Chapter Text
“You’re doing it wrong.”
James shot him a flat look, before asking with such copious amounts of sarcasm that the question was no longer a question, “There’s a wrong way to put candles on a cake.”
Q, because he was the mature adult human being of this relationship, ignored the non-question and made a grab for the candles, only to be thwarted by the brute of a partner he’d been foolish enough to choose. “There shouldn’t be, but somehow you’re managing it. You truly are a marvel, 007.”
“Sarcasm will get you nowhere, Q.” Before Q could bring up what else would be going nowhere (hint: it involved their sex life), James continued, “Besides, we all agreed that you were not allowed near the cake after the frosting incident.”
“That was months ago,” he protested, making another swipe for the candles and failing yet again as James held them just out of his reach. The bastard. “Besides, the principle behind it was sound. I didn’t hear you protesting, in any case.”
“If you need Uncle James to stop you from implementing bad ideas, then we’re all in trouble,” Richelle pointed out from where she sat at the kitchen table, watching her two guardians bicker. It was not an unusual occurrence. “Besides, he’s right. You did promise.”
Q glared at her, while James took advantage of his momentary distraction to complete his task of desecrating the cake. “Traitor.”
She hummed, a sound eerily reminiscent of Jim when he was trying to drive Q crazy. It used to make him flinch just slightly, like having his brother back in the room again, but he had become used to it over the last few years. Richelle wasn’t Jim, as much as she sometimes looked like him. She was herself, and that was fine. They were fine. “I’m just pointing out what happened, Uncle Richard. I mean, you don’t want to spend the entire weekend cleaning the kitchen like last-”
“Yes, thank you very much for that, Richelle,” he cut off as James smirked at him. He responded by throwing the towel into his partner’s face, the loving gesture just unexpected enough for James not to react in time. Either that or the agent was humoring him, as they both knew who was the one who built and distributed the tech. Not that Q would ever be so petty (or unprofessional) as to retaliate by sending James off on a dangerous mission with a non-functioning weapon, but there were other ways of making his displeasure known. Like the time he had put sparkly Hello Kitty stickers on 007’s no longer quite standard-issue radio transmitter. For the oddest reason James hadn’t believed him when he said that Richelle had got into his things, even though he had bribed his niece with enough chocolate to rot her teeth (he had tried offering her a new seal doll, but Richelle was already proving to be a terribly proficient negotiator) to back up his claims.
At times like that, it occurred to Q that maybe he should be trying to set a better example for her, really he should. It didn’t help that he knew he wasn’t cut out for this parenting business, and neither was James. They were both used to having been on their own for most of their lives, and had developed bad habits like working for days without sleep (or food, in his case) and failing to inform people that they were not actually dead, thank you very much. It had already been difficult changing their patterns to accommodate each other when they had started their relationship, despite working together and having such intimate knowledge of what sacrifices intelligence work required. The level of trust that was needed to truly be together was something neither was used to, and they’d both had secrets that were not easily revealed.
Adding a child to that mix had been near impossible, although once again James had taken the news of Richelle’s existence rather well. It probably helped that Q was still himself in a mild state of shock, making it difficult for James to get too upset over another previously unknown family member. Q still wouldn’t have blamed the agent for deciding that this was too much to handle, but James Bond had always been loyal to a fault. It was one of the things he so admired about the man, while at the same time worrying that it would be the death of 007. (Not that it ever would, as long as he had anything to do about it.)
So James had stayed, moving in not too long after. Together, they had done their best to raise Q’s niece, and honestly Q didn’t know what would have happened if he’d had to do it on his own. James was good with people – it would be difficult to do his job if he wasn’t – in a way that Q most definitely could not match, and his partner had settled into an easy rhythm with Richelle quite early on. Q and Richelle, in contrast, had spent a great deal of time during their early weeks dancing around each other, unsure of what barriers there were and where they were located. It reached the point where Q took to being slumped in the toilets (decidedly preferable to the psych department), wailing about how he was screwing up Richelle’s life and how she was definitely going to end up as a terrorist or worse, a politician because he didn’t know how to properly raise a child.
“Q, nobody knows how to raise a child,” Tanner had reminded him after Eve had sent the Chief of Staff over to deal with his seventeenth mental breakdown. “You just muddle through it the best you can, and that’s all you can really do.”
It wasn’t necessarily the most useful advice, but it was the most honest. As Q settled down into two unfamiliar roles – parenthood and partnership – some things began to change, like Q relinquishing just enough control over his department so that he could get home at a decent hour to help Richelle with her schoolwork (not that she really needed it, but it made him feel useful) and let her tell him about her day. Some things didn’t change though, like terrorists creating problems on Christmas day because terrorists didn’t care that he had a family to look out for. And that was what they were, really. Family.
