A Single Friend, My World - Part 01 [WIP]
Title: A Single Friend, My World
Author: Gideon BD
Type: Slash
Pairing: Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin, Albert Stroller/Ducky Mallard
Word count: 14,454 (for this installment)
Summary: 'The room in this hotel is like so many other hotel rooms he’s eaten, slept and/or fucked in throughout his tumultuous seventy-eight years of life. Plain albeit pristine walls with a painting or two hanging on them. Clean beige curtains, currently half-drawn and letting in a cheery cascade of sunlight. Dark brown carpet. Twin beds with burgundy bedspreads and fluffy pillows. A minimalist dressing table with a rectangular mirror. A slim, black television set. Another table, round and smaller than the dressing table, with two cushioned chairs set facing each other ... And on one of those chairs, basking in the sunshine with an ever-handsome, ageless face turned towards the window and blue eyes shut, sits his sole reason for living on.'
Categories: Angst, Crossover Pairings, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Older Lads, Romance
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Yeah, I know I don't own Illya, but I can at least have Napoleon, yes? No? Darnit.
Author's notes: Gah, I really want to finish this story, but I figured I'd post what I've written so far and then post the rest when I'm done. This is my first Man from U.N.C.L.E. and NCIS and Hustle story. In one! There are spoilers for Albert Stroller's and Ducky Mallard's backgrounds, and I'm definitely ignoring that '15 Years Later' MfU movie. :P
Also, a minor point for MfU fans regarding the character Mark Slate: For this story, I decided to use the original character background from the Moonglow Affair with the Noel Harrison incarnation since Harrison's version is more well-known due to the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. series. Sorry if it's confusing!
Soundtracks: Sting's Shape of my Heart, Michael Nyman's Big My Secret (the first 2:40+ minutes, anyway) and Avril Lavigne's I'm with You.
A Single Friend, My World
And if I told you that I loved you,
You'd maybe think there's something wrong,
I'm not a man of too many faces,
The mask I wear is one
~ Sting, Shape Of My Heart
The room’s number is 112, emblazoned in bold gold on a mahogany door.
No matter how many times he sees that number, his hand will always freeze and hover in the air in front of the door handle for a few seconds, in disbelief, or joy. Or a mixture of both, a near-paralyzing amalgam of emotions that don’t show on his face due to decades of mastering his poker face. Not even in his hooded, hazel eyes that have seen so much. Perhaps too much for an old, disillusioned man like him.
Albert Stroller, an old, disillusioned grifter. A scammer. A cheater.
But no matter how many times he remembers that about himself, remembers that the man in the room beyond the closed door knows that about him now, his hand will always bridge the inches of air to grasp the door handle. Answering the silent call of that man, like he used to over forty years ago. Like he still does.
The door swings open without a sound.
The room in this hotel is like so many other hotel rooms he’s eaten, slept and/or fucked in throughout his tumultuous seventy-eight years of life. Plain albeit pristine walls with a painting or two hanging on them. Clean beige curtains, currently half-drawn and letting in a cheery cascade of sunlight. Dark brown carpet. Twin beds with burgundy bedspreads and fluffy pillows. A minimalist dressing table with a rectangular mirror. A slim, black television set. Another table, round and smaller than the dressing table, with two cushioned chairs set facing each other.
And on one of those chairs, basking in the sunshine with an ever-handsome, ageless face turned towards the window and blue eyes shut, sits his sole reason for living on.
“Do I call you Albie today?”
He halts at the dressing table, propping himself against it to blatantly stare at the other man, smiling softly. Smiling at the eternal lustrousness of blond hair gone dark silver, at the steel-rimmed spectacles perched upon that patrician nose, at the Scottish accent he knows is learned and not innate. At that silly polka-dotted, maroon bow tie flaring out from the collar of a fine suit very similar to his own pin-striped, dark blue one.
At the tiny quirk of those miraculously still-luscious lips in a smile, one that only he has ever had the privilege to witness, to know it to be true. To know it to be his, alone. Once upon a time.
“Do I get to call you Ducky today?” he replies with what he hopes is a droll tone and not a voice wavering with the weight of all that he harbors within himself for this man. Forty-eight years is a damn long time for unvoiced thoughts - feelings - to grow and thrive, even locked away deep in the recesses of his mind as they are.
His breath catches in his throat when a gentle chuckle fills the cool air of the room. God, even that laugh is as endearing as he remembers it.
There is no way in hell he’s going to survive this meeting without fracturing something inside.
“Hello, Napoleon.”
The Scottish accent is gone, replaced by that oh-so-familiar Russian-tinged British accent, and god, the last time anyone had called him by that name - his real name - he’d been right here in New York City. In his U.N.C.L.E.-allotted apartment, packing his bags like a madman, stuffing them unceremoniously with his hoards of suits and t-shirts and jeans and anything else he can grab, his left shoulder tingling from the lack of his shoulder holster and gun, his chest seizing time and again, his eyes searing and his vision so mysteriously blurred -
“Illya.”
He thinks he’s said it casually, said that name as if it isn’t his holy word, the sum of everything that means anything to him at all, but the other man stands up and comes to him without another word, welcoming him with arms that embrace him tightly, unreservedly. The lump that abruptly lodges in his throat is massive, becoming even more so when he senses that head of lustrous, dark silver hair rest itself upon his shoulder as if it’s meant to be there. As if it’s always meant to be there.
“Napoleon,” he hears again, this time whispered, and no, it’s certainly not Dr. Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard - Scottish chief medical examiner for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for more than a decade - in his arms now, who’d almost been roped as his next mark for a desperate influx of big cash into a wallet on the brink of collecting only dust. Dr. Mallard might have been a potential mark, but Illya Kuryakin?
Oh, even he, the once legendary Napoleon Solo who was considered the top U.N.C.L.E. agent in America even by the evil T.H.R.U.S.H., isn’t that crazy as to risk losing a limb or three plus a number of organs (and very likely his head too) by robbing the man who was once also one of U.N.C.L.E.’s top agents. In the world.
Illya. His partner, long, long ago. His best friend. The only friend who had known the real him, who knew who he really was before he fled from America to England like a trampled dog with its tail between its legs, taking himself out of the game before Mr. Waverly could take him out first via red tape. Or gun. After his ultimate fuck up on that fateful day in the spring of 1972, the mistake that had cost U.N.C.L.E. the lives of more than a few good agents, cost him his life as it was, cost him his partner, well … it was unbelievable that Mr. Waverly hadn’t had him finished off with a blast of lead to the head.
“Sit with me, Napoleon. We have much to catch up on.”
He lets Illya guide him by the arm to the nearest bed and sits next to Illya on the side of the bed, facing the window. The sunlight reaches their lower legs and feet, burnishing their leather Oxford shoes, and he gazes at Illya’s pair, scrutinizing the decorative perforations of the toe caps. Did Illya ever wear half-brogue shoes like those when they were still U.N.C.L.E. agents?
He can’t recall. Then again, he never did spend a lot of time studying Illya’s shoes. He was usually studying Illya’s face. When Illya wasn’t looking, of course.
“Are you still going by the name Albert Stroller?”
They’re sitting so close that their arms are pressed against each other, Illya’s left knee touching his right, and he has to remind himself to breathe and look into Illya’s eyes - still so blue and beautiful! - and smile.
“Yes. It’s been my name for the past forty years. I don’t see myself changing it again anytime soon.”
“So you do prefer to be called Albert, then?”
His smile becomes much more genuine and wide.
“No, I didn’t say that.”
Illya’s eyes twinkle with amusement.
“You still don’t get to call me Ducky.”
Napoleon pouts, but with a twinkle in his own eyes, he retorts, “Why? Because only people in your current life can?”
Illya shakes his head once.
“No. Because it’s not my true name,” Illya says quietly, the twinkle in his eyes radiating into something even brighter, something very dangerous to the lifelong barriers inside Napoleon and that lump is back in his throat again, littler but yearning to swell, just like the immovable iota of hope in the left side of his chest. He imagines himself thumping on that portion of his chest with a fist, irately so.
Stop it. You aren’t worthy to have his attention, much less his love after what you did to him. Stop it, damn you.
“Hopefully this time, we’ll get to have an actual conversation,” Illya says after a long, somewhat awkward minute of hush. The tiny quirk of his lips is still there.
“The first time wasn’t even planned!”
Illya lets out a short laugh, eyes crinkling.
“Indeed. I can still recall Jethro’s face when you swaggered into the room -“
“Hey now, I don’t swagger -“
“Yes, you do, Napoleon. Now let me speak.” At Napoleon’s wave of one hand and a more pronounced pout, Illya says with eyes a-twinkle again, “As I said, when you swaggered into the room, you obviously hadn’t expected Jethro to be there with me.”
“Or all that spying equipment. Or the guns.”
“Were you surprised that I’m still in law enforcement? Or that I was in a hotel room with another man who had a gun in hand and was pointing it at your head?”
Deadpan, Napoleon says, “Actually, what really surprised me was that he was wearing nothing but a towel and it looked like it was going to drop at any moment while I was ass down on the floor. With my face less than two feet away from his groin.”
Illya laughs a second time, louder, and Napoleon can’t help but grin at the sound, at the lines of merriment around Illya’s eyes and broad smile.
“Yes, that would have been rather uncomfortable.”
