Chapter Text
Napoleon gets shot. Napoleon gets shot clear through the abdomen, and while he’s convulsing on the ground, coughing blood, he’s dragged into a van and taken away.
It’s Illya’s fault.
A misstep, a wrong turn, a false read of the situation.
He knows this, knows it, and the fact fills him with a nauseous panic, one that he feels rising into his throat when Waverly says, “We don’t have the resources to put out an exhaustive search, unfortunately.” And it swells into a white-hot tremor of anger when he hears, “Agent Solo has been officially declared as ‘killed-in-action.’”
The wooden arm of the chair nearly snaps off in his hand. “You are not even going to try to save him,” he says, and maybe it was a question in his head, but it falls flat onto the desk between them.
“As I said, Mr. Kuryakin, U.N.C.L.E can not risk chasing down a single agent, especially when the chance of survival is so low.” Illya nods, stiffly, his eyes fixed on the ugly pattern of the carpet. “But, we acknowledge that Solo was an incredible agent,” he clears his throat.
Illya looks up, face impassive as stone. “And seeing as you were partners, yourself and Miss Teller will be granted three weeks of paid leave, in order to process this loss.”
“Thank you,” Illya says, voice hollow. He is dismissed.
Illya carries his body back to their safehouse, where he finds Gaby rolling up neckties with shaky hands. His chest moves steadily, but he feels curiously out of air.
Solo’s things are almost packed away, but his shoes are lined neatly against the wall.
“Waverly says we leave Cowboy to die,” Illya says, and already he can feel the familiar anger rushing through him, filling the empty spaces that whistle like an empty bottle when he thinks about Napoleon, gasping for breath as he lay dying, clawing at the mud -
Gaby pauses, barely glancing up at him. “He’s probably already dead, Illya.”
He ignores the cold rush at that, ignores the thought that it might be possible to drown in a room full of air. “Maybe. Then we kill the men that killed him. Bury his body in American soil.” Her hand cinches around something blue and silk.
“He told me he wanted to be buried in Paris,” he whispers, eyes closed tight. Illya can feel a heat in his head, a pressure like a storm building. She looks up at him, mouth draw tight. “We don’t have backup?”
Illya shakes his head, hand curling into a fist at his side. He’ll do this by himself if he has to. He’ll burn the world down. He’ll do anything to chase away the image of Napoleon’s eyes, desperate and wide. He’ll fight to keep away the sound of one, two, gunshots, the cry of pain as they tear through him -
“How long do we have?”
Illya’s lips quirk. “Three weeks.”
Gaby tosses the tie down and looks Illya in the eyes. “Let’s do it.”
-x-
Napoleon wakes up, screaming, in the middle of the first surgery.
There’s an oxygen mask over his face, and hands, hands , inside of his torso, digging around. An arm, barred across his chest, forces him back onto the table. He’s been trained against torture, trained to resist giving up information while drowned, while beaten, while electrocuted, but there are hands in a hole in his stomach, and he screams.
Drugs swirl in his head, like syrup in his veins, like cotton in his mouth, like agony in his bones -
The anesthesia washes over him again, and he falls under.
-x-
Illya tears through warehouse after warehouse, crushing the hollow wood doors of abandoned office buildings and forcing open cellar doors with his bare hands.
They work logically, Gaby and Illya, neatly crossing out quadrants of the city as they decimate them in search of Napoleon. Their maps grow more precise as their hope frays, little by little.
Each clawing half-step forward always seems to be followed by a crashing, howling fall backwards. On the fifth day, they find the van abandoned in a lot, Napoleon’s blood soaked into the upholstery. It sends them on a false lead, and Illya nearly chokes out an unrelated burglar in the heat of the moment.
Ten days in, Illya returns to the hotel in the soft early hours of the morning, hands shaking and blood oozing from a cut on his eyebrow. Gaby stirs from where she’d fallen asleep on a pile of notes, the papers rustling as she shuffles them around.
They’re both exhausted, burnt out in the frenzy of searching, of killing and scraping for information.
Illya rages on, but Gaby can tell that he’s tiring too, bones propping him up most days, and eyes drifting shut at the evening wears on. “We’re so close,” Gaby says, a broken record, a mantra, a promise that is beginning to feel like a lie.
“Solo would not give up on us,” he says in German, voice low. Gaby smiles weakly. Illya doesn’t return it.
“He would if there was a good enough distraction.”
They cross another neat square off the map with a black marker. They’re getting closer.
-x-
He’s gotten used to waking up in pain.
The waking is the hardest part - the small moment of numbness, before his brain kicks the pain receptors back into action. He can, for that second, believe that everything is okay. Believe that Illya is an arm’s reach away in a soft bed in a safe hotel -
But waking is the hardest part.
Napoleon spends a lot of his time somewhere between asleep and passed out, the combination of overdoses of injected painkillers and blood loss makes staying awake for any extended period of time difficult.
When his eyes are open, they question him relentlessly, slapping him across the face for silence, and beating him for snark. He can’t manage much of the latter, not with his brain a watery mush and the rest of his body out of commission.
The mangled flesh of his stomach was messily sewn together in the surgery, skin around the stitches hot and tight. They pulled a bullet from the mess of his shattered kneecap, bound the whole thing in thick bandages.
He aches through the haze of the drugs, the pain persistent even through the vials of clear liquid. Though, he supposes that the general feelings of loss and confusion are the better alternative to the excruciating daggers of unmedicated wounds.
A sigh, breath rattling through exhausted lungs. Each inhale pulls at his stitches, surely infected. Each exhale is almost his last.
His tormentors are getting impatient.
“You’re not CIA, you’re not KGB. Who the hell are you working for?” an angry shouting, demanding.
Napoleon rouses himself, pointing himself in the direction of the voice. He grins a bloody grin, the cold air whistling through the absence of one of his molars. “I’m not CIA,” he parrots.
It’s a bad comeback, and it earns him a wallop on the temple that sends a black haze into the corners of his vision.
He just needs to stall, he reminds himself.
Illya will find him.
Illya has to find him.
He can’t die here.
They have to be close.