PLEASE NOTE: THIS FIC IS BEING COMPLETELY REWRITTEN. YOU WILL NEED TO REREAD CHAPTER ONE FOR THIS TO MAKE SENSE. THANK YOU!

ALSO: THERE IS MATURE CONTENT BEGINNING IN THIS CHAPTER. IF THAT OFFENDS YOU, PLEASE BE PREPARED OR FIND SOMETHING MORE TO YOUR LIKING.

Chapter 2:

The meeting stretched for several long minutes while they carved out their basic plans for the upcoming dual-focus mission. Unfortunately, Q's day didn't get any less hectic upon his return to the subbasement, and so it was nearing ten o'clock when he finally arrived back home and saw his partner again. James had supper waiting for him in the oven while he himself read a novel lounging on their large window seat. It was dark beyond, rain trailing down the bullet proof surface and a glass of amber liquid set nearly forgotten beside him in his distraction.

He glanced up when the door opened and marked his page a moment later, rising to greet him without hesitation. The lounging Tes jumped down with his tail raised in offence at being jostled from his comfortable spot nestled between James' leg and the cool rain covered window, but they paid no mind to his familiar antics. Q returned the offered embrace gladly, happy to be home at last after such an exhausting day. He took a long moment to pull away and then excused himself to go shower and change into his longue wear- an old pair of pajama pants and one of James' plain black t-shirts. When he arrived back in the kitchen, his partner had his plate waiting for him with a steaming cup of herbal tea sat beside it. The aromatic scent filling the room told him in was the unpronounceable blend he'd brought home with him from the mission in Sierra Leone a few months previously, and the smell of the food had his stomach rumbling in anticipation.

He sat and began eating immediately, utterly famished. James sat across from him, sipping on the glass that had come with him and waiting patiently for him to finish. Q pushed his plate back soon enough, settling deeper into his chair and cupping his mug comfortably between slender fingers. Only then did they began to speak in earnest.

"How do you want to handle this?" Q questioned. As much as it was his responsibility to help plan out missions to ensure the best outcome possible, it was just as much his responsibility to listen to his agents and take their own input into that planning to ensure the highest level of cohesion possible.

As he'd known he would, James began speaking easily, clearly having spent a good part of the day considering it. "I want to bring him in for a weapons test."

Q raised a brow. "Oh?" He questioned lightly, fully unsurprised to find that his first intention was to breake the only restriction they'd given him.

"You know as well as I that he's got to have some sort of training. So either B hasn't given us all of the information, or Rider's managed to keep the scope of his training from his handlers. I want to find out which it is."

"Okay. When do you want to bring him in?"

"We're set to head out Wednesday. Let's bring him in Monday. Depending on how things go, that'll give you Tuesday to get him a kit fitted. Can you get me a location?" He was capable of finding the boy himself somewhere within the expansive spread of London. He'd managed such feats before with little more than a name, age, and mental image to go on, but it wouldn't be anywhere near easy or fast and he'd much prefer to cut right to the chase.

"I've already got one." He'd expected the man to want it and so had taken the spare hour he had between ending a project in the ballistics lab and taking the Com during a critical part of 004's mission to track down the boy's address and school… And the fact that the boy was still in school blew his mind and once again brought on an unpleasant twist in his stomach accompanied by a flair of nausea.

He himself had taken his GCSEs before he left home at thirteen to ensure things went as smoothly as possible for him once he was on his own. Genus that he'd been declared, he'd prepared for every eventuality he could think of before he set his plans in motion. Because of that, he'd been far beyond a school yard mentality when he'd began his work for MI6, despite his young age. Beyond that, most of his early work involved data on a computer screen. He very much doubted a field agent would be so lucky. How high was the boys kill count? The file brushed over some deaths during the mission reports, but they never specifically named Rider as the direct cause. Still, field agents rarely went long without beginning their own death toll, and the boy had been active for years now.

That he was expected to go back and forth between being an Agent of Her Majesties Secret Service and attending secondary school was horrifying. Granted, the psych reports had been lacking at best, but it was his own experience that every Agent in the -00 program and most all the junior agents had some old trauma(s) that could trigger suddenly and unexpectedly. He'd eat his laptop if Rider didn't have his own mental scars after being employed in such work and managing to live a split life for so long.

Sending a trained Agent into a school full of children, the very idea! It was a miracle he hadn't gotten caught in a flashback or lashed out at any of the students instinctually at some point or other. At least within the origination Agents were surrounded by people trained and capable of handling them at their worst- if not psych (which was considered something of a joke, for the vast majority), than their fellow Agents, at least, stood a fighting chance.

He'd never forget the last time he'd assigned a more junior member of the branch to be James' handler. It'd been not long after they'd began sleeping together, and he'd gotten into his head that he shouldn't be the voice in James' ear any more, for much the same reason a surgeon wouldn't be allowed to operate on his partner. He didn't know how he would handle being the one on the other end of the line, listening to him take his last breaths alone in some remote part of the world because Q had frozen up, or hadn't been good enough to get him to safety, to get him home.

