"At that point, I figured, bugger all was going to happen unless I did something," Alec said as he walked tiredly through the door Bond held open for him. "So I rigged the building to blow and got out."
"This whole low-profile kick of Mallory's feels suspiciously like an effort to weed out the..." Bond fell silent as the smell of burnt coffee reached him.
He might have been an old dog, but he was entirely capable of learning new tricks. In this particular case, he'd left his Quartermaster sleeping in the master bedroom after spending two wonderfully distracting hours thanking Q for his (misguided) consideration in the effort of customised toast. Then, thinking it safe, he'd gone to get Alec at the airport.
Apparently 'safe' wasn't meant to be a part of his post-Q life.
Alec was going for the gun he'd illegally transported on the airplane. Bond put out a hand, dropped Alec's bag, and said, "It's Q."
"The Quarter— Oh, right. You're still shagging him?" Alec asked, baffled. "It's been... what, a week and a half?"
"Two," Bond said, heading for the kitchen.
"Christ, that's practically married for you. Are you sick? Are you dying? Do I inherit your flat?"
"Don't make me shoot you myself," Bond said, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
This time, there was no smoking, molten teflon-sausage mix. There was, however, the remains of a pot of coffee, little more than a caramelised crackling brown coating on the carafe, and a skinny, half-naked Quartermaster on the floor, head pillowed on a stack of tea towels, with what had once been an expensive digital toaster oven gutted beside him.
And there it was. That was definitely affection, that warmth that seemed to fill Bond's chest. He couldn't hide the twitch that was the beginning of a smile. It looked like Q had cannibalised something for parts — possibly the Blu-Ray player.
It took Bond a moment to pull his attention from Q's peaceful face to the remnants of the toaster, but when he did, he saw what looked an old school Apple computer and a joystick. A quick trace of the wires revealed that they were both connected to the toaster.
A Mac 2, a joystick, and a toaster that looked like it belonged in an episode of Robot Wars. It didn't glow yet, but when Bond looked for signs of scorching or open flame along the wall where he assumed everything would be plugged in, he realised Q hadn't actually got that far yet. The whole mess was twisted into a colourful braid of wires that snaked its way around and behind Q to end, plugged into a power strip that was itself unplugged several centimetres from the wall.
"What..." Alec began, looking over Bond's shoulder. "What the buggering fuck?"
"Show a little respect. This is the man who gives us our life-saving tech."
"Was that your toaster oven?"
Bond winced. "It might still be," he hazarded, though he had his doubts. He walked into the kitchen and crouched to tap at Q's shoulder. "Q?"
Q groaned and rolled on his back without opening his eyes. "Coffee? Or is it Russia again?"
"You killed my toaster oven. Come on, up you get," Bond said, getting his arms around Q. He resisted the urge to just pick him up again and instead helped him sit. "Let's get you back in bed."
Q yawned and let his head fall forward on Bond's shoulder. "I killed who?" Bond didn't get a chance to respond, however, before Q's body filled with electric tension. He sat up straight so quickly, he nearly knocked heads with the surprised Bond. "Oh! I didn't kill anything! I improved."
He turned toward to wall and the unplugged cables and shuffled forward on his knees. He flopped over to pick up the plug to the power strip and straightened unsteadily, still on his knees, in front of the wall. He shuffled the last centimetres he needed to reach the outlet, but his hand hovered in front of it for a brief moment's hesitation. He turned to squint at Bond. "You may want to step back. Just in case."
Bond glanced back at Alec, who was staring, expression trapped between horrified shock and profound amusement. His fierce grin won out, and he slouched against the doorway, arms folded over his chest. "Go on, then. This is brilliant."
"Allow me," Bond said, finally deciding that a brilliant, sleep-deprived genius was a more valuable MI6 resource than a worn-out Double O. Besides, his heart had stopped at least twice that he recalled. A third time wouldn't be anything new.
He took the plug from Q's hand (after a bit of a silly struggle on Q's part) and deliberately stepped away from Q before he stuck the plug in the outlet, hiding his instinctive flinch.
Even Q couldn't hide a surprised grin when nothing happened. He laughed and very lightly punched Bond in the leg. "Oh, ye of little faith," he said before he shuffled back to the Mac 2. He turned it on with a flip of an invisible switch, then moved to the toaster as the old computer hummed to life. He tipped it upright, looking critically at the internal components before screwing the side panel back on.
"Bread?" he asked in the same tone Bond had heard him use on lower-level Q Branch techs when requested assistance. Now, he held one hand expectantly, the other busy checking wires inside the bread slots.
Bond refused to cede his tactically sound spot by the outlet, where he could quickly intervene in the likely event of a disaster. "Alec?"
"Right. Morning, Q," Alec said as he finally ventured onto the battlefield. He reached over the electronics on the floor to flip open the sleek stainless steel breadbox. "White sandwich bread, James? Really?" he criticised, tossing the plastic-wrapped half-loaf aside. Instead, he took out the loaf of garlic-parmesan artisan bread Bond had bought in anticipation of an Italian dinner — he refused to entertain the word 'romantic' — with Q later that night.
"Good with peanut butter but not much else," Q muttered. "Wait. Is that 006?" He unfolded his long legs from his kneeling position to shift into a cross-legged one in front of the Mac, tossing a quick look behind him to nod at Alec. "Welcome home, agent," he said with a yawn.
"Thanks." Alec took the serrated bread knife from the block and started sawing off pieces.
Bond hid his sigh. He'd pick up a fresh loaf later today when he went out to buy replacements for whatever Q destroyed. Alec passed Q two slices of bread. Nibbling on the end, he went to the coffee pot and picked it up, eyeing the crackle-glaze of coffee residue at the bottom suspiciously.
