Time.
Happens.
To think.
Back in London, back at work, his passionate idyll over and done with, his arse pleasantly sore still, Q thinks.
Thinks, thinks, thinks and then ponders.
But then James Bond is returned to HQ in just two days, his mission accomplished.
The Jag is mostly intact and so is the gun. He's even managed to retain his tracker, 007. The pen, however, had quite fortunately exploded itself, right along with the latest villain.
Q thinks. He masticates concepts, ideas and theories like a gourmand, poking them, turning them over, examining all sides for texture and flavour and, ah? 'Doneness.' That ineluctable state of being just right.
Just right. James is a very flexible man, all 'round. Quick thinking, adaptable. Not up to the par of a Holmes, naturally but, then again, very few are. Given enough time and the inclination to parse it out, James would likely arrive at the inevitable conclusion anyway.
Well…maybe. Q scowls at his tea, gone cold by his elbow. Possibly not. He resembles Papa, as does Sherly. But really it goes back a generation, or maybe more, as H. sapiens sapiens tend to run.
No…yes…oh, fuck, likely. James would sort it, given just a few more hints and clues and evidence. Q's not chosen to fall headlong for any common garden sort of idiot. Never.
Thing is, Q's an MI6 agent also, even if he disdains the legwork aspect of it and abhors the field (and of course aeroplanes and queues on the Tube and really any sort of extraneous travel, excepting always cabbing). And secret agents, by definition, tend to keep their secrets. And Holmes's, by definition, tend to keep their own secrets very well, indeed. All of them, the whole bloody clan. Mumchance, like bloody mutes, even, and poker-faced enough to win consistently at all manner of card games.
But…Q wants James. He does so want James, and not just as 007, or because Bond, or anything like that. Nonsense, all of it; Q is decidedly not a fangirl. No, he truly wants the man, as in requires, craves and hankers after. In a whole differing way, and a brilliantly perpendicular attitude.
The crux, then? Mummy and Bond. Bond and Mummy (and then there's Papa. And let's not even consider his horribly interfering, terribly overprotective brothers, and their accompanying lot. No, let's not.)
Fine, then, as there's no help for it. Cards on the table. Smoking gun, disassembled. James, possibly (probably?) quite receptive?
The alternative really doesn't bear thinking of. It gives Q the cold creeps and sends him into fœtal, just the idea of it popping into his great brain. He casts it out again, right smart. Despicable idea!
Right then.
Next opportunity, Q will be cornering James and popping the next burning question he has been keeping fast in his mental 'to-do' list, all and only for the benefit of that impossible, improbable man he wishes to retain a proprietary interest in. (Real, real, real and so much real it's painful.) And it will likely be a bit of bang-up, drag-it-out, all 'round bomb in the making, even despite Mummy's best sherry, even despite Papa's consummate skill with the joint-and-the-mash, and every single one of them will just end up bloody choking on emotional shrapnel amongst the tinsel, but then they'll also like manage to muddle through it, when it's done and over. Although likely James will then take to watching over Q like the bloody raptor he would be, if he were a bird. Thank god he's not. And poking back, naturally, and pestering Q for the rest of their natural born days, if Q lets him. Which he shan't, or at least not intend to, but then James is a very determined chap. So…he might. Q's siblings have certainly caved unilaterally to the wishes, wants and inquiries from their better halves, drat and blast them. Spineless gits. This is what age-and-stage does to one, isn't it?
Q doesn't suffer from that malady, but James? James, at half again Q's age, he might.
And James will want to know everything, every damned detail, if only because his job of work, and if Mummy doesn't tell and Papa steps around it, as he so often seems to do with the more 'difficult' of issues, then it will be up to Q to intervene and reveal all. He'll be bloody forced to, by ethics and for James's stupid Scottish tendency to have things all squared up. And as James will be curious, and as it seems new information always seems to spawn new lines of inquiry, sod it all, and most definitely for the fucking perspicacious spy Q's fucking. Very determined, James is. Q should know. No—Q does know. But, despite that?
No, more it's 'besides' that—it's bloody Christmas. Christmas coming, but once a fucking year.
And besides that….Mummy.
Mummy!
Q misses several 'next' opportunities to bring up his proposal for James, in that the man should tag along to Christmas dinner at Q's family home, but somehow can't bring himself to mind it that he doesn't. Something about having fingers or tongues or pricks in his mouth and thus removing the practicality of saying much of anything to anyone intelligibly, that's it. And since 'pillow talk' for James is generally not a thing, and the pillows they employ for their sexual shenanigans and exploits are usually neither soft, nor flat, nor private—being the wall of the laboratory lav at HQ or the minuscule back seat of the Jag in a lay-by on the M5, or, rather memorably, him being bent over his own messy desk in his own private office in the terribly wee hours of some workday—Q doesn't get the actual words spoken aloud in James's hearing till just two measly days before the big event horizon comes dawning.
"Wouldn't miss it," is all James says to him, and proceeds to finish finger-fucking Q to nirvana. That would be in the loo at Tesco's.
Q doesn't even have the mental wherewithal left over after to reply politely to James's acceptance of the his invite with that universal phrase, most often used to signify his august family's intense pleasure over any random and/or most fortuitous outcome: 'Good.'