First of all, I hope you are okay, it has been a while since you last posted. I have a little prompt. Q was send to a mission without Bond, he was kidnapped and tortured. After he is rescued, Bond has to deal with the aftermath. Thanks so much! Love u and miss u
Thank you, dear anon; my posting is now legendarily irregular, but I’m trying! Hope you enjoy this <3 Jen.
“If you ask me one more time, I will not be held responsible for my actions,” Q told him, eyes fixed somewhere in the distant, outside the window of their car; and it would have worked, had his tone not been horribly, painfully dull.
Bond continued driving for a few moment.
Q had been retrieved after a week and a half. Bond had not been on the extraction team. In fact, the mission was so highly classified he had sod-all in the way of information; Q had been compromised, captured, tortured, retrieved. The mission had been a failure of phenomenal proportions, with the only upside being that Q was not dead.
After two weeks in hospital, he had been released. He had barely spoken in that time.
“You want the details, and I am not prepared to disclose them,” Q told him, and finally there was something sharp, an edge somewhere that allowed Bond to know he was alive and had a sense of anger, emotion, feeling. “You will not pursue vicarious curiosity around it, nor patronise me with discussion regarding trauma and/or repression; I have a therapist for that. In short: you have not earned my pain.”
It was the longest speech Q had uttered in Bond’s hearing for quite a while, and it had a learned quality to it.
Q glanced around, and for the slightest moment, Bond could see fear: Q was brave, yes, but he was not unfallible. He was not trained for this, to laugh and compartmentalise everything.
“I don’t care what happened, except what you choose to tell me, and I don’t expect you to tell me.”
“... what do you need. What can I do. What do you want. How do you want to play this?” Bond repeated, the same types of questions; he was never going to ask inanities like ‘are you okay’ (because it was obvious) or ‘what happened’ (because as Q rightly stated, it wasn’t his to know). “You’ve been tortured. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Not an insult, a fact - you are not trained or accustomed to this. Do you want me to pretend nothing happened? Because I can’t, and you can’t, so let’s not. To make jokes? I always prefer that option, Alec can’t stand it. Look after you, or let you test it out? I prefer the former, but try looking after Miller, she’ll eat you alive for being patronising. There are a lot of choices for how you want this to go, how you want me to behave, and I can’t predict it because that’s yours. All I ask is that you tell me and stop snapping at me for things I haven’t done, and won’t do.”
Q was eerily, painfully silent.
Bond let the moment hold.
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Bond smiled slightly. “Shockingly, I figured that much out for myself,” he told Q, with a gentle murmur of sarcasm; Q’s mouth mimicked the ghost of a smile.
Q’s expression crinkled very faintly, his voice soft on the admission: “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel.”
“That’s alright too,” Bond told him frankly. “The only option off the table is pretending nothing happened. You can’t do it, and you’ll hate that you can’t. I can’t do it, and I can’t pretend otherwise, I can see it. You can feel it. But you have to meet me halfway. I’ll do my best.”
Alarmingly, Q said absolutely nothing, and instead keeled sideways; Bond responded with reflexes born of a lifelong career in espionage, and Q leaned on him with a sigh, avoiding his injuries as best he could.
It took a moment to realise this was it: Q was asking for comfort.
Bond simply stroked through his hair as Q failed to find words.
(and Q quietly realised the thing Bond had been trying to tell him all along: that he always would be there, even if Q tried his best to close himself away. No matter what happened, Bond would be there, stroking his hair, loving him in the weird and fucked-up way James Bond loved people).
