A double-O is only as good as their cover. A cover is only as good as ones' appearance. Expensive clothes and a brilliant mind can only go so far in a world that values beauty above all else.
The hospital staff treat him like a leper. If not for his appearance, then for the guards posted outside the cramped room.
He thinks of James. His icy blue eyes and dirty blonde hair. 'Classically handsome' he'd heard someone say a lifetime ago. It may have been him, he can't remember now.
James had called him "swarthy" once, in their hovel of a hotel before James was shot. Their last assignment together. Marrakech.
Tiago realizes suddenly that James has likely thought him dead this whole time. His clearance wasn't high enough to know about the Guangdong handover, and no one knew about their relationship. He'll find out second hand that a double-O is dead, maybe he already knows.
It's been five months. Everyone knows.
Something snaps.
He pulls at the restraints shackling him to the hospital bed and feels the loose flesh of his cheek shake with the movement.
He'd known distantly that hydrogen-cyanide could burn through flesh. He hadn't known what the compound could do to bone and cartilage.
Classically handsome. Swarthy.
MI6 left him to die. Didn't even have the courtesy to equip him with a proper out.
A breeze from the window cools the exposed wetness of his sagging lower eyelid and he snarls as best he can with a stubbed tongue and no muscle control of what remains of the left side of his face.
He stops thinking about James and focuses on M. On the woman that knowingly sent him to his death.
If she did this to him, she'll do it to anyone. None of them are safe.
He tugs at the restraints again. He may have no voice, but he has his mind and his training. For now that's all he needs.
He didn't die. That means someone else has to.
Everything has to be even.
He's killed people before. So many people. But not like this. Not with so much rage and venom that his vision blurs and his bones ache.
The hate is so tangible Tiago can feel it crawling under his skin like a parasite. He can see it in the way his muscles pull taut as he strangles a night guard with his cuffed hands.
When he comes down there's blood on his hands and he's alone in a stolen car wearing someone else's clothes. He's afraid in that moment.
They taught him how to deal with this. How to suppress volatile behavior in stressful situations.
But he can't. He can't do it.
Years of repressed experiences and buried emotions bubble up in his mind.
All the things MI6 made him do, all of the people he killed, the lives he ruined, what was done to him, what he did to James, it all crescendos into -
Nothing.
MI6 thinks Tiago Rodriguez is dead and the Chinese will not be correcting that fact any time soon so he decides to take up a new persona.
He choses Raoul Silva for reasons he can't justify to himself, but he likes how it sounds, and he so deperately wants to like something about himself again.
The whole process is laughably easy, even accounting for his considerable experience in the SIS. New documents, passports, petty cash, everything so readily available that perhaps MI6 does deserve to burn, given how horribly they've failed this world.
Even though he may have new papers, he sadly still resembles the title character of a Gaston Leroux novel.
He cannot return home without a face.
Time slips by quickly after he pieces together a computer with enough processing power to slip behind Barclays' firewalls.
Initially he only takes the funds that had previously been in his personal accounts.
That's how it starts.
The lines begin to blur. What he did for MI6 would never be considered white hat, they burned morals out of you to make room for the killing, but it becomes increasingly entertaining to play around in other people's systems.
He begins to slip, even by his own standards, but Silva recognizes that he doesn't want to correct the behavior. He wants to explore it, refine it.
MI6 tried to burn this out of him and he wants to know why.
Initially he doesn't plan to make himself a villain. That comes some years later, after he's built a cyber empire out of smoke and mirrors, embracing the underworld that he had once rallied so hard against.
He kills selectively, those first few years, because a small part of him hopes one day for redemption. To be welcomed home with open arms by M and to touch James again, if only for a moment.
His sentimentality is fleeting.
MI6 taught him everything he needed to know about stealth, about manipulation and exploitation; he puts his training to good use.
He spends hundreds of thousands of Euros on extensive reconstructive surgery and a prosthesis that will give him back his voice. He creates the world's most dangerous weapons by stringing together simple lines of code. If he wants something, he takes it. He plans, and he waits.
Even though he desperately hopes M will still want him when he eventually finds the courage to come home, she still needs to be punished for what she did to him. For what she did to them all - the countless agents that must have come before him.
Revenge is a long time coming.
He's not celibate, those years after Guangdong.
