Chapter Text
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"Painting is a blind man's profession.
He paints not what he sees, but what he feels;
what he tells himself about what he has seen."
– Pablo Picasso.
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James had always been good with his hands.
It came with years of practice: whether it be mapping the body of a lover or a gun; palm over throat or engine, the soft steady purr of both. It came with the split moment between a frozen hand and a trigger; one sigh and the next; a pin in a grenade. It came from years passed trying to keep the blood inside his own skin (bullet wound, knife – the same); a book overfilling with words no one read.
James was good with his hands.
He had quick fingers, though they had been broken more times than he could count. He knew every inch of them, every line of his own dead veins. Sometimes he felt like each knuckle was tethered to his lungs and his brain by strings, sinew thin.
He, like those in his profession, had a knack for calculating distances and trajectories; and could map the arch of a bullet between canvasses of space and let his hands do the work. Before Turkey, James had been a crack shot. He was (did) good with his hands, his eyes – good with keeping his entire body still so that not even the sway of his own blood could misalign his shot.
He was good with blades too, and not just to trace vein and slide them open like the back of a of a sheer-lace dress. His hands knew needle and thread and the feeling of a wound pulled together by the light of a torch and the smell of cheap alcohol to dull the pain. His own body was a tribute to his hands; scars their signatures like a sketch done on the back of a napkin.
James’ had always been good with his hands, but he didn’t know what to do now that they were empty of these things; didn’t know how to hold wrists and not worry about breaking bones. He woke with the fear of it sometimes, lodged in his throat, back cold with sweat. Slowly, he uncurled his fingers from Q’s arm, and rolled over, away from the warmth. Q didn’t wake, but twitched in his sleep, head turning to follow James’ unconsciously across the sheets.
It was three in the morning.
Going by touch, James slid open the hidden drawer at the back of the bedside table. He lay his palm over the grip of the Walther there, and watched the lights flick to green. It illuminated his skin a sickly colour, and he could see the whorls in the wood grain like someone had magnified his fingerprints and etched them in with a scalpel.
James held the gun until his breathing evened out. Until his blood did not feel so cold.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, hand outstretched. But eventually he heard the change in Q’s breathing as Q woke, perhaps by the cooling empty space between them. Heard the shuffling of sheets; an elbow in the pillow. Deliberate movements, plenty of sound.
“…’ames,” said Q, voice rough with sleep, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, “Go back to sleep.”
A quiet exhale.
Q curled an arm around James’ waist. Slotted himself back in place; a loving hand to the back of an old, used gun.
James blinked the hot pain behind his eyes, and squeezed them shut. But the green light was imprinted on the back of his eyelids.
“Alright,” said Q easily.
James felt, more than heard, the word, in the shift of Q’s lips against the back of his neck. Q was good with his hands too. But unlike James, his hands killed in very different ways. Played along veins like a harpist running a fingernail gently down a string.
Slowly, James uncurled his own hand from the gun – watched as the green light dimmed to ink.
He closed the drawer with a long slide of wood on wood, until he heard the click of the lock.
Then he slid his own hand down to where Q’s fingers were, loose, undemanding. James held them, and thought of the things those hands had made and the lives they had saved. His skin was cold from being out of the duvet.
When James tried to pull away, Q’s fingers tightened around his wrist.
James could feel the scratch of his calluses; full-stops at the ends of his fingertips. A cellist, used to playing heart strings.
They fell asleep like that, palm to palm.
:i:
On hindsight, James really should have known Q had ulterior motives when he came home one day with an entire box of art supplies. He blamed the old age and the complacency and Italian summer heat.
Q always had ulterior motives.
You never knew what was going on behind all that hair, and James had given up second guessing a long time ago.
But still.
