Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/659021.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Skyfall_(2012)_-_Fandom
  Relationship:
      James_Bond/Q
  Additional Tags:
      Lolita, Alternate_Universe, Adolescent_Sexuality, Teenagers, Romance,
      Drama, Badwrong, Hacking, Government_Agencies, Espionage, Spies_&_Secret
      Agents, Age_Difference, Cross-Generation_Relationship, Non-Canonical_Age
      Difference, Underage_Character, Consent_Issues, Blackmail, Case_Fic,
      Geniuses, Prodigies, Dubious_Consent, Seduction
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-01-28 Chapters: 2/4 Words: 2927
****** Infinite Melancholy ******
by Saucery
Summary
     Bond goes undercover as a professor, but his cover is soon blown by a
     schoolboy half his age.
     Or, Humbert!Bond and Lolita!Q at your service.
Notes
     “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite
     melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-
     voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you
     have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable
     signs - the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness
     of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears
     of tenderness forbid me to tabulate - the little deadly demon among
     the wholesome children...” - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
***** Chapter 1 *****
===============================================================================
 
The path leading up to the house was unkempt, littered with pebbles and stray
weeds pushing up from among the paved stones. Trees crowded close to the narrow
path, nosy as too-curious neighbours, sticking stray branches out as if hoping
to trip him, forcing James to bend under them to avoid getting slapped in the
face with summer leaves. The heat was unbearable, buzzing with the odd bee and
crackling with the odd fallen twig.
James slouched and loosened his stride and made his eyes wide and unassuming,
in the manner of an absent-minded professor, to match his patchy tweed jacket
and the battered satchel dangling from one nail-bitten hand. He hadn't shaved
for the past two days, and as a result, his face was convincingly scruffy,
gathering sweat along his jaw like pine-cones collecting dew.
Finally, the trees parted. There was the sound of a sprinkler, and as James
squinted into the sun, he saw an arc of water suspended in the air like jewels
in a wire-mesh of light. Beneath that glittering veil lay a boy, belly-down in
the grass, in a soaking wet T-shirt and denim shorts, his long, bare legs
stretched out behind him, his tousled head resting on crossed arms.
James stared. It was an incongruous image, something that belonged more in
high-end illegal pornography than in the garden of an average British home.
But then, the boy raised his head and blinked sleepily, and the thick, black-
rimmed glasses leaving indentations on his nose didn't belong in pornography,
although his mouth, sleep-soft and slightly reddened, did.
James loosened his grip from where it had tightened on his satchel, and adopted
a thin, vacuous smile.
"Oh," the boy yawned, sitting up, his shirt see-through and clinging to an
insubstantial, almost elfin body. He studied James hazily from behind his
water-spattered spectacles. "You must be the new professor."
"The name's Bond," James said, mentally pulling up an image of the dull, spotty
child he'd been handed before being stationed here, and finding it at least one
growth spurt out-of-date. "Professor Bond."
"Yeah?" The boy stood and stepped out of the spray, running a hand through his
sodden hair. Stray droplets trickled down his neck. "My name's Q."
"Please!" huffed a female voice, and a woman emerged from the house and into
the garden, wiping her hands on an apron. "You're Que - ”
"Don't," snapped the boy, suddenly sharp, transformed from the elfin creature
of a moment ago to a stoop-shouldered, sullen teenager. "I hate that name."
"It was the name your father gave you."
"Before he drank himself to death? Golly, I'm flattered," Q drawled, not so
much sarcastic as downright acidic, and strolled into the house in the shocked
silence.
The woman - Mrs. Margaret Travers, according to the file James had studied -
was Q's mother, and a widow for the past decade. She had been letting out the
east-facing bedroom in her home to professors from the nearby university for
the last three years, in order to supplement her income as a nurse.
James stepped forward and raised a hesitant hand, as if to comfort her, but
dropped it an exact two inches from her shoulder. A calculatedly clumsy
attempt, as was in-character for 'Professor' Bond.
"Don't mind him," said Mrs. Travers, removing her fingers from her mouth, where
she'd pressed them momentarily. She sounded shaky. "He's at that age, you know?
