Author: ShadowInTheLight

Winner Winner

Food day was yesterday but here have this anyway. Also for anyone wondering about the incredibly vague meal Q is making it’s actually this recipe made by one of our very own so go check that out

Contrary to popular belief, Q actually does know how to cook. He’s lived on his own for a long time, far longer than he’s been Quartermaster or worked for MI6 that’s for sure, so it’s only natural he’s learned to be self-reliant. He might not be the culinary artist that James seems to be in the kitchen, but he more than gets by.

It’s something James doesn’t find out right away, which seems impossible with how long they’ve been together. In fact, it’s something he learns through sheer coincidence more than anything else, an event set into motion by James showing up unexpectedly from a rare mission gone right, intending to do the surprising and ending up the surprised.

The flat smells amazing, and James would be tempted to think Q’s simply phoned in dinner if not for the clear sound of dishes and pots clanging around.

He doesn’t know what he expects to see, only that Q standing over the cooker — barefoot and dressed in a pullover two sizes too big — bouncing on the balls of his feet as he uses the flat of a knife to slide neatly chopped tomatoes into a frying pan isn’t it.

Q notices him a beat later and freezes, caught out, with the knife and chopping board hovering awkwardly in his hands.

He blinks, mouth dropped open into a tiny, silent ‘oh’.

“I didn’t know you were home.”

“I didn’t know you could cook.”

Q smirks wryly. “Well, look at us, keeping each other on our toes.” The oiled pan pops loudly, it’s contents sizzling dangerously, and then Q is turning again, attention once more on the pots in front of him.

And James — James leans against the countertop and waits, content to simply sit and watch. Q in action is a sight to see, all casual, confident movements and sharp focus as he glides seamlessly from one step to the next. It’s beautiful.

Q is beautiful.

It’s over far too quickly. Q’s just beginning to finish up, adding and stirring thin slices of chicken into the large saucepan when James finally pushes himself to stand and set the table. The food looks just as good as it smells once it’s set and plated, and James makes sure to say so.

Q shrugs, avoiding his eyes as he pokes at his plate. The tips of his ears burn just the slightest shade of red. “It’s just pasta.”

“And here I thought all you could do was boil water,” James teases.

Q’s nose wrinkles in displeasure and just like that his embarrassment is forgotten. “I’m lazy, not incompetent.”

James takes a bite and finds he agrees.

It becomes a regular thing after that, until wandering out into the kitchen to find Q already at the chopping board or standing over the hot cooker becomes a familiar sight. It only takes a handful of times before James is sliding in next to him, rolling up his sleeves, reaching for a knife of his own and pretending not to be affected by Q’s surprised little smile as they get to work.

That quickly becomes a regular thing too.

The rest of it comes naturally, with the two of them falling easily and comfortably into their new routine. It should worry him — the sudden change their relationship takes from then on — James keeps waiting for it to, but he can’t find it in him to care quite so much when Q is laughing and darting away from him, disrupting the cats and leaving puffs of white everywhere he goes to escape from James’ flour-covered hands. Nor when he stands, hands at his hips, and unashamedly argues with James over spices in the middle of the market.

Certainly not when he’s dressed down, wearing nothing but a thin shirt and tracksuit bottoms that aren’t his own as he stands in the delightfully smelling kitchen, face warm and ruddy-cheeked from the heat.

No, James thinks as he sits at the table, he isn’t worried at all. Across from him, Q smiles.

They eat.

And Then There Were Six

Martin is the first to join their little family. A small grey thing that’s got trouble written all over him from where he peers up at Q with too large eyes, unfitting for his tiny body, which is only made smaller by the large hands cradling him. James looks ridiculously pleased with himself as he presents the kitten, completely ignoring Q’s insistence that he doesn’t have the time to take care of another cat, let alone one that’s still so young.

But then James is pushing the little bundle into his arms where it meows and bats curiously up at him with clumsy paws, and that, as they say, is that.

