Bondlock/Knives Out crossover - minimartian
Hello, sorry for the delay!! Early stages here, happy to continue if anybody’s interested - and thanks minimartian for the prompt! Jen.
Q was in full rant mode, and Bond had no intention whatsoever of stopping him, even if that had been halfway feasible in the first place; Q on a rant was a very intimidating thing, for a man who weighed about as much as a ten-year-old girl and an accent that implicitly mocked most people who passingly believed themselves upper-class.
“... and he’s pathologically incapable of looking after himself, just flies off to the next case the moment it materialises, regardless of the very genuine danger to life and limb and fucking sanity, plus it should have been in MI5’s remit, not his, don’t know what Mycroft thinks he’s playing at getting Sherlock involved…”
“... yeah, Benny just got back from some house in the middle of nowhere after a murder case; must be a detective thing, and I told him I couldn’t have my baby brother getting in the middle fo a case that should have been an MI job, but there you go…”
It was a solid thirty seconds of further ranting before Q abruptly cut himself off mid-sentence, as he registered the content. “Sorry, who?”
Bond blinked. “Who what?”
“What’s a detective thing?”
“Oh, that. Was just saying: Benny - Benoit, sorry, he hates when I call him that - just got off a case of his own.”
The silence stretched out comically for a moment. Q blinked. Bond would have taken a bite of his sandwich, had he not been mildly concerned about the possibility of Q throwing it in a fit of pique.
Bond nodded, uncertain whether Q was being deliberately slow or not. “Well, yes. Nickname, obviously.”
“No, I mean,” Q tried again, his eyes that slightly wild and wide cast they got when he was trying to calm down in the middle of an angry spell. “Who the fuck is Benny?”
“Well yes, I gathered that much,” Q managed, in a rather undignified screech; he cut off again, took a deep breath. “And since when have you had anybody in your life whom you refer you as a ‘baby brother’?! Surely that’s… a touch intimate, wouldn’t you think?!”
Bond was genuinely very unsure if he’d just entered a parallel dimension. Or maybe Q was drunk, high, injured. The possibilities were endless. “Intimate would be weird, for my younger brother,” he said slowly, as Q turned mildly puce. “Q, you do remember me talking about Benoit, don’t you?”
“Is this the face of somebody who has the faintest fucking idea what you’re talking about?!”
Well, it had to be conceded: no, it most certainly was not. Q looked incandescent and mildly nauseous and definitely not showing even the vaguest shadow of comprehension, and they were attracting a fair few stares by now, because of course, all this just had to happen in the middle of a coffee shop a few yards from HQ.
Q ran out of steam quite rapidly; he always did this. Rants were passionate and dangerous things for him, in need of quick expunging before he returned to something resembling human. Now, he went for a Q-favourite: a strangely strangled whimper.
“Explain,” he managed. “Now.”