“I didn’t know you paint,” he said, watching Q dump a stack of what looked like second hand sketch-books onto the dining table. They were mismatched and of different sizes, from Moleskine notebooks to large torso-sized ones. Several were leather bound, their spines slightly cracked with age a love. A few had covers of stretched canvas or cloth, one monogrammed with a stranger’s initials: C.R. All had thick creamy paper, luxurious as the thick white chocolate cakes Q loved. James could spot a few stained faintly with coffee or tea splotches. The box of paints were new though, a beautiful wooden set that unfolded in tiers to reveal an array of oil and water colours. The hinges were heavy brass, fastened with three filigree clasps.
“I don’t, really,” said Q, laying out the paint brushes next – matching, glossy handles – in descending height order. “I was never very good and couldn’t afford it. Then by the time I could. Well.”
Then came a case of pencils, brand new and unsharpened. There was a velvet pouch attached to the wooden case which held blades for sharpening. (At this point James really should have known – Q knew he had a taste for old fashioned things, and it was beautiful enough to have been suspicious. Q rarely indulged in things like this. He preferred to live in the galleries, and haunt the paintings there until all the tourists had gone and it was just him and the Flemish still life.
Still, Q had always had a burning lust for art – and so James wasn’t all that surprised or suspicious.
When Q painted, he frowned. His eyebrows needled together and his lips pressed down in a frown that James itched to kiss away. It was a strange thing to watch, because a Q embroiled in code was a Q utterly oblivious to his surroundings, one of singular focus, still when needed and always with lazy grace. Q in front of a canvas page was twitchy and restless, eyes flickering from the page to the window then to his tea in almost continuous loops.
More than once, he dipped his paintbrush into his tea instead of the water.
“Oh bloody hell,” he would exclaim, throwing the brush down and splattering his own nose with diluted water-colours, “Not again.”
He glared with James snorted with laughter, a safe distance away with the morning’s papers at his elbow and a paperback open next to his coffee and a half assembled gun. It was an antique, and James was coaxing it back to life bit by bit.
Q had green paint on his nose, and he held out his tea-cup imperiously.
“Go make me another, would you?”
James leaned back in his chair, examining Q’s pout. It was very pronounced, which meant that Q wasn’t really annoyed at all, but was putting on a bit of a show. Probably because his tea had gone cold and he wanted a refill at any excuse. The cheeky bugger.
“How many’s that this hour?” said James, raising his eyebrows, “I’m not sure I should be aiding and abetting.”
Q rolled his eyes and stared pointedly at his tea cup. It still had the errant paint brush in it, then handle sticking out above the rim precariously.
James shook his head, but got out of his chair, stepping carefully over the abandoned papers on the ground, the paint-stained paper towels and a bowl of fruit. He took the cup from Q’s hand and reeled him in close, kissing the paint from his nose to his cheek and his jaw.
“Stop,” said Q, but he was laughing, “You’ll get the paint in your mouth!”
“Uh huh,” said James, mouthing a curve down Q’s throat. Q tilted his head back obligingly, and James eased them more comfortably against the table, arm against the hard edge of the table and Q’s back.
“It’s alright,” he said in between kisses, “I’ve had more dangerous things in my mouth.”
Q whacked him across the shoulder, but groaned when James started sucking a bruise into his collarbone.
“That was terrible,” he said, “your standards has definitely dropped with prolonged – ugnh – domesticity.”
“Ah,” said James, “but then what else would you complain about?” He set the cup out of knocking-reach in favour of wrapped both arms around Q.
“You have many, many flaws,” said Q with an utter unaffected face. The only sign of emotion was the blush high on his cheeks. It did undignified things to James’ capacity to breathe, and he had to pull back to let his lungs expand to a proper size for fear of suffocation.
“I assure you options shall not be unduly limited.”
“Do you feel you made an uninformed purchase?” asked James, tilting his head so Q knew he didn’t have to answer if he didn’t want to.
