TW: Mentions of death, loss, and grief.
Underestimated—the word springs to mind as he reconsiders the weight of books and his mother’s fierce love of them. Q feels foolish, as both an engineer and a son, staring down shelf after shelf of romances and revolutions. Milton, Austen, Dostoevsky; they stare back in judgment of this misstep.
The rest of the house has turned cold and skeletal. The swarm of black-clad mourners and movers have done their quick, digestive work, have finished picking the meat from the bones like an efficient swarm of ants. Cabriole sofas and valances have gone. The absence of rugs leaves the hardwood floors naked, blushing in the sunset. The study remains, overlooked and untouched, its gentle dust swirling in the late summer light like so many thoughts still unspoken and unpenned.
The moving boxes, of which there are never enough, split at the corners as they try, vainly, to hold so much opinion within themselves. Q leans against her desk and sighs.
He should have let the movers have at it. She was neither private nor protective about it. She would never put a locked door between anyone and knowledge. The books are not valuable first editions or collector’s prints; many are dogeared, marked up, her longhand opinions swirling in margins and between lines. The book spines are intact only by the virtue of being so well-bound. So why did it feel important to move it all himself, to carry each weighty box down the narrow staircase, which seems to gain an extra step with each trip back and forth, back and forth?
A low point in his back has grown stiff and stubborn against the work.
The room should feel smaller now that he’s grown, but the dimensions are all wrong somehow; the walls and shelves have expanded, impossibly, either grown larger or himself smaller. Q tosses a grinning Carroll onto the pile, negotiates another hefty box into his arms, rounds the corner—
And runs, nearly, into James Bond, who appears at the top of the staircase of his childhood home.
Q freezes. His brain cannot place the agent, cannot reconcile the two parts of his life that have just collided like tectonic plates. It makes no sense that Bond is here—and yet, for that same reason, it does.
“Bond.” His whirling thoughts finally settle on saying: “You’re supposed to be in Lithuania.”
How foggy he must be to get Bond’s mission parameters mixed up. “Right, yes, Latvia, of course," he grimaces, apologetic, “but this is—this is neither.”
“No, it isn’t,” Bond agrees, reaching for the heavy box in Q’s arms.
“Did something happen, do you need me to come in—?"
“Q,” he’s interrupted, gently, “I need you to hand me this.” And Q, his thoughts miserably delayed, numbly releases the box into James’ arms. The agent ferries the box down the steps. Realization seeps in slowly, like the warmth from a blanket on a cold night.
Over the banister, he asks, “But Bond—how?”
“You've never called out."
Of course Bond would answer in such a way. The other limitless questions: How did you know where I was? How did you find where my mother lived? How did you figure it all out? All of that is merely routine for 007. All he answers is how did you know you were needed?
Q turns to blink rapidly and scrub at his face in the moment of solitude. Underestimated.
Bond may not have many words for grief, but he knows how to be useful, knows how to get things accomplished. They work through the rest of the books and boxes, sometimes in silence, sometimes not. Q does not feel the burden of entertaining, the way he had with so many of his mother’s guests and friends and the rare relative, but occasionally he will talk about her—the little life she made for the two of them here, alone. Her telescope that she loved and the vintage car she maintained herself. The frowning expectations that she defied, as all single mothers must. Her willingness to let him invent, explore, experiment, break. He offers the memories like news paper clippings, tiny pieces of his history cut out from all the rest, and over time, the shelves empty. The last personal sentiments are plucked from the house like wildflowers.
He packs away the last of her memories, work that is now not so difficult with an extra pair of hands and strong heart to help him carry it all.
In the stirring dusk, Q locks the door behind them and sinks down onto the front steps next to Bond. They stare out at the garden together in silence. He is tired, tired in more ways than any of those books crammed into the car have words to describe.
Past and present slide out of order. Q’s thoughts slip through time, back to the first (and only) time he and Bond sat like this, side by side, gazing ahead and trying to make sense of something bigger than themselves.
“The inevitability of time,” he smiles, though it aches at the edges.
But this time, James moves closer. This time, he rests a hand upon Q’s, and their fingers brush upon the cold stone steps. The smallest gesture of care.
Time, it says, is not the only inevitability, and that is not to be underestimated.
HEADCANON: Cutting my teeth on old Disney films exhausted the orphan child trope for me, so I prefer to headcanon that Q grew up as the only child of a single mother who very, very much loved him.
