This first part in italics is a brief exchange from Quriosity, you'll need to know it for the rest of this story to make sense:
"It's the camera on my laptop," Q said abruptly.
"What?" Bond flicked Q a puzzled glance, but he was still looking out the window.
"I modified the camera on my laptop with a fisheye lens, and wrote a facial recognition algorithm to account for the distortion. It's mapped onto MI-6's directory. When someone approaches anywhere behind me, it displays their name in the title bar of the active window of the monitor bank, in a code of my own devising. If the person is not cleared by MI-6, it flashes an alert. No one has noticed so far. Nobody ever pays attention to title bars, and if anyone did notice the change it would still look like gibberish."
"Oh." Bond thought about it for a moment, and chuckled despite himself. "That's...clever."
Q's forehead was pressed against the window, his eyes closed. His voice was slow and meditative when he spoke, as if he were thinking aloud. "I learned early in life to watch my own back, rather than trusting others to do it for me."
"Q, you are not wielding a bloody jackhammer until I get home. That thing weighs more than you do, the recoil will probably send your head through the bloody skylight."
Q smiled even as he turned down the volume in his earpiece to compensate for Bond's outburst. "Only Americans call it a jackhammer," Q snarked. "And I am perfectly familiar with the operation of a pneumatic drill, thank you very much."
"Of course you are," Bond grumbled. "I'm fine exercising in the workshop, Q. There's absolutely no need to tear up the living room floor and dig into the foundation."
"Nonsense, the cold is no good for you. Besides, it'll be lovely." Q tapped a few keys, opening up the schematics in a new window on the main screen. R wouldn't mind, it was past midnight and Q Branch was deserted except for the two of them. "I have enough of the original flooring left over to make a sliding panel in the hardwood, you'll hardly know it's there. And then the treadmill will just pop right up when we want it." He rotated the schematics in three dimensions, admiring his own design.
"You don't give a damn about the treadmill, you just want to tinker," Bond said fondly. "Besides, I like running in the park with you."
"I'll make it a double-wide treadmill. There's this DVD we can put on where we can pretend we're running from zombies. It'll be fun!"
"Your idea of fun is very different from mine."
Q smiled wickedly. "Not always," he said, dropping his voice to a low purr.
"Minx," Bond growled, a sudden roughness in his voice, and Q smiled as the window in the corner of the screen with Bond's vitals showed a sudden spike in respiration, pulse, and body temperature.
R gave Q a knowing glance as she pulled his Scrabble mug off the corner of his desk, taking it and her own empty coffee mug to the kitchen for refills.
Q cleared his throat, blushing only a little, he hoped. "Ta!" he called after her.
Bond muttered something under his breath and Q turned the volume on the earpiece up again. As he accidentally overshot the correct setting he could hear water sloshing gently in the background.
"Are you in the bath? Because if you short out another earpiece, James, so help me I'll…"
"Prat," Bond interrupted good-naturedly. "I'm wearing your tiepin camera. Put it up on screen."
"R's just fetching us a cuppa," Q warned, already tapping the relevant keys. "If you are in the bath she'll get quite the view."
"If I were in the bath, exactly what would the camera be pinned to?" Bond rejoinded easily.
Q snickered. "Far be it from me to underestimate your ingenuity — oh." He tapped a few more keys and expanded the window to fill the full screen, simultaneously dimming the Q Branch lights. "Oh, James — it's beautiful," he breathed.
The sunset filled the whole front wall of Q Branch, brilliant streaks of red and orange and gold that flooded the sterile white-painted brick walls and columns of Q Branch with vivid colour.
"I thought you'd like it," Bond said, the quiet tenderness in his voice sending warmth through Q's chest that rivaled the molten glow of the sun on screen. "I had to get all the way out to the end of the jetty to catch the Western-facing view over Basseterre Bay, but it's worth it, I think."
"I love it," Q smiled. "You're such a secret romantic."
"Not so secret anymore," Bond rumbled.
