Who: Silver & Olivia What: Meditative Chats with Silver (He should charge.) When: God time is messed up. After Tony leaves Gotham. Where: Passages
Her keys clattered. The apartment was wide and dark and silent and Olivia stepped out of the deceptively dark yet still impractically high shoes as she stepped across the threshold and turned on all the lights at once. it was a singular movement, with a heavy-limbed grace to it that came entirely from exhaustion. All the lights, not just an evening’s usual single lamp for the voice was loud in the back of her head until the shadows snapped to nothing at all. Olivia stood and she looked at all the crevasses and corners of her apartment’s hallway lit up like Mardi Gras, and she put a hand to her temples with a headache that had hardly really begun.
Stop it. There was nothing to fear. There were no lurking sins to throttle her behind the couch or lurking beneath the half-folded blanket on the armchair. No one had access -- it took quite half a minute to disarm the sleek and discreetly flashing alarm system. Half a minute she’d spent in heels and business suit on one side of the door when she could have been on the other. Stop it, thought Olivia, more stubbornly this time and she kicked both shoes across the room because she could.
She disappeared into her room, and the brightly lit apartment was suddenly full of sound, too. It was rich, bluesy jazz that rebounded off the walls and almost -- almost -- drowned out headaches and voices and anything at all. There was shucking the biscuit-colored suit until it lay like a shed snake-skin on the floor, and when she opened the cabinet to pour the wine, it was in loose pants the color of molten chocolate, a soft, dark sweater that skimmed her wrists and defiantly bare feet.
I am not going out. You can see me pouring this. Red wine lurched into the glass, the music sweltered around Olivia. It was, she supposed, a little like talking to a cat. Or a plant. Certainly something that couldn’t talk back. But something that demanded, something that insisted, with a throbbing ache in the temples and a low, tense knowledge that something was not as it ought be.
“I am drinking this,” the apartment did not answer back. It sat, in bright, artificial light and it gave up all its secrets and there was nothing to fear, nothing at all. She drank the glass, drained it as Miles Coltrane blared a golden sort of sound to drape around her shoulders and she sat with her bare feet tucked under her and with her hands folded underneath her thighs, and she was not going anywhere. Nowhere. Not now.
The hotel, on reflection, was more sad than it was vaguely terrifying. It was old and it was dusty and the roof did not bow under weather’s ravages but it could. She stood on the threshold, where the sidewalk slid into the hotel’s property itself, all smooth nothing of a line and she held arms tightly wrapped around herself the way Olivia never would in public and she looked at it.
“I don’t like you,” Olivia said, to cooling, clear night air and the hotel and the voice at the back of her head, urging onwards. She spoke clearly, the way of women used to making themselves heard above board-room clatter, and she spoke with precision, the way of women equally used to making a point. She said nothing else, nothing at all for a hotel couldn’t hear a thing and the voice did not care or she would not be stood, in her soft clothes and her voice wine-soft too with an evening ahead all hers that was to be given over to someone else.
Tony needed to get back through the door--his door, the one he belonged to, the Marvel door--but Silver needed some air. He needed to stretch in his own limbs a minute and think about the girl who was currently someone else entirely, someone else that was running around in a catsuit and getting torn to pieces for the love of some madman dressed up as a bat in the night. If he smoked, he would have wanted one, but he didn’t and so he just needed a breath of warm Las Vegas air. Silver stopped at the top of the grand staircase when he heard a voice in the lobby; voices weren’t exactly unfamiliar, but he was just a little on edge after riding around in Iron Man’s head for the last several hours.
“Hello,” he said, after allowing his eyes to adjust to the coming night framed in the doorway, the low purple clouds behind her confusing the outline of her image. Silver himself was pale as his name in the dusty innards of the hotel, and as he moved down the stairs his image resolved into something more human. The ghost-like whiteness enhanced into a carefully buttoned shirt that was loose over his jeans, and the comfortable steel-toe boots were spotted with old oil, hinting at the durable nature of the man under the cotton. Silver had broad features with sharp edges and keen brown eyes, and his easy manner of moving exuded calm.