"Remember that program I was telling you about last week? The one I was designing to be more anticipatory of your needs when running through buildings with locked doors?" Q stretched to reach for the bread, and took them with another yawn. He slid them into the bread slots and pushed down the button with no hesitation. "I've been having some trouble with it. In theory, it should be a simple matter of running an algorithm that calculates your speed and progress through the building, flagging and unlocking doors as you approach. In reality, the tests give us an excellent success rate, but with an error margin of plus or minus ten seconds. Which is a hell of a long time when you're running from the armed and angry sorts you usually have trailing you."
The Mac 2 finally flared to life in all its CRT glory, and the blue screen reflected oddly in Q's glasses as he grinned and pulled the joystick towards him.
"Does this have something to do with toast?" Alec asked as he ran the water in the sink. He stuck the carafe under, and it promptly shattered.
Reflexively, both assassins twitched. Q looked around at the floor in his immediate vicinity, as if searching for something. Then he looked up at Alec, surprised, and back to Bond. "It wasn't me," he said seriously before yawning yet again.
"Did you make coffee before leaving for the airport?" Alec asked Bond.
"I stopped at the cafe in the terminal, but I also haven't been asleep yet," Bond admitted, watching Q a bit suspiciously. The coffee pot was a minor price to pay for having a sleepy, ridiculously adorable Quartermaster in his life. A major electrical fire in the kitchen, though, might be beyond the reach of his insurance premium. The kitchen wall was shared with another flat, he suspected.
Alec turned off the tap, leaving the glass shards in the sink. Belatedly, he flipped the power switch on the coffee maker. "So, is this where I ask why there's a bloody computer hooked up to the toaster oven, or should I just go have a shower and assume the flat will burn down while I'm gone?"
"Predictability algorithms, progress, end goals... simple calculations that need tightening." Q did something with the joystick, and the Mac's blue screen disappeared, replaced quickly with an old Atari logo. After a few minutes, Centipede came on, and Q started playing it with more vigour than Bond would have expected from someone who was all but sleepwalking. Sleep game-playing? Bond shook his head and watched as Q systematically took out the centipede.
"It's not the same without a roller ball for a controller, but it's really about the unlocking program, isn't it?" Q muttered quietly. He killed a spider and blew off the digital creature's tail and, finally, destroyed the last two individual sections that were running around. The game played its endgame music through what looked like a portable, collapsible speaker, and Q laughed.
"Victory!" he shouted as he flopped backwards, head thunking loudly on the tile. He gestured with one hand to the toaster, and less than a second later, the pieces of bread popped up.
Q frowned at the blackened bread. "Four seconds late and burnt, but a good start," he said thoughtfully. He rubbed the back of his head with his free hand and looked up at Bond. "What do you think?"
There was no possible way he could answer that question without risking his budding relationship with the brilliant, erratic Quartermaster. Thankfully, Alec was more than willing to leap to Bond's defence.
"That's absolutely ingenious," he declared, extending a hand to Q. As soon as Q clasped his hand, Alec hauled him to his feet. Bond leaped forward to help hold him up (unplugging the toaster before he got out of reach) and caught Q around the waist. "Well done, Q. Really." Alec clapped his shoulder.
"You'll need to tell us about it," Bond added, "after you've slept."
"For about three days," Alec muttered.
Q looked from Alec to Bond, disappointment blooming on his face. "It was calculating the final moment of game over, and timing the toast to finish at the same time. Door, agent. Same thing."
"You're a genius," Bond reassured him, kissing his cheek. At least this time there were neither flour nor electronics componentry to get in his way. "Just a bit of upgrading for the code and you're done, right? You can do that later. Alec will be staying here today, so don't go wandering into the guest room," he added, herding Q towards the kitchen door.
"No need to humour me," Q sighed. "It's fine. You're right. I'll repair the toaster and call Sue to come fetch her components back. If I know her, she'll use the improvised program to do something horrible to students in her welding class during their designing sessions." He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and started typing in a text. "Good night, Trevelyan."
Bond took away the mobile. "It'll be brilliant, once you refine it," he said, tossing the mobile on the counter. He didn't bother to lock it; that would just be incentive for Alec to try and hack the unlock code. "And it's ten in the morning. Is that why you made coffee?" he asked thoughtlessly before realising the whole pot had been emptied. "My god, did you drink it all?"
"Do you think that if I had hooked it up to something, anything not breakfast related, I would have had more success?" Q asked. "Like, a crock pot? No, that wouldn't work. A panini grill maybe?"
"You did, didn't you?" Bond asked, wondering precisely how he could gently bring Q down from a caffeine-high. The circles under his eyes were dark, and though he looked as if he could fall asleep at any moment, it would undoubtedly be a restless, twitchy nap rather than anything healthier.
He hugged Q close and led him out of the kitchen, towards the master bedroom. "Alec, will you —"
"Already on it," Alec called back over the sound of glass rattling in the sink.
"And you're going to bed," Bond told Q. "We can discuss kitchen upgrades when we go shopping tonight."
"Kitchen upgrade shopping?" Q asked, a little bit of excitement creeping into his voice even as he let his head fall on Bond's shoulder in exhaustion. "You're going to go with me to a building full of things to love and blow up?"
"I'd been thinking another loaf of bread, since Alec will have eaten that one before he even gets in the shower," Bond said with a quiet laugh. He pushed open the master bedroom door and ushered Q through. "But yes, if you'd like. Just don't blow up anything while we're still in the store."
"I made toast," Q said proudly.
"That you did."