“Not as uncomfortable as him putting a bullet in my head, if you hadn’t convinced him otherwise.” Napoleon shifts on the bed, just enough that he’s turned more towards Illya and can see more of Illya’s face. “So who is he? This Jethro guy.”
He almost also asks, is he your partner now?
He doesn’t.
Illya glances at him, eyes incisive, then says, “Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. I work with him in the NCIS’ Major Case Response Team. Technically he’s my boss, but he is also a good friend. I’ve known him since the early ‘90s. We met in France.”
“France, huh?” Napoleon asks, his placid tone belying the clenching of his stomach. If Illya had been in Paris at the time, Illya had been a mere hour’s flight away from him in London. Just an hour away -
“Yes.” Illya clears his throat and glances at the floor. “He got me out of a complicated situation when I … pushed a French police officer off a cliff.”
Napoleon’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead at the mumbled admission. It takes him several seconds to say, “You … pushed a French cop … off a cliff.”
“Yes. Off a sixty-foot cliff.”
Illya continues to stare at the floor, twiddling his thumbs, while Napoleon’s eyebrows arch yet more.
“A sixty-foot cliff.”
“Yes. Into a lake.”
Napoleon blinks.
“You pushed a French cop off a sixty-foot cliff … into a lake.”
“Yes.”
Napoleon is glad that Illya isn’t looking at his visage where his lips are twitching.
“Dare I ask why?”
Illya immediately scowls. The downturn of lips, the groove between the eyebrows and the blazing of those blue eyes are so familiar, so much like the frowns Illya used to display whenever the Affair they were embroiled in was going topsy-turvy, that Napoleon’s breath hitches once more.
“He had corrupted a crime scene,” Illya growls, his Russian accent surging. “He had it coming! And anyway, there was a lake below the cliff. Not solid ground.”
Losing the battle against mirth, Napoleon smiles and shakes his head.
“That’s my Illya.”
If it didn’t cause him to appear a sheer fool, he would have kicked himself hard in the ass for allowing those words to tumble off his tongue. As it is, he stiffens instead, his hands clutching his knees, his gaze flitting away from Illya to random spots in the room. To anywhere, at anything but the man sitting beside him and staring at him now.
Who the fuck is he to think that Illya would permit such possessiveness from him after the decades that have passed? Decades in which he hadn’t contacted Illya in any way whatsoever, not even to let Illya know that he was alive at least?
Decades, in which Illya had ample time to brew even more ample amounts of anger and resentment and probably loathing too towards him, after what he’d done?
The touch of a large hand on his and the entwining of their fingers is the last thing Napoleon expects, so shocking to him that when it fully sinks in that Illya is holding his hand, he already has Illya’s in a death grip. Illya’s hand is warm. Calloused. Thinner, frailer than he recollects, blue veins stark beneath pale, smooth skin.
Traitor, he thinks as he glowers at his own frail and pale hand, but his hand doesn’t loosen one bit.
Neither does Illya’s.
“Jethro’s a lot like you, you know,” Illya says casually, resuming their tête-à-tête.
“Oh? How so?” Napoleon says as casually, dragging his eyes away from their linked hands to Illya’s face. Illya’s features are impassive. Deceptively so, since those blue eyes are gleaming with a tenderness that makes another of his traitorous body parts, high up in his chest, ache.
“For one, he has sarcasm honed to a fine art. Two, he has next to no forbearance for state-of-the-art technology and prefers to leave scientific endeavors to the qualified. Three, he’s bossy, smug, impatient, an absolute Don Juan -“ At Napoleon’s playful slap on his upper arm, Illya’s lips curve up in a smirk and he adds, “And oh yes, he has a predilection for smacking people too!”
It’s a wonderful feeling for Napoleon to chortle with Illya again, till his eyes are squeezed shut and his shoulders are hunched from the jollity while Illya leans against him, their heads nearly brushing. When was the last time he’d actually laughed like this? When was the last time he’d shared laughter with Illya like this?
Jesus, how he’d missed it all these years.
“And like you, he’s also a charming gentleman. A no-nonsense professional who gives his work his very best. Handsome. Respectable. Kind, with a sincere affection for children and concern for their safety and wellbeing. A superior who cares very much for his subordinates too. Very much. He even speaks Russian fluently.”
Just like that, the damn lump is back in Napoleon’s throat, bigger than ever. It’s almost too good to be true that Illya thinks all that of him. Maybe Illya’s suffering from amnesia of some kind. Yeah, maybe Illya had, at some point, swallowed a bottle’s worth of Capsule B and completely wiped out his memories of that day in 1972. Or maybe, maybe the six-day coma Illya had suffered as a direct result of that day’s events did damage his brain like the doctors had anxiously speculated and the only reason Illya had requested for him upon awakening from said coma was because Illya didn’t remember what he’d -
“I should mark my calendar today.”
Napoleon blinks hard, jolted out of his morose train of thought.
“What?”
“Finally, I have figured out the perfect technique to leave Napoleon Solo at a loss for words.”
Well, what is he to do in response except mirror Illya’s smirk and good-naturedly nudge Illya’s shoulder with his own?
It’s anything better than asking Illya whether he recalls the explosion that hurled him fifteen feet into the air and cracked his collarbone, ribs, left leg and skull on merciless tarmac. Who knows what else Illya may recall then.
Their fingers still intertwined, Napoleon asks, “Does he know?”
Illya seems to read his mind, like he used to when they were still partners. It is both comforting and unsettling.
“That I was once No.2 of Section II of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement?”
Napoleon nods, and Illya says, “No. No one does. No one alive anymore, apart from you.”
Illya’s enigmatic answer prompts him to look at Illya, to seek extra clues in the indecipherable set of those appealing features. If even someone like Special Agent Gibbs - a good friend for at least ten to fifteen years by Illya’s own disclosure - doesn’t know a thing about Illya’s U.N.C.L.E. past, just how long has Illya masqueraded as a Scottish doctor and medical examiner? Twenty years? Thirty? And since U.N.C.L.E. was permanently decommissioned in 1985 (last he checked in 1993), did the persona of Dr. Mallard begin its existence as a role for an U.N.C.L.E. Affair? If so, why has Illya carried it on until today? Is it because it’s safer to do so in a post-U.N.C.L.E. world in which former T.H.R.U.S.H. agents are still on the loose, ravenous for vengeance?
Or did Illya adopt a façade for the same reasons he did?
To escape the past. Escape the condemning stares, the unspoken judgment begging to be laid down by a jury of his peers. Escape the reality that he remained alive while others didn’t.
But Illya had nothing to do with how things went down so disastrously. Illya had nothing to do with that ill-fated decision. His decision.
Illya had nothing whatsoever to do with April Dancer going up in flames from the scorching bomb blasts, transforming into a staggering, screaming, blackened figure that, to Napoleon’s horror, had evidently felt every lick of fire before she died in the rescue helicopter en route to the closest hospital.
Air-conditioned as the room is, Napoleon senses blistering streaks zigzagging up his left arm and across his left shoulder blade once again, shadows of what they’d been as he’d crouched over Illya’s sprawled, grievously wounded body and shielded the unconscious man from raining debris. Phantom pain, one U.N.C.L.E. doctor had termed it. Peculiar for the fact that he hadn’t lost any limbs and barely has any scars from his injuries. Psychological. Incurable. Pain that he’ll endure for life. Good.
He flexes his left hand as he says, “So … what exactly did you tell him when we first met in Washington, D.C., about me?”
“That you are an old, trusted friend.”
His chest swells at the murmured words.
“And that was enough for him?”
“Yes,” Illya simply says, and it is enough for Napoleon too. He takes a deep breath, then says, “It is nice to be able to chat with you without having a gun in my face, for a change.”
Illya’s lips twitch for an instant.
“Understandable. But the last time, Jethro wasn’t around to be the third wheel.”
“No, but he did call you away before we even got past the hellos and how-are-yous.”
“He is my boss, Napoleon. He is not a man who abides unprofessionalism or any work that is less than exemplary.”
“Like you.”
This time, Illya gives him a visible smile.
“Like me.”
Again, there is a minute of awkward silence, in which Illya sits calmly and gazes at him with blue eyes far too astute for Napoleon’s peace of mind while he studies a non-existent strand of lint on the inner right thigh of his trousers. His treacherous hand still won’t release Illya’s.
But Illya isn’t letting go either.
“Third time’s the charm?” Napoleon eventually says, glancing into Illya’s eyes.
“Yes. I do hope so.”
There is something about the soft tone of Illya’s voice, a tone he’s never heard Illya speak with before. A tone he never dreamed he’d hear Illya speak with, particularly towards him. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear that Illya had just … flirted with him.
Oh, great. You haven’t seen the guy for forty damn years, and here you are, thinking with your dick! A dick, by the way, that hasn’t gotten up for a looooong time, buddy boy.
“It’s an omen, don’t you think? Room 112.”
And again, Illya is the one advancing their conversation, now the suave, silver-tongued talker and he the reticent, nervous old geezer. When did that change occur?
“I didn’t think you the superstitious type, Illya. Man of science that you are.”
He savors the glide of Illya’s name from his mouth, a nectar of letters he’d forbidden himself to think, much less utter, since he resigned from U.N.C.L.E. and vamoosed.
