Turn to Face // Silva & Bond
silvasabadboy
Tiago cringes. As James places the bowl into his lap, the brunet reacts visibly to the dregs of water still swimming around inside; his memory turning the clear liquid into blood. So much of it rolling down his arms, his legs… pooling out from the deep welts made in his back.He barely catches Bond’s words. But he does catch Bond’s hand. His breathing is erratic and his fears have hardly subsided, but touch is a therapy in itself. And, unlike Silva, M’s previous favourite double-oh never shied away from gentle fingers. “No, don’t…” The hand is returned to his head, digits pressed desperately against the tangled darkness “…don’t leave me.”M would calm him this way. Stroke his hair and stop the frustration consuming him from the inside out. Mother always knew best. That was why she adopted him.Tiago closes his mouth and fights off the first wave of nausea that surges through him, abdominals clenching. Breathe. There’s a memory again of other faces, looking him over. Assessing for cracks. One of the torturers worked out quickly just how much the emotional compounded the physical abuse. Again. On his front this time. He’s barely able to slide elbows under his chest to crawl away. Steel-tipped boots kick at his side, forcing him to roll over onto his back. Torn flesh stings upon concrete. Tiago cries out, feeling the revulsion of a butchered pride. The lick of metal teeth as the whips rip into his chest anew sprays more blood upon the floor. His eyes roll, and he’s dipping in and out of consciousness as sticky hands slide between his legs. The sound of a belt buckle clattering nearby echoes.Open him up.The second wave of nausea is more powerful than the first, and the Spaniard vomits into the waiting bowl. Depersonalisation is no longer an option with the cocktail of meds in his head. Reality hits as hard as a junkie going cold turkey, and soon the shaking has morphed into full-on body tremors. Bond’s hand on his head keeps him steady however, fingers resting on his scalp. His voice, when he speaks, is harsh and faltering.“She abandoned me, James. I can’t forget that, I can’t forgive her… she knew what I’d found-” Tiago bites his tongue. Honor the dead. He shivers as fatigue sets in. Picking up the bloodied glass, the ex-agent finishes shearing off the last bits of blond from his head in silence. For now, the devilish laughter in his mind is gone, leaving only static in its wake.
James is unaware of the specific narrative playing itself out in Silva’s head; ll he sees is his face passing swiftly from one horrified, pained expression to the next as his lips move without forming words. The ones that he puts breath behind cut him. Don’t leave me.
He feels something splinter in himself and tries to assess it and consciously perform damage control. He tries to bolster some of his own failing defenses, repeat the mantras, believe the lines that he has burned onto his own heart. Somewhere deep, though, he knows that he will never be completely free of Silva; he’d shot holes through the life he’d known and crawled inside.
James takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
“I’m here... you’re here. Here is London, London is home. You’re home,” he intoned softly, carding his fingers comfortingly through his shorn hair.
There’s no need for pride between them; they’re double-ohs, which means that they have both suffered deep indignities at one time or another. They’ve both been dehumanized. He reaches for Tiago’s cup and lifts it to his mouth.
“Rinse your mouth, spit.”
It takes a moment, but the criminal complies. James takes the bowl and sets it aside, pausing to drop a newspaper across the top to keep down the smell. Silva has hardly eaten, so it’s mostly acrid bile. Bond is so desensitized that it hardly registers.
He eases Silva back again and coaxes him to settle more comfortably into the pillows. He reaches up to stroke his hair again, exhausted himself, and pulls his fingers through the uneven threads. Watching the exhausted man, he feels uncertainty again. When he asks the next question, he isn’t sure if it’s for himself or for his country.
“What did you find?”
