"This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front: this is not a love story."
- (500) Days of Summer

Author's Notes:

Welcome back to my Less Painfully Caged 'verse. If you're wondering where Q got his scars, or why MI6 bugs his flat, I suggest you read "All the Kids Have Always Known." If you're wondering about this mysterious "Holly" who Q treats as his second brain/best mate/surrogate mum, I suggest you read "Timshel."

I hope you enjoy the ride.

I awake to see that no one is free
We're all fugitives, look at the way we live
Down here I cannot sleep from fear, no
I said which way do I turn
Oh, I forget everything I've learned

And the spies came out of the water
But you're feeling so bad 'cause you know
But the spies hide out in every corner
But you can't touch them, no
'Cause they're all spies
They're all spies

- Coldplay, "Spies"

1. I've Just Seen a Face

It happened so gradually, so insidiously, that for some time Bond was unaware that anything was amiss.

The first hint was an air of distraction buzzing like gnats through the upper echelons of Q-branch. Moneypenny said that M had tried to send Q on ten days' leave after his abduction and torture at the hands of Colin Burns, but the Quartermaster stayed away for only three days, which was as long as they could reasonably imprison him in Medical. Bond suspected that Holly Mason had intervened; she was meddlesome enough, and firm enough in her convictions, and she understood that what M saw as mercy Q would interpret as punishment. But a man didn't come back from that unscarred (and he had seen them, had cleaned the wounds that would serve as a reminder and watched Q's eyes bleed betrayal), and at first Bond thought that the distractions all originated in Q, that the others were watching him, just in case.

"…Something you need, 007?"

Q's eyes seemed drawn to his computer screen like electrons to a charged atom; he could only pull them away for a few seconds at a time.

"I'll be on a plane to Libya in two hours. I assume you have something to give me?"

"Oh. Yes." Q slid open a drawer with the hand not steering his mouse. "Your Walther – your fourth Walther, actually, do try to bring it back intact this time – radio, communicator, sunglasses with camera." A dialog box popped up on a wall-mounted monitor, and Q typed without looking. "I assume you've already seen Raj for your documentation?"

He hadn't, actually; it was easy to forget that such things were required when one never had to expend any effort to obtain them. Bond took his toybox from the drawer but made no motion to leave. "Pressing project?"

"Mmm. Very." Q's face had tightened into a pressed-lip, tensed-eyelid frown. "Fixing a fault in the machine. We wouldn't want another Silva, would we?"

That should have been a warning: Q never talked about Silva, and it was the things Q never talked about that mattered the most.

The second hint dropped when the mission in Libya went to hell on day five and it wasn't Q who said, "Good evening, 007" over the comm link.

Bond cocked his head. "Holly?"

"Speaking. Lovely to hear from you again, Mr. Bond."

"Likewise. Where's Q?"

"You picked a bad time to blow your cover – he's tied up at the moment." A sharp pause, then: "Considering the last time I was the voice in your ear was when you were rescuing him from kidnappers, I want to make it clear that I didn't mean that literally."

Bond would have chuckled if he had the breath; he had just avoided a sniper and two on-foot pursuers by ducking into a textile shop, forcing his way to the second floor, and making a series of astronaut-like leaps along the rooftops of the adjacent buildings, before using a brittle and folding fire escape to set himself down a kilometer away from anyone who might want to kill him – he hoped.

"At any rate," Holly was saying, "I'm more than qualified to offer the same level of tech support, guidance, and sarcasm that he would provide."

She couldn't see his smile, but he knew it spread to his voice. "I trust you."

He could hear her smiling too. "That's good to know – now, let's get started."

They managed to clean up Libya with only three or four skulls and gadgets broken, and Bond rewarded himself with a week on a Mediterranean island in the company of a woman who never expected him to do anything but leave, who in fact wanted it, because her distasteful husband had been among Bond's prey and his assets now belonged to her alone.

Confirmation finally came when Bond delivered his Libya report to M's desk and received only a fraction of the expected satisfaction.

"Welcome back, Mr. Bond." The greeting was sincere, but Mallory was drowning too deep in some urgency to derive pleasure from anything except a solution. "Clean work over there, though I wish you hadn't shot the ambassador's husband – the CIA is mortified."

"He was pointing a gun at his own wife," Bond explained with a tiny shrug, "and she's a much better asset that he is."

"I'm sure." M cocked a wry eyebrow, and Bond almost smiled. Then the moment evaporated; Mallory flipped distractedly through Bond's report and tossed the folder aside. His face had acquired deeper lines in the past two weeks.

"Before I send you off on another mission," he said, leaning forward on his elbows and lacing his fingers on the desk, "I need you to report to Robison for a debriefing on the Colin Burns incident."