“Dr. Mallard is, but not me.” Illya tilts his head. “It just seems … rather inexplicable that all three times, without any planning by either one of us, the room we would be given would have our U.N.C.L.E. ranks combined.”
Napoleon smiles at that. It figures Illya had also noticed it.
“Section VI got the first badge right with the Roman numeral.”
“But not with the second one. You went from being ‘II’ to ‘11’, and you never bothered to get them to correct it.” Illya pauses, then adds drolly, “And considering I was ‘2’ …”
Napoleon snorts in amusement, then puts on an outwardly arrogant expression.
“I think of it this way: Section VI must have considered me so magnificent an agent, my badge had to state I was No.1 twice.”
Illya groans and rolls his eyes towards the ceiling, an exaggerated reaction that dredges a chuckle out of Napoleon even as the voice in his head rebukes him yet again.
But they and the rest of U.N.C.L.E. didn’t think that for long, did they? Not after the fifth body rolled in looking and stinking like charred meat.
His humor expires swiftly, his mind beset by the imagery - no, the memory of standing in the morgue located in the second lowest level of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters here in New York, staring sightlessly at the half-dozen, shrouded corpses that were once agents from Sections II and III. Agents who were, just a day ago, alive and well. Agents who were his friends. One of them had been the older brother of another agent from Section IV, a young brunette with huge brown eyes who Napoleon had been flirting with for weeks. He’d let her strike him across the face, let her beat him with fists till his lower lip split and his nose bled and she had to be towed away by three men, crying hysterically and asking Napoleon why, why, why?
He didn’t have an answer then. He’d sat on the chilly, tiled floor with his back against the metal sink, his knees drawn to his chest, waiting for hours for one from his dead teammates, but they didn’t tell him anything.
Forty years on, he still has no answer.
“Being a chief medical examiner for the Navy is a far cry from being an U.N.C.L.E. field agent, no doubt about that.”
Illya is gazing at his face again. Examining it. Seeing everything splayed across it. Seeing through it.
“The dead don’t speak much, do they?” Napoleon blurts out, rife with the feeling that Illya knows precisely what he’d been thinking about.
“They do, just not the way the living do. It’s a matter of understanding their language. Of knowing what to look for, and then putting together their words into a coherent passage for those of us who still walk the earth. Those who wish to listen.” Illya angles his head to one side, nodding to himself. “But you do have a point, yes, the dead don’t speak like we do and sometimes … sometimes the conversation can be quite one-sided. Still, I speak to them, as any courteous host would to his guests.”
One of Napoleon’s eyebrows quirk upwards. So on top of being the talkative one between the two of them now, Illya happily talks with dead people too?
And here he’d thought Illya couldn’t possibly surprise him anymore.
“You chitchat with the, uh, bodies?”
“Guests, Napoleon. Guests. And yes, I do. It not only helps me with my work, it also …”
“Also what?”
Illya’s fingers tighten around his.
“It also keeps the ghosts at bay,” Illya murmurs, delicately, and Napoleon knows that Illya isn’t talking about scary ghouls in the night, about vampires in capes or the decayed undead starving for brains. Those monsters can be dealt with, straightforwardly. A priest with a bible would do the trick, or a cross or holy water, wooden stakes and shotguns. His monsters, however, follow him everywhere he goes. Insuperable, immortal. Impervious to all practices of exorcism.
Can Illya see them now, swirling around them, heavy as mountains upon his creaking shoulders and cold as ice within him?
Does Illya know that he wants his monsters, his ghosts to stay with him?
For a man like him, it is fair punishment. The least of what he deserves.
“Napoleon … Mr. Waverly never stopped searching for you until his death in 1978.”
Mr. Waverly’s passing doesn’t stun Napoleon. He’d heard the news in the mid-‘80s, purely by accident from a corrupt chief inspector who’d worked with U.N.C.L.E. London on several cases, a lowlife from whom he had delightedly swindled over £60,000 and a gold ring or three. It had sickened him to his stomach to hear his former boss’ name coming from the cop, to hear the glee in the sonofabitch’s blather about how easy his ‘extracurricular activities’ had been since Alexander Waverly kicked the bucket and the agent who’d been slated to supersede Waverly had vanished without a trace in 1972.
Napoleon hadn’t believed the last part then. He still doesn’t. There must have been another U.N.C.L.E. agent who upped and disappeared after he did, another agent Mr. Waverly had chosen as his successor and hadn’t informed anyone about it. Not him. No. It couldn’t have been him. Mr. Waverly would never have picked him as the next head of Section I, not after he killed those U.N.C.L.E. agents. And the innocents. So many of them.
But … if Illya is telling him the truth, why did Mr. Waverly search for him?
He smirks grimly to himself, and answers that question for himself.
“I guess he must have wanted to bring me to trial for what happened. Badly.”
Illya says nothing to that, merely gazing at him with those perceptive eyes through those steel-rimmed spectacles, as if perceiving something about him that he himself can’t. It sends a shiver down his spine, one that oddly stems from both fear and hope.
Hope for what? Absolution? Yeah, go on dreaming about that, old man. Go on trying to lie and steal for your ticket to heaven. Go on.
“Were you in England all the time?”
He doesn’t hear any reproach in Illya’s tone. Then again, Illya was a maestro at controlling his facial expressions and tenor during their days as partners. He highly doubts that skill has diminished, seeing as Illya has been successfully living a double life for the past twenty or thirty years or more. Just like him.
“Yeah. Stayed in London, although I did move to Birmingham for a while. I’d go back and forth between England and the States now and then. Mostly Las Vegas. Went to Indonesia once, but … I can’t go back there. Ever.”
“Why not?”
“I … sold the Indonesian Air Force some fighter jets in the ‘70s and they …” Napoleon grimaces. “Still haven’t arrived.”
To his amazement, Illya chortles with amusement, and he smiles, shaking his head at himself. What would Illya say if he told the story of how he scammed a greedy rat of an English earl out of £500,000 by pretending to be a mystical seer of the future? What would Illya say if he told the story of how he almost netted three million quid from a dirty art dealer who was conning his own clients?
What would Illya say if he told Illya that the sound of his laughter has somehow dispelled his ghosts, even just for a while?
Probably something sardonic. Something tongue-in-cheek about such startling sentimentality from him.
So he keeps his mouth shut.
“Since we’ve both never had a fondness for humid, tropical weather, I don’t see a problem with never vacationing in Indonesia again.”
Napoleon sends Illya a quizzical glance, one that Illya misses as Illya has his head bowed, still smiling. Wait a minute, why would him being unable to return to Indonesia affect Illya? It’s not like Illya wants him to stick around and spend more time with him in the days ahead … does he?
Illya suddenly clears his throat. Then, looking at the floor, he says gruffly, “You’d told me before how much you liked London, that you’d even considered living there one day. So when you … left, it was the logical choice as the first city in which to find you.”
The hesitation, fleeting as it was, does not go undetected by Napoleon. It digs in sharp, like a knife-cut along his finger.
“I couldn’t join the search at first. I was still recovering. The doctors wouldn’t let me out until my leg had healed at the very least.”
Illya’s snarl shouldn’t be reassuring to him, but it is. It’s so … Illya. He can imagine the scenario right now: Illya in bed in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters’ infirmary, his grace encumbered by bandages and casts, deflecting nurses and doctors and furiously demanding to be released so that he could jet off to England with the search party. Illya would have interspersed a multitude of Russian expletives in those demands too. Maybe lob a bedpan or two at the wall for good effect. What a sight for sore eyes that would have been!
“Mark Slate was there for months, along with Suzette Lanning and two more agents from Section II.”
It makes total sense to Napoleon that Mark had been in charge of the … pursuit. Aside from Illya, who’d been better to lead the hunt than his mentor? The man who’d taught him so much about the spying game and its thrills and perils -
“Wait,” Napoleon says, his brows furrowing with bafflement. “Suzette Lanning?”
“Yes. She was very insistent about being involved in the search.”
Napoleon lowers his eyes from Illya’s to a distant spot beyond the window. Suzette Lanning … yeah, Susie from Section IV. That’s what he’d called her instead of Suzette. He would tease her, to the delight of other female agents present, by warbling Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q whenever he walked into her department and saw her there and she’d loved it. Loved it so much she had consented instantly to a dinner date with him at Maxwell’s Plum on First Avenue at 64th Street when he finally asked her.
Then his last Affair took place.
And on the very night they should have dined on Iranian caviar and chateaubriand steak in a celebrity-habituated, four-star restaurant, with the potential for a different kind of feast later, he’d been in U.N.C.L.E.’s morgue instead. Flinched at the slam of the door against the wall, saw her storming in and mumbled her name - her nickname - and something had snapped in her.
All her affection turned into hate, in a single moment.
“Andrew Lanning was …”
Napoleon’s throat constricts as a brief wave of nausea passes over him. Andrew Lanning had been the third to be wheeled into the morgue, and although Lanning hadn’t been caught in the fire, his demise had been equally grisly. A gigantic shard of glass, across and through the neck to the spine.
The medical examiner had attempted to console Napoleon by stating that death had been instantaneous. It didn’t work.
