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Hong Kong is a city made of glass. It towers above the streets, the streets which are always hot and full of so much life, everything he is a speck of mere insignificance in the shadows of those towers. He’d like to say that he thinks he matters, that he’s the only one who can do what he does and do it that well, but it’s a lie. But lies are what he deals in, and he deals in them right up until a hand with a leather glove forces itself into his mouth and says, in furious Cantonese, you won’t die in here, it’ll be so much worse than that, and he deals in lies, looks up to meet eyes that he’s tried to ruin and knows, feels it in his bones, that in this room there is no such thing as lies.
The world is changing, slipping under his feet and he has to move first and fastest or he’ll get left behind. He got left behind before, Britain turning her back on her colonial past, as if the past is that simple, as if it is that easy to scrub clean. He meets his eyes in a thousand mirrors and the man who looks back is not a stranger but he is not the man who was born in Madrid a few short decades ago. In Hong Kong, something in him was burnt clean, and he meets his eyes once more in the mirror, gets the bitter thrill of knowing that only some of that is metaphorical. It does not bother him, the wreck that lies beneath his skin, because it’s a weapon just like everything else and it serves its purpose well. Europe is changing, and the Cold War is over. He will not get left behind again. He has left the room of true things, but only in body. He meets his own eyes in the mirror, and a man who is precisely what he needs to be looks back.
He walks out of the ash of post-British controlled Hong Kong and slides back into Europe without even trying. Eastern Europe is crumbling and there are guns in everybody’s hands, and this is what he was made for, this is what She made him to do. He sells the body he does not care for to the highest bidder, becomes a mercenary who becomes a warlord who becomes something else altogether. He stays in the shadows because he was made in the shadows, and he does not go to Britain for a very, very long time. Chaos is as easy to cause as it is to halt, and he hoards up his riches, bides his time. He did not used to be a patient man, but the room made him as much as the woman, and he’s learnt his lessons well. Some old adage about a dish best served cold. He touches the side of his cheek where, beneath, he used to burn, and knows that his vengeance will be paid back in kind. Fire for fire. Blood for blood.
It’s six years before he hears about his replacement. It’s eight years before he begins to care.
James Bond is in love. She is brilliant and beautiful and she will betray him. Her dress is cut low and her hair is black and piled atop her head like a crown and she is a match for him in every way but one-- but then the stakes are very high and murder is the only way out. Vesper Lynd is not a killer, but Bond, Bond was molded by Her hands, and Her hands do not know how to shape anything other than a killer. It seems like Vesper is the unlucky one, but he suspects that Bond, as he does, knows better. Souls are very expensive, but once sold you cannot ever get them back. Vesper will die clean, by her own hand, and if she dies clean it will be more than MI6 would give her. The rat maze is closing, and there is only one way for this to end. Just a little longer. Just a little more. Just one phone call that wasn’t supposed to be made.
She will betray him. The man who now calls himself Raoul Silva has paid a lot of money to make that a cold hard fact.
The island is easy, but then, most things are easy, now. The woman is easy, because he knows what it is to suffer, and he knows what you will promise in order to make the suffering end. Computers are easy because they were always easy, because his mistake was not a lack of skill but an overabundance of it, and his recklessness betrayed him with as much efficiency but with significantly more torment on his part than She ever did. He spent years in that room blaming himself. He blamed her, too, but as an afterthought, the rasp of the whiskey once it’s already down your throat. He got out of the room because he killed to get out of the room, and the years pass and his hands get bloodier and he no longer blames himself. He is what She made of him. He always was.
He knows the secret, now. It’s not the suffering that’s the hard part. It’s what comes after that counts.
His only regret is that he did not set the charges himself.
He watches on a screen, six hundred miles away or more, and it’s all a little less fun than it could be. James Bond is dead and as much as he loves watching that bitch’s palace burn, he wanted to tear into the bastard son she’d made to take his place, rip him open until his own finger never needed to hover near a trigger. She’d made him a weapon, but She’d tossed him away and not come back. She’d done the same to Bond, and he watches Thames House burn, wishes that this time, he’d been there to pick up those shards and make his own glue. It’s not enough for a fraction of it to burn. He’s lived through that. He knows how that ends.
James Bond is not dead.
It’s almost like getting exactly what he wants, but exactly what he wanted is locked in a swirl inside of his head, getting exactly what he wants is fifteen years too late, a fifteen years that feels like fifteen seconds, that feels like a lifetime, that feels like something from which he has just turned away his face-- but his face has turned and can never be set right, and there’s stitches made of steel set against his cheekbone, so he prepares himself, readies his armies, and war is not exactly what he wants, but it’s exactly what that bitch is going to get.