It happens again years later, once they’ve moved in together and established a steady routine both at home and at work. The adoption is unexpected, and when James opens the door to their home he freezes at the rapid click, click, click of excited paws tapdancing against the floor — too heavy to belong to any of the cats, even the giant ball of fluff Q insists is just ‘well feed’.

He turns the corner. And stops.

The dog isn’t so much massive as it is stocky, all muscled chest and wrinkles, and, most importantly, wrapped in a large union jack flag. Beside it is Q of all people, grinning as he spreads out his arms and steps aside in some grand showing as he lets out a happy ‘surprise!’ Surprise indeed.

It’s ridiculous and sentimental but —

Jack stays, and their family grows a little bigger.

(Later that night, with Q curled against him and the telly on, James looks at Jack and can’t help but snort. M would approve)

WIP Wednesday

A Skyfall fix-it of sorts that I’ve been silently agonizing over for almost three months now. 

Q looks worlds better already, bandaged as he is, with hair drying into dark curls around a pale face and wrapped in warm sheets as his breathing finally evens out from the stuttering, pained ones he’d been struggling to take not two hours before.

They move him about easily in quick, practiced motions before they wheel him out. Bond trails lazily behind, watching closely for any signs of distress, but not once does Q react to the jostling. He considers, briefly, following them the rest of the way to medical.

It doesn’t feel right to leave him now. Partly because Bond can’t imagine Q wanting to wake up blurry eyed and alone in the hands of strangers and partly because the helicopter ride wasn’t quite long enough to flush out the adrenaline pulsing through him that tells him Q is to be protected. 

He spares one last look before peeling away. 

Q is in capable hands, strangers or no, and Bond has more pressing matters to attend.

He catches up with M at the tunnel’s entrance. She looks immaculately put together — rumpled clothes notwithstanding — eyes hard and mouth drawn into a tight line and once again looking every bit the head of MI6 that she is. 

Tanner, already at her side from the instant they arrived, looks very much the same, grim faced and speaking in hushed tones as he leads them confidently down one winding hallway after another.

“How’s our rat problem?” Bond asks. 

Tanner reaches into his pocket, pulling out a phone and waving it wordlessly in Bond’s direction until he grabs it.

“Taken care of. Q’s program did most of the work for us, really. Two in Q-branch and another in Accounting,” he supplies as Bond flicks his way through names and faces of people who look only vaguely familiar. “Just the three.” 

“Four,” Bond corrects.

Eve Moneypenny stares up at him from the screen.

WIP Wednesday

Bond giving Q a kitten and somehow convincing him to name it Martin because it’s grey, and sleek, and fast, and “it’s wonderful, Q, just adit it. You love it.”

“I’m not naming him Martin.”

He names him Martin.

“How’s our son?” He says casually, leaning up against Q’s desk and politely ignoring the sudden clattering of fallen equipment behind them.

“Collin,” Amara hisses, swatting his arm so hard he actually flinches back. It’s a minion, one Bond isn’t familiar enough with to recognize by name, but who’s face he remembers repeatedly flitting over in his quests for Q.

“Sorry,” he stutters, cheeks flushing and eyes widening behind wide frames as he rushes forward to gather the tools he’s dropped.

Q shakes his head at the commotion, not once looking away from his monitor, but his eyes flicker briefly to Bond before he turns away, reaching out blindly as he types one-handed to grasp at his phone. It’s just out of his reach. Bond leans forward just enough to slide it further so it nudges against Q’s fingers.

He types one last line of code that Bond has no hope of understanding and then the screen goes black.

“Dreadful,“ Q answers, finally, attention now on his phone as he swipes and taps away. “He’s pulled the curtains down on his own head twice already, learned how to get into my drawers, and doesn’t listen to a word I say. He gets that from you,” he adds disdainfully when he looks up and spots Bond’s pleased smile, then shoves his phone in Bond’s direction until he catches the hint and inches closer to make out what he’s supposed to be seeing.

When he finally does, he huffs a laugh. It’s Martin, buried beneath the drapes and caught in the middle of meowing mournfully up at the camera.

