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After Savona, everything passes far too quickly for Q’s taste. On their flight home to London Bond is re-routed to the alps on M’s direct orders, and Q is forced to brave the plane home own his own. After the alps, it’s South Africa, and then on to the Americas, where Q loses track of Bond and consequently his own mind for two weeks until a building collapse in Mexico City puts Bond back on the radar and on M’s very short, one-line-long shitlist.
The satisfaction Q feels when he injects the smartblood into Bond’s veins with a vehement flick of his thumb is almost worth the brief flash of pain that crosses Bond’s face and the low curse he hisses out in response.
Their hands touch, briefly, when Q hands Bond the exploding watch out on the floor of Q-Branch, and he can feel Bond hesitate for a fraction of a second, his fingers lingering for one long, drawn-out heartbeat, and then Bond is asking Q what it does and Q withdraws his hand, the moment lost.
“It tells the time,” he smiles. Might help with your punctuality issues.”
Bond touches Q for a second time in the span of 48 hours in a remote clinic in Austria, when he hands his quartermaster a ring and a promise, and were there not men after them both Q might have taken a moment to appreciate the sheer poignancy of the situation.
“Where are you staying?” Bond asks, and Q hesitates at the doorway. To stay, now, and help Bond would be playing at treason. If he’s killed, no one will find his body out here in the mountains. Moneypenny will have to give away his cats.
He should not, cannot let Bond back into his life again like this. The ring, the room, it’s all leading up to be one big means to an end, and here Q stands on the precipice, the deciding factor in Bond’s whole scheme to take down whatever he’s been chasing after for years, perhaps his whole life.
“The Pevsner, room twelve,” Q says, wrenching the door open with one hand. “One hour.”
Q collapses in the emergency stairwell of the ski lodge and laughs hollowly, clutching the messenger bag and Bond’s ring to his chest. He’s escaped the men that were after Bond and by extension himself, by the skin of his teeth, and though he knows he ought to stand and get the hell out before they find him again, Q finds his legs have become the consistency of gelatin and he cannot stand to save his life.
He laughs again, and the sound echoes among the metal flights of stairs that spiral into darkness. Cheating death, treading dangerously into field operative territory. He thinks, dryly, that after this is all said and done he’s going to shut himself away in his office and not come out for a month.
And yet, he’s never felt more alive in his life.
“Bond, we need to talk. Alone.”
He should have expected that Bond would bring a woman into Q’s room. There always is a woman, isn’t there? Q isn’t blind, he can see that Dr. Swann is tall, beautiful, exactly the kind of girl a man like Bond would want. The sight of her makes Q want to be sick.
“She knows,” Bond says, and Q turns toward him sharply with pleading eyes.
It’s not about the traces of DNA he’s found on the ring, the organization, the way the whole bloody thing ties together like a perfectly wrapped Christmas present. Dr. Swann may be the link Bond needs to finish the job, but what Bond wants and what Q wants are two very, very different things.
No, Swann doesn’t know, not about this, this beastly thing between himself and Bond that neither man can put proper words to.
Don’t do this he thinks, staring at Bond with all the desperation in the world. Please. Not here, not now.
“But, Bond—”
“She knows.”
Q swallows, breath sticking in his throat, and he begins to tell them both what he’s sorted out.
The moment Swann is out of the room, Q steps very close into Bond’s personal space and has half a mind to slap him across the face. Instead, he’s almost equally angry as he is surprised when Bond lets Q grab him roughly by the lapels of his coat, nudge the door shut with the toe of his shoe, and manhandle him against the nearest wall before he’s kissing Bond with a vicious ferocity even he didn’t know he was capable of.
Feeling Bond shudder in response, lips opening up beneath him, warm hands settling at the curve of his hips and the nape of his neck, is everything Q could have hoped for and still not enough, all at the same, horrible time.
Q doesn’t know for how long they kiss, here in Q’s chilled hotel room as the tv broadcasts the fruits of Oberhauser’s work in the background. He doesn’t know for how long Bond mouths along the stubbled curve of his jawline, or when Bond had sucked Q’s earlobe into his mouth and nipped at the sensitive skin, but now Bond’s hands have found their way up his sweater and suddenly everything becomes too hot all at once and Q pulls away, heart hammering in the cavity of his chest as he severs the thin strand of saliva that connects his lips to Bond’s with a slow, deliberate swipe of his tongue.
“I’m sending you out to your death. You must know that,” Q says, voice still rough and starved of air as he tries to catch his breath.
“You act as if I’m not going to come back.”
“Not from this.”
Q glances toward his laptop and all the information he’s uncovered, the frightening brutality of what Oberhauser was, is capable of, and then turns back to Bond. “Not from this.”
Bond gives him that wry little smile, the one that had turned his knees into jelly so long ago at the National Gallery, and reaches out to slide Q’s glasses back up to rest at the bridge of his nose. Q blushes a deep pink and has the decency to look embarrassed; he hadn’t even noticed they’d slipped.
He then turns his back to Bond, knowing that what he says next is surely going to break him if he looks Bond in the eye while he’s doing it.
“James,” he says, slowly, with all the composure he can muster. “Promise me you’ll bring something back in one piece this time.”
He waits for Bond’s response, and when the silence has lingered on too long Q turns around and finds himself faced with the door to his room wide open, the woman gone, and Bond with her, and there is nothing to stop the floor from rising to meet him as Q’s knees buckle out, and he falls, and falls, and falls.
Q is standing behind the police barricade when he sees Bond throw the gun over the side of the bridge, walk away from what’s left of Oberhauser, and embrace Swann in his arms before pulling her in for a kiss that doesn’t seem to end.
He shifts, suddenly unsteady on his feet and Moneypenny is quick to grab hold of Q’s arm, to pull him back into a standing position befitting of a Six employee faced with the death of an MI5 mole and an awful lot of explaining to do to the inquiry board that’s sure to be drawn up within the coming days.
Though Moneypenny can’t possibly understand what’s happened between him and Bond over the past few months and in Q’s hotel room in Austria, she conveys her sympathy in the way she squeezes Q’s arm reassuringly, the way she looks in his eye as if now that Oberhauser is gone, everything will be right with the world. They both know it won’t be.
“He always comes back, you know,” she says to him softly over the wail of the sirens behind them. “He always does, in the end.”
“I know,” Q replies, and maybe if he repeats it to himself enough times, maybe it will come true.
It’s about four months on when Q gets an alert on his laptop, warning him that the nanos inside Bond’s bloodstream are going to expire without a supplemental dose, and that one should be administered within 72 hours to avoid a loss in coverage. Instinctively, Q starts to navigate over to the tracking program before he stills his hand, fingers hovering just above the trackpad.
As much as he wants to find out where Bond is, he’d lost the right to know, to pry that deeply into Bond’s life, the day Bond walked out of Six for the last time.
Perhaps, he thinks, he’d lost it long before then.
Perhaps he’d never had it at all.
Q dismisses the notification and turns to face R, who he now realizes has been standing behind him for several minutes now with 004 in tow.
“Ah yes, 004. Come along, and I’ll get you kitted up.”
In three day’s time the smartblood program goes offline, and with it Bond finally vanishes from the map without a trace.
Q realizes that perhaps this is what Bond had wanted all along when he’d whispered in Q’s ear to make him disappear so many months ago, and that Q had simply finished the job when he’d handed him the keys to the Aston Martin and allowed Bond to walk out of his life without so much as a word of protest.
Q hands in the paperwork to M that night marking Bond as Missing in Action, Presumed Dead, and doesn’t look back.