Q’s mouth quivered, the way it did when he was trying to cover a full out grin. He was a study in polarity, solemn and blank or laughing with his entire body, looking all of eighteen years old. He wasn’t laughing now, but his eyes had crinkled all the way up so that they were crescents, scrunched with lines at the edges of his lashes – drawn with one of the expensive pencils he had bought and smudged with careless affection. James couldn’t help himself, and he brought one hand from the small of Q’s back, just so he could rest the pad of his thumb there, at the soft corner of Q’s eye as he smiled.
“I’m always informed,” said Q, fond, and kissed the aftertaste of the question right off James’ lips.
They never got around to remaking that cup of tea.
Later, when the sun had moved to the other side of the house and the river Arno had been turned rust-warm with the late afternoon sun – they would sit just inside the balcony, half curled on top of each other on the chaise long. Anywhere else and the apartment would be an unforgivable security risk. But here, they didn’t have to worry about things like that. And so James had gotten them an expensive apartment over looking the river, near Ponte Santa Trinita but high enough that the tourists were only small figures on the pavement, their shadows lost in the loose spilling silhouettes of the buildings that lined the river. They could watch the sun set behind Ponte Vecchio, a postcard painting to match the one tucked on their bookshelf. And it didn’t matter because Q loved the view from the tall floor-to-ceiling windows; and he would sit in the window seat drinking tea with his laptop and the Duomo across the rooftops.
Behind them, the faithful gramophone whirred in its dedicated corner, wood soaked jazz quiet against the floorboards.
Q still had paint on his nose; it had faded from a bright apple green to the shade of river-water – but it was still there. He had a tablet propped against James’ bent knee, and they were laying against the arm of the chair, back to chest. Q was typing erratically, one handed. His other hand alternated between James’ glass of red wine and James’ spare hand that lay lax and loose on Q’s hip.
“This is much easier than painting,” said Q into the contented silence.
James looked up from his book.
“Hmm?”
“This,” said Q, gesturing to his tablet and the lines of numbers on the screen, “Tool of choice I think. It never comes out right, with paint. It’s like something gets disrupted from my brain to my hand.”
“You’ve only been going at it for three days,” said James, amused.
Q sniffed, and stole more of James’ wine. James found himself hypnotised by the curl of Q’s knuckles along that long glass stem, the sunlight from the balcony haloing his wrist. Stained his skin a deep burgundy.
“I’m an excellent judge of ability and limitations,” said Q, vowels clipped and oh-so-tidy, “You have a go if you don’t believe me.”
James laughed at that, the sound hooked right out of his chest at the thought of himself as an artist of any kind. He took the glass from Q and drank the rest, before setting it on the floor next to them.
“You’re giving up because you’re too proud to not be immediately brilliant at something,” said James, nosing at the nape of Q’s neck; finding the familiar scent of his shampoo.
Having been deprived of his glass, Q took to playing with James’ hand instead, thumb tracing an idyll pattern over the back of James’ hand, matching the tempo of the gramophone needle.
They passed two hours like that, letting the Florentine sunshine soak them from shoulder to toe, letting it slide silk-smooth over the edge of the balcony and the potted blue violets. The street lamps came on, baubles of yellow, punctuated by the sound of traffic and Italians calling to each-other across the narrow streets. Q had pulled James’ hand up to his chest at some point, cradling it absently like an easy memory. James shifted against the seat when he felt Q kiss the skin between his knuckles; a benediction.
“You have beautiful hands,” said Q, a confession in space just between their souls.
It was such a naked thing to say that James didn’t know what to do. He willed himself not to still, not to tense. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Will he had in by the weight of his blood and the bullets in that beautiful antique gun. Yet for all he was, James could think of no reply. For all his words, he was not a man of them.
Instead, James undid his fingers and placed a palm over the beat of Q’s heart beneath his ribs.
Held it there until his hand was less empty.
:i:
James really should have caught on to the plan when Q started leaving his paint supplies all over the flat for James to step on and over. True to his word, he seemed to have abandoned the brief ambition of becoming an artist and retreated to the comfort of his laptop and codes.