He stopped several feet away from her to examine her face, and then he gave her a friendly smile. “First time here?”
“Third.” Olivia was economical with words at the best of times, trussed up and clipped, with discreet gold at throat and ears but she was not remotely in the mood for economical. Discretion and board-rooms were far away from a shattered hotel with secrets and fears crept into its corners.
Vegas was warm, soft as breath on the back of her neck, behind her. The evening wasn’t exactly as she wished it to be and the inky depths of the shadows stirred that low roiling feeling, all birds-wings at cage door that was fear kept leashed but Vegas’ warm sigh through the thin knit sweater was not the hotel, not quite yet. She stood with her back to the doorway and she looked at a man who was more suggestion of a man than something flesh and blood until he let go of the staircase and she could see he was not a suggestion all the hotel’s but real.
If she had been in a board-room or even in a coffee-shop en route to work she would have noticed the oil-spots before anything else. Olivia looked at shoes first and she looked for ways of categorizing, of classifying. Instead, she looked at his eyes, at the calm written there and she noticed that, instead.
“I won’t get used to it.” It was said like a promise, like a tired sigh and something vaguely petulant. Olivia was rarely petulant but the night deserved it.
Silver’s eyes were good to look at. Better than the callouses (wrenches and engine burns hiding the trigger weight) on his hands and the breadth of his shoulders, because Silver’s eyes were warmer than the cooling desert night and kind in the most serious way. Silver was the kind of man who could carry his sins somewhere out of the way where it wouldn’t impede the people around him, and just looking at him made people willing to speak, because it seemed inconceivable he would ever break that calm trust.
That was why he made a good spy.
He tilted his head and the smile became gentle, even understanding. “Troubles with the alter?” he asked.
She didn’t smile back. Olivia looked at the crinkles that fanned at the corner of his eyes and her lips thinned, thoughtful. The headache returned, a timpani-tempest and the coiled-tense feeling threaded itself across her shoulders like a yoke. Whoever he was, he may have smiled as if it were a blanket to wrap around her shoulders, but she didn’t take it and do so.
“Demanding,” she said, and there was something cautious but not quite crisp about it, as if the word were cut off out of habit, rather than anything intentional. Olivia was rarely unintentional but habits were habits. Olivia’s eyes were not warm, they were wary; a hesitancy that rode on constricted shoulders and about the mouth. It was not the look of someone who inspired confidence, or trust but neither was it someone easily accepting it. “What about yours?”
Silver noticed that she didn’t react to him warmly or kindly, but he noted the crisp politeness, too, and he was impressed that she could be professionally courteous and yet not friendly at the same time. Silver was genuine in his approach and he had nothing to gain by her, so he could be patient and with his confidence so deeply rooted in who he was, he was not troubled that she didn’t think he was Father Christmas right off. He prevented himself from taking a step forward and grew comfortable where he was standing.
“Tony is also demanding. But I don’t have to go through the door if I don’t want to, so we’ve worked something out. Symbiosis, he calls it. Sometimes. When he’s not calling it a pain in the ass.” A flickering smile. Silver didn’t have one iota of concern about telling people who was in his head calling the ball game from the press booth. That didn’t make him a player.
He stood his ground. It was not entirely Olivia that noticed, but the hotel was all around, with its faint scent of dust and moss and wood and the door near enough to be pressing. She stood hers, and she tucked her arms tightly against her chest and leaned a little against the doorframe. There was scarce enough light, thin and hazed over but it was enough to pick out outlines, the soft grays and the startling white of his shirt, his hands and his face.
“Symbiosis.” Skepticism thinned through the word. Symbiotic relationships were not those in which she was commanded -- propelled - toward a door and forced to go through and martialed about by a man whose head was a place she had little fondness for. “Tony?” He wasn’t moving toward her; there was a solidness to him that was as real-world familiar as the hotel was off-putting.