“I know,” Illya murmurs, giving his right hand a squeeze, and he is here once more, in a hotel room in New York City and not in Mr. Waverly’s grand office, rivulets of blood staining his lower face, neck and dress shirt. Mute and numb while Mr. Waverly cross-examined him in vain about the catastrophic Affair, about the injuries he sustained to his face that had not been there when he returned to headquarters from Pennsylvania with the corpses of his fallen agents and a comatose Illya.
He never said a word to Mr. Waverly about Susi- Suzette beating him. Not one. Her reaction towards him had been very … reasonable.
“I was there in Mr. Waverly’s office when Ms. Lanning gave him a personal report of her attack on your person.”
Napoleon fights the urge to shrug his shoulders. Yes, he’d anticipated that Suzette would do that sooner or later. Enraged as she’d been towards him over her brother’s untimely death, she must have had lots to say about U.N.C.L.E. New York’s failure of a chief enforcement agent to Mr. Waverly, and Mr. Waverly must have agreed with all of it -
“She was very remorseful for her behavior towards you. It was unthinkable for an agent to physically assault the CEA like she did, even devastated as she was, and she realized that. At first, she had given Mr. Waverly a letter of resignation, but he rejected it. When she then volunteered to be part of the global search for you, he approved her participation based on her given motive.”
Napoleon gapes at Illya, his jaw sagging and his eyes wide.
“Remorseful?” he rasps, voice scratchy with incredulity.
“Yes, Napoleon. The reason she was so insistent on joining the search team was because she wished to apologize in person to you. For injuring you and venting her grief on you when you were not to blame. To find you and take you back to the fold, like we all wanted.”
Without being aware of it, Napoleon looks away from Illya and shakes his head slowly from side to side, his expression of shock transmuting into denial and confusion. No … no, she wasn’t the one who had to apologize. It was him, he was the one who had to, for giving the green light to the infiltration of the remote T.H.R.U.S.H. command center in the Pocono Mountains, for killing them all and no, Illya’s wrong. There was someone who didn’t want him to return to the fold.
“Mark Slate.”
Illya squeezes his hand again.
“What about him?”
“Mark found me in London,” he whispers, and with one blink, it is the arctic winter of 1972 in London, and he is in a dingy guesthouse, in a claustrophobic room with its rusty bed, crap heating, fissured mirror and tarnished sink. He’s shivering, tugging his trench coat tauter around his torso as he sits on the bed and counts his last quids and pennies in his hands.
He’ll be destitute very soon unless he goes on the prowl again. He has long depleted whatever money he could take with him from New York, from his bank accounts he drained over a few days so U.N.C.L.E. wouldn’t be alerted about it and pin a tail or two on him. Paid his airfare with cash and got on the next plane to London using a fake, non-U.N.C.L.E. passport, a late afternoon flight. Paid more cash for a cab upon passing Heathrow’s immigration check and rushing out of the airport like a bat out of hell. Paid even more cash for a room in a secluded inn far from any of the airports and U.N.C.L.E. London, and he’d stayed there for three fruitless days, dazed at his hair turning wholly grey-and-white within that time. Dazed at just what he’d done by leaving his gun, holster and U.N.C.L.E. ID on Mr. Waverly’s table when the man wasn’t there and walking away from Del Floria’s forever.
Coward. Deserter. Murderer!
Oh, yes, he is indeed all three.
And seven months later, after hopping from one guesthouse to another (while avoiding all U.N.C.L.E.-friendly ones), he is jobless yet again. He hasn’t fleshed out his new identity enough, hadn’t had the time to do so before leaving America, and he’s paying for it with dubious, erratic labor. The crooked kind. The kind where people are willing to turn a blind eye to lack of legal paperwork and authorization. The kind that eagerly backstabs a lone wolf and seizes anything and everything it can from him, and then some.
Oh, yes, how far the great Napoleon Solo has fallen -
“NOOOOO!”
His yell is deafening in the tiny room. His next words to himself are much quieter, tremulous: “No. You’re Albert Stroller now. Albert. Stroller.”
Albert Stroller, the thirty-nine-year-old American visitor without a past. The pickpocket, the grifter, the card cheat. Thief.
Albert Stroller, stalking the streets of London in an elegant suit and trench coat - the only ones he has left after selling the others out of necessity - and caught red-handed with his hand in the pocket of the last man in the world that he wishes to meet.
“Good god. It is you.”
With his tweed flat cap fallen to the ground, an astonished Mark Slate’s shaggy blond hair is difficult to ignore beneath the flagrant illumination of the street lamp. It is even more difficult to ignore Mark’s hand around his right wrist, clamping more as he struggles to free himself, to get away, run, run before the other agents get here and drag him back there -
“Good god, finally.”
There is emotion in Mark’s voice, an emotion that rams into him like an arrow to the chest and infuriates him, and he slips into a British accent, his visage a rictus of panic and wrath when Mark grabs his other wrist.
“You leggo a’ me right now, you bloody nutter -“
“What the - it’s me, Mark! Don’t you recognize me?!”
“I said let -“
“Listen to me! I don’t know what’s happened to you, but we can help you! Christ, your hair, it’s not dyed, is it? And you look like you’re starving -“
“Let GO!”
“Do you know how long we’ve been searching for you?! How many of us?! We thought you were -“
“Dead? Barbecued to charcoal like April?” he growls, ditching the accent, glaring Mark in the eye, daring the man to retaliate.
Mark recoils from him. Lets go of his arms. Overwhelmed. Shattered, and he runs as fast as he can, heedless of the pedestrians he barges against or of their annoyance, runs block after block until he collapses to his knees in front of a closed pharmacy, panting, his breast pocket fat with four wadded wallets from his night’s work. His vision hazy and hot, his chest brimming with repugnance towards himself.
It seems, in the four decades since, he hasn’t lost an ounce of that self-revulsion.
“I was a ublyudok towards him, through and through,” Napoleon murmurs to Illya now, lips compressed into a thin line, eyes lowered. “I lashed out at him in the worst possible way.”
Although it was general gossip at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters that Mark and April had a strictly older brother/younger sister relationship, Napoleon and Illya, no one else, were privy to the actual fact that Mark had had a profound crush on the attractive, chestnut-haired agent for years. Illya had discovered Mark’s secret first, by way of a celebratory night of alcoholic drinks after an accomplished Affair for which they were temporarily partnered. Napoleon discovered it months later, also by way of a long queue of alcoholic drinks while they debated on the important things in life. Luckily they never got past defining ‘important’, much less defining those important things, or Mark might have been privy to his innermost secret too: That the women in his life were transient, convenient for slaking his lust and fortifying his Casanova reputation and nothing more, for he was madly in love with his taciturn, supremely intelligent, gorgeous Russian partner.
And that hasn’t changed at all.
“I’m sure you had not meant it. You wanted him to leave you alone, and you were distressed,” Illya says gently. “Mark was not the only one hurting.”
Despite his lingering glumness, Napoleon shows the other man a small smile.
After Illya smiles in return, Illya’s expression segues into solemnity, and Napoleon asks, “What is it?”
Illya sighs heavily.
“As much as I’d felt sorry for him … I also know that Mark never reported finding you in London to Mr. Waverly. I didn’t know you were even alive until 1980.”
It is Napoleon’s turn to give Illya’s hand a squeeze of consolation. Eight years. Illya had thought him deceased for eight years, just because Mark had decided to lie to U.N.C.L.E. about encountering him. Just because of one vicious, excessive line spat out in anguish.
One wrong line on a London street, one overturned card on a poker table, and the course of his history was diverted for the worse with no hope of doubling back.
A terrifying insight … but only if he stops playing the game and slinks away a loser. As long as he plays, the opportunity will always be there that he will win again. Win big. Win the jackpot that’ll set him up for life with everything he desires in it.
Everything, encapsulated in the bespectacled, bow tied, blond and blue-eyed man sitting next to him.
For him, after a lifetime of playing against the odds on every level conceivable, there can be no grander reward.
“He should be glad he’s dead,” Illya mutters to himself. Illya’s scowl is back, the groove between his eyebrows deeper.
“Mark’s dead?”
Illya nods and replies, “Bullet to the gut. Pakistan. 1980.”
Napoleon’s eyes narrow in contemplation. Huh. What are the chances that the year Mark died and the year Illya learned of his continued existence being the same is just a coincidence?
“Mark told you.”
Illya nods a second time.
“On his dying breath. Mark resigned from U.N.C.L.E. in 1973. He worked for the C.I.A. from then on as an undercover agent in the Middle East. I had no idea about it when I went there as well in 1980, as Dr. Mallard. I didn’t know either exactly how he knew I was there or where to find me. I still don’t, actually. He sent a Pakistani man for me, an ally of his, who told me that Mark had been shot by a terrorist and was dying from his injuries, and that Mark was … vehement about seeing me before it was too late. The only reason, though, that I crossed the border with the Pakistani man was because Mark had claimed he had recent news about you.” Illya’s lips twist upwards in a bleak smile. “Who would have thought it was a confession that he actually wanted to impart to me?”
“Mark told you about London.”
“Yes. And that you were still alive. That he had reliable info that you frequented Las Vegas. He died before he could tell me more. I couldn’t save him.”
A pall of darkness suddenly envelopes Illya like a cloud.
“I was …” Illya coughs, then says in a more steady tone, “I was in Afghanistan in 1980 as part of the Royal Army Medical Corp, during the Soviet invasion. In the Jalozai refugee camp on the Pakistani border.”
