to a place that's ours

Q is listening to music when Tanner arrives. All the best rendezvouses have secret knocks; he’s opened the door in the split-second moment after he’s raised his knuckles to the door but before Tanner actually knocks. Surveillance cameras, probably, or the ability to pick out the subtleties of his particular footfalls out from underneath the sounds of a singer-songwriter (already un-hip by the time they were post-pubescent) moaning tonelessly.

He swipes at the monolithic speakers and manages to silence the twangy guitars and self-deprecating drone of the lead singer’s voice.

“That’s what you listen to when you have company over?” Bill says, laughingly.

“Well, hardly company,” Q says, with infinite wounded dignity, patting him on the back as he goes by. “Take your coat off, for heaven’s sake. Put your bag down anywhere.”

“Shoes?”

He’s already tracked some grime on the narrow Turkish carpets, the least he can do is stop digging the hole deeper.

“If you like.”

Q’s immaculate shoes are tidily paired by the door; he’s padding off in stocking feet to straighten out the countertop and sweep up some change. It’s a cursory gesture that seems like a calculated tip of the hat to what they’re ostensibly doing here, as if Tanner has just dropped in, and as if Q spends a lot of time in his flat anyway. It’s amazing how much less like student digs the place looks as soon as the Smiths aren’t playing in the background, but Bill focuses on the relevant details, such as the neat figure Q cuts while walking away.

“Food will be on the table in five. Open the wine, won’t you?”

---

Q seems expectant, and Tanner isn’t so sure how well he’s performing on the courtship-display front, or whether each mysterious cue missed is a disappointment. He supposes this is one of the hazards of fooling around with the divorced that his partners must take in stride; it’s been ages since he’s had to go through the protocols of meeting someone interesting, and while the trouble of first meetings has been taken care of for them, he’s not sure how to make his approach. He knows intellectually that it hasn’t been that long, but a great deal has changed, and the pace of his career is one of them. Making time for his last one had been relatively easy, until it wasn’t. They’d done things like watch films together, go to parties, go out drinking. Making time for Q proved to be a bit of a trial. He’d found himself calculating transit times on his way over, how much of a bite that would take out of their time together, how long until the next critically important phone call was likely or until he needed to book his plane tickets for next month’s jaunt. What they do in the course of careers in espionage is far sexier in abstract than it is actually conducive to ever having sex. (Unless you’re Bond, the swine.) There have been opportunities, of course, so this courtship isn’t as awkward as it might be, but their window of time is fairly brief.

It’s late for dinner by conventional reckoning, but he’s not too peckish; Q’s obviously been preparing since before his arrival, and the kitchen is reeking of herbs and perfumed steam. There are two place-settings at his table, obviously an arrangement modified from a plan for one; Q most generously offers him his choice of handsome antique or ergonomic desk chair, before gesturing at him to uncork the wine so he can manoeuvre the meat onto plates. When Tanner was a post-grad – and well into his marriage – dinner had meant a great deal of carry-out, or cereal, or microwaved freezer-bag potato wedges and a beer. Colour him thoroughly impressed.

Bill had thought of putting the match on or something of that kind, but Q doesn’t own a television, and all his computers are employed for other more sinister purposes than streaming video. They don’t have a minute to waste, and there’s an odd, rapid, tight quality to their conversation that makes that show particularly strongly. They talk, at length, about what a pain this all was to cook – for Q an expression of annoyance at the difficulty of something he’s clearly already mastered is a not-so-subtle way of bragging, and he glows. They talk about work, and what exactly Bill intends to do in Luxembourg for a week running after Mallory and his crew.

(“If I did your job, it’d be a miracle if I didn’t snap and bludgeon an airline stewardess with my smartphone. Though if you did my job, you’d be fucked, so we’re even.”)

---

“We really oughtn’t be carrying on like this,” Q remarks out of nowhere. “Departments have been shuttered for less.”

Tanner takes a drink of wine. “We haven’t done anything explicitly improper yet, unless you’ve been charging all this as business expenses.”

“Yet being the operative word. I’d rather like to.”

“What, tonight?” Tanner says, in mock surprise and real amusement. He feels like he’s back in school again, sneaking around praying that the condom packets in his pockets won’t audibly crinkle and give him away to mother. Or father now, as the case may be.

“At some point in the future. In the interest of your schedule and its effect on national security, tonight may prove most convenient.”

Of course Q knows his schedule as well as he does, probably better.

Q still handles his knife like he’s in a school canteen and it’s about to be taken away from him, so it’s not all glossy new expense. His knuckly hands are one of the more endearing details about his person. Nice table-settings, nice silverware, all very new and up-to-date and clean, neurotically matching its set-mates. The net effect was like he’d gotten his first paycheque and gone to Ikea and bought all his home furnishings at one go. It’s not all in order, of course, which would be rather creepy, but the right parts are all there. His flat is a nice one, in the right area and for the right price (Q might not know how much it cost, being of a kind with Bond in that expenses only mattered when you were being chewed out.)

“In the event of a crisis, I accept full responsibility for all inter-department friction that may result.”

Crises are what’s brought them together in the first place; it’s all well and good to joke about workplace harassment statutes and so on, but nothing will come between Tanner and his job, and the same at least in theory goes for Q. The thought of something ugly – too much of distracting affection, perhaps, or the other extreme, a bad break-up, a spat – becoming an impediment to national security because they couldn’t be trusted to act like grown men was rather chilling.