It was supposed to have been a routine intel gathering mission, honestly a little low key for a -00, but James had been benched for going on seven weeks after being injured. He'd been declared fit for duty at week six, but there hadn't been anything come up that would be to the man's caliber, and so he'd gone to standby with increasing frustration. Q had assigned him more because he was at at his wits end than anything else, and he'd already planned to have Andrew run the junior Agent who received the assignment, the man desiring to transition in to a more full time handler position, so it all seemed to work out.

Or, it had seemed to work out. That was, until an unknown with an agenda of his own burst unexpectedly onto the scene, a dozen armed men at his back. Q had been in the munitions lab at the time, soundproof muffs blocking out the sound of his phone buzzing on the workbench nearby. It went unnoticed until he happened to see the light from the corner of his eye. The screen went dark before he was able to grab it, and he cursed silently when he noticed four missed calls from his second.

Before he could dial back, the phone began ringing once more. He answered it immediately with a curt "Yes?"

"007 is demanding you on Com." R responded immediately, voice showing the faintest hum of anxiety. Q was half way back by the time he'd gotten the full story, and he had his own earbud tucked into his ear when he pushed through the reinforced door to his branch. He was patched through as soon as he had visual on the screens and he'd managed to guide the man to a safe extraction point five miles away after some rather fancy finger work on his part.

When it was all said and done, he found out Andrew had told James to turn right when he should have turned left, essentially trapping him into a dead end. It was only thanks to his own skill in hand to hand combat that he was able to escape the three men pinning him down, out of ammo as he'd been at the time. It was bad enough dealing with such a blatant mistake on their end (Q especially having to force himself to remain the impartial Head and not the furious lover), but when 007 arrived back on base in a blaze of fury, proverbial heads rolled. He'd been so visibly livid as he growled at the pallid faced man that 006 had physically clasped a hand of steel around his bicep and escorted him out to the streets of London to let out the pent up steam.

The two had ended up shit-faced on the shadier side of London, under arrest for starting a bar fight in the early hours of the morning. Q liberated them from their jail cell without complaint and dropped off the Russian at his own flat before taking James' back to the man's own. He'd intended to drop him off and head home himself, but the man had been determined to keep him there. He'd given in easier than he'd admit to and what remaining rage James held was spent in a particularly furious round of fucking. After, James had forced his assurance that he wouldn't pawn him off on anyone else, not unless there was other choice- no other choice being that Q was physically incapable of being on Com, or he was on with another Agent who was in deeper shit than he was.

The point of it was- at Six the Agents knew there were others around who could support them and contain them in equal measure. It might have seemed an odd thing to most, but for them it provided comfort. They'd seen the darkest depths of humanity, had seen what men could be driven to do with enough dedication and time, to appreciate the knowledge that there were others around who were just as strong and skilled as they themselves. Q could admit he had a hard time understanding at first- the man seemed so unbreakable, so strong.

It wasn't until a separate conversation entirely, when the man offhandedly compared himself to a weapon to be used at the discretion of its owner, that Q really began to comprehend just what he'd meant. James- all of the -00's, were finely honed machines, capable of feats that should be impossible for a mere man to perform. Q couldn't begin to count the number of bodies buried or burnt because they came up against the deadly man, or the number of times he'd fucked a target for the betterment of the mission- there was little the man unwilling to do if it meant success. Despite it all, no matter how strange or unorthodox of methods he used, he always either completed the mission or put himself out of commission trying to. All of the -00's did, that tenacity was something they were known and valued for.

In the same vein, they'd all been conditioned to take orders without question. They received their mission and more or less followed the set of objectives given. If things went smoothly, they returned home as planned. If things got rocky, extraction became more uncertain of a concept and the outcome could fall sharply and suddenly. Under the right set of circumstance, it wouldn't be impossible to imagine someone else being able to trigger that trained response in them for their own use. It'd be difficult, absolutely no doubt about that, but anyone could be broken under the right pressure. It was a fact they lived by as well as a quiet fear that went unspoken and was rather twisted and added to their impressive arsenal of useable tools.

Rider though was isolated, tossed into a pit of teenage angst and hormones and expected to maintain a cover that became more and more suspect every time it was used, and seemingly without a single contact to fall back upon. He honestly couldn't believe Child Protective Services hadn't been called yet, consider how often he returned from his 'bouts of illness' with injuries to spare. It was impressive that the boy had done as well as he had for as long as he had.

He kept his tone even while he filled the other man in on what he'd found out. He didn't want to risk copying the highly secure files he'd managed to dig his way into, considering the powers-that-be were already worried about the ridiculously redacted file they'd been given getting out somehow. It didn't matter though, his memory was enough that he was able to hit on all important points over the mission briefs and psych reports that gave a much deeper look into the boy they were to investigate than what they'd been given.

Despite the rush of new information, they were still severely lacking in their knowledge. Both knew first hand just how vague those reports could be in comparison to the full scope of events, and expected they were only looking at the tip of the ice burg. After further discussion, it was agreed that James would spend the next couple of days doing recon before initiating any kind of contact.

