Work Text:
The tops of the mountains and anything past thirty metres in front of the car were obscured by thick, heavy fog that settled on the road. Séverine liked to think herself a practical woman, but she couldn’t help her thoughts from wandering and inventing things that would greet them just out of sight. She believed in hauntings, but not in ghosts. Some deaths caused a disturbance so great that the world was forced to retaliate. It wasn’t a loved one calling out in the night; it could only ever be an echo of something no longer there.
She did not expect to see Raoul standing in the middle of the road, or expect to see him crawl out of the shadows, alive or injured or otherwise, but if it were possible for anyone to survive out here for three years alone, and if anyone could come back after their body was burned and their ashes scattered, it would be him.
Eventually something did push its way out through the mist: their final destination, marked by gates etched with SKYFALL just beneath two statues of stags, their horns pointing upwards.
The car slowed as it neared these gates. As they descended to the bottom of the hill to meet what remained of Skyfall, the fog opened up and Séverine could finally see something besides road.
The moors were barren. There was grass, and the occasional tree, and a lake. Then there were the ruins of Skyfall, as jagged as the mountains with rubble and ash scattered across the grass.
Raoul had certainly been thorough in his work here.
Séverine never read the official reports about what happened here, having no access to them herself, but she knew enough. When Raoul’s body was released to her she was told the basics of how he died; it had come as a surprise to learn he had not burned, or died at his own hand.
After the investigation concluded, and after her release from the hospital and then her release from MI6 custody, she approached James. The plain, blunt truth left no room for discussion or elaboration, and although it was the truth it was not enough. She was still left with too many questions that lacked answers. It was debateable whether or not she was the right person to ask them, herself having conspired to get him killed not days before he finally died, but there was no one who knew him left to wonder what happened in the end. And so she asked, not expecting any answers, but James surprised her.
Now she was here, gazing upon the wreckage of what had once been a home.
“Sorry if it’s not what you were expecting,” James said. “I haven’t had the chance to stay on top of the upkeep, and it’s hard to find someone to look after it when there’s no roof.”
“Was it beautiful?” Séverine asked.
“It had its charm,” James said, “if you knew how to appreciate the scenery.”
Séverine had never seen anything more isolated. Even Raoul’s island was less lonely; there was no life left there, but at least there once had been. Out here, everything just looked barren.
In a way it would have been blasphemous for Raoul to die in a crowd, with witnesses. All he needed was one witness; she hadn’t understood what he meant when he’d first said that to her, back when she was a girl, in another lifetime, but it made sense now.
Séverine climbed out of the car, followed a moment later by James.
There was no front door that she could see, but looking at the drive she could guess at where it once was. So much of the building was in shambles across the ground, but surprisingly some semblance of the foundation remained, in the charred edges of walls reaching upwards to the sky.
It didn’t look stable. Each brick looked precariously positioned above the one under it, but somehow everything in front of her had survived the wind and snow and rain for three years.
James didn’t seem to be following her. Séverine walked around the side of the house, kicking away the rubble under her feet to clear a poor attempt at a path. There was wreckage from the helicopter scattered among the old stone bricks, and emerging from the side of the building was what remained of the steel body of Raoul’s helicopter.
There wasn’t much left of it. Parts were scattered around the grounds, burnt pieces of tempered metal that Séverine couldn’t dream of reassembling into anything that could get off the ground.
“How did you not die here?” she asked, once she heard the crunch of gravel behind her that indicated James’ presence.
“I was underground,” he said. “There are tunnels under the moors.”
“And that was safer,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have survived in there,” James said, nodding to the wreckage left behind by Raoul. Séverine watched as he approached, looking on at remained of his childhood home. “The tunnels are old, from the Reformation. It couldn’t be too dangerous, if they lasted that long.”
“Your family are Catholic?”
“Were,” James said, but gave a small, slight smile at her comment. It was meant for himself, so small that it would normally be overlooked, but Séverine knew how to spot those smiles, and what they meant. “I wasn’t aware you were up to date on British history.”
