Corpore Sano

Bond would be in the wrong line of work if he still balked at scars.

The view from behind isn’t bad; Q leans before the mirror, scraping off an overnight growth of prickly beard with a safety razor, his bony hip pressed against the porcelain (and why yes, he is wearing Bond’s own briefs). The mirror showcases what the night before, partially clothed as usual by the end of it, had not. A constellation of marks among the white contour of his left shoulder, proceeding down and up the arm itself in methodical rows and crossings, like a road map.

He stands close behind him and looms, he shapes his body to Q’s narrow back. When Q pokes around at his knotted scars and asks how they’re healing, it’s curiosity. Bond’s eyes are filing a formal inquiry.

“So you’ve noticed,” he says, lightly enough. “I’ve had some bad habits in my youth, as you’ve probably also picked up. Nothing to worry about.”

The edge of Bond’s blunt, broad thumb brushes his shoulder, the juncture of two raw lines.

“Problem child?”

“Eventually I did learn to use my words.” Q turns his head, all disheveled curls. His smile is tight.

His hand drops to Q’s belly. The boy is frightfully thin; he’d have put it down to asthma and bad school lunches before, but the beaded deliberate lines make Bond think, how much of a time bomb is he holding on to? This is where the sort of middling-new cuts are, from a general survey. Quite the legacy of damage, incongruous with his boyish freshness.

“It would seem you haven’t.”

He has simply relocated the target of his frustrations.

Forearms – the backs of his forearms, moreover, cautious about his veins as they stand out, but not too cautious. Schoolboy sweaters. White starched cuffs. Sweatshirts and jackets. Discreet – but not too discreet. Wanting to hide oneself, and at the same time wanting desperately, bleedingly to be seen. Kid stuff, really. Broad, pale patches of scarring, very minor, almost invisible compared to the scattering of neatly raked lines that stand out from shoulder to mid-arm and from elbow to wrist. Very old. Fingernails. Q’s are square and short, appropriately for someone who makes a living with his hands and can’t abide too much interference; at least the others seem orderly, a mathematician’s tally, these can only be the frantic scratchings of a – one would suppose, a child.

Some of them have faint traces of pigment trapped beneath the skin, like an amateur tattoo. Ballpoint pens.

The safety razor has clattered to the floor, discarded, and while both of them notice, neither of them moves to retrieve it.

The newest ones are not nearly so haphazard. They’ve been cleaned and dressed, judging from how they’ve knit up again; deep enough to bleed freely, but not too deep. Arranged not by some geometrical method, but by deliberate avoidance of anything important and fiddly beneath the surface. Knowing Q, he probably pulled up a couple of anatomical diagrams and brainstormed what not to do, letting that dictate his method. There are considerably fewer, much thinner, having been made with a blade, and far brighter. The newest of them are only just turning brown at the edge.

Bond knows for a certified fact that Q is, his own intrusions aside, generally celibate. He lives alone in a carelessly decorated flat (that has also seen some changes for Bond’s intrusive presence, he’ll be damned if he sleeps in the warm spot where a laptop’s been, or drink his coffee out of a droll brightly-colored mug). He has never had a roommate, a housemate, or an intimate friend. He has passed the physical without comment, or what passes for a physical for a job requiring little more strenuous sitting on one’s scrawny arse in an ergonomic desk chair, and the psychological assessment too. Clever boy. Who’s to catch him? Who’s to intervene? It’s not a workplace hazard, but some distant part of Bond is still appalled. The boy is wounded.

Self-destruction is the order of the day, and it’s almost sensible, really, that the self-assured, highly reasoned savant would choose a method that endangered neither his precious brain cells nor his liver. It fits with the man he knows: diligent, haughty, and desperate to hide the scent of his own self-displeasure. The boy that this man must have been (Q trembles a little under his roaming hands, like a woman) and whatever frustrated folly he’d written on his own body. Perhaps they recruit orphans for Q branch too, or more likely, cringing boys with scholarships and glasses and spots. Cringing boys in cardigans who drink Earl Grey and suck off their coworkers if asked in the right tone of voice.

“They’re very ugly, aren’t they? I regret starting, but I never thought anyone’d –”

His voice almost cracks. Something at the heart of him is laid bare, and there’s no other option than action. Bond has done this before. He supposes he will do this again. It’s meaningless, but it does seem to reassure the guilty.

“May I?”

He lowers his head – what an un-self-consciously homely pair they must be – and takes Q’s hand. Thin, knobbly schoolboys’ hands, this one the dominant, obviously – the perpetrator, the unmarked half, the sinner against self. He kisses it on the knuckles, and Q’s eyes flutter closed. Then he unfolds it and kisses each fingertip, lifts Q’s forearm and holds it up to the mirror. Along the outer side of his forearm, shallow marks gone white, old scratches.

Finally he kisses him on the mouth. It’s unwise; he doesn’t flinch, but he tastes of soap and mint and he breathes a pathetic little sigh once Bond’s lips have departed from his own.

“Anything else you’d like to say?” Hurt has crept into Q’s voice like a ghost, a shrinking-away from Bond’s concern, or what he perceives as such.

“I’d prefer, not while I’m around. That’s all.”