The concept had taken time for him to get used to because family… well, family in his mind wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He’d loved his parents, of course, but there was always a distance created by their knowledge that something was not quite right about their oldest son. After they had died, his only family had been Jim, someone who was there whether he liked it or not – and it was usually not. Then, family often felt like an obligation, especially considering the fear he carried with him for so long about what his brother would be doing next. He’d loved Jim too, loved him as only a brother could, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t truly terrified of the man. Jim knew how to destroy him, to burn the heart right out of him, and sometimes he did not know what (if anything) stopped his brother from doing just that.
In contrast, the family he had now was not one that he had been born into; it was one that he had made for himself. It wasn’t the most conventional of families, and it wasn’t even remotely normal because normal wasn’t a word in the vocabulary of MI6’s quartermaster and England’s most notorious double-o agent (it said a lot about their family when the most normal person was the daughter of a deceased, internationally wanted terrorist, although luckily Jim’s penchant for skinning people was not genetic – he had always suspected that Moran was a bad influence on his brother). But it was more far normal than the one he’d once had because at least they weren’t trying to kill each other or ruin each other’s lives.
And he wouldn’t have given it up for anything in the world, especially when he picked up the absolutely ruined cake and James wrapped strong arms around his waist. It made it difficult to walk but he didn’t care, the warmth of his partner at his back as they made their way to the table where Richelle was trying (and failing) to conceal her excitement.
Because his niece had missed out on so many milestones, like birthdays and Christmas and other things he was reliably informed normal people celebrated, Q and James had decided to compensate by celebrating… other things. It was probably unnecessary, and she was no doubt reaching the age where she would be properly embarrassed by their antics and spend most of her time locked in her room composing angsty poetry or smut about fictional characters, but until that point he was going to make the most of the time they had.
He somehow managed to set the cake down rather than dropping it, straightening with James’s comforting presence behind him. He imagined the look on his face was disgustingly soppy, and no doubt James’s was as well as Richelle looked up at them with a happiness he hadn’t thought possible when she had first shown up, not able to trust anyone in this world.
“Happy two-year anniversary,” Q said, still unable to believe that this was his life, that it had been two years since she had arrived at his front door with a suitcase. It had been far from perfect, and it would continue to not be perfect as the years went on, but that didn’t matter now. He ruffled her hair, a motion he had hated when Jim did it but she still adored, and continued, “I’m glad you’re here, Richelle.”
“I am too,” she said with a soft, sincere smile, before blowing out the candles.
Q woke up to darkness and a truly exquisite pain in his head.
“Oh,” he said, and the word was muffled by the gag in his mouth. “Buggering shit.”
“Uncle Richard?” Richelle asked quietly, and he felt like the ground had dropped out from beneath him. She didn’t sound very scared – which was more than made up by his own fear because she wasn’t supposed to be involved, she was never supposed to be involved, but apparently his intent mattered little to the realities of this world – but more irritated as she informed him, “There is a man with a gun. He is being very rude.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Normally, Q would have been more concerned about what James would say about his getting kidnapped again, even if he tried to tell his partner that it didn’t happen quite as often as the agent made it out to be. After all, he had managed to rescue himself eighty-three percent of the time, which wasn’t bad considering how he was still being underestimated as a skinny, helpless boffin who would scream and faint at the mere sight of blood. However, normally his niece would not be here with him, and the thought of what people were capable of almost made him want to return to the darkness, except there was no way he was going to be leaving Richelle to deal with this alone.
“Is he awake?” an unfamiliar voice asked. He heard and felt movement, as he could not see anything, and closed his eyes quickly as the blindfold was taken off. Q waited until the gag was removed as well before slowly opening his eyes, trying not to visibly wince at the harsh, artificial light.
The room they were in was small, with no windows and only one exit. There were four men, one of which indeed had a gun. He did not aim it at Richelle, but considering his close proximity to her, the intent was clear.
Q swallowed, automatically ready to start with the ground rules but voice dying as Richelle was pushed forward towards him. She quickly went to his side, although she did not move behind the chair he was inconveniently tied to. Q wasn’t sure if he should be admiring her courage or yelling at her to hide herself because this wasn’t her problem, this wasn’t her fight, and she shouldn’t be here.
The problem, of course, was that she was here, and that changed the ground rules considerably.
The man who he assumed was The Boss – he certainly was the largest, most confident, and most stupid looking of the men, at least – stepped forward, pleased as he could be. Q wanted dearly to disabuse the man of that notion, but seeing how he was the one tied to a chair and with his niece at their mercy, he had to admit that he was at a slight disadvantage. “I’m very sorry for the discomfort,” the man said, in a tone that rather suggested otherwise, “but we find ourselves in need of your assistance.”