“Clever little thing, and absolutely beautiful.” He grins widely, turning to face Q and not making a single move to put respectable distance between them. “He gets those from you.”

Just Ideas June

That one self-indulgent amnesia fic that no one but me asked for.

Bond’s been gone for six long months, off making a new life with Madeleine Swann god knows where doing god knows what, when he stumbles back into Six. He’s bloody, bruised, and looking worse than he did even after the trainwreck that was Skyfall, with no car, no Madeleine, and no memory of the last seven years.

And that’s how they find themselves stuck with a James Bond who’s fresh off the death of Vesper and the dismantling of Quantum, and worryingly fixated on the new Quartermaster who took less than five minutes to figure out he wasn’t quite right.

SPECTRE Timeline

midrashic:

Some assumptions have been made. Most importantly, the timeline has been compressed whenever possible; if no night scene takes place between scenes, it is assumed those scenes take place on the same day. Travel time is not taken into account but honestly London, Italy, and Austria aren’t that far apart. Austria to Morocco is a little dicier, as is how Bond and Madeleine got to London in a stolen helicopter from the North African desert, but those are plot holes for a greater woman than me to fix.

  • November 2: The Day of the Dead is actually a three-day celebration. The last day, corresponding to All Souls’ Day, is actually called el Día de los Muertos, though the name also refers to the whole holiday. In real life, the parade might take place before the actual holiday; the first Day of the Dead Parade in the real Mexico City was on October 29. For simplicity’s sake and because this is fiction we’ll assume that the parade actually takes place on the day itself.
  • November 3: Bond gets back to London and is immediately chewed out, because I can’t imagine M letting him continue to fuck around after… all that happened. Moneypenny comes over that night.
  • November 4: Q injects the smart-blood tracker.
  • November 5: In the morning, Q finds the car stolen. Bond attends the funeral, saves Lucia Sciarra’s life, and then attends the SPECTRE meeting at midnight.
  • November 6: In the evening in Japan (which means midday in Austria), C votes on the Nine Eyes measure. Tanner and M get the news that the Aston was pulled out of the Tiber, about twelve hours after Bond’s street race, which seems like a reasonable length of time to recover a submerged car. Bond visits Mr. White that afternoon.
  • November 7: Bond fucks around, I guess. In London, Q is probably getting chewed out all day. Alternatively, he hops on a train to Austria, which will take him about 20 hours.
  • November 8: The Hoffler Klinik. Bond tells Madeleine her father died “two days ago.” South Africa is bombed. Bond and Madeleine leave for Tangier and L’Americain. That evening/early in the morning of the 9th, Bond finds the secret room.
  • November 9: Nine Eyes is passed. On the train, Bond and Madeleine talk about self-defense. That evening, Moneypenny and Q beg M to help Bond. Mr. Hinx attacks.
  • November 10: Bond and Madeleine arrive, blow up the facility, steal a helicopter, and get back to London (somehow). That evening, Nine Eyes is set to go online at midnight. The events on Westminster Bridge happen around or just after midnight. It could be argued that the events in London happen on November 11th, giving Bond and Madeleine more time to get back and letting Blofeld’s wounds heal a little, but again, compression.
  • Bond retrieving the Aston could happen anytime after November 10th, but it’s probably at least a week given that the Aston was a, uh, hot mess on November 4th.

Effects of Retirement 2

castillon02:

Notes: Bond’s first retirement trip after Spectre. Technically a prequel to Effects of Retirement, showing the first pic from Bond’s POV, but you don’t need to have read it. For the mi6cafe prompt ‘Spirits.’ 

“What do you usually do when you’ve finished a mission?” Madeleine asked while James drove them back to the hotel they’d been staying in. He listened carefully for any breaks in the purr of the Aston’s engine, but she ran as smooth as butter and felt silky and solid beneath his hands. Q had done a fine job of restoring the old girl. 