It's… been difficult for him, growing up without a father." Then, as if
realizing that she was saying too much, she stuttered to a halt. "Oh, dear! I'm
so sorry! To have been introduced to you this way…" She nervously patted her
brown hair, that had in it a hint of Q's untidiness. "I'm, I'm Margaret. And
you're - ”
"James Bond," said James, resuming his vapid smiling and shaking her hand, at
last. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Margaret. Q, too."
"A pleasure? To meet him?" Margaret snorted. "That boy wouldn't be pleasant
company for a gargoyle."
"Perhaps I'm a gargoyle." James crinkled his eyes. "You wouldn't know."
"Professor Bond! You have have quite the sense of humor, I see. Well, you'll
need it, in this house." Margaret sighed. "I truly am sorry for that horrid
introduction."
"No, no bother," James hurried to assure her, affecting a nervous twitch as he
clutched his satchel to him, like a shield. "May I - may I see the room?"
"Of course. How remiss of me!" She rushed indoors, as if to make up for the
delay, and James followed, more slowly.
The home was a humble one, but comfortable, filled with knickknacks and throw-
rugs and old-but-dignified furniture and cheap, moderately ugly porcelain.
James's room was up the stairs and two doors to the right, with a shared
bathroom. He nodded along to Margaret's good-natured prattle, and spotted, out
of the corner of his eye, the vanishing shape of a watchful, whip-thin boy.
 
===============================================================================
 
***** Chapter 2 *****
===============================================================================
 
James had been moistening his hands with cream for weeks, to soften his gun-
calluses into an ordinary smoothness. He'd also been walking with sloping
shoulders in order to make his hunch more believable, and had begun using eye-
drops to make his eyes seem more watery than they were. He had a slight, almost
undetectable lisp that sounded as though he'd worked hard to overcome it, and
had a nervous habit of licking his lips until they chapped.
Everyone at the university bought his cover. Everyone. From the departmental
secretary (a heavyset but good-natured woman with a fondness for floral prints)
to the Vice Chancellor (a surly gentleman with a hooked nose) to the students
(uniformly bored, not even pretending to pay attention as they clicked in and
out of Facebook on their laptops). James himself, being a professor of
literature, droned on about Chaucer and Shakespeare, extolling the virtues of
the iambic pentameter, and had acceptably brief flashes of brilliance that
justified his appointment.
In the meantime, 'Professor' Bond began to passively socialise with the members
of his faculty, and, during the inter-faculty dinners, with members of the
prestigious School of Computer Science. He established a tentative friendship
with Joey Randall, a young lecturer in Computer Science with an appreciation
for medieval poetry, and casually asked about Joey's relationships with the
other lecturers and professors in his school.
What James learned was this: that everyone in the school was generally very
open to new ideas, except for Professor Jagdish Nath and Associate Professor
Lorraine Hardy, both of whom were highly possessive of their research and were
secretive, to boot. Nath was an award-winning scientist and an expert on
Artificial Intelligence, and appeared to be more interested in his robots than
he was in living human beings. Hardy was a renowned cryptographer and chess
champion, who got up to… god knows what, apparently.
It was a good start. While the university was mostly deserted, after dark,
James infiltrated the offices of Nath and Hardy and planted surveillance
devices there, in order to expose whichever one of them had been assisting the
Russians in hacking into the MI6. It might take months for anything to emerge,
but James planned to utilise that time by profiling everyone else in the School
of Computer Science. While it might've been more efficient to transfer directly
into the school (thanks to M twisting the arm of the university's director), it
would've raised the suspicion of the Russians. Comparatively, being employed as
yet another bumbling professor by the otherwise remote School of English was
uninteresting and non-threatening.
So, it was going well. And when James returned to the Travers' house, he got a
warm dinner and a warmer reception - from Margaret, at any rate. Her son was
strangely pensive, observing James like one might examine a slide under a
microscope. James found it mildly unsettling, but no more than that. Q was a
child, after all, no matter how sharp he was.
That all changed, one night, when (while concealing his firearm) James heard a
knock on his door.
"Come in," said James, sliding his unremarkable pyjamas up and over the slim
gun strapped to his thigh.