The box of paints sat on a spare space on the book shelf, most of the paints unused. The brushes sat in a colourful glass jar next to the paint-box, along with the pencils.
Bored one evening, James took the box of pencils down from the shelf out of vague curiosity, and opened it on the coffee table. There they were, sitting in neat rows, both ends flat and new. He slid the blade from its nest, flicking it open. Figuring it wouldn’t be too difficult, he set about sharpening one of the pencils until it had a tidy tip, black graphite emerging from the wood until it was a sharp point. Testing it against the corner of a newspaper, James was satisfied he hadn’t filed it too thin, and went about sharpening a second pencil – which proclaimed to be a different thickness.
By the time Q wandered into the living room, making soft noises about food, James had finished sharpening a pencil of every kind, and laid them side by side on the coffee table. He was cleaning the wood shavings from the newspaper into the kitchen bin when he caught Q’s self-satisfied smirk.
“What,” said James, tipping the paper so all the shavings slotted neatly into the bin.
“Nothing,” said Q, giving him a kiss, “Going to draw, are we?”
“It was this or let your entire supply go to waste,” said James, neither denying nor admitting to anything. “You can at least use pencils for non-artistic purposes.”
“Mmhm, so clever,” said Q, opening the fridge.
“Your condescension is the light of my soul,” said James, in flat tone.
“Anything I say should be the light of your soul,” said Q promptly, “I am a blessing unto you.”
Then he yelped when James retaliated by pinching him on the arse.
“Then what am I, a burden?” said James, grinning.
“One could say I am a saint for bearing it,” said Q solemnly, then hooked a finger through the belt-loop of James’ trousers and pulled him close, spinning them around and pushing him up against the back of the fridge.
“I think you should make it up to me,” said Q.
“I thought you wanted me to make dinner,” said James, innocently.
Q narrowed his eyes, still pressed against James from shoulder to knee. Those eyes narrowed further when James’ hands slid to Q’s arse and shamelessly copped a feel.
“Don’t think I won’t call you on your bluff,” said Q.
“You know I’m a gambling man,” said James, taking a kiss for the road.
Q raised both his eyebrows and went to pull away – James kept him in place by the hand on his arse.
“I will make dinner,” said James, “But I’m not hungry yet.”
“Really,” said Q, eyes glittering with want. “Perhaps we need to whet your appetite.”
“I can think of a few ways.”
“Can you, Mr. Bond.”
Distracted as he was, James didn’t actually get to use the pencils until the day after.
Q had barricaded himself in the study to experiment on something that had already made three minor explosions before noon, and James was feeling slightly cooped up in the house. Putting on a light shirt and comfortable shoes, he mentally checked off the grocery list and wondered if he could charm the woman at Q’s favourite gelataria to sell him an entire two-litre tub.
On a whim, he tucked one of the pencils in his pocket and selected a sketchbook at random from the bookshelf. Checking his gun was safety out of sight and the knives in his shoes and at his thigh were in place, he left the apartment.
There were still a few hours until sunset, and James had always enjoyed people watching – especially when it came with the added bonus of not being shot at. Unfortunately, summer in Florence meant tourists, and he had to walk quite a few bridges north of Ponte Vecchio before it was quieter and the heat less claustrophobic without the jarring mix of American accents with Italian vendors. He settled himself in the middle of a deserted stone bridge with a view of the River Arno, flipped open the notebook, and smoothed out the first page.
It was like drawing a schematic, really, thought James, retrieving the pencil from his pocket. He eyed the angle of the river bank, the width of the river, and the bridges that drew curving pause marks above the water. He took in the houses that lined the riverbank, the distance and height between their rooves; the way every single balcony had a clear sight line from somewhere else. Security nightmare.
The water glistened, murky. James wondered idly what it would look like if you could see to the very bottom. Probably the corpses of a thousand stock-made keys and odd euro-cent coins.