Bond frowned. "I've already been debriefed, sir, and I filed an official report. And I was under the impression –" He searched Mallory's face. "– that Burns's trial has already concluded, that he was found guilty on all counts, and that there was nothing more left to be said."

"In most ways you are correct," M conceded, though he didn't sound pleased. "However, there is still a serious unanswered question about the matter – namely, how the kidnapper, Mr. Rafferty, knew when and where the Quartermaster would be out in the field. Under questioning he has admitted that he and his little gang of counterfeiters received a tip from an anonymous source that their drop would be tailed by a team from MI6. This source leaked him pictures of everyone involved –"

"– And he recognized Q as the person that Burns was looking for," Bond supplied.

"Yes. Mr. Burns had been circulating an old picture of Q in some of the… darker corners of the internet, with a reward for anyone who could put the two of them in contact. Rafferty decided to abandon his companions and collect a reward that he wouldn't have to split three ways. His source had not provided him with the names or ranks of anyone on his tail, so he had no idea that he had just kidnapped someone MI6 might tear apart London to find."

Some would find the reassurance of rescue encouraging, Bond thought, but beneath M's glowering brow there was no comfort or warmth, only a steely pragmatism. Taking a man might be permitted; taking a valuable resource, property of the Commonwealth, would not.

"Rafferty claims not to be able to identify his anonymous source. Apparently the source was never in contact with him directly, only his employer." Mallory slid an eight-by-ten headshot across the desk to Bond. The man depicted had a round face and high cheekbones, dark hair slicked back from a broad forehead, handsomeness marred by a cocksure grin. "Douglas Zims. Worldwide counterfeiter of currency and pharmaceuticals. He's been known to us for nearly a decade, but he's a hard man to pin down – he has multiple safehouses on four different continents. And he was born in China to a Chinese mother, which means he's a national, so we'll never get extradition if he chooses to hide out there."

"And he's got a mole in MI6," Bond muttered. "Bet he feels like the world's at his feet."

M gave him a grim smile, the kind that wasn't a smile but a reflex. "The mole doesn't belong to Zims alone. He's quite mercenary. Since the first of the year eleven of our agents in seven different countries have been compromised in the field. Fortunately none of our people have been killed, but we've lost important contacts and I doubt our luck will hold much longer. We need to pursue any possible lead." He dropped his voice, for Bond's ears only: "That's why I need you to go over, again, all the details of the Colin Burns incident. Anything could be helpful – anything Burns or Rafferty said, anything you saw in the Quartermaster's flat –"

There it was, the key to the code, the truth about who they were really spying on, and why: "He's a suspect."

M did not have to clarify the pronoun. "Q-Branch provides the software that secures MI6's databases. Everyone in his department is a suspect, Mr. Bond." His eyes left Bond for the barest instant, shot to the closed door and bounced back. "And you must admit history is not on his side."

But Mallory had not been there to witness the shutter snap of Q's emotions, the way he could never quite hide behind blinks and barbed words and glare. The kid had control, but he was no actor. "You saw what they did to him."

That made M's mask slip, and Bond could tell that his next sentence was much more tired and much less stern than he meant it to be. "I am considering every scenario, no matter how unlikely." Then he smiled, wire-thin, a misjudged attempt to break the tension. "For some impenetrable reason, he seems to like you. So I also want you to keep an eye on Q-Branch. I'd like someone with an outside perspective to report back to me on the general tone of operations. Right now Q-Branch is potentially our greatest enemy and our greatest ally. I'll sleep better if someone of your experience can judge which is which."

Bond nodded, because that was the only acceptable response, then thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned to leave without permission, because that was the only way to express his displeasure. Mallory's voice followed him to the door.

"It's possible your exposure in Libya was also orchestrated by the mole. If you were a lesser agent we would almost certainly have lost you. Keep that in mind."

Bond had been playing this game long enough to know the answer right away.

"Good thing I'm not a lesser agent."

It happened so gradually, so gently, that for some time Q was unaware it was even happening at all.

Despite his best intentions he had developed a routine: Charing Corner Coffee right at the six a.m. opening, Dirty Chai and two servings of tea biscuits, usually a corner table, or by a window if he could get it. For years he had walked past the shop every day on his way to the Tube and never gone inside. Then the Skyfall incident earned him six weeks with nothing to do but not sleep and not call Holly Mason and stare at the crawling figures in the cracking paint of his flat, until he realized that London did not sleep either and he should not waste or ignore this most beautiful cage. Among its public he felt comfortably anonymous; few people asked questions or demanded explanations, and if any strangers came to recognize him, politeness usually held them back from acknowledgement.

