Disclaimer: I do not own the Bond movies or books.
Warnings: None for this chapter.
The Quartermaster may have been young but he was good at what he was doing; some may even say that he was the best. As opposed to what many people thought, he was not a workaholic, either. Even though he had always been a bit of a loner, Q enjoyed his nights off when he was still R, but shortly before he got promoted to Q, he stopped going out entirely.
The reason, his work colleagues settled on, was that promotion. He had too little time as Q, which was really a shame.
The Q-branch employees generally took it very well, having someone so young lead them. This was for a variety of reasons, but two of them stood out as big contributors. One, was that many of them, at least in the computer section, were quite young themselves. Many an administrator or "old dog" of a field agent assumed he was one of the youngest techies they had. They were sorely mistaken.
The other reason, and this was by far the largest motivator, was that Q-branch employees were clever. They, better than anyone, could see the suberb skills of their new Quartermaster, and they appreciated it.
That the new Q also had good leadership skills, were fair and nice and generally lead an antiquated place into a new age, a process which started within moments of him getting the job, that only made it better.
Subsequently, they tried to take care of their boss as much as possible. It is very likely that they still would have brought him tea and the occasional snakc even if they had known that his new position as head of Q-branch had nothing to do with his sudden lack of social life, but he made sure that they didn't.
Q was not as foolish to believe that they would have thought less of him for it, the painful past he now suddenly had, but he wanted to keep it for himself. It was new, after all, and besides that it was not something he was going to let define him. That he had stopped frequenting all his favourite pubs because he feared to run into his abusive ex-boyfriend was nobody's problem but his own.
Capable, intelligent and a damned good boss, he hid that sad story away. He vowed to focus on his work for a while, and stop having such poor taste in men, constantly going for the dangerous ones. The latter promise only lasted for six months.