Silver imagined tree roots growing down from his soul into the ground under the hotel, and curling into whatever bizarre foundations the building might boast. He grew even steadier, even calmer, and even easier as he stood there without moving. His breathing deepened, slowing between the rise of his chest, and yet his eyes were still keen and open. If someone could be asleep and yet deeply present at the same time, it was him.
Ordinarily he would have waited until he was alone, but he was tense from the event of the last few days, and he had trouble letting it go. In all the time he wasn’t watching her, not exactly, because Silver didn’t stare unless there was a purpose to it. “Tony. He’s the one on the other side of the door. And here.” Silver lifted one hand to touch his index finger to his right temple, under a fringe of coarsely cut brown hair.
He didn’t move, not even a bit. Olivia wasn’t certain why that was reassuring - certainly, she had no great interest in moving forward into the hotel and past him but there was no impetus to leave. Her headache would continue, painfully tightening around her head like a fist closing, if she did not go through the door. She stood, and the loose sweater fluttered in the thin, cool breeze of a Vegas evening sliding on into night and she watched him carefully not look at her. It was, perhaps, a little like looking at art - being allowed to look without anyone turning and staring back. She stared, because she could and because he was so obviously not and in the looking, her own breathing evened, slowed. Olivia didn’t notice.
“Tony who?” She was less strident, clipped. It was a question, shaped out of interest, curiosity rather than a demand. The name sounded familiar, like a pulled chain ringing a very far-off bell. “Who are you?”
Another thing that made Silver a good spy: he’d never been in the military. He noticed that military men and women had a certain way of walking, even of holding their heads. Max Main had that, but he suspected she let her guard down around him because she knew he knew, and he knew she knew he knew. Spies. Silver moved without a guard, like water, allowing his limbs to do whatever was natural. It didn’t make him graceful like a fighter or a dancer, but it made him even more collected than he was naturally. “Tony Stark.” He smiled again at how it sounded.
At her final question he actually turned fully to face her and advanced forward, hand outstretched, palm slightly up and not down. “I’m Silver McKellar. It’s nice to meet you.” He was going to wait with his hand held out to her, and he was confident enough to weather any awkward pauses. He felt her dislike of something--him, the hotel, the situation--and he naturally wanted to ease it. It took his mind off things.
It was as innately drilled in as it was unwanted. Olivia did not want to shake his hand but she did so. Her hand was slim and the nails were neatly shaped and it was cool and firm and the handshake was one she intended to end just as soon as it was polite to leave go. He did not seem unpleasant - no, he smiled as if it were ordinary to meet in the center of a tumbled-down hotel and by smiling, she felt a little as if that ordinariness brushed up against her, almost took her along with it.
Tony Stark and her hand set in his and she blinked once, and her hand tightened just a minute. The name was recognized, somewhere - the door too close and Olivia opened her mouth and she closed it again, awkward. It sat on her shoulders, weighted like an ill-fitting coat far too big for her and for a moment it was obvious, like a painted outline bleeding in. “I think I know you,” Olivia said, and she didn’t give her name at all. “I think -- they might be from the same place.” She withdrew her hand, but she looked at him, a half-beat closer than he’d been before, studied the mild, inoffensiveness of his outline as if she had a great deal to say and nothing at all.
Silver was aware he had cornered her into the handshake, and he wasn’t going to lord the victory over her. His hand was extremely rough, and all-over rough that came from soap that stripped engine oil from the skin. The grip was warm but not unpleasant, and the firmness of it hinted at more of that solid, controlled strength. He released her a split second before she withdrew, and then he rocked slowly back on his heels, rolling stiff shoulders back against his neck. He took the opportunity to examine her features, and he must have liked what he saw, because he smiled again.
“Then you know him, not me. We’re together but most definitely separate.” He rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling as he fought the phrasing of the response, and when his eyes came back down they twinkled with temporary amusement. “We’re not too much alike.” This could be debated, of course. “Not that I wouldn’t mind a suit of my own. Where is your alter from?” He was extremely casual about it; he’d had several months to get used to the situation.