When he returned to active duty he thought occasionally about giving up the morning coffee, because routines were anathema to evolution. But the atmosphere put him in a particular contemplative mood that seemed to serve his work, and it was an interesting exercise in probability and prediction to observe the same set of people in the same shop at the same time every day. They were like the cast of a telly programme, charming in their familiarity: The impatient businessman, who tapped his foot every time he had to stand still and wielded his mobile like an extension of his arm. The schoolteacher, handbag the size of a holdall and clay earrings that matched the season (apples for autumn, snowflakes for winter). The old man, maybe a retired professor, ensconced in the window with wire-rimmed spectacles and the Evening Standard. The mother and son, three days a week, latte for mum and a blueberry scone for the boy (Q worried, a little, when they did not show up). The King's College London girls, always in ponytails (one red, one blond), who carried IDs from St. Thomas's and leaned their heads together over books with color photos of vivisected lungs and livers and hearts.

Q had a minor interest in the King's College London girls, because they were intelligent and animated and close to his own age and very, very attractive. The blonde read Sartre and Hannah Arendt. The redhead had a habit of slipping her shoes off under the table and curling her feet beneath her on the bench, and she wore her keys on a long silver chain around her neck beside a plastic model of the TARDIS. Occasionally Q caught them looking at him, and when their eyes met the girls would turn away and giggle behind their hands. Q didn't date, and he certainly wasn't sixteen anymore, to hang his self-worth on the attentions of attractive people, but he did enjoy having his ego stroked sometimes.

Then he ran late one morning in February and joined the queue right behind the pair of them, swiping his thumbs across his glasses like windshield wipers to clean off the steam. The blonde had on a white knit hat with a rainbow pompom, while the redhead had wrapped herself in a monstrous scarf in clashing colors. It took Q an embarrassingly long time to figure out where he had seen that scarf before.

When the blonde moved away to claim a table and the redhead stepped up to the counter, Q leaned close to her ear and said, "Nice Tom Baker scarf." She didn't wear perfume, but her hair smelled of citrus and he had to check a sudden impulse to inhale deeply.

He had startled her, but she smiled. "He's my favorite Doctor. Not my first, but my favorite."

"You're a little young for Tom Baker, aren't you?" Classic Q-Branch – the older members fixated on age as a subject for teasing, and Q had started to adopt the same attitude around the interns. It was hazing and he should feel ashamed – should.

But the redhead wasn't one of his interns. For a moment he froze, afraid she'd feel patronized, but instead she nudged him playfully with her elbow. "Look who's talking."

They smiled at each other and went to their separate tables and by nine a.m. Q was up to his ears in a particularly vexing agent extraction and had forgotten, mostly, about the redheaded girl from St. Thomas's with the citrus shampoo and the Tom Baker scarf, and that should have been the end.

Except that it wasn't. Two days later she winked at him from her place in line when he turned around with his Dirty Chai, and he devoted a disproportionate amount of brainpower to wondering why she had done that and if she had really spared any thought for his compliment or his teasing. The following week he spotted her a fiver when he saw her fidgeting at the counter as she picked through her purse, and the day after that he came in to find his drink already paid for and a presumptuous grin on the cashier's face.

A week or so later she leaned over his shoulder while he was tinkering with a low-security Q-Branch prototype and asked, "Are you an architect?"

Q could see how she would think so; the files open on his tablet were floorplans. "No, I'm a computer programmer."

"So what are those for, then?"

"I'm writing a 3-D visualizer that builds files and then opens them for modification. Sort of like Minecraft except with more accurate physics."

She was still absorbed in his screen. "Who made those plans?"

Q quirked an eyebrow. "Here I thought you were interested in me and my work."

She rolled her eyes, but the corners of her lips twitched tellingly. "I can't talk about computers. But my brother's an architect, so I know a few cocktail-party facts about drafting."

"Well, drafting's not my specialty, but I do have a good architect among my colleagues."

"Where?"

"Hmm?"

"Where do you work?"

Enough cashiers and customer service reps and fellow bus passengers had asked this over the years that Q no longer felt any anxiety about his stock answer. "For a small software developer. We mostly do data security, but we're allowed pet projects. Some of them turn out to be quite valuable."

Normally he would have enjoyed the way her whole face became focused with interest, but he had never tested his story against a sharp person's scrutiny, and somehow he did not want to be reticent or rude.

The blonde saved him. "Stop flirting and come sit." She handed the redhead her drink and put a hand at her elbow as if to steer her away. "We've got case notes to go over."

"For St. Thomas's," Q said before he could stop himself. It wasn't a question, which confirmed exactly how much illicit attention he had been paying over the past couple of months.

She caught the implication; a sly smile slid across her face. "Full marks. What's my position at St. Thomas's, though?"