Author: Gideon BD
Type: Slash
Pairing: Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin, Albert Stroller/Ducky Mallard
Word count: 14,454 (for this installment)
Summary: 'The room in this hotel is like so many other hotel rooms he’s eaten, slept and/or fucked in throughout his tumultuous seventy-eight years of life. Plain albeit pristine walls with a painting or two hanging on them. Clean beige curtains, currently half-drawn and letting in a cheery cascade of sunlight. Dark brown carpet. Twin beds with burgundy bedspreads and fluffy pillows. A minimalist dressing table with a rectangular mirror. A slim, black television set. Another table, round and smaller than the dressing table, with two cushioned chairs set facing each other ... And on one of those chairs, basking in the sunshine with an ever-handsome, ageless face turned towards the window and blue eyes shut, sits his sole reason for living on.'
Categories: Angst, Crossover Pairings, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Older Lads, Romance
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Yeah, I know I don't own Illya, but I can at least have Napoleon, yes? No? Darnit.
Author's notes: Gah, I really want to finish this story, but I figured I'd post what I've written so far and then post the rest when I'm done. This is my first Man from U.N.C.L.E. and NCIS and Hustle story. In one! There are spoilers for Albert Stroller's and Ducky Mallard's backgrounds, and I'm definitely ignoring that '15 Years Later' MfU movie. :P
Also, a minor point for MfU fans regarding the character Mark Slate: For this story, I decided to use the original character background from the Moonglow Affair with the Noel Harrison incarnation since Harrison's version is more well-known due to the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. series. Sorry if it's confusing!
Soundtracks: Sting's Shape of my Heart, Michael Nyman's Big My Secret (the first 2:40+ minutes, anyway) and Avril Lavigne's I'm with You.
A Single Friend, My World
And if I told you that I loved you,
You'd maybe think there's something wrong,
I'm not a man of too many faces,
The mask I wear is one
~ Sting, Shape Of My Heart
The room’s number is 112, emblazoned in bold gold on a mahogany door.
No matter how many times he sees that number, his hand will always freeze and hover in the air in front of the door handle for a few seconds, in disbelief, or joy. Or a mixture of both, a near-paralyzing amalgam of emotions that don’t show on his face due to decades of mastering his poker face. Not even in his hooded, hazel eyes that have seen so much. Perhaps too much for an old, disillusioned man like him.
Albert Stroller, an old, disillusioned grifter. A scammer. A cheater.
But no matter how many times he remembers that about himself, remembers that the man in the room beyond the closed door knows that about him now, his hand will always bridge the inches of air to grasp the door handle. Answering the silent call of that man, like he used to over forty years ago. Like he still does.
The door swings open without a sound.
The room in this hotel is like so many other hotel rooms he’s eaten, slept and/or fucked in throughout his tumultuous seventy-eight years of life. Plain albeit pristine walls with a painting or two hanging on them. Clean beige curtains, currently half-drawn and letting in a cheery cascade of sunlight. Dark brown carpet. Twin beds with burgundy bedspreads and fluffy pillows. A minimalist dressing table with a rectangular mirror. A slim, black television set. Another table, round and smaller than the dressing table, with two cushioned chairs set facing each other.
And on one of those chairs, basking in the sunshine with an ever-handsome, ageless face turned towards the window and blue eyes shut, sits his sole reason for living on.
“Do I call you Albie today?”
He halts at the dressing table, propping himself against it to blatantly stare at the other man, smiling softly. Smiling at the eternal lustrousness of blond hair gone dark silver, at the steel-rimmed spectacles perched upon that patrician nose, at the Scottish accent he knows is learned and not innate. At that silly polka-dotted, maroon bow tie flaring out from the collar of a fine suit very similar to his own pin-striped, dark blue one.
At the tiny quirk of those miraculously still-luscious lips in a smile, one that only he has ever had the privilege to witness, to know it to be true. To know it to be his, alone. Once upon a time.
“Do I get to call you Ducky today?” he replies with what he hopes is a droll tone and not a voice wavering with the weight of all that he harbors within himself for this man. Forty-eight years is a damn long time for unvoiced thoughts - feelings - to grow and thrive, even locked away deep in the recesses of his mind as they are.
His breath catches in his throat when a gentle chuckle fills the cool air of the room. God, even that laugh is as endearing as he remembers it.
There is no way in hell he’s going to survive this meeting without fracturing something inside.
“Hello, Napoleon.”
The Scottish accent is gone, replaced by that oh-so-familiar Russian-tinged British accent, and god, the last time anyone had called him by that name - his real name - he’d been right here in New York City. In his U.N.C.L.E.-allotted apartment, packing his bags like a madman, stuffing them unceremoniously with his hoards of suits and t-shirts and jeans and anything else he can grab, his left shoulder tingling from the lack of his shoulder holster and gun, his chest seizing time and again, his eyes searing and his vision so mysteriously blurred -
“Illya.”
He thinks he’s said it casually, said that name as if it isn’t his holy word, the sum of everything that means anything to him at all, but the other man stands up and comes to him without another word, welcoming him with arms that embrace him tightly, unreservedly. The lump that abruptly lodges in his throat is massive, becoming even more so when he senses that head of lustrous, dark silver hair rest itself upon his shoulder as if it’s meant to be there. As if it’s always meant to be there.
“Napoleon,” he hears again, this time whispered, and no, it’s certainly not Dr. Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard - Scottish chief medical examiner for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for more than a decade - in his arms now, who’d almost been roped as his next mark for a desperate influx of big cash into a wallet on the brink of collecting only dust. Dr. Mallard might have been a potential mark, but Illya Kuryakin?
Oh, even he, the once legendary Napoleon Solo who was considered the top U.N.C.L.E. agent in America even by the evil T.H.R.U.S.H., isn’t that crazy as to risk losing a limb or three plus a number of organs (and very likely his head too) by robbing the man who was once also one of U.N.C.L.E.’s top agents. In the world.
Illya. His partner, long, long ago. His best friend. The only friend who had known the real him, who knew who he really was before he fled from America to England like a trampled dog with its tail between its legs, taking himself out of the game before Mr. Waverly could take him out first via red tape. Or gun. After his ultimate fuck up on that fateful day in the spring of 1972, the mistake that had cost U.N.C.L.E. the lives of more than a few good agents, cost him his life as it was, cost him his partner, well … it was unbelievable that Mr. Waverly hadn’t had him finished off with a blast of lead to the head.
“Sit with me, Napoleon. We have much to catch up on.”
He lets Illya guide him by the arm to the nearest bed and sits next to Illya on the side of the bed, facing the window. The sunlight reaches their lower legs and feet, burnishing their leather Oxford shoes, and he gazes at Illya’s pair, scrutinizing the decorative perforations of the toe caps. Did Illya ever wear half-brogue shoes like those when they were still U.N.C.L.E. agents?
He can’t recall. Then again, he never did spend a lot of time studying Illya’s shoes. He was usually studying Illya’s face. When Illya wasn’t looking, of course.
“Are you still going by the name Albert Stroller?”
They’re sitting so close that their arms are pressed against each other, Illya’s left knee touching his right, and he has to remind himself to breathe and look into Illya’s eyes - still so blue and beautiful! - and smile.
“Yes. It’s been my name for the past forty years. I don’t see myself changing it again anytime soon.”
“So you do prefer to be called Albert, then?”
His smile becomes much more genuine and wide.
“No, I didn’t say that.”
Illya’s eyes twinkle with amusement.
“You still don’t get to call me Ducky.”
Napoleon pouts, but with a twinkle in his own eyes, he retorts, “Why? Because only people in your current life can?”
Illya shakes his head once.
“No. Because it’s not my true name,” Illya says quietly, the twinkle in his eyes radiating into something even brighter, something very dangerous to the lifelong barriers inside Napoleon and that lump is back in his throat again, littler but yearning to swell, just like the immovable iota of hope in the left side of his chest. He imagines himself thumping on that portion of his chest with a fist, irately so.
Stop it. You aren’t worthy to have his attention, much less his love after what you did to him. Stop it, damn you.
“Hopefully this time, we’ll get to have an actual conversation,” Illya says after a long, somewhat awkward minute of hush. The tiny quirk of his lips is still there.
“The first time wasn’t even planned!”
Illya lets out a short laugh, eyes crinkling.
“Indeed. I can still recall Jethro’s face when you swaggered into the room -“
“Hey now, I don’t swagger -“
“Yes, you do, Napoleon. Now let me speak.” At Napoleon’s wave of one hand and a more pronounced pout, Illya says with eyes a-twinkle again, “As I said, when you swaggered into the room, you obviously hadn’t expected Jethro to be there with me.”
“Or all that spying equipment. Or the guns.”
“Were you surprised that I’m still in law enforcement? Or that I was in a hotel room with another man who had a gun in hand and was pointing it at your head?”
Deadpan, Napoleon says, “Actually, what really surprised me was that he was wearing nothing but a towel and it looked like it was going to drop at any moment while I was ass down on the floor. With my face less than two feet away from his groin.”
Illya laughs a second time, louder, and Napoleon can’t help but grin at the sound, at the lines of merriment around Illya’s eyes and broad smile.
“Yes, that would have been rather uncomfortable.”
