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They let him have as many showers as he likes. James supposes he can live with that. The food isn’t bad either and the guards don’t touch him. He spends a lot of time staring at the wall, curled up in a ball on his cot, not thinking as hard as he can. He stares at the peeling paint, memorizes it, sometimes he even picks at it until it flakes off. There’s another layer of whitewash underneath, which is peeling too.
There’s even another layer under that. James knows this because in a few places he’s picked all the way down to the third layer.
He rolls over, looks at the ceiling, squints at it in the faint natural light. There’s no door to lock him in or to block the light, but there’s a guard sitting in the hallway wearing one of those navy sweaters and looking like he’d like to pistol whip James, if only James would do something to deserve it. James rolls the rest of the way over as the guard watches. James slowly sits up, winces, and stretches to loosen up his lower back.
“Shower.” James says, wishing he didn’t feel dirty. The man nods, still looking like he’s waiting for James to do something stupid. But he lets James out of the cell and they walk quietly down the dusty hallway, past grimy windows, to the barracks shower. He can’t tell for certain but he thinks it’s the same island- After… After… James remembers staggering, legs going out from under him, nausea, arms holding him tight, and Silva’s voice cajoling him to follow along… And then he woke up in the cell, on the cot. The light looks the same out the windows, but he can’t actually see out them to be sure.
He licks over the missing tooth cap and the guard stops outside the shower, leaving James alone.
He hasn’t seen Silva since. He’s not entirely certain what he would do if he did. MI6 would want him brought in alive, but James is full of something he can’t name, isn’t sure he’d be able to refrain from doing something… permanent.
James turns on the water, keeps turning the knob until the pipes are screaming and steam is filling the room and his clothes are sticking to him from it. He strips down, leaves his clothes on a wooden bench by the lockers, watches sweat break out on his forearms before he steps into the scalding stream. He hisses out a scream when the water pours over his shoulders, over the scars- over the bite marks and the scratches and the hickeys. He doesn’t look at them, even at the fingerprints dug into his hips.
There are fifteen kinds of soap in the shower- like Silva raided every bathroom on the island- twenty seven bottles of shampoo, thirty one bottles of conditioner.
There’s an electric razor which is a total piece of junk with no useful parts inside of it- nothing he could use as a weapon or to escape- James already took it apart to see and put it back together so he could shave.
James washes in the burning water, uses soap after soap, but he never feels clean.
~~
He eyes his dinner but doesn’t feel very hungry. He doubts he’s been here more than twenty four hours but the radio Q gave him is gone and no one has come for him yet and he’s had six showers. The guard- a different one than before, this one has a moustache- gestures with his hand that James needs to eat. When he just picks at it the man drops his hand to his gun- James realizes there’s something wrong with the food, but clearly he’s supposed to eat it anyway.
Just the thought of it having drugs in it is enough for him to take big bites of it. Its turkey and something else, some kind of specialty meat from Italy. He half remembers having it before at a little sandwich shop in London, where the place was packed with foodies and hipsters and he’d only been hungry, but later impressed.
~~
James wakes up in the night to a lot of hurry and noise and realizes he was right about the food having drugs in it. It’s dark in the hallway, except for the flashlights, and the guard watching him keeps checking his watch.
James lies on his side and wonders if he should be attempting to escape. It’s all very confusing and right now the drugs are making him sleepy and complacent. He pets the bed, rubs the callous on his thumb over the rings of the springs, listening to the rasping noises it makes.
Silva is suddenly in the doorway, wearing a dark suit and a red shirt, and he has a jaunty red scarf wrapped around his neck.
“James.”
James sits up, glares. The room swings around a bit.
“It’s time to be going.” Silva tells him and holds out a hand. He makes a grasping gesture a few times and then sighs when James won’t take it. “We’ve got a flight to catch, there’s no time for this.” He steps in close and the guard comes in, and between the two of them grabbing him under the arms, they get him on his feet. “How much was he given?” James hears Silva asking. The guard says something back, but there’s a roaring noise outside and more light- it’s hard to pay attention to all of it at once. They get him into the hallway and James tries to shove loose from both of them- it doesn’t work out, or rather he sort of throws the guard aside into the wall, and he staggers away from Silva only to miss a step on some stairs he never noticed before and the ground is coming up like it’s going to fucking kill him because it’s another cement floor and he can’t seem to get his hands up in time and then someone grabs him from behind, hauling him back, and then they’re both on the floor and his elbow hurts but it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.
Silva has him wrapped up in a bear hug and he’s cursing. When the guards pull James off and help their boss to his feet his suit is stained with concrete dust and the right knee is ripped and there’s a bright stain of blood there to match his shirt and tie. One of the guards pulls his gun out and presses it to James’ temple while he sits there wide eyed, trying to be stoic.
“Put it away, Henri, it’s what he’s trained for.” Silva says, then curses and touches the blood at his knee. “Lord, I just got this suit.” He huffs and tugs at it, thumbs away the blood. “My tailor is going to kill me.” He looks to James, comes over to give him a hand up- James is too startled to not take the hand, though Silva takes him hard up under the arm so he can’t get away again. “No more antics, James, that could have been your face in the concrete floor.” He scolds and leads him down the hall, towards the outside.
There’s a V-22 Osprey sitting in the courtyard and Silva’s navy sweater wearing henchmen are loading things into the plane.
“How long?” Silva asks one of the men as they cross the courtyard, heading for the hatch. The man looks down at his watch.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, sir?” He says and Silva nods.
