Does it still hurt?

Of course it does. No less than the butt of a rifle being slammed into his head, an overlapping burst of agony that rises and rises and never settles. He has been electrocuted, beaten, sliced open, stabbed, and, of course, shot. Every wall of his refuge has been torn to the ground, his training protocols dismantled with the bluntest of instruments, they have not left one stone on another, and still, he has himself -- he has a core somewhere which is intact, a dead-drop, a heart inside a chest at the bottom of the sea, a tunnel piercing into the ground where the man who was Tiago hides and where these men cannot touch. His body has been brutalized in every way he can identify, and he's sustained himself through it. He has sustained himself but he is falling apart; holding himself together with hands that shake and fingers that won't work. Only his thoughts are his own. And so he will continue, without breaking, even as he's in slivers on the poured concrete floor.

They've stopped shocking him above the waist, which is not saying much; only the fear of damaging or rendering inaccessible the store of information he has in his head (and it is working damage, rendering his world broken and uneven) deters them. His hair is growing in prickles, and an ache like a star blazes above his right eye socket. Some of the joy has clearly gone out of the endeavor, on his captors' side of this equation -- the polish has worn off, their methods have become habits against which he can brace himself (optimistic) or be conditioned to flinch from (pessimistic), their methods have worn their own grooves with repeated use. As their enthusiasm starts flagging, their methods don't change, and it gets worse-- it's patience that's running out, not their determination. It doesn't mean an end to the stressor or a moment's rest for the subject. All his mental energies have been spent taking stock of his own damages and bracing for new ones. He casts about blindly for even a mental image of what MI6 would be doing on the outside just then, a make-believe connection like a wire to his heart. If he holds M herself in his mind's eye, all is lost. If he thinks of her he will splinter apart, break and fail. Let them scrape off layers, let them take his heart, he doesn't need it. A man can live without a heart.

If they are growing tired of him, and of their wasted labor, death is coming sooner rather than later.

Does it still hurt?
Of course it does.

Bond has never really possessed an understanding of the kind of man who'd want to be fucked, and happily he won't have to start now; it's hardly more pitiable than the alternative under the circumstances. The mattress in the master bedroom remains, but the bed itself is draped in a white cloth like a bier, anerotically funereal. They've taken the mirror down and it's left a discolored void on the wall. There are no ghosts here -- no domestic objects remaining, no silver-backed brushes or shaving kit, and the air smells only like neglect and stinging cold. No sentiment lingers here to evoke mother nor father. But Silva must think he'll achieve something by it. He's a poor hostage-taker, but a fine terrorist; there's no time for distractions, for anything superfluous.

There have been no sounds of struggle, no shots fired. Outside in the hall Bond can hear no creaking boards, and Silva's men are sufficiently well-qualified that they don't fumble with their automatics as soon as they're out of their employer's line of sight, but listening very closely he can hear disinterested shifting from foot to foot. Silva begins stripping off his coat jauntily, but the guns remain, a presence in the room as strong as any third party, and the heavy thrum of a distant helicopter. It's difficult to be cagey when confronted with the full farcical wrongness of this. One for the books.

Silva hums to himself, not a tune, a distracting little hm-hmm-him-hum in the back of his mouth. Bond tries to undress.

His eyes are on closer examination a dark blue that even the most sentimental lover would be at a loss to describe. Sévérine had been a most unsentimental woman and all things considered must have looked on him with very little love even in her youth. He casts sticky glances.

"I want you to fuck me. If it makes it any easier, you're doing it for her." His manner is loathsomely jaunty, and yet for whatever this says about their manner of relating Bond is hardly surprised. Surprised by the choice of subject and object, maybe.

"Not dry," Bond says, a little incredulously.

"Unless your old gamekeeper is more lively than I care to think about, it would seem so," Silva drawls, but he's watching Bond's every move, keen and lips parted. He wants this very badly.

"I suppose we'll have to make do."

He shrugs, eloquently, even as Bond peels back that impossibly sleek turtleneck and starts to jerk him off against his own belly. (Either his devotion to peroxide is uncommon or he is that rare creature, a natural white-blond.) "I've had worse."