“Not as uncomfortable as him putting a bullet in my head, if you hadn’t convinced him otherwise.” Napoleon shifts on the bed, just enough that he’s turned more towards Illya and can see more of Illya’s face. “So who is he? This Jethro guy.”
He almost also asks, is he your partner now?
He doesn’t.
Illya glances at him, eyes incisive, then says, “Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. I work with him in the NCIS’ Major Case Response Team. Technically he’s my boss, but he is also a good friend. I’ve known him since the early ‘90s. We met in France.”
“France, huh?” Napoleon asks, his placid tone belying the clenching of his stomach. If Illya had been in Paris at the time, Illya had been a mere hour’s flight away from him in London. Just an hour away -
“Yes.” Illya clears his throat and glances at the floor. “He got me out of a complicated situation when I … pushed a French police officer off a cliff.”
Napoleon’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead at the mumbled admission. It takes him several seconds to say, “You … pushed a French cop … off a cliff.”
“Yes. Off a sixty-foot cliff.”
Illya continues to stare at the floor, twiddling his thumbs, while Napoleon’s eyebrows arch yet more.
“A sixty-foot cliff.”
“Yes. Into a lake.”
Napoleon blinks.
“You pushed a French cop off a sixty-foot cliff … into a lake.”
“Yes.”
Napoleon is glad that Illya isn’t looking at his visage where his lips are twitching.
“Dare I ask why?”
Illya immediately scowls. The downturn of lips, the groove between the eyebrows and the blazing of those blue eyes are so familiar, so much like the frowns Illya used to display whenever the Affair they were embroiled in was going topsy-turvy, that Napoleon’s breath hitches once more.
“He had corrupted a crime scene,” Illya growls, his Russian accent surging. “He had it coming! And anyway, there was a lake below the cliff. Not solid ground.”
Losing the battle against mirth, Napoleon smiles and shakes his head.
“That’s my Illya.”
If it didn’t cause him to appear a sheer fool, he would have kicked himself hard in the ass for allowing those words to tumble off his tongue. As it is, he stiffens instead, his hands clutching his knees, his gaze flitting away from Illya to random spots in the room. To anywhere, at anything but the man sitting beside him and staring at him now.
Who the fuck is he to think that Illya would permit such possessiveness from him after the decades that have passed? Decades in which he hadn’t contacted Illya in any way whatsoever, not even to let Illya know that he was alive at least?
Decades, in which Illya had ample time to brew even more ample amounts of anger and resentment and probably loathing too towards him, after what he’d done?
The touch of a large hand on his and the entwining of their fingers is the last thing Napoleon expects, so shocking to him that when it fully sinks in that Illya is holding his hand, he already has Illya’s in a death grip. Illya’s hand is warm. Calloused. Thinner, frailer than he recollects, blue veins stark beneath pale, smooth skin.
Traitor, he thinks as he glowers at his own frail and pale hand, but his hand doesn’t loosen one bit.
Neither does Illya’s.
“Jethro’s a lot like you, you know,” Illya says casually, resuming their tête-à-tête.
“Oh? How so?” Napoleon says as casually, dragging his eyes away from their linked hands to Illya’s face. Illya’s features are impassive. Deceptively so, since those blue eyes are gleaming with a tenderness that makes another of his traitorous body parts, high up in his chest, ache.
“For one, he has sarcasm honed to a fine art. Two, he has next to no forbearance for state-of-the-art technology and prefers to leave scientific endeavors to the qualified. Three, he’s bossy, smug, impatient, an absolute Don Juan -“ At Napoleon’s playful slap on his upper arm, Illya’s lips curve up in a smirk and he adds, “And oh yes, he has a predilection for smacking people too!”
It’s a wonderful feeling for Napoleon to chortle with Illya again, till his eyes are squeezed shut and his shoulders are hunched from the jollity while Illya leans against him, their heads nearly brushing. When was the last time he’d actually laughed like this? When was the last time he’d shared laughter with Illya like this?
Jesus, how he’d missed it all these years.
“And like you, he’s also a charming gentleman. A no-nonsense professional who gives his work his very best. Handsome. Respectable. Kind, with a sincere affection for children and concern for their safety and wellbeing. A superior who cares very much for his subordinates too. Very much. He even speaks Russian fluently.”
Just like that, the damn lump is back in Napoleon’s throat, bigger than ever. It’s almost too good to be true that Illya thinks all that of him. Maybe Illya’s suffering from amnesia of some kind. Yeah, maybe Illya had, at some point, swallowed a bottle’s worth of Capsule B and completely wiped out his memories of that day in 1972. Or maybe, maybe the six-day coma Illya had suffered as a direct result of that day’s events did damage his brain like the doctors had anxiously speculated and the only reason Illya had requested for him upon awakening from said coma was because Illya didn’t remember what he’d -
“I should mark my calendar today.”
Napoleon blinks hard, jolted out of his morose train of thought.
“What?”
“Finally, I have figured out the perfect technique to leave Napoleon Solo at a loss for words.”
Well, what is he to do in response except mirror Illya’s smirk and good-naturedly nudge Illya’s shoulder with his own?
It’s anything better than asking Illya whether he recalls the explosion that hurled him fifteen feet into the air and cracked his collarbone, ribs, left leg and skull on merciless tarmac. Who knows what else Illya may recall then.
Their fingers still intertwined, Napoleon asks, “Does he know?”
Illya seems to read his mind, like he used to when they were still partners. It is both comforting and unsettling.
“That I was once No.2 of Section II of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement?”
Napoleon nods, and Illya says, “No. No one does. No one alive anymore, apart from you.”
Illya’s enigmatic answer prompts him to look at Illya, to seek extra clues in the indecipherable set of those appealing features. If even someone like Special Agent Gibbs - a good friend for at least ten to fifteen years by Illya’s own disclosure - doesn’t know a thing about Illya’s U.N.C.L.E. past, just how long has Illya masqueraded as a Scottish doctor and medical examiner? Twenty years? Thirty? And since U.N.C.L.E. was permanently decommissioned in 1985 (last he checked in 1993), did the persona of Dr. Mallard begin its existence as a role for an U.N.C.L.E. Affair? If so, why has Illya carried it on until today? Is it because it’s safer to do so in a post-U.N.C.L.E. world in which former T.H.R.U.S.H. agents are still on the loose, ravenous for vengeance?
Or did Illya adopt a façade for the same reasons he did?
To escape the past. Escape the condemning stares, the unspoken judgment begging to be laid down by a jury of his peers. Escape the reality that he remained alive while others didn’t.
But Illya had nothing to do with how things went down so disastrously. Illya had nothing to do with that ill-fated decision. His decision.
Illya had nothing whatsoever to do with April Dancer going up in flames from the scorching bomb blasts, transforming into a staggering, screaming, blackened figure that, to Napoleon’s horror, had evidently felt every lick of fire before she died in the rescue helicopter en route to the closest hospital.
Air-conditioned as the room is, Napoleon senses blistering streaks zigzagging up his left arm and across his left shoulder blade once again, shadows of what they’d been as he’d crouched over Illya’s sprawled, grievously wounded body and shielded the unconscious man from raining debris. Phantom pain, one U.N.C.L.E. doctor had termed it. Peculiar for the fact that he hadn’t lost any limbs and barely has any scars from his injuries. Psychological. Incurable. Pain that he’ll endure for life. Good.
He flexes his left hand as he says, “So … what exactly did you tell him when we first met in Washington, D.C., about me?”
“That you are an old, trusted friend.”
His chest swells at the murmured words.
“And that was enough for him?”
“Yes,” Illya simply says, and it is enough for Napoleon too. He takes a deep breath, then says, “It is nice to be able to chat with you without having a gun in my face, for a change.”
Illya’s lips twitch for an instant.
“Understandable. But the last time, Jethro wasn’t around to be the third wheel.”
“No, but he did call you away before we even got past the hellos and how-are-yous.”
“He is my boss, Napoleon. He is not a man who abides unprofessionalism or any work that is less than exemplary.”
“Like you.”
This time, Illya gives him a visible smile.
“Like me.”
Again, there is a minute of awkward silence, in which Illya sits calmly and gazes at him with blue eyes far too astute for Napoleon’s peace of mind while he studies a non-existent strand of lint on the inner right thigh of his trousers. His treacherous hand still won’t release Illya’s.
But Illya isn’t letting go either.
“Third time’s the charm?” Napoleon eventually says, glancing into Illya’s eyes.
“Yes. I do hope so.”
There is something about the soft tone of Illya’s voice, a tone he’s never heard Illya speak with before. A tone he never dreamed he’d hear Illya speak with, particularly towards him. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear that Illya had just … flirted with him.
Oh, great. You haven’t seen the guy for forty damn years, and here you are, thinking with your dick! A dick, by the way, that hasn’t gotten up for a looooong time, buddy boy.
“It’s an omen, don’t you think? Room 112.”
And again, Illya is the one advancing their conversation, now the suave, silver-tongued talker and he the reticent, nervous old geezer. When did that change occur?
“I didn’t think you the superstitious type, Illya. Man of science that you are.”
He savors the glide of Illya’s name from his mouth, a nectar of letters he’d forbidden himself to think, much less utter, since he resigned from U.N.C.L.E. and vamoosed.