He had callouses; it was a dim knowing that slid into her mind without Olivia truly registering it. These days, she learned people’s faces. Their freckles, the way their eyes wrinkled when they smiled, the shapes of their mouths, the odd, nuanced way they held their hands. Olivia registered Silver’s hands and noted that it meant something (a profession? Callouses, toughened skin was caused by something) in the recesses of her own head the way a spy might. Her smile was a cautious echo, a thin thing all mouth and not quite stretching to her eyes and she looked at him without hiding the assessment there, as if she weren’t aware it even happened.
“Fury,” she said, because it was true and the word hung like a still note, deceptively simple, quiet. It still sounded strange, but her tongue shaped it as it had a thousand silent times. “The alter - my alter. Nicholas Fury. There’s no suit.” She smiled, sudden and strong. It was not, as she had hoped it might be, madness. But she was not alone, either. Olivia smiled and it made much of long, strong cheekbones and her wide mouth, it made the pale thing she’d given before look flimsy. “Same place.”
Silver’s pension for working with engines meant it was impossible to detect gun callouses even when he did go to the range without gloves. His clothing would have told her that he was managing with money, but didn’t spend an excessive amount on clothing. He smelled clean, of practical deodorant, and he was strong but not intimidatingly so. His hair was just slightly overgrown and he kept working his shoulders as if unable to work a kink out of his neck.
His eyebrows lifted when she mentioned Fury. “The Colonel. Oh, God. Poor you.” He was quite serious in his sympathy, and he took a deep breath and then let it out. “He doesn’t need a suit. Does he laugh?” Silver tipped his head in her direction, forehead creasing with earnest hope. “Please say he’s laughed. At least once. Is it all just, go here, go there?”
Olivia laughed. It was the kind of laugh that sounded like it ought to be private, low and full and it rang out against the walls of the hotel, bouncing off them. It surprised her, she hadn’t intended at all on laughing but the slow unclenching of her spine, the rigid way she had held herself was undoing itself as she tried to imagine Fury laughing. It would be unpleasant, she supposed, a hard sound but she looked at Silver and she smiled and she shrugged her shoulders.
“He doesn’t laugh. Ever.” There was weight to it, implication that sat metal-solid in the words. It was startling, for someone to understand without her explaining. “He’s,” she slid back into sounding tactful, professional. Her spine straightened a little as she did so, Olivia didn’t notice, “Difficult. Nothing is as he wants it to be.”
She watched Silver standing there, a man utterly comfortable in being him, in the absurdity of someone inside his own head, able to laugh. “What’s Tony like to you?” Olivia asked. Her fingers were knotted together, but she was standing tilted face on, and she’d stepped beyond the doorway without ever a second’s thought toward it.
She had a great laugh, and he enjoyed listening to it. It felt like a ridiculously long time since he had heard a woman laugh--or anyone laugh. The things inside Wren’s door had sobered him, and it felt like coming back after a mission; strange, like living in a dream, where the things he expected to have teeth or claws never manifested. “Tony is...” Tony was different right now than how he usually was, and the black screaming cure of his chemical antidote had not been pleasant to live through, even if he was not the one doing the screaming. The haunted eyes of the boys in the Gotham cave were occupying the scientist’s mind, and Silver decided not to prod him. “Really distracted,” Silver decided. “Usually he’s nonstop and annoying because he’s brilliant. He thinks very quickly.” Whatever else Silver was, it was not quick. His shine was that of solid, pounded metal, not liquid mercury. “But he can’t make me do anything I want to without a lot of effort and pestering. So we worked out... an agreement. A regular schedule and parameters so he’s not taking over my life.” As if Silver really had that much to occupy his time. He left that out.
Olivia was not a woman who gave things away. She sat quietly and neatly, made small, non-committal noises of approval or disagreement and had a professionally-neat smile either way. Perhaps it was the hotel itself, prying things loose that held themselves tightly rigid, perhaps it was being stood across from someone who talked easily, freely as water running from a tap but her eyes showed a flash of something, and her mouth pulled at the corners. Surprise wrote itself into the corners, the scraps that it was permitted to write anything at all.