One can't travel prepared for every exigency; Bond gamely spits into his hand and sets to work.

For one who had been so bold with his eyes, daring Bond to flinch or quail, he didn't want to look at him during the actual bout. But he asked to be fucked, after all, so Bond fucks him mercilessly. Keeping him pinned is difficult, not that he struggles in earnest after a sudden pang of conscience but that he refuses to be subdued gently; disappointing heartless sex with all manner of people is a hazard of the occupation, and in all likelihood Silva's had more than his fair share. Down to and including rape, which Bond cannot avoid considering as a factor here. The traces of its memorable flavor he cannot avoid (call him unsympathetic) and which he half-suspects Silva of evoking on purpose, another feint. But he jostles and hisses insolence, he seethes and digs his knees in against the mattress, and the muscles in his back knot and course as Bond drives home, working into him with grimy fingers and hard cock.

They're roughly matched for size when lying down. Bond twists his arm behind him (bulging with fine muscle) and Silva arches up against him with a cry, tensing beneath him. He does not send that arm slack, like an amicable sparring partner interested primarily in not being harmed, but maintains resistance until Bond's grip is slippery with sweat and he's shaking under him, taut as a bowstring.

Mouthing at skin and mashing of lips and cheeks is a poor substitute for kissing a partner more willing and more able. His teeth work against the broad muscle of Silva's shoulder; Bond's never been particularly interested in biting as a feature of the sexual act but it's a convenient place and Silva can hardly gloat about it under the present circumstances. He groans a little more and his free fingers dig in, catching up a fistful of the bedsheets.

"Good, good. You're doing better already." Silva's voice is drowsily satisfied. Bond puts a hitch in it.

His arm wraps around to brace himself, half-instinctively to feel for Silva's damp throat like they're fighting instead of fucking (and grappling they are, in any case). He can feel the pulse in his throat, battering fiercely against Bond's arm, can feel the dull vibrations of a comment to which he pays little attention.

Silva sucks greedily on his fingers, grotesque and abandoned, and Bond takes the opportunity to probe just the slightest bit -- for a loose place or a pitted scar, a wire or the edge of a plate. Silva bites him hard. It's too bad they didn't opt to do this face to face, because Bond would have head-butted him in the nose.

Bond curses instead, feels the unsettling yielding of his own flesh as he pulls his hand free as roughly as he's able. A coppery patina of spit shines around the bite marks.

"Ah-ah-ah, James," he says thickly, too slurred to affect his usual lightness. Saliva trails down his lip, traces a line between the broad blunt tips of Bond's fingers and his wet tongue. With his head turned, the tendons of his neck stand out. Strangulation is briefly an appealing thought.

Bond releases his arm and he slumps down again against the mattress. He's still deep inside him, snarlingly annoyed and aroused and exhausted. It isn't a matter of staying power nor of his pleasure. It might not be about pleasure for either of them.

"--so easily discouraged-- I'd thought--"

A few more thrusts; Bond pulls out of his slick hole and gouges ineptly with his fingers, feeling scar tissue slip under the pads of his first two digits, uncertain how to make him work, to finish the thing. If he wants to come from this, if he wants Bond to come, if reducing him to frustrated unprepared fumbling is punishment in itself. It puts an end to hard breathing or annoyingly expressive sighs and commentary.

He'd expected any enemy of his to get off on this more, if that wasn't an unreasonable assumption, to take luxuriant grotesque joy in such malicious pleasures of the flesh, but it's spare and unvarnished and as sensual as an interrogation, a brutal exorcism of -- something inside him that whines for blood and to be wounded.

Bond comes guiltlessly but not painlessly, an orgasm torn free from him by his own hand and poured out. After they've fucked, Silva slumps on his chest and he weeps like a wounded animal, until his raw unsentimental sobs shake the bedframe. He cries until he roars with laughter, and strikes Bond's chest with his fist and rolls off of him.

"Get out. Get out." His voice is bloody-raw.