“Dr. Mallard is, but not me.” Illya tilts his head. “It just seems … rather inexplicable that all three times, without any planning by either one of us, the room we would be given would have our U.N.C.L.E. ranks combined.”
Napoleon smiles at that. It figures Illya had also noticed it.
“Section VI got the first badge right with the Roman numeral.”
“But not with the second one. You went from being ‘II’ to ‘11’, and you never bothered to get them to correct it.” Illya pauses, then adds drolly, “And considering I was ‘2’ …”
Napoleon snorts in amusement, then puts on an outwardly arrogant expression.
“I think of it this way: Section VI must have considered me so magnificent an agent, my badge had to state I was No.1 twice.”
Illya groans and rolls his eyes towards the ceiling, an exaggerated reaction that dredges a chuckle out of Napoleon even as the voice in his head rebukes him yet again.
But they and the rest of U.N.C.L.E. didn’t think that for long, did they? Not after the fifth body rolled in looking and stinking like charred meat.
His humor expires swiftly, his mind beset by the imagery - no, the memory of standing in the morgue located in the second lowest level of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters here in New York, staring sightlessly at the half-dozen, shrouded corpses that were once agents from Sections II and III. Agents who were, just a day ago, alive and well. Agents who were his friends. One of them had been the older brother of another agent from Section IV, a young brunette with huge brown eyes who Napoleon had been flirting with for weeks. He’d let her strike him across the face, let her beat him with fists till his lower lip split and his nose bled and she had to be towed away by three men, crying hysterically and asking Napoleon why, why, why?
He didn’t have an answer then. He’d sat on the chilly, tiled floor with his back against the metal sink, his knees drawn to his chest, waiting for hours for one from his dead teammates, but they didn’t tell him anything.
Forty years on, he still has no answer.
“Being a chief medical examiner for the Navy is a far cry from being an U.N.C.L.E. field agent, no doubt about that.”
Illya is gazing at his face again. Examining it. Seeing everything splayed across it. Seeing through it.
“The dead don’t speak much, do they?” Napoleon blurts out, rife with the feeling that Illya knows precisely what he’d been thinking about.
“They do, just not the way the living do. It’s a matter of understanding their language. Of knowing what to look for, and then putting together their words into a coherent passage for those of us who still walk the earth. Those who wish to listen.” Illya angles his head to one side, nodding to himself. “But you do have a point, yes, the dead don’t speak like we do and sometimes … sometimes the conversation can be quite one-sided. Still, I speak to them, as any courteous host would to his guests.”
One of Napoleon’s eyebrows quirk upwards. So on top of being the talkative one between the two of them now, Illya happily talks with dead people too?
And here he’d thought Illya couldn’t possibly surprise him anymore.
“You chitchat with the, uh, bodies?”
“Guests, Napoleon. Guests. And yes, I do. It not only helps me with my work, it also …”
“Also what?”
Illya’s fingers tighten around his.
“It also keeps the ghosts at bay,” Illya murmurs, delicately, and Napoleon knows that Illya isn’t talking about scary ghouls in the night, about vampires in capes or the decayed undead starving for brains. Those monsters can be dealt with, straightforwardly. A priest with a bible would do the trick, or a cross or holy water, wooden stakes and shotguns. His monsters, however, follow him everywhere he goes. Insuperable, immortal. Impervious to all practices of exorcism.
Can Illya see them now, swirling around them, heavy as mountains upon his creaking shoulders and cold as ice within him?
Does Illya know that he wants his monsters, his ghosts to stay with him?
For a man like him, it is fair punishment. The least of what he deserves.
“Napoleon … Mr. Waverly never stopped searching for you until his death in 1978.”
Mr. Waverly’s passing doesn’t stun Napoleon. He’d heard the news in the mid-‘80s, purely by accident from a corrupt chief inspector who’d worked with U.N.C.L.E. London on several cases, a lowlife from whom he had delightedly swindled over £60,000 and a gold ring or three. It had sickened him to his stomach to hear his former boss’ name coming from the cop, to hear the glee in the sonofabitch’s blather about how easy his ‘extracurricular activities’ had been since Alexander Waverly kicked the bucket and the agent who’d been slated to supersede Waverly had vanished without a trace in 1972.
Napoleon hadn’t believed the last part then. He still doesn’t. There must have been another U.N.C.L.E. agent who upped and disappeared after he did, another agent Mr. Waverly had chosen as his successor and hadn’t informed anyone about it. Not him. No. It couldn’t have been him. Mr. Waverly would never have picked him as the next head of Section I, not after he killed those U.N.C.L.E. agents. And the innocents. So many of them.
But … if Illya is telling him the truth, why did Mr. Waverly search for him?
He smirks grimly to himself, and answers that question for himself.
“I guess he must have wanted to bring me to trial for what happened. Badly.”
Illya says nothing to that, merely gazing at him with those perceptive eyes through those steel-rimmed spectacles, as if perceiving something about him that he himself can’t. It sends a shiver down his spine, one that oddly stems from both fear and hope.
Hope for what? Absolution? Yeah, go on dreaming about that, old man. Go on trying to lie and steal for your ticket to heaven. Go on.
“Were you in England all the time?”
He doesn’t hear any reproach in Illya’s tone. Then again, Illya was a maestro at controlling his facial expressions and tenor during their days as partners. He highly doubts that skill has diminished, seeing as Illya has been successfully living a double life for the past twenty or thirty years or more. Just like him.
“Yeah. Stayed in London, although I did move to Birmingham for a while. I’d go back and forth between England and the States now and then. Mostly Las Vegas. Went to Indonesia once, but … I can’t go back there. Ever.”
“Why not?”
“I … sold the Indonesian Air Force some fighter jets in the ‘70s and they …” Napoleon grimaces. “Still haven’t arrived.”
To his amazement, Illya chortles with amusement, and he smiles, shaking his head at himself. What would Illya say if he told the story of how he scammed a greedy rat of an English earl out of £500,000 by pretending to be a mystical seer of the future? What would Illya say if he told the story of how he almost netted three million quid from a dirty art dealer who was conning his own clients?
What would Illya say if he told Illya that the sound of his laughter has somehow dispelled his ghosts, even just for a while?
Probably something sardonic. Something tongue-in-cheek about such startling sentimentality from him.
So he keeps his mouth shut.
“Since we’ve both never had a fondness for humid, tropical weather, I don’t see a problem with never vacationing in Indonesia again.”
Napoleon sends Illya a quizzical glance, one that Illya misses as Illya has his head bowed, still smiling. Wait a minute, why would him being unable to return to Indonesia affect Illya? It’s not like Illya wants him to stick around and spend more time with him in the days ahead … does he?
Illya suddenly clears his throat. Then, looking at the floor, he says gruffly, “You’d told me before how much you liked London, that you’d even considered living there one day. So when you … left, it was the logical choice as the first city in which to find you.”
The hesitation, fleeting as it was, does not go undetected by Napoleon. It digs in sharp, like a knife-cut along his finger.
“I couldn’t join the search at first. I was still recovering. The doctors wouldn’t let me out until my leg had healed at the very least.”
Illya’s snarl shouldn’t be reassuring to him, but it is. It’s so … Illya. He can imagine the scenario right now: Illya in bed in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters’ infirmary, his grace encumbered by bandages and casts, deflecting nurses and doctors and furiously demanding to be released so that he could jet off to England with the search party. Illya would have interspersed a multitude of Russian expletives in those demands too. Maybe lob a bedpan or two at the wall for good effect. What a sight for sore eyes that would have been!
“Mark Slate was there for months, along with Suzette Lanning and two more agents from Section II.”
It makes total sense to Napoleon that Mark had been in charge of the … pursuit. Aside from Illya, who’d been better to lead the hunt than his mentor? The man who’d taught him so much about the spying game and its thrills and perils -
“Wait,” Napoleon says, his brows furrowing with bafflement. “Suzette Lanning?”
“Yes. She was very insistent about being involved in the search.”
Napoleon lowers his eyes from Illya’s to a distant spot beyond the window. Suzette Lanning … yeah, Susie from Section IV. That’s what he’d called her instead of Suzette. He would tease her, to the delight of other female agents present, by warbling Dale Hawkins’ Susie Q whenever he walked into her department and saw her there and she’d loved it. Loved it so much she had consented instantly to a dinner date with him at Maxwell’s Plum on First Avenue at 64th Street when he finally asked her.
Then his last Affair took place.
And on the very night they should have dined on Iranian caviar and chateaubriand steak in a celebrity-habituated, four-star restaurant, with the potential for a different kind of feast later, he’d been in U.N.C.L.E.’s morgue instead. Flinched at the slam of the door against the wall, saw her storming in and mumbled her name - her nickname - and something had snapped in her.
All her affection turned into hate, in a single moment.
“Andrew Lanning was …”
Napoleon’s throat constricts as a brief wave of nausea passes over him. Andrew Lanning had been the third to be wheeled into the morgue, and although Lanning hadn’t been caught in the fire, his demise had been equally grisly. A gigantic shard of glass, across and through the neck to the spine.
The medical examiner had attempted to console Napoleon by stating that death had been instantaneous. It didn’t work.