“You have a schedule,” she managed to sound calm, flat as if it were nothing more than a diary appointment for lunch. “A schedule for the Door.” Neatness, ordinariness opened up like lines sketched down on paper in front of her. Except --
“He takes over my life anyway.” Again, the clarity of calm, normality. Olivia was grateful nothing leached itself into her voice, the weariness of constant wariness. “How do you manage?” He must be strong, stronger than the smeared shoes and the rough hands and the familiar-pleasant voice gave him credit for. There was something of Silver McKellar that was more than stood in front of her, and Olivia was for a moment at least, sharply aware of it.
Silver was accustomed to this reaction to his arrangement with Tony. The people who frequented the Hotel had such a variation of relationships with their alters that Tony and Silver’s situation was unique. Silver could push Tony all the way back into nothing when he was in his body, and Tony could do the same when behind his door. Either one of them could go to sleep, but neither really did, preferring to take a strangely intimate back seat to the other’s thoughts and actions. It was a bizarre situation, and one that many people, especially those that knew nothing of their alters except bumps and bruises that appeared when they left the hotel and a few scrawls or lines of text in their journals.
He waited for her to get through it, and then hid most of his disappointment that she seized up into defensive again when they returned to the topic of Fury. “Resilience. The first few months were not pretty,” Silver said, readily. “But eventually he’ll realize that things are easier with your cooperation. It takes some give. I know it’s not... comfortable. Are you one of those that everything just turns off when you go through?” he asked.
“No,” It was, Olivia thought, a little like a hole in a dam. The answers - the questions - flowed like water, as if she’d wanted to be asked them, wanted to answer them, pull apart the whole business like a poor calculation and pry into the reasoning, the why of it all. “No, it doesn’t turn off.” It was like being asleep, dreaming vividly, dreaming so strongly you wanted to kick off the covers and wake up, but unable to move. It was like being pinned down and being weightless, like being dragged under an undertow. For some of it, Olivia was an unwilling viewer to a private showing of Fury’s life. For others, she was near but distant.
“He doesn’t seem to need my cooperation,” her words were dry, dust-like. She raised a hand, threw it palm out at the space around them, pulling them back into the hotel, its corners and its crevasses. “I’m here.”
Silver was one of those men that preferred to be fully informed and fully aware. Probably came from his former occupation, but he had a compulsive need to be armed with every trace of knowledge he could acquire. When he had retired, he had gone to every effort to restrain that impulse, knowing that normal people did not dig into criminal records and romantic backgrounds on friends they wanted to keep. Yet still he preferred to be awake for Tony’s activities, if only to explain any injuries that he may (and often did) receive. He had no idea how Wren managed it. The thought of Wren cast a frowning shadow over Silver’s face. He had no way of knowing she had already come through the door, and assumed that Selina was taking care of her injuries as they spoke. Still, it was hard to be sure.
“But I’m betting you fought him tooth and nail first,” he said, smiling. “That’s a delay that men like that don’t like. Wheel and deal with him; I bet you’re good at that, too. Make it so this is happening on your terms.” He twisted his neck again, compulsive. “I should get back in. Tony has work to do. You coming?” He offered her an ironic gentleman’s arm that he was halfway sure she would refuse.
She considered it. Bargaining. She hadn’t begun to think of it as she hadn’t contemplated Fury possessing any right at all. Taking her over, kidnapping her off-time. She was resentful, belligerent about setting foot near the hotel. She’d taken to driving the opposite route to work. But if it meant an end to the sense of compulsion, of feeling propelled toward the door even as her feet dragged - Olivia looked down at the tippy-toes of her silly shoes, even sillier beneath the soft brown pants, and she rolled her shoulders, as if undoing some of the tight tension there. She looked at Silver’s arm and she looked again at the so-bland-they-were-familiar eyes and she laid a hand gently in the curve of it - light enough to snatch it back.
“He won’t be at all polite,” she warned, as they proceeded to - and through - the door.