He finds numerous partners, male and female, to satisfy his needs; but they all pale in comparison to Silva's untouchable memories of James.
With that said, Sévérine comes close.
They meet in an ally off a Macau flea market. She's being chased by god knows who and Silva's training kicks in hard. He knocks two of the men unconscious, the third he outright kills after the man rips away the scarf he has taken to wearing to cover his face. She doesn't thank him, and though she stares openly at his scars she doesn't shy away like the others.
Her name is Sévérine and a local brothel has 'employed' her since she was no more than a child. At twenty-two her beauty hides her rage at the authorities that should have protected her, but she is too soft. Years of conditioning have made her afraid of the very freedom she so desires. In a moment of weakness he offers to train her in the methods that would allow her to seek the revenge she craves, but she doesn't want it. She wants to be taken care of and is too ready to let him take charge and control her every move.
Sévérine does not love him. She makes that clear from the beginning.
In all honesty, he doesn't think she's capable of the emotion, such is her state of mind. Nonetheless, he has no difficulty accepting her declaration and in return he makes a proposal. He will protect her, employ her in a non-sexual capacity and pamper her for as long as she should wish, but she will do as he asks without question or he will kill her outright.
She agrees on the condition he kills her former handlers.
He does this gladly and he lets her watch.
She can never be the companion he wants, but he can be the protection she needs. For now it is enough. It has to be.
He gives her everything and she spends money like it's going out of style. She's vicious and cunning and she points his hired guns at anyone that eyes her crossly. She acts as his public face, and he uses her beauty to draw targets in like he used to be able to do himself.
Their arrangement works for a long time. Longer than it rightly should.
After he obtains a properly fit prothesis their partnership turns sexual; but the act is a hollow comfort and he grows tired of her games. She's grown too ambitious and he needs to take care of her or put her down. He is not like Mother, however, and he will not cast her aside because she no longer serves an immediate purpose.
So he reigns her in. Gives her bodyguards that now answer only to him and sets her loose in a world that he has created.
She grows to resent him as her leash becomes shorter and shorter, but she does this to herself. Sévérine shackled herself to him all those years ago and tossed away the key.
She will not be the death of him.
A hired gun informs him of "a newly minted double-O" mucking about in Montenegro. An informant in Q branch tells him it's James.
If he anonymously sends his beloved a congratulatory bottle of scotch, no one is the wiser.
Quantum is a quaint little terror syndicate that Silva never seriously considers joining; the idea of being beholden to any kind of authority, even a criminal one, sickens him to his core.
He's even less endeared after he discovers what they do to James through Vesper Lynd.
In retaliation he drains Quantum's Swiss and South African holdings to throw a wrench in their Bolivia spearhead. The act is part business and part pleasure, because though they've never actually met in person, Dominic Greene has been a thorn in his side since Greene Planet undersold one of Silva's holding companies in Buenos Aires.
The pipeline plan goes up in smoke anyway when MI6 gets involved, and perhaps it's fate that James ends up taking care of Greene for him.
It is just another sign that he and his Corazón were truly destined for one another.
Istanbul.
He's finally tracked down a complete hard drive of embedded MI6 operatives, and he's a heartbeat away from the retribution he's craved for so very long.
He taps into M's private line, because he wants to hear her lose everything when Patrice walks away with her security blanket. He wants witness the beginning of the end.
Instead he listens as M demands that a junior agent - Moneypenny, Evelyn, an SIS personnel record supplies - take an unclear shot at a double-O. He knows before Moneypenny fires that she'll miss her target.
He can hear it in her voice. A hint of fear that preludes hand tremors and missed opportunities.
He knows that M hears it too.
She's compromised, but Mummy doesn't rescind the order and demands the agent proceed.
James dies much more quickly than Tiago did.
Small mercies, he supposes.
He taps into MI6 to witness M fall apart.
In a way, he gets what he wants.
He orders Patrice to go back and search for a body. Sends a small contingent of his personal guard to assist.
In an instant James becomes Bond again.
A part of him had never truly intended to expunge the operatives. A part of him also intended to have a apple blintz for breakfast.
Plans change.
People change.
People die.
Silva is oddly calm in the days after Bond's death.