Q inclined his head and considered her over the frames of his glasses. "You went to King's College London, which means you test well, you're ambitious, and you take medicine or social status or both very seriously. But you haven't been out of medical school long, so you're not a doctor, not yet. I'd say you're doing your foundation."

As she listened, emotions kaleidoscoped across her face almost faster than he could read them: pride, surprise, indignation, amusement, always with that undercurrent of interest, interest in him, inexplicable and tantalizing. When he finished she was still smiling. "Top of the class."

The blonde dragged her away, giggling with mortification. "God, you're terrible –"

Q couldn't whistle and he never sang, but when contentment crept up sometimes music would come with it, sentimental songs from his childhood that flowed through his mind and the rhythm of his fingers and asserted themselves in a hum. As the streets of London bloomed with spring he found himself humming much more often than he would have thought after Skyfall. The redhead kept smiling and waving and peeking at his screens and once when he ducked out to the loo he came back to find the TARDIS sketched in blue ink on his napkin, captioned Guess who?

Then April stormed in and Colin Burns gave him three weeks when he couldn't look in the mirror, couldn't set foot in the Tube or a pub or the coffee place because he didn't have a good excuse for the stitches in his lip and the marks of a chain at his throat. MI6 only designed excuses for the people who attracted attention.

When he did venture back, feet carrying him without conscious consent, the shop had so changed that he felt unexpectedly betrayed and a little bit frightened, as if all familiar places might have altered during his withdrawal from the world. The regulars had been displaced by a crowd of flushed middle-aged women in neon vests and bare-legged athletes with numbers plastered on their chests. Q recalled an ignored headline, an advertisement on the side of a bus – some sort of charity race starting at Hyde Park. The queue ran along the walls right up to the door, and he would have turned around and walked out if Tanner hadn't dropped a report into his inbox at exactly that moment. The crowd could be tolerated if he had the barrier of work.

He shuffled through the line automatically and it spat him out right as a couple vacated a table in the front window. Apparently the shop was attempting to appease him with offerings of prime real estate. Q accepted this karmic apology and sat for a few minutes with the report and the tea biscuits and an odd idea in the back of his mind of how normal he must look in his necktie and dress trousers, only the palest line of a scar on his lip.

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

It was the redhead, alone, some cinnamon-smelling drink in her hands, eyes darting between him and the valuable empty chair across the table.

He should tell her that yes, he minded, or, more politely, that he preferred to be alone, or, even better, that he was saving the seat for someone else.

"No, course not."

She sloughed her bag onto the floor, settled sideways in the chair with her back against the windowsill, and crossed one leg over the other, cup cradled in her hands like a baby bird. They deliberately did not look at each other, Q crunching through the report at about three-quarters his normal processing power and the redhead drinking in the crowd and her coffee as though she savored both. Q could see her foot bouncing out of the corner of his eye and wondered what was making her nervous.

"I haven't seen you round here in a while."

He met her eyes over the rim of her cup and lied. "I just got back from holiday."

"Oh, where did you go?" Her face glimmered with a sly amusement that Q associated with camaraderie, the gentle teasing normally born of years of friendship. "Clearly not Brighton, you didn't tan."

"Swansea, actually. It rained."

"Does it ever not rain in Swansea?"

Q flicked his eyes to the ceiling in exaggerated thought and said solemnly, "I think I saw the sun for ten minutes on Wednesday."

She matched him with a nod of mock approval. "So not a complete wash." Then she winced. "Sorry, that pun was unintentional."

Q glanced back at his mobile and discovered that he had lost interest in its contents. "I'm surprised you're not with your friend."

She sighed and drew away, and he cast about for another topic – but then she turned her body to face him as though she had reached an important decision. "We've had a… a bit of a quarrel." Her fingers wrung the cardboard sleeve on her coffee cup, but she flipped her hair back over her shoulder and looked at him with an odd defiance, I'm-fine-really. "She thinks it's ridiculous that I don't approve of her new boyfriend, even though he's thirty-eight and married and definitely cares more about her tits than her intelligence."

"In ascending order of importance," Q muttered, and that must have been the right thing to say, because she lit up with glee. Despite – or because of – his intelligence, Q rarely pleased people so sincerely, and he allowed himself a flash of smugness.

"Yes. We've gone back and forth on this so many times, and she always accuses me of bringing my own baggage into it because I dated an older man a few years ago, and I keep telling her that I would be saying the same thing no matter my own life occurrences, and –" She caught his eye and faltered. "– and clearly it's affecting me to the point where I tell the whole story to strangers in coffee shops."

Q smiled encouragingly, and that made two things he rarely did, in under a minute. He could not picture what the expression must look like on his face. "We're not really strangers, I don't think."

