silver mckellar and tony stark are (silverandsteel) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-21 23:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | iron man |
Who: Silver
What: Rumination.
Where: A Vegas general hospital.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating:Not a one.
Silver was good at his job because he was good at lying. He wasn’t proud of the fact, but it was true. Men in similar positions were often of a more radical temperament, and had learned their skills of observation and falsehood through survival: survival of abusive homes or even the Wall Street collapse. Silver had not come from a precisely stable home, but if anyone dared to imply that it was abusive, he might be in danger of losing his rarely seen temper. Instead his aptitude came from a natural stability of temperament, an ability to look into the face of totally unexpected chaos and take it with aplomb. That attribute combined with a dedication to study and a healthy dose of patriotism made him a good addition to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he showed a willingness to take orders even when he was intelligent enough to question them.
Lie detection was a matter of paying attention to the signals of the eyes when the mouth said something different, of taking in a flurry of movements and gestures that indicated deception, and of understanding other people enough to realize the difference between their behavior meant lying and when it simply denoted a bad hangover. Regardless of the situation, Silver was an expert at reading lies and at telling them with his body as much as his tongue.
When he left the agency in a flurry of gunfire and threats of imprisonment for life, Silver had retired as much as he was able. He took as many of his secrets as possible and buried them deeply where they were unlikely to resurface. Such was his deal with his superiors. Secrets would stay secret, and Silver would be allowed to live his new life amid the placid waters that ran so deep.
Silver had done his best to embrace this new life. He tried to tell the truth even while he could easily see the lies that were told to him in others. He was honest in his dealings, and with the people he liked he tried to be giving without really seeking true closeness. Felicia was the best example of a friend that knew Silver without actually knowing Silver. The previous owner of the garage had worked with Silver and known some of his history, and Silver was fairly sure he had not passed any of it down, and he was able to be a friend without worrying. Tony’s closeness with Pepper somehow strengthened that relationship, but not to a worrying degree that endangered her.
Miss Minette--Wren, as she called herself--was the most trying. Silver was too much a man of self-knowledge to be unaware of his affection for her. He thought she probably noticed, or at least she did when she didn’t have plenty else on her mind. He did wish she was not so good at lying to him, though. He tried not to take it personally because he knew that was just the face she presented outward, a constant blank-faced kind of lie, as much deception as her name. After her rash actions to reclaim her son and the positive seething mess that he perceived to be her relationship with Luke Henry, he tried to avoid thinking about her. He was not as successful as he liked even on the best days, and had Tony not been full of his own drunken concerns about his precious lab and the new distance with Pepper, the inventor probably would have been annoyed.
Silver knew he let Tony push it too far with the out-patient burn treatment regimen that consisted of a specialized iodine-based antiseptic, booze and pain pills, but he wasn’t in a hurry to deal with it himself. Finally, once Tony put his lab on hold and finished the little temporary prison Thor requested to hold Loki, Silver drew the line.
In Vegas, Silver ignored the pain long enough to check on his affairs. He saw Felicia at the party, saw Wren and Luke too (a sight that made his blood boil with almost adolescent anger), and then made sure Tony’s equipment and his new spare living quarters were in place Downtown. He was using a building that used to be a pawn shop for that purpose, spending more money than he liked on the rent; a sacrifice for privacy. After that he went to the hospital.
They admitted him immediately, a process that Silver disliked because it seemed to require almost nothing of him except a willingness to take off his shirt. Something about removing dangerous scar tissue and infection, and someone came to listen to Silver’s recitation of treatment in some other city and the list of prescription antibiotics and pain pills he’d been “prescribed” before they stuck him in a bed and scheduled first one procedure, and then another.
Silver found himself with a great deal of time on his hands and little to fill it with. He was forced to do more reflecting on his situation than even he was willing to undertake in normal situations. There were only so many baseball games he could watch, only so many newspapers to read. It was in this forced examination of self, inflicted by blue hospital dividing curtains and the kind of morbid thoughts that come in the package, that Silver realized he didn’t have access to the truth he had so desired to purify his existence a few short months ago. Instead he was as deeply embroiled in lies as he had been when on assignment, perhaps even more so, the division between himself and the people around him so deeply lacking in earnest relationships that it was a wonder they even knew his name. He wasn’t sure when that had happened, and try as he might, in the darker hours of the evening as Las Vegas glittered outside the window, he could not imagine how.