He'd truly lost James years ago, and whatever god still believed in Raoul Silva knew how deeply the man had mourned that loss. Perhaps everything had simply come full circle.
"C'est la vie." He says to affably to Sévérine, who watches him with fierce eyes from where she's handcuffed to the headboard.
"Lost your little pet, did you?" She taunts.
He gags her that night.
Reality catches up to him far too quickly when Patrice hands off the drive, conspicuously alone. Dried blood has stained the edges of the plastic case and Silva is instantly ill. He draws a steady hand over the container.
What's left of James Bond flakes onto the concrete.
Something tightens in his gut and he knows this feeling - hates it to his very core.
"Did you find the body?" He asks Patrice carefully. The man does not confirm, only takes his payment from Sévérine and leaves.
He has the drive. The mission was successful.
"Did you find the body?" He demands of the quiet room. No one moves. No one answers.
He is struck by a vision of rats devouring James' waterlogged corpse.
He resists the urge to retch, largely because he can't tell if the impulse is coming from a place of grief or rage.
He chooses rage and puts a bullet between the eyes of the man closest to him. A new hire. Easily replaced, but it doesn't help.
He chokes on his own breath and screams at the floor until wetness gathers at the corner of his good eye and the voice modulator in his prothesis shorts out.
Everything is different now. The precise planning, tireless work, years of delicate coding and manipulation suddenly meaningless in the face of an all encompassing desire to kill. To burn everything and butcher everyone. A hundred thousand contingencies and this was never one of them.
Years of deifying James made Silva blind to the man's mortality. His hands shake imperceptibly. He feels doubt for the first time in years.
James is his. James was his.
Bond wasn't hers to lose.
He's tired. So very tired.
Sévérine must hustle Patrice along, because the assassin is nowhere to be found after Silva manages to compartmentalize his loss and compose himself.
He finds her, cigarette in hand, nursing her bruises from the night before. She hides her emotion well enough, but he can see the sly indulgence coiling beneath her passive exterior.
"You are so proud, " He drawls, stalking toward her. "That you lived to see me hurt this way, hmm?"
"I didn't think it was possible." She tosses back witheringly from her seat at the bar. "He meant too much to you. Your whole world revolved around an obsession with a man who did not even know your name. Now you have time to focus on what is truly important."
Silva's hands clench into fists.
She has no idea of the hundreds of plots and potential missions that dried up in his mind the second Patrice returned unaccompanied. He didn't truly need her if James was ever to come back into the fold, that was what he had always told himself.
"Enjoy your moment of triumph." He barks, turning his bloodshot gaze on Sévérine only to have the woman assess him in return. She smiles viciously, a small quirk of her lips that speaks volumes.
In a heartbeat he's crossed the room, his hand around her throat, gripping tightly.
"You are going to be with me for a very long time, my darling," He says hotly as she gasps. "And I will keep you safe, if nothing else."
He releases her and she coughs pointedly, but her eyes are still gleaming as she grabs her wine glass to toast him, victorious.
She's all he has left and she knows it. A woman who no more cares for him than M did.
That night he dreams of M for the first time in a long time.
She's playing with dolls. Hundreds of them. Delicate little things made of porcelain, each one a unblemished mirror image of her precious agents.
She hand paints the faces on each one with such love. She dresses them in the finest little clothes and they drink the most exotic tea that's never existed.
And she grows bored with them one by one. Tossing the old aside to fashion the new.
Tiago's doll isn't like the others, though, he's perfect, untainted and cherished like nothing else.
Until she spills a bit of tea on his little velvet jacket.
Silva wants to yell at M, tell her he isn't ruined, that he's still good inside, but she tosses the little Spanish doll aside, where it's warm porcelain face cracks on the cold marble floor and rests among the splinters of countless others, largely intact but irreparably damaged.
As is, he can only watch as she discards figure after figure with only one of his beautiful brown glass eyes still able to see.
She comes to her last doll, a once beautiful James Bond, and pauses, inspecting the cracks and chips in his patina, the dirt and age that have darkened his once bright golden hair to a dull brown.
She holds the figure with such care, like she used to hold Tiago, and then lets go.
James shatters on the marble. Little broken bits mixing in with what is left of Tiago's ruined body.
M sweeps them both into the dustbin.
Silva wakes up with blood in his mouth.
He's bitten through his tongue.