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Q pauses at the cafe door, looking up and down the street before he steps out onto the uneven paving, balancing James’s brimming coffee cup. It’s habit more than anything else: Madame Garnier and her dogs walk by around this time and James has a pocketful of dog biscuits for them. Q had promised the Broussard children help with their tablet so he’s expecting to get mobbed at some point. It only takes a fraction of a second for him to recognize the man walking down toward them.
‘James.’ Q takes a step so he’s between Bond and the oncoming reminder of their past lives.
‘Yes, dear,’ James says absently, biting at the end of the cheap ballpoint he keeps to do the Le Monde crossword. He says it helps him keep his French up to the mark; Q says it’s blatant showing off.
‘You may wish to glance up the street to your right.’ Q puts down James’s coffee and takes his seat, back to the front window of the cafe and in the dim of the faded blue and white awning. James prefers the full sun, and Q feels he really doesn’t have reason to complain when it turns James’s hair to gold and his skin to bronze.
‘May I?’ James looks up at him under his eyebrows and Q can see the change in the line of his shoulders, the sudden tension of his hand holding the folded newspaper.
‘Nothing like that.’
‘Mm.’ James drops the paper on the table and yawns, rather theatrically stretching his arms over his head and twisting himself about in the chair, just like a lazy man who had gotten up late and sat in the sun at a cafe table long enough for a nap to sound like a pleasant idea -- which is more or less exactly what he has been today. He resettles himself facing Q and looks with interest at his coffee. ‘Well, goodness me.’
‘Do you think he’s seen us?’ Q doesn’t realise until he hears himself ask the question that he’s tense, then he can’t think of anything else. It thrums in his chest like a painfully tight wire. He can’t hear the music playing inside the cafe anymore, can’t hear the hiss of the steamer on the espresso machine, can’t hear Marcelline chatting to one of the other regulars -- who had it been anyway? He had spoken to them just a minute ago-- He twitches when James touches his hand.
‘Darling, there’s nothing--’
‘Pardonnez-moi, messieurs, mais je pense que je suis perdu. Je cherche le-- what the fuck.’
James shifts position with feline ease, hooking one arm over the back of his chair and looking up with an expression of elaborate surprise. ‘Good morning, sir. Wasn’t expecting to see you today.’
M’s expression goes through so many changes so quickly that Q can’t follow them all but it ends on bewilderment so pure that he wants to laugh. ‘Bond. What the hell are you--’
‘Having breakfast, sir.’ James lifts his coffee cup in demonstration and downs half of it appreciatively. ‘Or, no, I suppose it’s rather a late lunch now, isn’t it?’ He glances back at Q who makes a play of looking at the watch he isn’t wearing.
‘Very late. You were looking for something? Sir?’ Q doesn’t miss the slight jolt that means M hadn’t even seen him until the moment he spoke. It’s a little deflating but he supposes M has sent enough functionaries to their doom in his time that he’s only the latest in a long list and probably not even the latest any more.
It’s been almost three years since he and James drove their stolen BMW out of the Galician hills towards Bilbao because James remembered a good fish restaurant there.
They hadn’t found the restaurant but they had found new clothes, new phones, and an Internet connection that let Q take charge of the funds they had both left in various accounts in the UK with James taking some pleasure in pointing out to Q how well-justified his passing boast of wealth had been. Q took the liberty of relieving the government of his last paycheck -- with accumulated leave -- as well as Bond’s and then set about deleting their existence in Her Majesty’s dominions.
They had also, Q remembers, found a very comfortable hotel and enough lube to make up for the olive oil several times over.
M is silent for a minute -- a long minute that would have meant danger had this man retained any power over either of their lives but, Q reminds himself, he doesn’t. He doesn’t.
M clears his throat. ‘I, ah.’ He pauses, clears his throat again. ‘Hm. I was rather under the impression that -- that you were dead.’ His gaze rakes over Q as if disappointed to find he was wrong and Q surprises himself by smiling cheerfully back. M can’t expect to lie to his face and get a sensible response. There was no possible way in which M didn’t know they had at least left Spain alive. Why he hadn’t done anything about it -- well, that question has kept Q awake more than one night but James is really very good about finding ways to send him to sleep.
‘Did you.’ James hums and shrugs. ‘Well. We knew you weren’t.’ He lets go of Q’s hand with a squeeze and picks up his coffee cup. ‘Can we offer you a tea?’
‘Tea?’ M glances up at the front of the cafe as if he hadn’t noticed it were there.
‘Marcelline is always happy to show off for English tourists,’ Q chimes in, giving M his best and blandest smile. ‘James spent such a long time teaching her how to brew tea properly.’
‘Marcelline,’ M repeats.
‘I thought it was Henri this morning,’ James says, taking a sip of coffee.
‘They switched shifts, you remember,’ Q says and James snaps his fingers.