The pencil was rather soft; it made dark sooty lines when he drew it across the paper. The paper was so thickly textured that it was more like canvas – but James enjoyed the feel of it beneath his fingers. He started by drawing the clearest lines first, the river and her waist, the bridges and the distance between them (close enough not to need any long range scopes). Then he filled in the rooflines on the left then the right side of the river, and realised belatedly that he had forgotten to bring an eraser with him. Experimentally he tried rubbing with his fingertip, but only succeeded in smudging the pencil. He decided he’d outline the proper bits later.
James had just finished making rough marks of where all the shadows were when he looked from his sketch of the sun and the position of it low over Ponte Vecchio – and with a flicker of surprise realised he had been standing there for well over an hour.
Even though they had done this many times now, it was still a startling luxury to have so much time.
All the time in the world, Q had said a lifetime ago, for once, not an exaggeration.
Closing the book and tucking the pencil back into his pocket (the nib was a lot blunter now than it had been, but James didn’t want to pull out his knives to sharpen it further in case it alarmed any locals.
The wind was picking up, pleasant in the heat. Florence went to sleep early, and James would have to start heading home if he was to pick up the milk and sugar before the store closed.
Turning from the river and tucking the sketchbook beneath one arm, James began walking.
:i:
Q’s mysterious project took almost an entire week before it allowed him out of the study for more than meal and bathroom breaks. As such, James had been spending odd hours sketching out side of the house but never in Q’s presence – and it was it was the following Tuesday that Q caught him coming home, a beautiful World War I rifle in one hand and a sketchpad in the other.
Q was in the chaise long, eating what looked like an entire stack of toast with jam and a truly ginormous mug of tea. He looked up when the door opened.
“You’re out,” said James. Then sniffed. “Is your hair burning?”
“Was,” said Q dismissively, eyes fixed on the sketchpad, “Were you out drawing?”
Suddenly James felt uncharacteristically self conscious.
“Possibly,” he said, setting the heavy case on the hallway floor. Walking over, he dropped a paper bag on the coffee table.
“I brought you lunch you know, you don’t have to subsist on toast.”
“I do appreciate your hunting and gathering skills,” said Q, crunching on said toast, but he pulled the paper bag closer and made a happy noise when he discovered it was a toasted baguette filled with lemongrass and beef.
“Oh I like this place,” he said, taking a gulp of tea and beaming at James, “Did you ask for rocket?”
“You can just look, you know.”
Q shrugged, sliding the sandwich from its slightly oily paper and taking a bite. He made an orgasmic noise.
“I’m starving,” he said, defensively, when James gave him a pointed look. “Anyway, you haven’t told me what you were drawing.”
“Random things,” said James evasively.
Q made a grabbing gesture at the sketch book.
“Show me,” he said. It wasn’t a request. James sighed. He didn’t really want to – he had seen Q’s hand drawn schematics for various wonderfully explosive things he created – but obligly handed over the book. Q wiped his fingers on his trousers before taking it, flipping open the cover.
James found himself watching his expression as his eyes scanned over the page, fingers hovering over the river Arno. James had shaded in the shadows with another lighter pencil when he got home, and whilst it wasn’t a piece of art exactly, he didn’t think it looked terrible.
Q’s face was unreadable, flipping through the pages.
“They’re not that bad,” he said, when he had made about half way through the sandwich. “Why don’t you draw any people though?”
“They’re a lot harder,” said James – who had tried to draw a girl sitting outside a café for all of five minutes before scrunching up the page in embarrassment – “landscape is easier. Mostly straight lines, here.”
Encouraged by the upturned twitch of Q’s lips as he stared at James’ sketch of Palazzo Pitti, he said: “Might try the bell tower when there are less tourists.”
Q turned the page, and paused. He turned the book over and pointed at the subject.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a pigeon,” said James.
Q turned the book back and frowned the page.
“But where are its legs?”
“It’s sitting down,” said James, “Can’t you tell?”
There was a very long pause.