The lure is easy, but then, everything is. The girl is easy and leading Q Branch up the garden path is easy -- he remembers being that young, but there’s a bright spot in his vision and it comes out blurred and dirtied -- and getting Bond into the casino, onto the boat, into the shower, is easy. He barely has to push, because he knows how Bond will move, is both gratified and disappointed to learn that She has not found a new way to build her boys into bombs. Bond is easy because he is Bond, was Bond, in a very literal and not at all metaphorical sense, and he orders Bond to be bound too tight to get free but with enough give to make him feel like he’s got the very slimmest of chances, and he pushes the button for the elevator door.
He knows when it breaks in Bond, feels an echoing snap inside his chest of something that was long ago stabbed to death and left to bleed out inside his internal cavity. He did not hope to recreate the room, but he knows as soon as their eyes meet that James Bond’s life has been a series of rooms, and that there is nothing left within him capable of fear. He cannot pinpoint what it was that he said, but a pair of eyes exactly like his own except in shade flicker over his jacket lapel, and James Bond says, “So, how about you get me out of this fucking chair?”
“Put your weapon where your mouth is, Mr Bond,” he says, holding on just a bit too long when he passes the gun over, finger sliding along a pulse point where a heart beats as fast as his own; and Bond flicks him a hard, well-worn smirk, lifts his arm, and kills the girl like it’s nothing more than a reflex reaction, and he’s already turning away when Sévérine’s body slumps to the ground.
“I’m definitely going to blame that one on you, you know,” he says, his smirk gone filthy and knowing, and hands the gun back, as, above them, the helicopters begin to swirl.
He paces his cage like the lion everyone who comes to stare at him knows to be. He draws his lips back from his teeth and laughs and scratches at his arms and sings all night, just because he can. It’s been quite some time since he enjoyed himself this much, and he means to make the most of it. He knew that Bond would be followed, of course he did, and he feels no anger at not being told. This is a game they’re playing, and games where no one lies or plays tricks or bluffs simply aren’t fun. Bond has a poker-face to match the best of them, but it’s a poker face he helped build, the blueprint for a Silva 2.0, and he knows the other hands holding Bond together at his foundations. Every puppet has strings, and strings require hands as bullets require guns. He used to be a gun, streamlined and sharp, and the fact that Bond is a blunt weapon and not the edge of a knife makes very little difference, when all is said and done. Dead men tell no tales, and they’re still dead. So, he laughs and he sings and he paces his cage with its transparent walls and it still makes no difference to him. He’s spent fifteen years in a cage. It is transparent, too.
He pulls it from his mouth to watch Her recoil, because he’s getting old and never quite getting exhausted and if he’s tired of anything, it’s of being afraid. He ripped his own face apart, biting down on what should’ve been the last trigger he’d ever had to pull, the last man he’d ever have to kill for Her; but his ticket to the undiscovered country was the last lie She ever told him, and the last thing the room of true things laid bare. It was a thing not even MI6 said to their agents, how it would burn. He learns later that there would be no point, that the numbers of those who survive cyanide poisoning are negligible. He was lucky, always lucky, until he wasn’t, and then, by someone’s reckoning -- although never his own -- perhaps he was lucky once more. He bit down and he started to burn and if you asked him, if you could meet those eyes, he would not say he was sorry. It’s not about him being sorry. That’s rather the point.
Bond comes to him at night, and it could be any night because they’re all the same, waves the guards to close the door and they obey him, because if Bond cannot kill him, even unarmed, then every person in the building knows, deep down, that they could not. He sits on the glass floor of his cage and watches Bond through upturned eyelashes, playing at coy because this is still all a game, the best game he’s ever going to play, and Bond leans forward in his chair, spreads his legs, says, “You read the psychological report from my assessment, didn’t you.”
It is not a question. This is shorthand, a code for something Silva doesn’t quite know how to crack, so he smiles, says, “An insight into the mind of a killer.”
“I don’t think you need one of those,” says Bond, pulling down his immaculately pressed shirt sleeve over what looks like fresh scars, “But I am supposed to make some pantomime at interrogating you, so here we are. We both know you aren’t going to talk.”
Another smile, one of co-conspirators who cannot speak freely with all eyes on them, one Silva answers in kind, says, “Ask me.”