 

“Speaking for myself, I don’t intend to make a scene if – well, if this doesn’t work out, no harm done. We’ve handled a great deal worse.” Oh god, we, we, please let that not carry across as a massive presumption; by their separate efforts and combined they’ve kept Britain from falling to pieces day in and day out, through the unimaginable worst of things, and that’s all he means, he’s not sure if he wants to tether himself to a plural pronoun with Q anyway. No one truly works alone in their line of work, that’s absurd, that’s just something men like 007 tell themselves to feel better about being total bastards to their coworkers when they’ve had a difficult day. But Q is… singular.

“There’ll be time to work out the particulars later. We’ll simply have to agree to behave like mature adults in all of this.”

Q’s impish face, behind his glasses, does not exactly exude maturity. But he knows what he’s on about.

“Oh, yes. Sophisticated in the extreme.”

Q checks his phone in his hand. His other hand is on Tanner’s leg under the table; one quick inviting squeeze and he’s leapt up to clear the dishes away.

“Let’s get to business, shall we?”

---

Q takes off his sweater on his way down the hall and brandishes it to fold it before setting it aside on the end-table by the door. In a red tee shirt he looks even more like an overgrown gamin child, arms swinging and dark eyes glinting with laughter.

He catches him by the arms, rubbing at his knobbly elbows.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No, not at all. Are you?”

Q prefers his living space at a temperature a few scant degrees above ‘glacial’; he’s been led to understand it’s an electronics thing. Q leans forward onto the balls of his feet and kisses him, a charming kiss that tastes of thyme and red wine, then makes a face.

“What?”

“Serves me right for trying to cook with herbs. Go on without me, I’ll be right back – it’s torment having senses like these, it’ll bother me all evening.”

Q nips off to brush his teeth, which makes Tanner feel a little beastly and carves another 2 minutes out of their trysting time. Tick tock.

---

His bedroom is a bit more the den of electronic wonders than the rest of the flat; perhaps he likes to keep it all in one place for security’s sake, or at least the feeling of security. The part of Tanner that notices these things – the part of him that gets paid, these are not old reflexes but current skills – is pretty impressed with his household security, and judging from the beautiful obscurity of the equipment he works with (parts of which Tanner recognises readily, like the student laptop he has to transplant over to his desk chair with paternal care, other bits rather more foreign) his electronic security isn’t shabby either. Perhaps he’d stepped it up. It stings a little to think of his last foolish mistake in the heat of the moment during the Skyfall affair. He’d have to adapt and learn from that, or be paralysed by doubt and perish. The sight of it puts him on edge a bit, he’s always expecting some alert klaxon to sound and send them scattering to grab their coats and tear down to MI-6 offices.

He’s peeling his suit jacket off with vigorous enthusiasm and keeps at him with urgency; catching at his mouth with swift kisses one after the other which Tanner trades back in kind. It’s impossible to be in an intimate situation with Q without being at least a little tempted to pull on his hair, but he hates it with a passion and Tanner doesn’t have time to argue even half-jesting. He runs his fingers over those curls instead, rather than snaggingly through, and Q plucks his braces down from his shoulders.

Fast-paced work is made for high stakes. Q’s uncomfortable with the particular requirements of a position like Tanner’s, he is uneasy with being further than a handful of Tube stops away from his workstation and the nest he keeps here; he’s got a network of long twitchy digital fingers in a lot of pies, connections that span every corner of the globe but in the end the support he gives is that of a home-base, something to which one can return. It’s Bill’s job to be where Mallory is, and to go where Mallory wishes him to go; he might wander abroad, and some day he may not come home again or he may come home to police cordons and bits of ash floating on the air that used to be MI-6. Or Q Branch in particular; it’s not a top concern but it’s not unlikely. Q, like many, gets a kick out of doing such exciting work; Bill is satisfied to know he’s doing something important, and could take or leave the excitement. He’s not a very exciting person. Q’s continued interest must indicate some previously unglimpsed reservoir of saintly forbearance.

Q is eager and ready beneath him, and they haven’t long.

---

They drowse like that together for around two hours, by the read-out on Q’s unsightly digital clock and the luminescent screen on Tanner’s mobile phone. He would very much like to lie here forever, with Q’s arm thrown over him and his cold feet resting against his warm calf.

He can’t.

He gets up and pads through the dark to shave and take a shower. He cleans up, uses Q’s soap on his hair (like a perfect philistine, he’s sure) and gets dressed again, still slightly damp, by the jaunty light of the desk-lamp furthest from where the other man lies sleeping.

He’s excruciatingly careful not to wake him – Q sleeps like a perfect wretch, all huddled up under his arms like an exiled schoolboy, all but shivering despite having probably the largest and most comfortable bed Tanner’s been in for a while. (Q isn’t a monk; he takes care of himself well, and all the scornful business about working in his pyjamas isn’t all posturing for dominance, though Tanner’s seldom seen him wearing anything at all to bed. He likes to live well, when he can be persuaded to take the time to live.)  A brain like that can’t run inexhaustibly forever, and the hour is such that if woken he probably wouldn’t bother to go back to sleep, just lurch out of bed to put the kettle on and get a head start on his work-day in the irradiated blue light of his laptop screen. He’s uncommonly good-looking at rest.

 

London before daybreak is a strange scene. A stately lady without her wig on – there’s always other people going about their business as well, it’s never deserted, but it has a peculiar character to it that’s enhanced rather than dampened by sleep deprivation and the lingering fantasy of a warm bed left behind him.

His shoes haven’t even made contact with the pavement outside before his phone is buzzing in its case.

Safe travels. q