An even slimmer Q slipped in, quiet as a shadow, in a sagging T-shirt that
bared one shoulder, and shorts that scarcely made it past the T-shirt's hem. He
looked like an overgrown urchin in a nightshirt. Except for his eyes - those
were dark and hooded, secretive behind his glasses. The eyes of a nymph.
"Yes?" James blinked at him, gently befuddled, in-character with the professor.
"What may I do for you, Q?"
"You may give me your hand," Q said, imperiously.
"I beg your pardon?" James let his words stumble over each other.
"I said," Q repeated, "I'd like to hold your hand, Mister Bond."
"Professor," James corrected, absently, and Q's eyes narrowed.
"Really? Well, if you insist."
"You're a bit old for hand-holding, aren't you?"
"You're a bit heartless for denying a fatherless boy, aren't you?"
"You're a bit manipulative," James shot back, before he could even think. Fuck.
That wasn't what the professor would say.
"And you're a bit unbelievable," said Q, sweetly. "But don't worry. Just a
bit." And then, smiling, he reached for James's hand, and James couldn't think
of a single reason to pull it back that wouldn't break his cover even more than
he'd already broken it. 'Fatherless boy.' Damn it.
Q pulled James's hand toward him, letting his thumb press against James's palm,
stroking it firmly, before lifting it to his mouth.
James jumped. That was what the professor would do. "What are you doing?"
"Oh, nothing," said Q, and licked a long, hot stripe from the base of James's
palm to the tips of his fingers.
James jerked his hand back, almost glad to be given a justifiable reason to do
so, and made a show of wiping it on his pyjamas. "You shouldn't do that to
grown men," he chastised, sounding appropriately shaken. "They might get the
wrong idea."
"And what would be the right idea?" Q looked up at him, eyes wide and
deceptively guileless, voice so soft that it was almost a whisper.
"Stop - doing that." James meant it, too. He didn't need the added complication
of a seductive little brat in the very place that his cover identity needed to
live.
"Doing what?" Q tilted his head. "Figuring you out? Those were gun-calluses.
Almost gone, but still. Calluses just the right size for a P2K pistol. I've
done my research. And that moisturizer I tasted on your skin, by the way? So
not what the 'professor' would use. He doesn't care enough about the rest of
his sloppy appearance - why would he only care about his hands?"
Q wasn't even done speaking before James's gun was out, pressed to Q's temple,
just as Q himself was pressed to James's door, with one of James's hands around
his throat.
This -
This couldn't be -
"Don't worry," Q drawled, "it's not completely your fault. My IQ is far higher
than yours. It was inevitable."
"What do you want," James said, flatly. He couldn't be bothered making it a
question. "Who do you work for."
"Work for?" Q laughed. "I'm sixteen."
"Who. Do. You. Work. For." James's grip tightened on his gun.
"So this is you," said Q, wonderingly. "I spent ages imagining what you were
like, without your cover. Spent ages imagining how you'd react. This is better
than anything I could've imagined. Oh, and also? I don't work for anybody. I
don't need to. By the time I'm done with school, I'll have at least three
different agencies begging me to work for them. The MI6 will be one of them.
Why? Because you'll recommend me, after seeing how good I am at what I do."
"You know I'm from the MI6."
The tiny bastard had the gall to roll his eyes. "Yes, James - can I call you
James? - I know you're from the MI6. Not from the Russians. Not like Associate
Professor Hardy."
James fought the temptation to slam the boy against the door. He would not hurt
a minor. He would not - "And how," he said, as calmly as he could, as coldly as
he could, "did you work that out?" Even James hadn't managed to isolate Hardy
as the prime suspect. Not yet.
"It simply took some deductive logic, and some handy pictures of you sneaking
in and out of Nath's and Hardy's offices. I hacked into the campus security
cameras ages ago, did you know? Those false feeds you think you're putting in
there? They don't hide the truth from me." When James shook him, Q sighed. "I
knew Hardy was hacking for the Russians. I was waiting for the MI6 to send
someone. It was too much of a coincidence when you arrived as a professor of
sodding literature, of all things, and then showed up slinking around campus
like a cat, on my cameras."