“Ask you what?” says Bond, and there’s a tiny crack of uncertainty in those cold blue eyes, the small slip of a man who is so unused to having an equal that he can barely even remember what it’s like.
“Ask me what they asked you,” says Silva, and Bond’s eyes narrow, but he cannot fall, at this or any hurdle, so he says, “Day.”
“Oh, it was murder,” says Silva, with great and final emphasis, and Bond almost ghosts out a huff of amusement, cocks his head, says, “Agent.”
“Shot,” he says, stroking a hand across his collarbone, over where on the other man’s body his mark is clawed into his skin, and Bond’s eyes widen, imperceptibly, as he begins to realise exactly what is happening here, in what Silva knows, but will not tell, is a second room of true things.
“Provocateur,” he says, and Silva rolls his shoulders, says, “England.”
“Provocatrix,” says Bond, wearing what is not quite a smile, but is starting to grow into one, and Silva hisses it out, theatrical and deadly, “Bitch.”
“M,” says Bond, openly enjoying himself now, waiting for the next blow to fall, and Silva stills, looks up, says, “Occupation.”
“Woman,” says Bond, and Silva grins, says, “Shot. Oh, did I cheat?”
“You always cheat,” says Bond, leaning back in his chair, “As do I. England.”
“Skyfall,” says Silva, and then, hands pressed up against the glass and his grin pulled wide, “Done.”
It was pure luck that he picked the exact moment when all the lights went out, but then, he’s always been a lucky man.
“Tell me a true thing,” he says, in the ashes of Temple Tube Station, dust and ash and viscera in his hair, and Bond wraps his two hundred pound tie around bloody knuckles, says, “I’m not dying in here, and neither are you. Get a bloody move on.”
“Out of the honeymoon period, I see,” says Silva, voice light and sharp and deadly, and Bond flicks him the V with fingers that are already starting to bruise, says, “When were we ever?”
He lets Bond drive because it’s easier, because it’s been years since he’s had his own hands on the wheel of a car, because watching Bond drive is poetry in motion, every killer’s instinct writ clear in the way he handles himself and the car as if they were one. There’s an arsenal in the boot and they’re driving further north than Silva’s ever been, and She will follow them, her last two boys, so they all they must do is drive and wait and wait.
Skyfall says the sign, and things reveal themselves in time. A priest-hole, so Catholic, like him, a manor house, so not dirt-poor, no tick in that box. Bond kills the man who answers the door with a single shot to the head, so he loved him once, or what passes for love, in a bad light. The house is bleak and quiet, and they move to the master bedroom as if compelled.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” says Bond, and Silva kisses him, tightens his fingers around his wrists, digging into fresh scars, says, “Nothing ever does.”
“No,” says Bond, pulling off his shirt, his trousers, his shoes, “It doesn’t, does it?”
They fuck until it gets dark, brutal and honest and leaving bruises in their wake. He can tell Bond hasn’t been as rough as he’d like for a long, long time, and he goads him into it, hisses into his ear the only untrue things he’s spoken for fifteen years. Afterwards, they share a cigarette and do not speak.
Bond’s chest is still scarred. Silva looks, but does not touch, and accepts the cigarette with a slow, hot smirk. He looks and he does not touch, and this is the most true moment he has ever known, and he would sully it as he sullies everything, but he drags the smoke into his lungs and sees Bond’s scar tissue in the smoke when he breathes out, and passes it back without a word. Bond does not smile, and Silva does not speak, and this is not peace, for this is no such thing for men like them, but Silva breathes out smoke and does not touch and, for once, lets himself believe the lie.
“Tell me a true thing,” says Bond, mocking, the way he always is, the mirror Silva never knew he needed and the brother he never really had, and Bond’s eyes flick downwards to the long, thin knife in Silva’s hand, and, above them, a helicopter whirs, and just like that, they both know that the time for words is over.
“Time to pay the piper,” he says, anyway, and Bond’s smirk is exactly as sharp as the blade he tightens his fingers around in easy response to the tightening muscle in Bond’s neck.
There are lights in the sky and time is running out, and Bond has leather gloves on his hands and something terrible and perfect in his eyes. The moors are wide and dark and silent, and Silva has teethmarks in his neck and a ruin for a face and nothing left in his chest capable of regret, not for any of it.
“It’s been too late for that for quite some time,” says Bond, and Silva closes his eyes and cocks his shotgun, because he got what he wanted, the way he always does: he got Bond to tell him the last true thing he’s ever going to need to hear.