"City of eight million people and you see the same ones every day." Anyone at Six would make that thought disparaging, but in her voice it had hope, a quiet marvel at whatever gravity drew people into each other's orbits, and a hint of melancholy that he couldn't quite trace.

"My name's Audrey. Audrey Kingsolver." She offered her hand across the table. "Like Audrey Hepburn. My Fair Lady is my mother's favorite film."

"Robert Shaw." It felt strange to shake the hand of someone he didn't need to know for work; Q had a vague notion that hand-shaking was for the old, not the young and flirtatious. "I don't think I'm named after anyone, though apparently there was an actor in the sixties named Robert Shaw."

"Was he talented?"

"I don't know. I've never seen any of his films."

Silence, growing thicker and harder to break with each second they allowed it to continue. Q scrolled idly down the report still called up on his mobile and tried to remember what civilians talked about in their spare time – he had never been good at this, but once upon a time he had done it quite often, and it was ridiculous that he couldn't summon a guiding memory of a time when it had gone right –

"Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime?"

He looked up sharply. She was watching him with her chin resting on her hand and the end of a stir stick between her lips like a cigarette. The surrounding rumble of dishes and conversation and cars surged as if someone had turned up the volume, made the muteness of their table seem stark by comparison.

"If you don't want to," she said slowly, as though he were a wild animal she was trying not to scare away, "you can say no."

"It's not that I'm not flattered –"

At that she leaned away and glanced over her shoulder like an agent assessing the exit routes, and Q bit back a familiar frustration. Over the years he had learned to reconcile with most restrictions, even wrangle them to his favor (he would never have to worry about his personal expenses, never have to fly to drooping climates in the company of disagreeable agents) – but sometimes he had run up against the rules without trying, discovered consequences that he could never be assured were unintentional. Never have anyone over to your flat, unless you want them known to MI6. Never forget that you are not who you say you are. Never put yourself in a situation that invites curiosity, or intimacy, or honesty.

Under the table he flexed his left wrist, felt phantom fingers close around it and restrain.

"I'm sorry." It was the most sincere thing he had said.

Audrey smiled without her eyes. "It's all right. Thank you for being honest." She stood up and gathered her bag. "Good to talk to you." And then she was gone.

Q automatically reached for his Chai and had brought the cup to his lips before he realized it was empty. The vacant chair faced him accusingly. Under the table he braced his foot against it, to shove it back or kick it over, displace his tethered anger onto a target that couldn't retaliate.

Inexplicably he thought of Bond, suntanned and sated, sauntering down the corridor to Mallory's office – Mallory who had daughters and a wife who stood on his arm for state events, who could soften even his stern visage into a smile. She had seen them, surely, the scars from his three months with the IRA (scars, a faithless thought reminded him, that he had earned serving his country, not as a years-late consequence of betraying it); she must comfort him, as Holly's husband did her when she told him in truncation about the trials of their office. And Q wasn't looking for a lifetime, for any sort of promise, just a sharp wit to parry his own over coffee and hot nights and sex, someone who could learn him outside of the labels he had assumed and calculate their own appraisal.

He had left the shop and was walking in the wrong direction, towards Charing Cross instead of Embankment, because she always turned right out of the shop door and walked past the window and that was the way to Charing Cross –

Surely this couldn't be part of his sentence, because he had been alone a long time before MI6 had come for him, and he was so tired, tired of the jokes and assumptions about inexperience, tired of looking but never touching as though other people were animals in a zoo.

He just barely made the right train, using his skinny shoulders and bony elbows to full advantage – the Tube was the one place that made him grateful for his lankiness. It took a search of two full cars before he found her, cross-legged in a seat with her mobile in her lap, ignoring the people around her like any good Londoner. Q had to clear his throat twice to get her attention, and even the shock, not entirely pleasant, that flew into her face couldn't deter him, because they had only minutes before Lambeth North and this whole exercise would be extremely embarrassing if he couldn't manage to say what he wanted.

"You thanked me for being honest, but I wasn't." She was staring at him like she doubted his sanity. Q suddenly wished that he had spent less time justifying this to himself and more time planning his phrasing. "The truth is that I had several good reasons to say no, the most important being that I have a demanding job with inflexible hours and I haven't done this in a long time because of said job and I'm somewhat nervous, but I actually would very much like to take you to dinner and I have a meeting on Thursday at seven that I can cancel if you are free."

A pause. Audrey looked up and down the length of the car as though she found something about their surroundings spectacular. "Did you… follow me onto the Tube just to tell me that?"

"Is that flattering or inappropriate?" Q asked, because he genuinely didn't know.

