Sorry it's been so awfully long! Holidays have been crazy at my house but here's a short chapter for you lovely people. Happy late Christmas!
James would have been lying to say that he regretted his actions later.
He never did where Q was concerned.
James came to himself in a deserted corridor deep in the belly of MI6 with his arms tightly around the whippet of a man and the echo of the technician's tiny gasp in his ear. He wasn't horrified exactly, to find himself in such a position. He knew that the pose spoke deeply of need, weakness even, and there was nothing he hated more than appearing weak. But he couldn't quite work up to the freak out this would normally warrant.
It felt nice to have a warm body against his again. It felt even nicer to have one that he wasn't required to sleep with for information, one that wouldn't die soon, sometimes by his own hand.
He sighed but he didn't make a move to let Q go. Instead, he sank slowly to his knees and took his captive with him. Once there, he pulled the Quartermaster into his lap until the smaller man had his skinny arse on the floor between James' crossed legs and his own long legs resting at the small of the agent's back. James didn't loosen his hold on Q. If anything, he gripped him tighter, burying his face where his neck met his shoulder.
For an endless moment the men stayed curled around each other. Somewhere in that moment Q reached one of his trapped hands up and curled it into the small hairs at the back of James' neck.
James didn't pull away.
He reflected on that. Normally, and hand on his neck that wasn't his own set the beast inside him snarling. His instincts were the product of too much training. He, like all the double-ohs, had an acute paranoia so ingrained into them that it became an art. But for whatever reason he trusted the man that the lightly-muscled torso in his arms belonged to.
The Quartermaster exhaled lightly from where his chin was pressed into the top of the agent's head. He would never begrudge James a moment like this. Since the night James had crawled silently in between Q's sheets and let tears soak into the pale flesh of his side, Q had started to care for the older man in his own quiet way.
After a mission, one of many since the technician had sewn up a leg and muffled sobs, he left a key to his apartment on James' desk. Neither spoke when James inevitably appeared in the doorway.
Some mornings, most often when he was recovering from a rough outing and it was difficult to make the walk to the break room, the spy would find a tall thermos of coffee just the way he liked it steaming on his desk. Once, there had been a box of quaint tiny pastries, as if his Quartermaster somehow knew that James had skipped several meals in favor of a bottle.
And many, many times the technician had simply allowed James to crawl into his bed in the early hours of the morning without judgment. He had allowed himself to be wrapped in tight embraces and even more often had been the one giving the embrace.
So Q sat silently while James worked through whatever he needed to in the dark corridor of MI6. Q made it a point never to ask what had the lion of a man nuzzling into his shoulder and James very seldom offered. They remained until the automatic lights had clicked out and then longer still. When the spy finally pulled away with a sigh Q held his gaze.
Slowly, for one had to do just about everything in a cautious manner around James, Q took the agent's head between his palms. He pressed their foreheads together and murmured quite nothings into the space between breaths.
When James pressed up and their lips met the Quartermaster didn't move.
James couldn't have told you why he wanted to kiss the man in his arms.
He could tell you exactly why he wanted to hold and to be held by him, in many different languages. He could wax rhapsodic about the reasons he had first pressed his nose into Q's bare ribs only hours after allowing Q to sew up his leg and tuck him into a different bed. He could even explain, if a bit shakily, why he had found Q's door instead of the many other available. He had spent a lot of nights awake and thinking about it.
But he didn't know why he wanted Q's lips on his own.
Sure, he had spent a lot of time thinking about those lips: the way they became more chapped the longer he was away from London, the way he had found the spot where the Quartermaster had chewed through the skin of his bottom lip after Bond had fallen off his digital maps, the way they would surely taste of the Earl Grey the technician consumed like water, and the way they whitened when Q pressed them together in irritation. James had made a study of Q's lips the way a detective might make a study of cigarette ash.
Never had he imagined them against his own, but now that they were there, he didn't plan to let them go again.