"They're not your cameras."
"Every camera everywhere is my camera. That includes the ones you planted in
Hardy's office. And Nath's."
"You're saying you hacked them."
"I can hack anything. Anything. And if you want my help, I'll be happy to give
it to you. For a price."
This, at least, was familiar. Not the part about an opponent being sixteen, but
the part about a trade-off. Something for something else. James could do this.
"Name your price."
Q raised his chin. "Fuck me."
James stared at him. And stared at him some more. James didn't ask Q if it was
a joke; it was clear that it wasn't. He didn't ask why Q didn't just date a boy
his own age; it was plain that Q was painfully lonely. He didn't ask why Q was
so desperate for intimacy as to trade his genius for it; Q was clearly starved
for touch. Instead, James asked: "Why me?"
"Have you looked at yourself? Um, without your cover, I mean? You must shag
women all the time, on your cases. You do, don't you? I bet they beg you to."
They did. But that was neither here nor there. Q was wasn't a woman, nor was he
an adult. "Why. Me."
"Because you're hot. Because you're here. Because you're smarter than anyone I
can find in that stinking university or at school. And I have a thing for older
men. Don't psychoanalyse me and tell me I just want a father figure; I don't. I
want someone to fuck me. Not someone to fuck me over."
"And you're willing to bargain with the country's national security for the
sake of getting sex."
Q hitched a shoulder. "I'm a teenager. What did you expect?"
Not this, James thought, and lowered his gun. Slowly. Let it trail along the
boy's arm, until he shivered. "Are you afraid?" James asked, hoping to have
dissuaded him.
"I'm turned on," Q answered, frankly. "A buff secret agent is running a gun
down my arm while glaring into my eyes."
"You enjoy being at risk."
"Like I said. Teenager."
"I'll have to run this past the MI6. They'll need to check your facts. You'll
have to give them something, first."
"Fine. I'll give them Hardy's code. That's enough for them to get started on
tracing the Russians. Still, if they want to find out who's really behind it -
behind the Russians, even - they'll need me. They have absolutely no hackers on
their team that are as good as I am."
"They're among the best in the country."
"But not the best."
"How can you say that?"
"Because they got hacked," said Q, with exaggerated patience, as if speaking to
a simpleton. "Obviously, they're terrible."
"The IT department won't take kindly to being told that."
"They'd better, because I'll be running them, in a few years."
"You're awfully ambitious."
"You're awfully attractive. Kiss me."
"No."
"What?" Q scowled. "I thought we had a deal."
"You haven't sent MI6 the code, yet."
"Fine," Q groused. "Fine. Let me at your computer."
"That doesn't seem wise."
"What makes you think I haven't already had at your computer? From a distance?"
James… paused.
"Ha. Let me at it."
James let him at it - and then watched Q's fingers fly over the keyboard,
slender and confident as a concert pianist's, making music of a kind James did
not understand.
Minutes later, James got a call on his mobile phone. It was from 'Mum' - from
M.
"Hullo, Mum," he said, ignoring Q's disbelieving chuckle. "Yes, Mum. No, Mum. I
can't do that, Mum."
'Mum' informed him, in no uncertain turns, that he could do that.
"He's sixteen," said James, helplessly. "You can't expect me to work with him,
let alone - "
'Mum' told him to assess Q while simultaneously discovering who was behind the
Russians.
"Yes, Mum." James hung up, defeated.
"Well?" Q tapped his fingers restlessly on the keyboard. "Did she say yes? Your
'mother'?"
"She said yes," James replied, shortly. "But only to our working together."
That was a blatant lie. "She doesn't know about - "
"Then you should just call her back and tell her that I'm not helping. Because,
unless you fuck me, I won't."
"Q - "
"No," said Q, getting up, a petulant set to his mouth. He leaned up and kissed
James, briefly; James allowed it. "You're going to think it over, tonight. And
if you still want my cooperation, tomorrow, let me hear what I want to hear. Or
the deal's off."
"You're being a fool," James said, as Q walked to the door, but Q didn't even
look back.
"So are you," Q answered, and shut the door behind him.
 
===============================================================================
 
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