‘Ah, the concert. How could I forget.’
‘Memory’s finally going, eh?’ Q tsks, shaking his head. He can feel M watching them and this feels rather like playing a game of catch with something explosive. ‘Bound to happen, I suppose.’
‘All this soft living,’ James agrees, settling back in his chair like a cat on a warm blanket and smiling at Q. ‘Dulled those razor-sharp skills of mine.’
It hasn’t, not one of them: they’re hard-wired at this point, a part of James until the day he dies. ‘Good thing I never loved you for those, then, isn’t it.’ Q leans forward and turns his hand palm-up on the table and James covers it with his own.
‘Very good, I think.’
There’s a strangling noise from beside them and Q glances up. ‘Oh, I am sorry, sir -- was that a yes to the tea, then?’
‘No -- no, I --’ M clears his throat, coughs, clears his throat again. ‘No. Thank you. I -- have to go. I’m -- late. A party. Expecting me.’
‘We mustn’t keep you,’ James agrees affably, making no move to stand up or shake hands or shift his position in any way.
‘Glad to see you looking so well. Sir.’ Q looks up long enough to hold M’s gaze and to his surprise, M flushes and looks away first.
‘Ah, yes, well, thank you. Very kind. And, ah -- and you. Of course. Always good to -- to see -- to see our, ah, our people -- ah -- doing well.’ M licks his lips, swallows hard, then spins on his heel as though called to attention and practically marches back down the street the way he had come.
James doesn’t bother to wait until M is out of earshot before starting to laugh, his fingers tightening around Q’s wrist for a minute before he falls back in his chair and gives himself up to amusement.
Q doesn’t feel quite like laughing -- his nerves haven’t decided which way they want to jump just yet -- but he does want to know something. ‘James. When you’re quite through cackling like a panto villain.’
James takes a deep breath and gives himself a shake, then turns back to Q, still grinning broadly. ‘Yes, my love.’
‘How the hell did the head of British intelligence come to be walking down a tiny street in a tiny village fifty kilometers outside of Paris?’
‘You heard him. He was lost.’
‘James.’ Q does his best to look unimpressed but honestly, he’s having a bit of a hard time holding the expression because he’s starting to realise what he mostly feels is intense relief, sharp and all-consuming, like running cold water over a burn.
James shrugs and picks up his cup. ‘I may have allowed one or two people to understand where we were.’
‘You may have,’ Q echoes flatly and James nods, finishing his coffee.
‘Mm.’ James drops the cup back on the saucer with a clink. ‘It hasn’t escaped my notice, darling, that you have been -- mm -- what shall I say? Jumpy? Of late? Since we stopped being wanderers in the world.’
Really it hadn't been wandering so much as what Q had dubbed their twenty-first century Grand Tour but with the debauchery cheerfully planned in, rather than shamefully sought after.
After the stop in Bilbao, James had turned the car northeast because that was the direction it had been parked on the street outside the hotel. Until they came across this tiny little place in the Vexin outside of Paris, they had chosen their route more or less at random, going through Q’s blurry memory of his gap year on the Eurostar and James’s much less blurry memory of places where he definitely hadn’t done covert, dangerous, and possibly illegal things for Queen and country.
‘And you thought seeing our old boss would make that better,’ Q says, putting as much scepticism as he can into his voice.
James raises an eyebrow, reaches across the table, and takes both Q’s hands, squeezing them hard. ‘We brought ourselves here and we keep ourselves here and there’s nothing he can do about any of that.’
‘James--’ Q is horrified to realise he’s almost on the edge of tears. Not that Bond hasn’t seen him cry before because, of course, he has, but Q doesn’t even know why--
‘And if I’m being entirely honest,’ James continues with a slightly harsher tone, ‘I wanted the brute to see you.’
‘Showing off to your ex,’ Q says, a slight tremor in his voice because M is gone and even if he were to come back, there’s nothing he can do to them. He can’t make Q go back to those men who tried to beat secrets out of him with blunt objects; he can’t make James go back to a life where a bomb in his car boot is a reasonable daily possibility. M can’t make them leave each other because they chose each other, he and James, and this is the life they have made. Q blinks across the table at Bond and resists the instinct to gasp for breath like a surfacing swimmer. ‘Fuck. James, he -- he’s gone. He’s gone.’
‘He’s gone,’ James agrees. ‘He’s gone and he won’t be back.’
Q shuts his eyes, gathering James’s hands in his and pressing them to his forehead, then to his lips. He feels James wiggle a thumb free and press the pad of it to the center of Q’s lower lip, a spot James is particularly fond of.
‘He’s gone and we’re here and fuck anything else,’ James says softly when Q opens his eyes again, blinking tears away.
‘Fuck anything else,’ Q says as firmly as he can, keeping James’s hands between his own and James smiles at him, warm across the table in the late summer sunshine.