“That won’t happen unless you let her go,” he replied flatly, ignoring the way her fingers dug into his arm. “She’s not involved in this, and you had no right to bring her-”
“Of course she’s involved, she’s a Moriarty.”
“-here, and I cannot believe you would… what?” Q blinked. It took a moment for this information to process, and then he let out a loud groan. “Oh for goodness… you cannot be serious. This is about my brother? Again?!”
He just managed to not ask how it was that even now, more than two years after he had died, Jim was still able to cause so much trouble for him. It was truly insane. “What is it this time? You’re a little late for revenge, seeing how he’s been dead for a while. Or haven’t you got the newsletter?”
The man lost some of his smugness, but compensated for it by spitting out (literally – Q could see the flecks of spittle flying, and it was not a pleasant sight at all), “Of course we know he’s dead. We also know that someone has spent the last two years dismantling his network, but they haven’t got everything yet. His connections, his passwords, his accounts and information… whatever is left, we want all of that, and you are going to give it to us.”
For fuck’s sake, had they really been kidnapped by a group of fanboys? James was going to laugh himself sick when he found out about this, and then Q was going to have to kill him and be a single parent, and no good would come of that. He decided, even though he knew it would do nothing, to try and appeal to reason. “And what on earth makes you think I have that information to begin with?”
The man frowned. “You’re his brother,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“Yes, but honestly, I still haven’t figured out why you people seem to think that means something when I can assure you, it clearly does not.”
It appeared that appealing to reason was not a very effective strategy, given the slap to the face. It didn’t hurt as much as it could have, and in fact Richelle’s tightening grip on his arm was perhaps even more painful, but the rapid escalation to violence was definitely not a good sign. “You will give us the information!”
“And I already told you, I don’t have that information,” he said as calmly as he could. He might not have good self-preservation instincts, but he wasn’t the only one at risk here. “We might have been brothers, but I was never involved in his… operations.” Operations seemed like a nice, safe word, seeing how he had never actually told Richelle what Jim had done and why he had died. He sometimes suspected that she already knew, or at least had some idea, because she had never asked. He had a feeling that after today though, they might finally have to have that talk he had been hoping to put off until the next of never.
Q winced as he earned another slap, this one more painful than the last. It was quickly becoming apparent that he had underestimated how determined (how desperate) these men were, which made him wonder exactly what their connection to Jim was. Perhaps they were remnants of his brother’s organization, trying to stay one step ahead of the detective who had brought their boss down. He doubted they would last very long; Sherlock Holmes seemed very determined, after all.
“You know,” Richelle said, her voice soft but dangerous, “you are making a very big mistake.”
“Tell the girl to shut up, Moriarty,” the man snarled, although he looked slightly perturbed by the look she was giving him. Q couldn’t blame him; as superficially pleasant as Jim could be, people tended to go silent and back away quickly when his brother dropped that façade. It was as if on some sort of animal instinct, one could tell that he was a danger, and that care needed to be applied (although it was never a guarantee of survival). Sometimes he could see that part of Jim in Richelle, that look that made one question whether or not he would be surviving to the next day. It wasn’t deliberate, and really it was something in every person (he saw it often enough in himself, as well as the double-o agents who had to dig so deep into that part of themselves to survive their missions), but he imagined it was still discomforting to behold in one so young.
His failure to quickly obey resulted in a third slap, and Richelle said angrily, “You shouldn’t hit him.”
“You should shut up then.”
“I’m not the one being suicidal,” she replied before Q could say anything at all. Her grip was still tight on his arm, but that was nothing compared to his rising terror as she continued, “And I really would stop that if I was you. Otherwise, Uncle James is not going to be very pleased with you.”
“Who the fuck is-”
That sentence was never finished because, as if to prove her point, said Uncle James came bursting through the door. Everyone’s attention had been so focused on Richelle that they were completely unprepared to deal with this new threat, and 007 was most certainly efficient. It didn’t take long at all before there were groaning men on the ground, James checking their bleeding, twitching bodies for additional weaponry as Richelle immediately went to work on his bonds, her deft fingers struggling with the tight knots.
“I can’t believe you got kidnapped again,” James said by way of greeting, having relieved the men of any shiny yet dangerous objects they might have possessed. “It’s like a bad habit with you. And now you’re teaching it to Richelle. For shame.”
Q scowled at him, “You’re just jealous because I’m more valuable than you.”
“Of course you are,” James said soothingly, causing Q to bare his teeth at the agent. It was easy for James to be so smug when he was tied to a bloody chair, but if he had any say in it his partner was going to be regretting that smugness before the day was out. “What did they want this time?”
“They wanted information on my brother’s network.”