That reply hadn't been on her register, and she rewarded him with a long, evaluating look. Finally she said, with a curious smile, "I haven't decided yet. It depends on the character of the man."

"Well, I think you need more data before you can arrive at a valid conclusion."

"Appealing to me as a woman of science." The smile widened. "Give me your mobile."

Impossible, because although Q was confident in his locking of each individual app, one blunder could wipe several months' worth of state secrets. Audrey saw his hesitation and gave an impatient huff, belied somewhat by the amusement in her eyes.

"Give me your hand, then."

In the jostling crush Q didn't dare let go of the hanging strap with both hands, so he tugged off his right glove with his teeth – Audrey's eyebrows went up speculatively – and proffered bare skin. As she wrote she steadied his hand in hers against the rocking of the train, and the hairs stood on Q's nape as he felt, instead of saw, the way she formed her numbers.

They slid into Lambeth North. Audrey snapped the pen cap and said, "Text me first," and swung easily off the train.

Q got off at Elephant & Castle and took a cab to Vauxhall and tried, for his own productivity, not to think of the twin secrets beneath his gloves, one that would wash off and one that would stay.

Thursday, at seven – actually seven-thirty, because it was impossible to extricate oneself from the Branch on time – Q followed Audrey's suggested address to a Chinese restaurant in Leicester Square and only realized after his arrival that maybe he should have spared some thought for his appearance. His reflection in the glass door glared at the gunpowder smudge on his sleeve and the hair that refused to curl calmly behind his ears.

Audrey had selected a table against the far wall, somewhat removed from the other diners, near enough to the kitchen that they could watch the waiters swirl in and out like dancers exiting a stage. She looked tired around the eyes, but when Q approached and pulled out a chair she greeted him with a sincere smile.

"Sorry I'm late. My work conspires against my punctuality, especially on days when other people are involved in my plans." Not that there were many of those days.

She waved aside his apology. "Oh, I know that feeling. Medical emergencies wait for no man. I only just got here ten minutes ago."

Q ran his eyes down the Chinese characters on the side of the menu and considered how much he wanted to show off. "What are you having?"

"Fried dumplings, maybe. You?"

He favored her with a tiny smirk. "You'll find out."

"What does that mean?"

She looked at him like she had done on the Tube, dubious but anticipatory, and Q feared that the longer he kept her in suspense the wilder her speculations would become, until they grew audacious enough to touch on the truth.

But then the waiter appeared and gave Q the satisfaction of both of their faces when he placed his order, the waiter's grin at this unexpected kinship and Audrey's widening eyes at the unfamiliar syllables he could summon to his bidding.

"You speak Chinese."

"Standard Mandarin," Q corrected, and then, because he didn't quite deserve her level of astonishment: "Not perfectly, the waiter had to ask me to repeat myself."

"Where did you learn a thing like that?"

"At uni. I had a lecturer who recommended it. There's quite a lot of creative computer engineering going on in China." And a great deal of expert, government-sanctioned hacking that he had known he could emulate if he only understood the theories tossed around on message boards.

She was still gaping. "Can you write it? The traditional characters?"

The napkins were fancy cloth things that pen wouldn't wash out of. "Have you got any paper?"

Audrey dug around in her handbag and produced a sheet folded into fourths. When she handed it to him her hand wavered, as if she had thought of something that almost made her withdraw.

Caving to curiosity had gotten Q in trouble more times than he could count, but that little slip had ignited inquisitiveness like fireworks, and he couldn't resist bending back a corner of the paper to see what was on the inside.

"What is this?" It appeared to be a hastily typed set of questions.

Her hands fidgeted, from embarrassment or maybe excitement, but her face gave away nothing. "My first flatmate had this list of questions that she would bring on first dates. It was called 'The Dirty Dozen.' I'm sure you can guess what it was about."

Q knew she was probably putting him on, but he wasn't sure enough to stop his eyes from flicking once down the list, checking for certain choice words.

Audrey's mouth twitched in self-satisfaction. "That's not The Dirty Dozen, but it is… protection, in a way. It's my last resort, in case we didn't have anything to talk about."

"Bit of a gimmick, isn't it?"

She tossed her head and stared out at the room without seeing. It took several seconds for her eyes to come back. "First dates are always a gimmick. You go on a socially sanctioned outing – dinner, movie, picnic in the park – nothing too expensive so you don't feel like you wasted your money if it doesn't work out. You talk in circles around the questions you want to ask, like what are your politics, how important is religion in your life, and how many sexual partners have you had, because if your date is a fascist or a fanatic or a nymphomaniac that's really all the information you need."

The arrival of their food interrupted her. Q watched her poise the chopsticks expertly between her fingers and elected to use a fork.

"Labour, irrelevant, and four."