“It’s not as though it is obscure knowledge,” she said. After a beat, she added, “Raoul had many books on the subject. He had books about a lot of subjects, and was always telling me to look online for anything I didn’t understand.”
“He was well read, then.”
“Of course. Did you think he wouldn’t be?”
She walked closer to the building, stopping to look at a sheet of metal. Barely anything from the helicopter had been salvaged – why bother? Nothing here could be salvaged. That was obvious just from looking at where it collided with the building. There would have been testimony given by James, and a forensics team would have come to investigate, but in the end it would all come too late.
What Séverine saw in front of her was what a forensics team would see, although they would know how to look. It didn’t matter, though – no matter how accurate or extensive their reconstruction was, it would help no one. At most such information would help to prepare for future, similar disasters, but there would be no one like Raoul again. He was the only one, which was the only comfort Séverine had.
She walked away from that thought and kicked aside a piece of the helicopter before stopping to bend down and look at it.
“What happened to the bodies of his men?” she asked.
“They didn’t tell you?”
“No,” she said. “I only know what became of Raoul.”
“DNA was taken, and those who could be identified were,” James said. “There were only a few, though, and even fewer with family who could be tracked down. The rest were buried. The standard for unidentified bodies.”
Séverine nodded. “Well. I suppose they knew what would happen to them, coming out here with Raoul.”
“It would be expected,” he said. “There weren’t any survivors. None, except for you.”
“I wasn’t here with him,” she said. “If I had been, I would have died, too. Can I go inside the house?”
“If you want,” James said. “There isn’t much left.”
She walked up closer to the structure, stepping over rubble and kicking what she could out of the way. When she reached the remnants of the helicopter she paused, tentatively reaching out to touch it before grasping it tight and using it to pull herself up.
Looking inside, Séverine could see more of what resembled a house rather than just an abstract arrangements of crumbling walls and fire damage. It was no less fire damaged on the inside – it almost looked worse, with the helicopter having served as one of the primary sources of the flame -- but there was a sense of closure: there were boundaries of a room, now featuring a helicopter. The walls themselves were blackened, and Séverine could see shards of glass strewn across the floor.
She used the helicopter to pull herself over the wall and inside. There was a clear hole in the ceiling, and looking up she could see the clouds and the fog. Along with all the damage was the beginnings of life returning to the place: grass sprouting from between floorboards and signs of small animals. It still resembled ruins more closely than it did a house that was destroyed and abandoned only three years ago.
It would have taken so much longer for the building to fall into this state had it not been damaged so thoroughly. Decay was natural; it was the pristine, everlasting buildings that were unnatural.
With a hand on the helicopter Séverine walked around the room, careful to make sure that the floor supported her every time she took a hesitant step forward. She could see through to some of the other rooms; most looked like they fared better than this room, not having a helicopter planted in the middle of it, but the fire damage was still extensive. Nothing in the house looked undamaged.
Carefully Séverine took a few steps towards one of the doorways, pausing beneath the arches as she looked in through the window. So much of the house was burnt. She could see remnants of furniture, something that looked like it might have been a table once, and the black metal of a broken chandelier. The damage was extensive; she figured she could go from room to room, carefully picking out the things that were salvageable and examining them, and that it would still take several days.
It felt wrong to look. James hadn’t minded bringing her here, and he hadn’t said anything as she stepped into the house, but it was his past, and his family. It was painful enough to have Raoul live as a constant shadow hanging over their head when they were together. She didn’t think she could bring James back to the island or to Macau, even if she wanted to. She wasn’t strong enough for that. She would never be strong enough to bring him to her home, to open up her past to him.
Séverine turned away. What she was here for was behind her, anyway, in the burnt steel wreckage of the helicopter. The windows were shattered, and the paint melted off. No part of it was identifiable; it was just a shell.
The bodies of the pilots had been pulled from the helicopter. She knew the pilot, and the co-pilot. She knew all Raoul’s men who died that day – she was probably the only living person who did. Standing in the gutted heart of where everything had reached its natural conclusion and fallen apart, it felt that that should be a burden.