James blinked slowly, pausing in his inspection of the new weapons he had collected before pointing out the obvious. “What information? You don’t have any information on that.”
“That’s what he tried to tell them,” Richelle said distractedly, still fussing with the ropes. He’d give his kidnappers some credit; they were excellent at tying knots, but James had been a strong proponent of teaching Richelle practical skills. And while Q would greatly have preferred to keep their work and family lived separated by an electrified chain link fence, the general unlikelihood of that made James’s lessons unfortunately necessary, as was currently being demonstrated. “But they didn’t believe him.”
“They never do,” James sighed. “I can never tell if it is because you are so snippy or if it has more to do with people generally finding it difficult to take a teenager seriously.”
Before he could respond by demonstrating said snippiness or better yet, attempting to kick James in the shin, Richelle smiled in quiet satisfaction as she finally worked one of the knots free. He grimaced at the pain in his wrist, although it was slightly soothed by her rubbing the blood circulation back into his freed hand, and completely forgotten after her quiet admission, “I was really scared for you.”
Q hated that she’d been put in that position to begin with, since it was supposed to be his job to worry about her, not the other way around. He had never wanted her to get pulled into this mess of an experience, truly he hadn’t, although he had long ago accepted it as inevitable. But that didn’t mean he and James weren’t going to do their damn hardest to protect her as best they can, and to also make sure that they always came home in one piece so she wouldn’t ever have to be alone again.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly, pulling her into an awkward, one-armed hug before pressing a quick kiss in her hair. He wasn’t sure how reassuring it was, given the loud groans of the men on the ground, the smell of blood and gunpowder, James’s protective stance in front of them, and the fact that he technically was still tied to a chair, but he supposed that was just typical of them. It might seem odd and dysfunctional to the rest of the world, but it was right for them.
So he held her as tight as he could, exchanging a knowing look with James, before he said quietly, “Everything is going to be fine.”
Of course, “fine” was a relative term, and one that was sorely tested by the inconvenient appearance of New Scotland Yard a few moments after James had finally deigned to help Richelle get Q’s other wrist free. As a general rule, Q did not like to work with the police because they tended to get very irritable about the number of bleeding bodies MI6 left behind, even if those persons deserved it. Detective Inspector Lestrade seemed a reasonable man though, or at least he’d seen enough in his life to do little more than sigh at the bleeding and groaning men.
Less reasonable was a certain consulting detective, who had swept onto the scene with the dramatic flair of someone who could seriously benefit from a good kick in the arse. It had taken Q only a few moments to realize why Jim had been so obsessed with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and only a few microseconds more to realize why Jim had wanted to murder the man, with his stupidly billowy coat and a perpetual glare that rather suggested that everyone in his vicinity had deeply disappointed him, and they should all keep quiet lest they infect him with their collective idiocy.
As it turned out, Holmes had indeed been keeping an eye out on the remnants of Jim’s network, and had alerted Lestrade when Q and Richelle were so rudely kidnapped off the street. Apparently the man had extensive contacts with the homeless network that almost put MI6 to shame (after all, James did still get there first), although why he had contacted the police at all was a whole other question. Based on their first twenty seconds of interaction, Q could already tell that Holmes was the ‘do-it-yourself’ kind of idiot, although he strongly suspected that the detective also needed an audience to gloat at. Which would explain why Holmes was taking such immense pleasure from pointing out that Q had managed to get himself kidnapped by the most incompetent persons left in Jim’s network (“Then why didn’t you take care of them earlier?” Richelle had muttered under her breath, only to be ignored), to the point that Q was about three seconds away asking James to shoot the detective.
Not that he would have needed to ask; for someone who was supposed to be so observant, Holmes had either failed to notice the tightening clench in James’s jaw or simply didn’t care as he proceeded to loudly dissect the agent’s tangled past. Only a snarled, “Sherlock, there is a child here,” from the short, ordinary (yet… oddly dangerous and familiar) looking man at his side had finally stopped him. This had sent the detective into a full-on sulk, and James and Q had decided that it was time to make their hasty exit. If Detective Inspector Lestrade or the idiot detective wanted to take care of the bodies, that was on them; Q would deal with the consequences (and no doubt reams of paperwork) later, and might also have gone out of his way to make it very, very hard for Holmes to buy nicotine patches for the next three decades.
But as bad as all of those things were, they were nothing compared to what happened a few weeks later, when he found himself bolting up so fast that he knocked over his chair and sent the before-mentioned reams of paperwork flying everywhere. He knew that all of Q-branch was staring at him in abject horror, but he couldn’t give two fucks as he snarled, “You… absolute… prick.”
Because Jim’s face was grinning up at him from his phone, the words “MISS ME?” dancing across the screen.