you take the dark and carve me out a home

A sunny day, the Harley, caffeine, and sugar are all that Bond and Q had on the agenda for the day - until an unexpected encounter with someone from Q's past changes their plans.

There are few secrets at MI6 — and the relationship between 007 and his Quartermaster is not one of them. It was only a matter of time before word reached Bond's best friend, Alec Trevelyan, 006.

In the wake of a mission gone horribly wrong, Q helps Bond through his nightmares.

Q would have liked to say he remembered the night he got the tattoo well. He would have liked to say the reason he was so fond of it was because it was the product of his own imagination, his thoughtfulness, his attempt at branding himself with his own unique identity.

But he’d be lying.

In which Bond is a retired naval commander with too much house, Q is a mechanical engineer with too many sisters, and they have lengthy conversations about decorum, bonnet-ribbons and philosophy in Regency England.

~

“I just thought you might go pay a visit," his mother suggested.

“Me?” Q asked, aghast. “Pay a visit?”

“He must be starved for proper gentleman company, now that he’s settled in so far from London--”

“I am far from proper gentleman company.”

“--and perhaps if you befriended him he could introduce you to some nice heiresses.”

“Heiresses?” Q repeated, baffled and horrified. “What in the world would I do with heiresses?”

Bond wants nothing more than for someone, just once, to be waiting for him at the airport when he returns home.

“I’m going to make a mess of you,” Bond promises him, removing the glasses carefully from his face and folding them up. “I’m going to fucking take you apart, Q, until you’re sobbing for it.”

Q rolled his eyes. “Oh, there are just bloody wheels within wheels to it, aren’t there, this kidnapping business? Really, you should give it up. You’re not cut out for it. Think about it, your first time out, and you pinch a national intelligence treasure and ask his MI6 boyfriend for ransom. It isn’t very promising, is it?”

The one where Bond really, really isn't used to sleeping with people who don't tragically die soon afterward.