker all the time. There’s a difference.”
“A hair’s breadth of difference. We’re going to drive each other mad.”
And yet, even as he’s arguing the point, Q’s hands are still underneath Bond’s suit. Beneath the pleats of his shirt, Q touches a spot near a nipple that makes Bond flinch. A discordant note sounds from the piano and sends both of them into a round of sniggering.
“Isn’t that what makes it fun?” Bond smiles against his cheek. Under his breath, he sings a line from that blasted song, the bit about parting breaking his heart, and that deep baritone is the final battering ram against Q’s defences. He pulls Bond in again, kissing him senseless.
The calling off gets called off.
It gets called off so thoroughly that by the time Q surfaces for air, he is pinned between Bond’s lap and the keys of the piano. They’re making an intolerable racket. Q spares a moment’s gratitude for the band in the ballroom, who are turning as loud and raucous as the crowd before them.
“Do you suppose that door locks?” asks Q.
He’s halfway to undoing Bond’s bow tie when Bond stops him. He brings Q’s hands to his lips and does something to his knuckles that’s somehow careful and obscene all at once.
“I could have you up against it if it doesn’t. Or…”
“Or?”
“Or you could take me home and have me there. I could meet the cats afterwards.”
“Oh.”
It’s a conundrum. As much as he’s compelled by the latter scenario, Q’s not sure he has the fortitude for a celibate taxi ride. His trousers are rather tight, and his own bow tie feels stifling around his newly sensitive neck. And he must admit, the offer to be fucked here is a wildly enticing one. To be pressed up against the door, his cheek and forehead pinned in place while Bond whispers filth at his back. Or to be lifted high, his back to the spirited party happening next door, to look out over the ballroom’s gardens, hoping no one turns their head to the music room proper to see Bond’s trousers around his ankles with Q writhing under him.
But the thought of taking Bond to a proper bed is equally enticing. They could strip properly, for a start. They could take their time. They could rise later, in the early hours, for a whisky or two and a slow dance around the living room. They wouldn’t have to squander their first time rushing against the clock. Q has a record player, after all, and the right collection of records for that sort of thing. He has cats who are easily, sweetly charmed, and bacon, eggs and coffee in for the morning’s breakfast.
“The traffic will be hell,” warns Q.
“Then we can appal the driver.” Bond makes his mind up for both of them. He stands up and offers his hand to Q. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“All right. If you leave first, I’ll—”
Bond comes very close to rolling his eyes. “We’re leaving together, Q.”
“M will notice.”
“Bugger M.”
“Certainly not.”
Bond’s face lights up with amusement. “Didn’t I tell you this would be fun?”
He closes the lid of the piano and abandons his martini, which is dripping with condensation now, having sweated through the show before it. With a skew-whiff bow tie, dishevelled hair, and a stray hair of Q’s around his cufflink, Bond leads them out of the music room and into the night.
The band plays them out of the ballroom to a very familiar tune. Q hardly pays it any mind. He’s past paying attention to any music that isn’t the drum beat of Bond’s hammering heart pressed against his palm.