“I know,” Illya murmurs, giving his right hand a squeeze, and he is here once more, in a hotel room in New York City and not in Mr. Waverly’s grand office, rivulets of blood staining his lower face, neck and dress shirt. Mute and numb while Mr. Waverly cross-examined him in vain about the catastrophic Affair, about the injuries he sustained to his face that had not been there when he returned to headquarters from Pennsylvania with the corpses of his fallen agents and a comatose Illya.
He never said a word to Mr. Waverly about Susi- Suzette beating him. Not one. Her reaction towards him had been very … reasonable.
“I was there in Mr. Waverly’s office when Ms. Lanning gave him a personal report of her attack on your person.”
Napoleon fights the urge to shrug his shoulders. Yes, he’d anticipated that Suzette would do that sooner or later. Enraged as she’d been towards him over her brother’s untimely death, she must have had lots to say about U.N.C.L.E. New York’s failure of a chief enforcement agent to Mr. Waverly, and Mr. Waverly must have agreed with all of it -
“She was very remorseful for her behavior towards you. It was unthinkable for an agent to physically assault the CEA like she did, even devastated as she was, and she realized that. At first, she had given Mr. Waverly a letter of resignation, but he rejected it. When she then volunteered to be part of the global search for you, he approved her participation based on her given motive.”
Napoleon gapes at Illya, his jaw sagging and his eyes wide.
“Remorseful?” he rasps, voice scratchy with incredulity.
“Yes, Napoleon. The reason she was so insistent on joining the search team was because she wished to apologize in person to you. For injuring you and venting her grief on you when you were not to blame. To find you and take you back to the fold, like we all wanted.”
Without being aware of it, Napoleon looks away from Illya and shakes his head slowly from side to side, his expression of shock transmuting into denial and confusion. No … no, she wasn’t the one who had to apologize. It was him, he was the one who had to, for giving the green light to the infiltration of the remote T.H.R.U.S.H. command center in the Pocono Mountains, for killing them all and no, Illya’s wrong. There was someone who didn’t want him to return to the fold.
“Mark Slate.”
Illya squeezes his hand again.
“What about him?”
“Mark found me in London,” he whispers, and with one blink, it is the arctic winter of 1972 in London, and he is in a dingy guesthouse, in a claustrophobic room with its rusty bed, crap heating, fissured mirror and tarnished sink. He’s shivering, tugging his trench coat tauter around his torso as he sits on the bed and counts his last quids and pennies in his hands.
He’ll be destitute very soon unless he goes on the prowl again. He has long depleted whatever money he could take with him from New York, from his bank accounts he drained over a few days so U.N.C.L.E. wouldn’t be alerted about it and pin a tail or two on him. Paid his airfare with cash and got on the next plane to London using a fake, non-U.N.C.L.E. passport, a late afternoon flight. Paid more cash for a cab upon passing Heathrow’s immigration check and rushing out of the airport like a bat out of hell. Paid even more cash for a room in a secluded inn far from any of the airports and U.N.C.L.E. London, and he’d stayed there for three fruitless days, dazed at his hair turning wholly grey-and-white within that time. Dazed at just what he’d done by leaving his gun, holster and U.N.C.L.E. ID on Mr. Waverly’s table when the man wasn’t there and walking away from Del Floria’s forever.
Coward. Deserter. Murderer!
Oh, yes, he is indeed all three.
And seven months later, after hopping from one guesthouse to another (while avoiding all U.N.C.L.E.-friendly ones), he is jobless yet again. He hasn’t fleshed out his new identity enough, hadn’t had the time to do so before leaving America, and he’s paying for it with dubious, erratic labor. The crooked kind. The kind where people are willing to turn a blind eye to lack of legal paperwork and authorization. The kind that eagerly backstabs a lone wolf and seizes anything and everything it can from him, and then some.
Oh, yes, how far the great Napoleon Solo has fallen -
“NOOOOO!”
His yell is deafening in the tiny room. His next words to himself are much quieter, tremulous: “No. You’re Albert Stroller now. Albert. Stroller.”
Albert Stroller, the thirty-nine-year-old American visitor without a past. The pickpocket, the grifter, the card cheat. Thief.
Albert Stroller, stalking the streets of London in an elegant suit and trench coat - the only ones he has left after selling the others out of necessity - and caught red-handed with his hand in the pocket of the last man in the world that he wishes to meet.
“Good god. It is you.”
With his tweed flat cap fallen to the ground, an astonished Mark Slate’s shaggy blond hair is difficult to ignore beneath the flagrant illumination of the street lamp. It is even more difficult to ignore Mark’s hand around his right wrist, clamping more as he struggles to free himself, to get away, run, run before the other agents get here and drag him back there -
“Good god, finally.”
There is emotion in Mark’s voice, an emotion that rams into him like an arrow to the chest and infuriates him, and he slips into a British accent, his visage a rictus of panic and wrath when Mark grabs his other wrist.
“You leggo a’ me right now, you bloody nutter -“
“What the - it’s me, Mark! Don’t you recognize me?!”
“I said let -“
“Listen to me! I don’t know what’s happened to you, but we can help you! Christ, your hair, it’s not dyed, is it? And you look like you’re starving -“
“Let GO!”
“Do you know how long we’ve been searching for you?! How many of us?! We thought you were -“
“Dead? Barbecued to charcoal like April?” he growls, ditching the accent, glaring Mark in the eye, daring the man to retaliate.
Mark recoils from him. Lets go of his arms. Overwhelmed. Shattered, and he runs as fast as he can, heedless of the pedestrians he barges against or of their annoyance, runs block after block until he collapses to his knees in front of a closed pharmacy, panting, his breast pocket fat with four wadded wallets from his night’s work. His vision hazy and hot, his chest brimming with repugnance towards himself.
It seems, in the four decades since, he hasn’t lost an ounce of that self-revulsion.
“I was a ublyudok towards him, through and through,” Napoleon murmurs to Illya now, lips compressed into a thin line, eyes lowered. “I lashed out at him in the worst possible way.”
Although it was general gossip at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters that Mark and April had a strictly older brother/younger sister relationship, Napoleon and Illya, no one else, were privy to the actual fact that Mark had had a profound crush on the attractive, chestnut-haired agent for years. Illya had discovered Mark’s secret first, by way of a celebratory night of alcoholic drinks after an accomplished Affair for which they were temporarily partnered. Napoleon discovered it months later, also by way of a long queue of alcoholic drinks while they debated on the important things in life. Luckily they never got past defining ‘important’, much less defining those important things, or Mark might have been privy to his innermost secret too: That the women in his life were transient, convenient for slaking his lust and fortifying his Casanova reputation and nothing more, for he was madly in love with his taciturn, supremely intelligent, gorgeous Russian partner.
And that hasn’t changed at all.
“I’m sure you had not meant it. You wanted him to leave you alone, and you were distressed,” Illya says gently. “Mark was not the only one hurting.”
Despite his lingering glumness, Napoleon shows the other man a small smile.
After Illya smiles in return, Illya’s expression segues into solemnity, and Napoleon asks, “What is it?”
Illya sighs heavily.
“As much as I’d felt sorry for him … I also know that Mark never reported finding you in London to Mr. Waverly. I didn’t know you were even alive until 1980.”
It is Napoleon’s turn to give Illya’s hand a squeeze of consolation. Eight years. Illya had thought him deceased for eight years, just because Mark had decided to lie to U.N.C.L.E. about encountering him. Just because of one vicious, excessive line spat out in anguish.
One wrong line on a London street, one overturned card on a poker table, and the course of his history was diverted for the worse with no hope of doubling back.
A terrifying insight … but only if he stops playing the game and slinks away a loser. As long as he plays, the opportunity will always be there that he will win again. Win big. Win the jackpot that’ll set him up for life with everything he desires in it.
Everything, encapsulated in the bespectacled, bow tied, blond and blue-eyed man sitting next to him.
For him, after a lifetime of playing against the odds on every level conceivable, there can be no grander reward.
“He should be glad he’s dead,” Illya mutters to himself. Illya’s scowl is back, the groove between his eyebrows deeper.
“Mark’s dead?”
Illya nods and replies, “Bullet to the gut. Pakistan. 1980.”
Napoleon’s eyes narrow in contemplation. Huh. What are the chances that the year Mark died and the year Illya learned of his continued existence being the same is just a coincidence?
“Mark told you.”
Illya nods a second time.
“On his dying breath. Mark resigned from U.N.C.L.E. in 1973. He worked for the C.I.A. from then on as an undercover agent in the Middle East. I had no idea about it when I went there as well in 1980, as Dr. Mallard. I didn’t know either exactly how he knew I was there or where to find me. I still don’t, actually. He sent a Pakistani man for me, an ally of his, who told me that Mark had been shot by a terrorist and was dying from his injuries, and that Mark was … vehement about seeing me before it was too late. The only reason, though, that I crossed the border with the Pakistani man was because Mark had claimed he had recent news about you.” Illya’s lips twist upwards in a bleak smile. “Who would have thought it was a confession that he actually wanted to impart to me?”
“Mark told you about London.”
“Yes. And that you were still alive. That he had reliable info that you frequented Las Vegas. He died before he could tell me more. I couldn’t save him.”
A pall of darkness suddenly envelopes Illya like a cloud.
“I was …” Illya coughs, then says in a more steady tone, “I was in Afghanistan in 1980 as part of the Royal Army Medical Corp, during the Soviet invasion. In the Jalozai refugee camp on the Pakistani border.”