Necessary conversation finished, they set their minds about finishing their evening in a more enjoyable way than the rest of the day had gone. James came to stand behind his lithe partner, setting a sparkling glass filled with a deep red liquid on the table before him. While not one to indulge in alcohol near as often as his partner, Q did enjoy a drink every now and then. He reached for the glass with a pleased hum of thanks, bringing it to his nose before his mouth in a long integrated habit left over from a childhood long gone.

He took a slow sip and then set the glass back on the table. James' hands fall to his shoulders and begin rubbing immediately once his arms had relaxed back down. After a second he pulled his black t-shirt off of the smaller man, leaving him bare from the waist up and bring his vibrant tattoo into the soft lighting of their dining area. He began kneading in earnest, firm pressure uncomfortable at first but easing as he transitioned to a much more soothing and sensual massage once the worst of the knots had been forced to loosen.

Q let out a sigh through his nose, slender body slumping gracelessly back into the harder torso of the predator looming over his seated form. James accommodated the shift easily, bringing his hands up over his shoulders and around to his chest, switching his attention to his front and bringing his lips to the sensitive skin beneath Q's jaw. His hands continued to move, dragging almost teasingly across ever more sensitive flesh. Playful fingers dipped boldly beneath the band of his trousers but refused to move any further.

As enjoyable as the ministrations were, Q soon desired more and attempted to turn in the embrace he was held in. James immobilized him immediately and without effort, his arms becoming veritable flesh covered bands of steel while his hands shifted from sensual to vice-like, keeping him in place and at his mercy. The noise he let out was one torn between a combination of what was admittedly partially put-on annoyance and very real arousal. The laugh it brought him was low, husky and aroused in turn as the soft press of lips turned to one with the sharp bite of teeth nibbling on just the right side of pleasurable pain down the sharp line of his spine.

When he was level with the bottom of his tattoo- that is, right above the dip to his lower back, his attention shifted, captivated as it often was by the vibrant colors etched permanently into the otherwise flawless stretch of porcelain skin. It stretched nearly eight centimeters at its widest point, and was more than three times that in length. Though he'd gotten it young, he could never bring himself to regret it.

It was a unique piece he'd designed himself, though he'd gotten some help from the tattoo artist in the details as a whole. It took up nearly half of the skin covering the right side of his back and shoulder, stopping just shy of curving forward and being visible from in front of him. He had what appeared to be several surgically precise incisions dissecting various points across that portion of his back, with a mass of various electronic wiring visible 'beneath' the skin. Each of the 'incisions' had various wires appearing to be coming from them, certain points looking as if the skin was being pushed down by the weight of the wires rising out and then disappearing into various other points of the tattoo. The real skill had come in placing the wires along the natural dips and ridges of his back to give it a much more realistic looking quality. The majority the wiring had been done in black with grey tones for highlight, but vivid dark blues were also prominent and could also easily be seen throughout, helping set apart the amazing amount of detail put into it.

James seemed enthralled with it, even to this day, and often got lost in tracing the lines that seemed to disappear beneath his skin. Sometimes he traced beyond the edge of ink, almost as if he could envision where the wires would run had they been real. Q enjoyed the attention and was hardly going to argue against his fascination, not when it brought about such delicious results.

As he worked his way back up Q's body, his left hand rose in tandem, moving so that he could burry his calloused fingers in the unruly mop of chaotic dark curls that were practically begging to be tugged on. The groan Q released with the first firm tug was even louder than the noises he'd released before, and his arousal strained against the front of his trousers and remained ignored.

The hold James had on him had loosened in his distraction- or perhaps by design, Q realized when he moved to take advantage. He twisted his body around with a graceful motion that intensified the ache coming from his partner's hand still holding a fistful of his curls. He'd expected the increased ache, looked forward to it even, as his blood surged hotly in his veins, as he attempted to take control of their embrace. What he hadn't expected was James to predict his move and rotate his arm with the sudden motion, pulling harder still and somehow maneuvering his much smaller body out of his seat and then up against his own solid chest.

Q's body arched at the hold, rising up onto his tiptoes automatically and James maneuvered him easily, his other hand moving around to grasp at his taunt arse and pull him closer still, manually forcing him to grind his erection against James' own body. The noise that earned him was breathless as Q relaxed fully into the dominating hold. As soon as James felt the change he moved, letting go of his hair and reaching down instead to grasp his narrow hips and lift him free of the floor. Q moaned aloud as the sudden motion caused his manhood to drag up the other man's body as he was lifted, and he brought his legs up to wrap around the other man's waist without protest, arms clasping around his strong neck. He felt another surge of pleasure as James spun him around to press briefly against a blank stretch of wall, ravishing him impatiently then and there.

Q took advantage of the small height advantage he'd gained thanks to the hold, and shifted his body to tease at his partner in turn. Thankfully, not long after, James grew just as impatient as he, and pulled him free from his braced position against the wall. He kept Q held tight to him as he made his way to their shared bedroom, not a gap of air between them. Later, after they finished the more physical aspect of their activities, they fell asleep in much the same way…

Tbc