Somehow it wasn’t.
When she returned through the same gap between wall and helicopter through which she had entered, she spotted James standing down the slight slope of the hill, looking across the lake towards another building in the distance.
Séverine paused, hesitant to interrupt him. Undoubtedly he was aware that she was standing there, as much like Raoul as he was. They came from the same place; of course they’d have some things in common, and she’d rather see it in things like this.
Eventually he looked up at her.
“There isn’t much left of your home,” she said.
“Perhaps,” James agreed. “It’s not my home, though.”
She nodded. “All the fingerprints are burned off,” she said. “There’s nothing left to mark it as yours. It’s just… burnt. Like any other rotting building.”
“It hasn’t been mine for a while,” James said. He began walking around the side of the house, glancing back to Séverine and over her head, at what remained of the home.
She followed, picking up her pace only slightly so as to keep pace with him, but never breaking into a run. He briefly paused so she could keep up with him.
“He has this effect,” she said as they neared the lake. “I can’t keep track of what’s fallen into ruin after it’s met him.”
“His island?”
“That’s one,” she said. “But he wanted that for himself, so it wasn’t destroyed.”
“It looked rather run down when I was visiting,” James said. “Although I suppose I wasn’t given the full tour of the place.”
“You weren’t,” she said, as she tried to push away thoughts of the rooms that still breathed with some life of their own instead of only having the twinkling of sunlight for company – those stones weren’t plants, though, and the sunlight didn’t help much.
But her room was nice, with its bookshelves and her computer and TV, and the rooms occupied by Raoul’s men who lived on the island were good, as far as she knew. Raoul’s room, too, was nice. It was always so dark compared to the hallway outside. Some days he drew the blinds, but not often. He liked the sunlight, he’d said, but did not appreciate its glare on his computer screens while he was trying to work.
“There were other places, though,” Séverine said, forcing those thoughts away. “That was not the only place that he lived.”
“Other abandoned islands?” James asked.
“No,” she said. “He had homes. Some were like this, by themselves in the middle of nowhere. They were abandoned by their owners too, willing or not. Then he would move in and take them.”
“And did they end up in a similar state as the island?”
“Eventually,” she said. “Keeping a place standing was not his speciality. He was far better at taking things apart.”
“He demonstrated that well,” James said.
“The places he didn’t let fall into disrepair, he burnt down,” she said. “Sometimes it was to send a message. Other places he destroyed just for fun. There were a lot of missions he went on where things ended up exploded or burning when they really didn’t have to be. But everything he touched would break eventually. Even if he didn’t burn it. Nothing that stood facing Raoul Silva ever came away in a better condition than he found it.”
“Well, you aren’t broken,” James said, and Séverine laughed.
“I suppose I’m not,” she said. “Probably the only time I’d say I ever was lucky. He meant to kill me, but I didn’t die, and now I’m the sort of woman who walks through abandoned buildings where the man I once loved died.”
“We haven’t reached that building yet,” James said, and nodded at the small chapel in front of them.
Séverine fell quiet as they neared the graveyard.
Again, it more closely resembled something from hundreds of years ago than a place that had been lived in until recently, but thinking about the rest of the house, and how this home was at least as old as the 1600s, that didn’t seem like an unfair comparison. She followed James up the hill, through the row of graves, and then moved closer to the door.
For a moment they stood together outside. Séverine eyed the door and scanned the building itself. The windows were still in-tact, although some of the glass chipped. It wouldn’t be long before one of these windows shattered inwards, opening the building to exposure and then decay. Like the graves of the people buried around this chapel, soon all that would remain to identify it would be sanded off, leaving nothing behind to distinguish or identify it.
“This is the place?” she asked, although she knew the answer.
“Yes,” James nodded. “Do you still want to see?”
“Of course.”
She followed him up the stairs, and as she passed through the doorway her hand briefly lingered on its wooden frame. How many people visited this building? How many people found something holy within its walls? Were any of them Raoul?
