A floorboard creaked in the living room.
James
turned off the electric drill he had been using to put Q’s new desk together. A
floorboard had creaked in the living room, and that wasn’t correct because
currently Q was out fetching groceries, and Tesla and Turing were both at the
vet getting flea dipped and plotting murder. There was no one in the flat but
him.
James’
grip on the drill tightened. If the intruders were in the living room, then
there was no way he was going to be able to reach the gun hidden behind the
sofa. The next closest firearms were in the bedroom, tucked away in his dresser
and strapped to the bed’s headboard. Honestly, he would have felt much better
with more around the flat, but he couldn’t run the risk of Q finding them. His
husband would likely have a heart attack right before accidentally shooting
himself while trying to take the thing apart. James loved his husband, so
shootings, both accidental and on purpose, were things he generally tried to
keep the other man away from.
With
a snap decision, James turned off all the lights in the room and hid behind the
open door. He held his breath and waited.
A moment later a figure entered the room, visible to Bond by his shadow in the
doorway, painted by light coming in from the living room. The figure’s gun was
raised, steps silent as he crept into the office. Bond waited until the man was
fully inside the room before slamming the door closed, plunging both of them
into darkness.
When Bond
emerged it was with the enemy’s gun in hand and his drill still currently
lodged in the man’s eye. He crept silently along the hallway, stopping with his
back to the wall at the doorway of the living room. A quick glance around the
corner told him that there was another assailant waiting for him. This one was
a woman, her body almost completely hidden behind the love seat except for
where she was poised to shoot Bond upon entry. He would have to create some
sort of diversion.
There was
a click of a key turning in a lock. The front door pushed open. Bond’s breath
hitched. No. No no no dear god no. Q.
“James!” Q
called. “I’m ho-”
Two
gunshots sounded at once. One bullet had gone through the woman’s head, clean
and efficient. The other had Q slumped over on the ground, red leaking out onto
the floor around him, and James couldn’t breathe.
Dear god, there was so much red.
He didn’t
remember moving, but suddenly he was on his knees next to Q. His heart was in
his throat, beating out a rhythm on his tongue. His hands were on Q’s back, his
shoulders. Everything was moving too fast and too slow all at once, and fuck,
he would give anything to take this back, to make this not real. His darling Q
couldn’t be- he wasn’t-
“Q.” The word came out ragged and broken,
torn from his throat.
The younger
man looked up at him with wide green eyes. He shifted, pushing himself up into
a sitting position, and James grabbed both sides of his face in a desperate
need for touch.
“Are you
okay? Are you hurt?”
Q blinked
up at him for a moment, and James might as well have been speaking an alien
tongue for all he seemed to understand. Q looked down at the ground and
flinched, grabbing James’ arm. “James. James!
Be careful, there’s glass.”
James
looked down at the overturned grocery bags to see a shattered jar of Prego, the
tomato sauce having spilt all over the floor.
For a
moment James was dizzy with relief. He pressed his and Q’s foreheads together,
his eyes closed as he listened to the other man’s rapid breathing in the
otherwise quiet house.
“You’re okay, then? You’re not
hurt?”
“N-no. But James, you’re bleeding.”
James pulled back to touch at the
small cut on his head from the previous fight before shrugging it off. “It’s
fine. It’s nothing.” Q just blinked at him some more. His eyes jumped to the
dead body in their living room before going back to James. “Listen, Q, you’re
going into shock right now.”
“James,” Q’s voice wavered, “what
the hell just happened?”
James took one of Q’s hands and
placed it against his heart, trying to ground the man. “You know that
government job I do? It’s for MI6. I work there as an agent.”
“Oh…” Q swayed a bit, and James
placed a hand on his shoulder to keep him steady. “Well, that certainly
explains all the guns around the house.”
James started. “You know about
those?”
Despite being half way to a panic
attack, Q still managed to give him a pitying look. “James, who do you think
does all the cleaning around here? I figured they were simply part of your
paranoid overprotectiveness spurred on by your parents’ early death and
childhood trauma. Though now I see that I was a little bit off the mark there.”
James blinked. Had he ever mentioned
that he loved his husband? It was something that likely needed saying more
often. As the shock wore off Q would likely begin to act differently, but James
could honestly say he wouldn’t be surprised if the boffin remained just as non-pulsed
as he currently was.
“Q, darling, listen to me. The two
of us are going to go for a walk, and I’m going to make a call to the office.
After that you can ask me as many questions as you want, I’ll answer them as
much as I can, and when we get back home everything will be normal again.
Alright?”
Q nodded and allowed James to help
him to his feet. He wasn’t shying away from his husband at all, but there was
something still nagging at the agent.
“Q, you’re not afraid of me now, are
you?”
The boffin looked at him like he’d
grown a second head. “Should I be?”
A tension James hadn’t realized he’d
been carrying in his shoulders melted away, and he pulled his husband close to
press a kiss to the man’s temple. “No. Absolutely not. I couldn’t bring myself to
hurt you even if I tried.”
Q rolled his eyes. The hand he took
James’ with rattled with tremors, and James held on tight. “Well, yes, there’s
no need to state the obvious. Come on then, let’s get out of here until our
flat looks like our flat again.”
James pressed a kiss to the back of
his husband’s hand and followed him out into the night.