Audrey looked up with one cheek full of dumpling. "Hmm?"

"The answers to your questions. Labour, irrelevant, and four."

And a grin broke across her face like the sunrise, slow but certain and dazzling. "Labour, used to be but not so much anymore, and five. I'm surprised my number is higher than yours, which just goes to show that intelligence doesn't exempt one from stereotyping." She leaned forward, close enough that the breath he drew came tinged with citrus, and plucked the list from his hand with her chopsticks. "Well, now that we've got the difficult questions out of the way…"

They chose topics by making a highly unscientific number wheel on the back of the list and spinning one of Q's unused chopsticks until it landed on an uncalled digit. Most of the questions were innocuous enough for Q to answer honestly.

("What's your favorite book?"

"Dracula."

"Really?"

"Yes. Is that surprising?"

"You're a British computer programmer who speaks Mandarin and likes Dracula."

"I've also seen every episode of Star Trek and played an obscene amount of Counter-Strike, in case you were afraid I'd shatter the stereotype."

"Oh, no, shatter away.")

But it didn't take long for them to stumble on simple things he could not say.

"What's your favorite place in London?"

Q pictured his offices at Vauxhall, three whole floors of wall-mounted monitors and wireless signals pinging from mind to mind like telepathy, cars and servers in the basement, coffee and chemicals and Holly at his right hand collating data with a pen behind her ear. "The National Gallery."

"I've been there once, a long time ago. I've been thinking recently about going again." A pause, as if that were his cue from a script he had never read; for a minute he floundered, but then she swallowed and continued, unruffled by his silence. "Mine's Battersea. The power station. For years I didn't know what it was – I'd only ever been past it from a distance, but then when I was in secondary school a friend took me there one night and we snuck in with lanterns and helmets and went free soloing."

"Doesn't that mean climbing without –"

"Without ropes or safety harnesses, yes." He must have looked sufficiently impressed, because a dash of pride curled her smile. "Usually I free climb, which means you don't use aids for the ascent but you're attached to a rope in case you fall. But I've soloed up Battersea a couple of times. When you come out on the top, in the dark, with the city on all sides… it's like the whole world has inverted while you were lost in focus, and you're looking down at stars and galaxies and realizing that every point of light is another person, that all around you is this incredible creation that you're only one speck of. It takes you outside of yourself."

She was looking at him as though she had never confided this in anyone, and although he knew that couldn't be true, the thought was seductive enough to magnetize his focus, draw his body closer to the edge of the chair until their knees were touching under the table. She delivered all her answers like that, with a sincerity that would be dangerous at Six, but she didn't seem vulnerable for it – in fact the opposite, as though she could stand before the Queen and tell Her Majesty these same stories with grace. Her candor woke in him a compulsion to return the same.

"What's the worst date you've ever been on? If it's this one, don't tell me, please, because I've got nowhere to go for the next half-hour."

It was honesty, and not MI6, that made him say, "I don't think I can answer that question."

"Why?"

"It involved controlled substances – which I haven't touched since I left uni," he added hastily at her expression, "– and there was a lot of shouting. And I vomited all over the loo of an awful cheap pub. The next day my girlfriend left me."

Audrey pulled a face that was somehow comical and compassionate at once. "Ooooh. I was fishing for funny, not traumatizing. I'm sorry."

Then she scrutinized him in a way that made his shoulders tense, teeth worrying her lip and eyes narrowing as though she were deciding which way to tip the scales. Q stared back impassively; after a moment she softened, went back to her food and her answer.

"Mine was with a guy named Tommy who took me to see Failure to Launch, and then we had dinner with his older brother, who was a stockbroker, and the brother's wife, who was this pretty timid thing dressed like a Stepford wife – pearl necklace, even. The men spent the entire time talking about some golf club their dad belonged to that I had never visited and knew nothing about, and when I tried to ask Stepford where she went to uni, she said, 'Oh, Imperial College London, but I left when I met David, and David's just invested in some property out by Heathrow, and David's buying me a dog but he wants it to have a pedigree, we can't just have any old stray, you know, and doesn't David have a fantastic arse, except I wouldn't know because we only ever do it with the lights off.' Then when we left I asked Tommy what he thought of Stepford, and he went on and on about how she was so lovely and he hoped he and his someday wife could have a life just like David and Stepford's."

"Maybe we dated the same Tommy," Q said without filtering, and then mentally berated himself, because this was not Q-Branch where almost everyone accepted that sexuality had no bearing on a person's usefulness to the Crown.

Audrey said nothing, but she cocked her head with a little line between her eyebrows that could mean sincere interest or unpleasant surprise.

Nothing to do but plunge ahead. "The Tommy I knew was gay, but still very invested in the nuclear family ideal. And I was definitely the wife."