Everything was still. The pews were in order; there was dust on their backs, and spider webs hanging in the windows, glinting in the sunlight. James’ footsteps echoed as he walked down the aisle to stand at the front of the pews. It was simple, and deserted, but something in the air that made it heavier than the fog outside.
On the floor there was blood. It was dried, no longer the violent red that once flowed through Raoul’s body.
If she had ever thought that Raoul would turn the corner and walk out to meet her, it didn’t compare to what she thought now. This wasn’t like driving through the Highlands, alone and searching for remnants and proof of a dead man. It wasn’t like late at night, either, when she lay awake in her bed staring at the ceiling and her eyes played tricks at her and the darkness lied and told her Raoul was there, suffocating and surrounding her.
And if he did come back now, if he rose from the pew and turned to face her, what would she do? Cry? Fall to her knees and beg his forgiveness, and for her own life? Would she run? She had done none of those things on the island, but everything was different there. There was still some life on that island, clinging to it like an infection: Raoul, stalking through the hallways as the island collapsed around him. Dying there seemed natural; it would be the end of a slow decay, like everything else.
Here there was nothing. It was completely dead, and life was determined by if one could walk away or not.
If he came back now, she’d run, and she’d live.
A knot was quickly forming in her throat. It had been years since she really cried, and if she hadn’t been able to shed a tear upon finding out that Raoul was dead when she woke in hospital, she knew she wasn’t going to now.
At the front of the chapel, James was seated at a pew. Another bloodstain spread out across the tiles; if she hadn’t known what it was Séverine might not have guessed, but she’d seen enough bloodstains in her time.
There were a lot of questions she wanted to ask, now that she was standing where Raoul fell. How long had it taken for him to die? Had it been instantaneous? She was the closest he had to next of kin, despite how he would have loathed for her to carry that title, and so she’d been entitled to ask her questions.
In her thoughts, it would be different if James explained to her. The explanation she’d received was complete, but not thorough: a knife to his back, a stab through the heart, and then Raoul was dead. There wasn’t anything new to learn, not unless James hadn’t been thorough when he’d given his account of events, but still – something was missing.
Something always was missing with Raoul, just as he was missing now.
What had he found in this room?
“Séverine?”
She dragged her eyes away from the floor but remained all too well-aware of where she was standing.
“It’s too small,” she said. “This chapel – it’s too small to be his grave.”
“It’s big enough for everyone in the cemetery,” James said. “Bigger, in fact. And let’s not forget about what he did to the manor. He left his mark on everything he touched.”
“Ashes,” she said. “Just like he is now.”
“Did you bring his ashes with you?” James asked, and it occurred to Séverine for the first time that he didn’t know what she’d done with them. How he even knew that she had them, she couldn’t say, but she supposed it was obvious. Who else would take them?
“No,” she said. “I’ve already dealt with them.”
She didn’t elaborate, and James didn’t question her further. She wouldn’t have told him, even if he had asked. Perhaps he’d have been able to read an answer from whatever she said, like how Raoul could. Perhaps by not asking, James was giving her a right to keep her secrets. It really wouldn’t make a difference if he knew or not because it was too late – the deed was done – but it would still be better, Séverine thought, if he didn’t know.
Raoul wouldn’t have wanted her to have anything to do with his remains – he did not die for her, after all – but given that the situation had been what it was, spreading his ashes was the least she could do. He was dead, like she wanted; what more did she need?
“Do you hate him?” she asked.
“No.” His response came quickly, but not so fast that she assumed he was lying.
“How?” Séverine finally asked. “He killed someone important to you.”
“And he’s dead now,” James said. “So is she. Whether or not I hate him for that won’t change it.”
Séverine nodded. She couldn’t even bring herself to hate James – she felt like she should, but she wasn’t sure for what. For killing him? For not killing him on the island? She knew she would probably die. Somebody always does, and she’d hoped only that Raoul would, as well.
“Besides,” James added, bringing her back from her thoughts. “I don’t think M even hated him, by the time it was over.”
“Do you think she loved him?” Séverine asked.
“I think he loved her,” James said, “and that she knew it. And if everything here is because he loves her – well, how could anything measure up to that?”