Q felt himself flushing, and cleared his throat as he heard the door to Q Branch open again. "R, isn't it — "
He blinked, his brow furrowing as the entire window flashed red in warning. He hadn't seen that happen since he had last tested the intruder alert on his facial recognition program…
He ducked under his desk just a moment before the shot cracked out.
"Fuck," he muttered scrabbling under his desk for his metal equipment return tray. Margot had checked in her equipment earlier this evening and he hadn't had a chance to return it to the armory yet.
"What is it, Q?" He could hear the sudden hyperawareness in Bond's voice.
"Hostiles in Q Branch." Q could feel the eerie calm of mission mode settling over himself as well as he snapped a half-full magazine into the box of the Walther. "Stand by."
The light on the microdermal sensor lit green as the weapon recognized Q's palmprint. Q's standing desk was almost no cover. He was not such an easy target now that he wasn't backlit by the bright screen, but their eyes would adjust.
"How many?" Bond asked, his voice low and tight.
Q took a deep breath, and then scrambled on his hands and knees to the side, overturning one of the smaller tables. It crashed to the tile floor, providing Q with a small amount of cover but unfortunately giving away his location beyond any doubt.
He flattened himself on the floor as two more shots thunked into the surface of the table. Thank god, they didn't seem to be high enough calibre to pierce the metal.
Q avoided the temptation to duck up above his cover, leaning left and then right to examine the shiny tile floor instead. After countless hours spent in the Branch after dark, Q knew every inch of the branch even in dim lighting, and three shadows did not belong.
"At least three," he muttered into his microphone. "When I say, cover your camera."
"Understood."
Q could feel his heart thumping, his breath rasping through his dry throat, and he swallowed. "Three, two, one, now."
Q branch plunged into darkness, the figures silhouetted against the lights of the hallway as Q knelt up, bracing his forearm on the table edge and firing three shots in quick succession. Two dropped immediately — after all his time on the firing range testing weapons Q was a damn good shot — but the third ducked away, returning fire.
"Damn. One left," Q muttered into the microphone. "One more bullet."
Q heard the door to Q Branch start to swish open again. In sudden inspiration, Q turned his head. The LED screen was still dark, but the menu bar was green, R's name appearing in the title in Q's own code.
"R! Get down! Hostiles!" Q shouted. "Bond, light!"
Events seemed to pass in a flash of images — Q Branch flooding with magenta light as Bond uncovered his camera, revealing the man who was already turning towards R, gun lifted. R's wide brown eyes and the crack of Q's Scrabble mug and her coffee cup smashing to the tile floor as Q fired his last bullet.
The man jerked and cursed, ducking down under cover of his own. Q couldn't see R anymore, and he felt a chill crawl up his spine. How many gunshots had there been? Was R down, or had she managed to find cover herself?
"Q?" Bond's urgent voice was in Q's ear, grounding him.
"I'm okay, James," he whispered. "Out of bullets though. Last one may be injured, but he's not down. And god knows how many others there are outside the Branch."
"Your taser?"
Q looked longingly at his messenger bag, still atop his standing desk. Too far. "Not reachable."
"Q…" Bond's voice was bleak.
Q swallowed down the lump in his throat. "I love you, James."
"I love you too, Q. Oh god — so much."
There were no more words to exchange. They breathed into the silence, waiting, the blood-red light dimming slowly to indigo as the sun sank below the horizon in St. Kitts. Unless the man was severely injured, he would be breaking cover any moment now. It would take him only seconds to realize that Q was out of rounds.
Chhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
Q's brow furrowed at the strange noise. He risked a quick peek around the table top, barely able to make out the oblong object, rolling across the tile floor from where R had last been seen, coming to resst against the table behind which the hostile had taken cover.
"Oh, R. You bloody genius. I could kiss you," he muttered.
"What? What is it, Q?"
Q smiled. "Sorry about the bang you're about to get in your ear, James. But did I mention R developed a prototype of that exploding pen you're always on about?"
Q curled himself into a ball, head to his knees, closing his eyes and sticking his fingers in his ears, Bond's shaky breath of relief rasping warm and loud in his ear as the explosion shook the Branch.