Audrey snorted. "Did he know you? I mean, even I barely know you, yet, but the look on your face speaks volumes."

"Evidently not. We were nineteen and living on our own for the first time; it wasn't a relationship based on conversation." She had said yet. "Thank you, by the way, for taking that revelation in stride."

She did the kindest thing she could have done, which was wink and return to her own story. "The sad part was that I really liked my Tommy at the time. When we split up I actually moped – ice-cream-in-my-pajamas moped. Meanwhile I think my friends had a party to celebrate him leaving."

A solution of sadness and irritation and old hurt welled in Q, because he would never understand this human weakness of wasting love on the undeserving, and because none of the people he had called friends had ever cared enough to venture opinions on his relationships. "We're well shot of the Tommys of the world, I think," he said, and she smiled back at him in sympathy.

They had almost reached the last of the questions. Audrey flipped the list over without spinning the chopstick and glanced from end to end. "What sex act have you been told you're the most talented at?"

She said it so blandly that Q almost thought he had misheard her. "It doesn't say that."

Audrey raised her eyebrows, expectantly.

Q had no problem talking about sex in the abstract, but – "I looked at that list, it doesn't say that –"

Her hand flew up too late to cover her smirk. "I had you for a second though, didn't I?" She leaned so close that Q could see little shining flecks, like mica, in the green of her eyes. "Did you really think I would tell you that on our first date? A lady must preserve some of her secrets."

Oh, there were so many things he wanted to know, wanted to know if she liked Indian food and what she looked like while she was concentrating on a patient's problems and which posters she mounted on the walls of her bedroom, wanted to know how quickly he could wipe that wicked grin off her face with his mouth at her ear and his hand down her trousers. Questions and choices and desires chased themselves around his brain and he heard himself asking, "Did it work?"

"Did what?"

"The Dirty Dozen. Did it work? For your flatmate?"

Audrey looked him dead in the eyes. "She didn't have a single serious relationship in the time I knew her, but she did have lots of sex."

And Q felt a tug deep in his chest like a fish on a line.

A sudden siren made him grip the edges of the table – not here, not now – but Audrey twisted round, unconcerned, to pull her mobile from her handbag. "My alarm," she explained. "You've officially kept me out too late. I've got an early shift tomorrow." She slapped a handful of bills on the table before Q could work his wallet out of his trousers.

"I can pay –"

"Don't be ridiculous. I asked you."

Reaching into his pockets he had found a pen. "I'll at least leave my compliments for the wait staff."

She came around the table to watch him write the flowing characters that so fascinated her even though she couldn't read them – yet, Q thought, because he had no doubt that she could and would learn them if her curiosity grew too great. When he stood up and slid out from behind the table, she took a step in, so close that their knuckles knocked together, and Q started to apologize – but never finished, because she seized him by the knot of his tie and swallowed the words with a kiss.

It wasn't a dirty kiss, but it was lingering, and just before she pulled away she swiped her tongue across his bottom lip so he felt her saliva cooling and glistening like wet paint, like a mark of territory, big plans coming soon.

"We should do this again sometime," she said, with a polite-company smile and eyes that promised more. "Next week?"

In his flat Q dropped his bag on the floor and flopped back against the locked door, said "Oh, fuck" into the silence and wondered who was listening on the other end.

I have never known the like of this
I've been alone and I have missed
Things and kept out of sight
But other girls were never quite like this

- The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"

Author's Notes:

Q leaned close to her ear and said, "Nice Tom Baker scarf."

Tom Baker was the fourth actor to portray the Doctor, from 1974 to 1981 (before Q and Audrey were born). His version of the Doctor is still popular today, and that massive scarf is instantly recognizable to Doctor Who fans.

"You went to King's College London, which means you test well, you're ambitious, and you take medicine or social status or both very seriously. But you haven't been out of medical school long, so you're not a doctor, not yet. I'd say you're doing your foundation."

King's College London School of Medicine is one of the most competitive medical schools in the U.K. Unlike the U.S., where students complete a more general undergrad degree before applying to medical school, British students can begin their medical education right out of secondary school. After (usually) five years of study, they receive a degree and apply for a position as a foundation doctor (sort of like a medical residency in the U.S.). Foundation doctors are not fully licensed and are not permitted to practice medicine without the supervision of another practitioner. (I'm not British and I don't have a Brit-picker, so please feel free to correct anything that doesn't match your experience or expertise.)

"I don't think I'm named after anyone, though apparently there was an actor in the sixties named Robert Shaw."

I had to throw this in here because the real-life Robert Shaw had a role in the 1963 Bond film From Russia With Love. Q's identity as "Robert Shaw" in my stories is a total coincidence.