Silva gets him up into the plane and sits him down against the wall, in one of the seats, then straps him in. Having him so close, even injured, sets James’ nerves on fire. When he looks over Silva’s shoulder to distract himself he sees Severine sitting on the opposite side of the plane. She won’t meet his eyes. He wonders what she knows. Guesses. She looks like she’s been crying.
“Stop touching me.” James hisses, when Silva is nearly done with all the seat belts.
Silva’s hands freeze and rather than settle on his knees- James flinches at the memory- they land on the seats on either side of his legs. As if he could forget how big Silva is, what a presence he has, he fills up nearly all of James’ vision.
“I have to make sure you’re safe.” Silva says with a faint smile.
“Is that why you drugged me?” James demands and Silva smiles just a little more.
“I meant the seat belts.” Silva tells him and stands, slowly, knees making painful ratchting noises.
~~
James wakes up later, midflight, and he’s slumped over in the seat harness, until he’s half in the next seat over. Silva is one seat up from him, though his hand is on James’ head, petting him.
“Stop.” James growls and Silva shrugs.
“You were making noises in your sleep.” The other man says and the hand disappears.
James realizes he has a headache- probably from all the drugs- and that Silva is reading something on a Kindle. He wonders how the man orders things for it without MI6 tracking him. Probably a fake name, money laundered from somewhere…
“They’re going to come for me.” James says and Silva nods and sort of shrugs at the same time.
“I’m sure they will.” Silva says, after a minute, but he doesn’t look up from the screen.
~~
MI6 does come for him, out of the darkness off the sea, from little all black dingy and helicopter gunships, repelling down in the streets of the island, guns at the ready. They kick in the doors, shine their flashlights around the rooms, radios squawking as they work their way through the buildings.
They find the computers, find James’ clothes.
The sun is up before someone James actually recognizes shows up, the girl who shot him- Jesus, he never bothers to remember their names- and she’s in an all black BDU. She’s on a satellite phone with someone back at base.
“No, he’s not here.” She keeps saying. She digs at his shirt on the floor with one booted foot, other hand on the butt of her rifle. “Looks like he has been though.” On the other end of the line someone is squawking in an outraged fashion and the woman James slept with, who shot him, she frowns and chews her lip. “Let him go? But I thought-“ She pauses, swallows hard, nods. “I understand, Ma’am.” And she shuts off the phone.
~~
James watches all of this from one of the nicest hotel suites he’s ever been in in his entire life. Silva left the island bugged from floor to ceiling and MI6 doesn’t seem to have a clue- James and Silva and some of the henchmen have been watching the whole thing on the televisions in the room for the last few hours.
Silva had offered him a chair in front of the TV, taken one look at James’ face at the offer of a chair, then taken it himself. James sat on the sofa and wished the henchmen would just leave- so he could kill Silva, so he could kill himself, so he could call home. There are at least four phones in the suite, it’s that big. At the very least he could throw a chair through one of the hotel windows and leap out into the streets of Tokyo. It’s a long way down and reminds him of how he killed Patrice. Of how easy that was.
Only the first kill was hard.
James wonders why M is so willing to let him go. Why it took MI6 thirty-six hours to find him- find where he had been. He grinds his teeth where he’s missing something and doesn’t miss the way that Silva doesn’t miss him doing it.
“I want a shower.” James says and they let him go- though one of the navy sweaters follows him to the bathroom, takes the safety razor and the phone, then sits just inside the door.
~~
James wakes up in the middle of the night to Silva sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s looking out at the skyline, all the twinkling lights of the city- James wakes up but he doesn’t feel scared, just… resigned. If there was peeling whitewash he’d be picking at it so he doesn’t have to think. Silva has all of his clothes on, though it’s a different suit than the one James ruined in his escape.
“What do you want.” James doesn’t quite ask and Silva just sighs.
“How many 00s do you think there are, James?” Silva asks, still looking out at the city.
James considers. “As many as they need.” He finally says, wondering what this has to do with anything.
“There are nine, James.” Silva tells him. “One through nine- and when one dies there’s another one to replace them.” James thinks of all those eager young agents, how they’d all eyed him when he’d come in after he’d died, when he’d nearly failed all those tests. How hungry all their eyes had been, how many of them had told him he’s old. So hungry for that awful promotion. “When you were promoted to 007 where did you think that came from?”
James thinks about it for the first time. Silva makes a disparaging noise, the sort of sound James heard more than often enough from his schoolmasters.
Silva turns to look at him, face lit up by the lights outside. He looks like a fucking ghost.
“Someone died.” James guesses. He half remembers a weird name, but it hadn’t mattered at the time. He didn’t know the man, only wanted his job.
Silva makes another noise and rolls his eyes, turning back to the cityscape in frustration- James lunges up out of the sheets, a pillowcase wound between his hands, gets it around Silva’s throat, and then they’re rolling around trying to kill each other again. Silva gets a few really good shots into his ribs with his elbows, knocks the wind out of him, but James keeps his grip up on the fabric, until Silva is making a terrible rattling noise in his throat, nails dug into James’ forearms so deep theres is blood smeared on both of them.
The door to the room is kicked up and James is dragged away, hit in the kidneys a few times until he’s gasping on the floor and Silva finally gets his breath back enough to put a stop to the beating.
Then they’re staring at each other across the floor, shoulders pressed to the glass of the window, both of them gasping for air, and Silva has blood dripping from his nose. He rubs at it, smirks down at the swath of red across the back of his hand. “First blood to you, I suppose.” He says, with a sort of salute. James just stares at him, arms curled around his waist where it hurts. “I was the one that died, James. I was 007 before you were.”