He and Madeleine had needed their few weeks of recovery in the hotel, as much as he hated to admit it. Time for the cuts and bruises to heal, time for the bloody brain damage to be assessed, time for Madeleine to stop waking in the night with memories of violence, time for Bond to stop drinking himself to sleep in order to prevent the same thing. 

They did a lot of walking around London. Madeleine caught up on her professional journals. Bond made a lot of scrambled eggs and read a lot of suspense novels. Reading gave him a headache now, and he was much slower at it, but the brain was plastic, Madeleine had said after assessing Bond’s neurological functions. Her professional opinion was that all Bond needed was some retraining. 

Bond had had lots of injuries. He knew about retraining. If he sometimes threw a book at a wall because the words were too slow to make sense, he always picked it back up again and managed to stare the thing into submission. 

Now they were hale and healthy, ready for adventures beyond a book’s pages. As much as he wanted to take his new-old Aston for a spin around the country, he also wanted…well, the usual. “I tend to go somewhere tropical,” Bond said. “Swim, drink, have sex. Relax.” 

“Let’s do that, then,” Madeleine said. “A transition. You still have time to decide where you want that transition to lead to.” She eyed him. 

Bond ran a hand down his whiskery jaw. “I always need mission specs after the tropics,” he confessed. “But they don’t need to be Six’s mission specs. I just need to learn how to set my own parameters.” He’d never been good at being his own boss. 

Madeleine nodded. “We can work on that,” she said. 

*** 

The first thing he and Madeleine did in Freeport was make their way to the beach and order the fruitiest rum drinks they could find. The second thing they did was people watch. 

“She’s cute,” Madeleine said, nodding at a dark-haired tourist with a perky little arse that she obviously didn’t mind showing off. 

The sex last night had felt like goodbye, but even so, James stared at her in disbelief. “Did you just skip the breakup and go straight to wingmanning me?”

Madeleine shrugged. “If you don’t want her, I’ll try my luck,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking for something else?” She glanced at the bare-chested bartender; he had a swimmer’s muscles and a pouty pair of lips. Not bad at all. 

“Maybe,” James admitted. “Here, take a picture.” He handed his mobile to Madeleine. “To James Bond, retired.” He held his fruity glass in the air as if in a toast and heard the ‘click’ of the photo being taken. “I’ll have to send it to Tanner; he’s running the book on when I’ll be back, and he says he wants proof that I’m doing things that aren’t killing people.” 

“Hmm,” Madeleine said. “Sounds like a man of little faith.” 

“Or a man who knows me too well,” James said, trying not to sound bitter. He’d been in this place before. Every time after a mission, there came the thought: why go back? Why do it all over again? And every time, he returned to Six like a homing pigeon, because he needed a purpose and he was shite at coming up with one himself. 

Madeleine smiled. “Have you bet on yourself yet?” she asked. 

“What?” 

“You’re a man who doesn’t like to lose,” Madeleine said. “Especially when you gamble. I think that if you bet on yourself, you’d figure out a way to keep from losing.”  

“That’s not a bad idea,” James admitted. He could probably talk Tanner into it. He raised his fruity glass again. “To mind-tricks, then.” 

Madeleine tapped her pineapple ring against his. “To new beginnings,” she corrected. “Full of possibility.” She glanced again at the perky tourist, at the bartender. 

James let his eyes linger on the square line of the bartender’s jaw, the smooth curves of his pronounced pectorals, the flirtatious glances of his dark eyes—all very beautiful, but also very different from what he’d have fancied if he were home. (Tall, dark, nerdy, witty; he had a type.) He would never go for this if he were in London; times were better now, but he’d been raised not to take a big gay shit where he ate. 

Of course, he wasn’t in London, and he wasn’t exactly employed any longer. What was anyone going to do? Fire him? Try to blackmail him at the job he no longer had? Call him a slur so that Bond had an excuse to ‘accidentally’ trip them into a wall a few times? 

“I think I’ll get another drink,” James said, knocking the rest of his glass back in a long, sweet swallow. He walked towards the bartender with purpose. 

It was time to start living life for himself instead of his country. 

***