“Is it facing me or facing away?” asked Q, and James wanted to snatch the book back and burn it.
“I told you I wasn’t very good,” said James, embarrassed – but he didn’t have a killer poker face for nothing. “And it wouldn’t stay still.”
Q looked like he was struggling not to laugh.
“Of course not, it’s a bird,” he said, turning the page but finding it blank. “Hang on, did you draw this today? Is that why you’ve been out for so long? Trying to convince the local fowl to stay still?”
“You’re being extremely rude for someone who I regularly save from starvation,” said James.
“James,” said Q, sounding delighted, “Have you been on a stake out, drawing birds? Hey – give that back I hadn’t finished!”
James had stolen the baguette while Q was gleefully being a little twerp. He took a very large bite out of the sandwich and held it aloft when Q attempted to get it back.
“I don’t think you deserve this,” said James, taking another bite.
“I’m still hungry!” Q protested, “And don’t talk with your mouth full, please.”
James took another bite.
“Alright, alright!” said Q, holding out the sketchbook, “Trade?”
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” said James, but gave him the rest of the baguette in return for his sketchbook – which he promptly tossed across the room onto the dining table. Q was staring sadly at his sandwich.
“You ate last of the beef,” he said, forlorn, “Go make me some eggs on toast.”
“I swear to god,” said James, but did as he was bid.
:i:
“Can you draw me?” asked Q one evening, drunk on too many glasses of whiskey and the seasons’ sweetest Florentinas. They were naked save for the sheets tangled around their waists, and Q’s left sock (for no apparent reason). Usually Q could drink most people under the table, but a drunk Q was not altogether too different from sober Q.
Drunk Q was simply normal Q, subtract any dose of tea or sleep.
“No,” said James, flatly.
Q struggled upright. His glasses were askew and his hair was sticking up all on one side, so his put-out expression wasn’t the least bit intimidating.
“Why not?” he said, once he had managed to sit up, “You’d draw pigeons but not me?”
“I didn’t think you were this vain,” said James fondly, running one palm up Q’s side, then back down again.
He took another sip of whiskey and set it down on the bedside table so he could better turn onto his side. He pressed a kiss to Q’s hip-bone, then another, then decided the skin was missing a bruise. Q whacked him on the back of the head – probably harder than he meant to because it made James jerk so as not to bite down.
“It’s not vanity to want be more significant than a pigeon,” said Q haughtily, but he was patting James’ hair in clumsy apology. His fingers felt divine against the scalp and James abandoned the hip bone in favour pulling at the sheets so he could kiss down Q’s thigh.
“It’s alright,” said James, “I can assure you that if it ever came to a choice between you and a pidgeon – “
“James!”
“I’m not going to try drawing you, Christ,” said James, propping himself up on one elbow so he could appreciate Q’s expression in glorious detail – right down to the red of his lips, frowning.
“Pigeons don’t stay still,” said Q, raising both eyebrows in the expression of one who has just delivered a killing blow of logic.
James waited.
When no elaboration was forthcoming he said,
“Yes…?”
“I’ll stay still,” said Q, looking at James as if he thought the latter was missing a few brain cells. To be fair, compared to Q, most people could probably be found lacking in that department.
“Will you, now,” James said with a leer, “How still?”
Q visibly took a breath and held it.
“Very,” he said, solemn and serious. Q’s eyes looked big and dark without their usual frames, and James huffed out a laugh because something had squeezed all the air from his lungs, ribs be damned. He sat up, the better to pull Q closer.
He slid one hand slowly, purposefully down Q’s navel.
“Well, perhaps I’ll reconsider your request if you can convince me of your suitability as a subject,” said James.
Q’s eyes narrowed.
:i:
“Well, are you a man of your word or not?”
“For the love of god, just give me a min – nngh – ”
“Your word.”
“You are not where this sadistic when you’re sober. Jesus Christ!”
“Your – ”
“ – Yes! Fine!”
:i: