Vesper had met him coolly, that first time, but he knew better.
He saw the flame in his own eyes reflected in hers. The crack of lightning in her laugh. They were the same, and so of course she should meet her end in the deep, stifling blue. She had hidden it well - apparently, there's a stigma, though he's never paid it much mind. He had never seen her so much as light a flame on the tip of her finger, but he took one look at the dash of red on her lips and knew she was fire through and through.
And, just like him, like all of them, she would bring destruction.
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The Fighting Temeraire is a strange confluence - the sunset ablaze above the water set against the chill of an indigo horizon. He's not seen this painting before; generally speaking, museum curators are not fans of firebenders. The thought brings a smirk to the corner of his mouth. He's done some heinous things with the sun in his hands.
The man who sits down beside him, though, definitively has not.
It's not a double-O tendency so much as human one to attempt to gauge instantly the element of a stranger. And, for many, it's no trouble. There are signs of pride, even in the most humble, even in the firebenders putting on gentle faces around ember eyes. But Six is different; among those who understand the liability of personal information, neutrality is key. And the boy next to him is the picture of it - eyes carefully dull, clothes immaculately impartial. His palm is an unremarkable 98.6 degrees, and there is no dirt beneath his fingernails. When he walks, it is with a measured, grounded step.
"007," he murmurs, his voice as smooth as the ribbon around a Christmas gift, and a chill runs up Bond's spine at the impeccable attention sacrificed to each syllable. This is not the encounter he expected; he feels his skin heat and works to dampen the smoke in his bones.
Q just smiles quietly, as though he knows exactly what he's done, and has no intention of stopping it.
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Every high level MI6 employee is a master of his or her element, as it is in most professional organizations, but a disproportionate number of Double-Os are firebenders. Bond, sometimes, finds himself avoiding this thought, as if aware that it has implications for his people, and his nature. Inevitably, though, he reminds himself that 009 once caused an earthquake so powerful it razed a small Nevada city, and that 003 is not above bloodbending when confronted with the insurmountable.
Even the boffins in Q-Branch are weapons of mass destruction; pyjamas or not. Surely, Q knows that.
(At night, sometimes, Bond pictures Q with fire in his palms, reflecting off charcoal eyes. It's not quite right, though. He and Q are not the same.)
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He scorches every element in his path on the quest to find some atonement for Vesper, and for himself. He burns, and is burned himself, but fire is something he understands and it has never failed him before. He sets the Bolivian desert aflame, but it does not sear away his sins. This is okay. At this point, he doesn't expect it to.
It's fitting that he should find Vesper's lover in the cold. And it's fitting, too, that the only warmth he has left should gather in M's eyes. She keeps with the MI6 tradition of secrecy - he's never seen any element move beneath her fingertips. He supposes that it is theoretically possible that she, against all odds, has been beholden to all the discrimination aimed at those unburdened with bending and rose to the top of the shadow world regardless. There are a few stories in which the stratified world breaks down and allows for such anomalies but, in M's case, he's not sure he buys it. Something like power stirs behind her pupils, and it's not the sort that can be bluffed.
His palms are steaming when he drops Vesper's necklace into the Russian snow.
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Tanner's an avid gardener, but he's also not the kind to bother with secrets among friends, tradition or not. There is dirt in the lines of his palms and sometimes the sidewalk quakes, slightly, beneath his feet when Bond is in town and they go for lunch. Tanner, he's come to suspect, is considerably potent than he advertises. Perhaps, even, in a league above all of them. Bond, strangely, is comforted by this. The perennially blooming flowers on his office windowsill are in good hands.
"Do you know what Q is?" Bond asks impulsively, as they sit under the canopy of a Fitzrovia pub one summer evening.
Tanner just sends him a shrewd smile. "Yes, but only because I read his file, before they wiped it when he became Quartermaster."
Bond pauses, then, to take a long sip of his pint. Finally, he smirks. "I'll have you know, Bill, I've been trained in a number of unsavory interrogation techniques-"
Bill breaks into laughter before he can finish.
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Eve Moneypenny is different, yet very much the same. The heat beneath her skin nearly melts the barrel of the gun that sends him plummeting into an achingly familiar watery death outside Istanbul. The woman who finds him is waterbender, but not a healer - as always, he is left to stitch himself together on his own.
Eve is not like Vesper. The first time he sees her after his resurrection, she's letting flames lick between the joints of her fingers. The two of them simmer together, but never boil. She is the warmth of the fire without the burn, the raw power without the destructive edge.
"Field work isn't for everyone," he tells her, and he's been singed enough times to know.
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If Bond is suave, then Q is smooth. Suave implies something forced, Bond thinks, but smooth is something innate. Every movement of Q's hands, across circuit boards and unassembled sniper rifles, has a preternatural elegance. He moves uninhibited. And for all Bond works so endlessly to conceal his hard edges, he is positively jagged in comparison.
Bond arrives in Q-Branch for a debrief and a Walther and Q places a delicate looking bowtie cam in his waiting palms. "Do be careful with that," Q says, almost as an afterthought, glancing at the camera. He's already turning back to his laptop, fingers moving swiftly and fluidly across the keys.
"You do realize I burn everything I touch," Bond retorts, but the smirk isn't quite convincing and Q looks up, eyes searching.
"That is how fire works." Q frowns. "If you believe the ugly stereotype, that is."
"Do you?" Bond asks, before he thinks better of it. He lights a flame on the end of his pointer finger and waves it beneath Q's nose.
"I could be convinced," Q replies, stepping backwards in mild discomfort. It takes a bit but, after a moment, they're smirking at each other.
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It's only at Skyfall that the mystery begins to unravel. One of them, at least.
He finds it a little entertaining that it should come to a head between the four of them. Bond, fire; Kincade, earth; Silva, water; and M, air, of all things. The rarest and the most enlightened. He imagines, with some ironic amusement, her secluded monk training back in secondary school. It is in rather sharp contrast to the fighting drills they instilled him before he had any concept of what he really could, and inevitably would, do. It seems odd that despite this they should both end up here.
And despite the balance between the four of them, Skyfall still burns.
The flames lick orange against the deep indigo of the Scottish night. It reminds him of something, though he can't quite place what. Something deep and divergent and, again, a mystery. Then a cold wind blows across the moor and he feels M calling for him.
Silva dies unremarkably, with a knife in his back. Bond is all up and ready to pitch fire against water but the moment never comes. In the end, M dies, stirring a wind that blows soft against his wet coat. And no one cares about the flames in his chest.
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Madeleine Swann appears to him among the ice and the snow, with an expression to match. He knows immediately that she is nothing like the dash of searing heat that so embodied Vesper. Madeleine's smile is the color of the Antarctic winter, and he finds solace in the chill it sends from the crown of his head all the way to his toes. She is a palliative, and she tames something inside him that probably needs taming.
She, though, is as jagged as he is - for all that tendrils of water can move with such beautiful seamlessness across the planes of her snow white skin, she looks at its elegance with a disdain that removes any grace from the element. She is a healer, but it is a learned skill, not a natural leaning. And, in the end, she's not at all interested in patching Bond back together. He can't really blame her for that. It does always seem to be such a monumental task.
And, she's afraid of him - much in the way Vesper was afraid of herself. Even as Madeleine meets him blow for blow in every contest they come across, there's a flicker of doubt in her gaze when she watches him out of the corner of her eye. He's too much like her father. They both have been known to raze.
For a few months she soothes his burns and he spikes her placid tendencies with bursts of lightning. Then he gets antsy, and starts glancing at his phone for Q-Branch updates that never come, and things devolve from there. Madeleine departs for some place icy and anonymous and it doesn't feel like a betrayal at all.
A year after he leaves Blofeld to burn in an English prison, Bond's back in London, a bullet wound in his shoulder after pursuing a few work-related leads independently.
He is alone.
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He ends up in Q-Branch on the vague hope that it won't be empty; alarmingly, that prayer comes to fruition. Q is there, even though it's past midnight, finishing off a rendezvous with 001 over the comms and tinkering with something under his desk. It's the first time Bond has seen him looking at all unkempt.
"007," Q says, and the surprise in his voice imitates the way his head pops up so suddenly at the sound of approaching feet. He raises an eyebrow. "It's been a while."
Typical British understatement. For all that his life is so often whirlwind fire and romance, he's missed this. Or something like it. Q stands up to his full height and appraises him with heedfully neutral eyes. "Are you alright?" he asks, voice trying for passive. "Where's Dr. Swann?"
"No," is all Bond says, and it seems to answer both questions. He's walking awkwardly, trying not to jostle his sticky, aching shoulder. Q's eyes narrow.
"Take off your jacket," he murmurs efficiently, brushing rubbish off a rolling chair and sending it in Bond's direction. He does as he's told and slips out of his coat gingerly. He winces, but makes no sound as Q searches around for the switch to one of the directional desk lamps.
And it's almost expected when Bond, settling hesitantly into the chair, looks up just in time to see Q, with a single, elegant twist of his wrist, summon all the water out of the cup of tea to his left. It buffers itself with some of the moisture out of the air and collects into a slightly shimmery blue coating over the Quartermaster's right hand.
Of course, Bond thinks. A waterbender.
Q approaches, and strips back Bond's bloodstained collar until he can get a clean look at the wound. The bullet's gone straight through, so it's a simple matter to stop the bleeding and get the opening to begin to seal on its own. Q's touch is cold and ethereal, the water pulsing slightly with each pass over the rawest part of the wound. It's late, and Q is less than fresh; he smells vaguely of stale sweat and tea and Bond doesn't imagine that he's faring much better himself. Still, Q smells of home, of a familiar kind of lull after the tension's resolved, and so Bond can't help but breathe him in. The Quartermaster doesn't look at him, but there's something in his deliberate lack of eye contact that makes it clear he's aware of Bond's gaze.
"The secret's out," Bond says after it's over, even though he's hesitant to break the reverent silence that has set in.
"It was hardly a secret," Q replies, eyes on his fingers as water curls smoothly off them and back into his mug. "I'm just not in the habit of revealing it to your kind. There's a tendency to condescend." He can't be too deeply affected by such a thing, though, because he smirks slightly as he says it, turning back to Bond. He wonders if by "your kind," Q means firebenders or Double-Os.
Bond only hums at first, buttoning back his bloodied shirt, then says abruptly, "But there is something to be said for the unity of opposites."
"Yes, I suppose there is."
Bond is looking at the floor, but after a few moments, a second pair of shoes enters his line of vision. He tilts his head back up to find Q at his side, close enough to exchange body heat, that smirk still present. Bond reaches out an unobtrusive hand to slip a finger into Q's nearest belt loop, and feels the sharp angle of Q's hipbone. It's not quite a summons, but somehow they end up pressed together anyways, and Bond watches a few droplets of water gather nervously around a drain in the cement floor. He slides an arm around Q's waist and mutters out a "thank you" as he breathes in.
"It's good to see you again, 007," Q replies, smiling angelically as a cool hand tangles in the short hair at the base of Bond's neck. The agent's skin simmers slightly, but Q seems undeterred. Unimpressed by flames, perhaps, or maybe just not bitter enough to avoid complications when he sees them.
Q, it seems, is not afraid of fire.
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"I might burn you," Bond says, between kisses.
"I won't mind," Q replies, just as Bond's palms turn feverish against his skin.