Chapter Text
Half asleep, he rolls over in the hotel bed and finds… nothing.
Hadn’t Napoleon been in the bed with him earlier? Illya racks his jumbled brains. He’s certain the other man had assisted him out of his clothes and under the covers – it would otherwise have been, he can admit, fully beyond his capacity. And then…?
He ignores the visual recollections, which are somehow out of focus and make him feel dizzy. The only sound he clearly remembers is someone speaking in an irritating and continuous murmur. Could it have been himself? He hopes not and gives up trying to make the words out. He falls back on memories of sensations. A warm hand on his back while he retches – that must have been earlier, before the bed, which smells clean and only faintly of sweat. Cool water on his lips and a glass that keeps slipping through his grasp and never falls. He understands now that someone else must have been holding it, steadying it. Someone stroking his hair while he drifted off to sleep.
There. The last sensation before unconsciousness. And who could that have been if not Napoleon? So, he must have come to bed. And now?
The bedspread is unmussed, but warm, as though someone has been laying on top of it until only just recently. Illya slips out from between the sheets, pleased to find that his legs support him and the room spins only slightly.
Napoleon is sitting in the dark in the tiny sitting area – the feature that makes theirs a suite rather than a room and will surely draw the ire of the accounting department as soon as they submit their expense reports.
“It’s the middle of the night, why are you up?”
He smiles, teeth flashing in the dark. “Isn’t that my line? I didn’t wake you, did I?”
There’s something in Napoleon’s voice – a strained sort of casualness, admixed with concern, that puts Illya immediately on edge. “No,” he lies, “I thought I might be sick, but it passed.”
“That’s good, then. It must be working its way out of your system.”
“Yes.” Illya does feel better – clearer than he has since before his encounter with the latest Thrush serum. “Did you come here to report in? I have half a chance of speaking sense, now, if you’d like me to call in my half.”
“No, no, it can wait ‘til morning. I was just, ah, thinking through a few loose ends.”
“Perhaps I can help.”
“You need your rest.”
Napoleon isn’t meeting his eyes. Illya’s pulse pounds in his ears and the nausea comes rushing back.
“Is it…? Did I say something?” He mentally skims the sensitive information in the badly dented filing cabinet that is his mind – trying to determine whether anything feels particularly picked-through.
He catches a banked intake of breath from the armchair by the window.
Putting it off until morning won’t fix anything – he needs to know the worst of it. “Which teams did I compromise? Or… not headquarters?”
“No, no, nothing like that. Don’t worry.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You, ah, you asked me to do something, that’s all. Something personal. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Illya’s head swims and he gropes for the other armchair. Napoleon springs up and catches his arm, guides him down until he’s sitting with his head between his knees. A moment passes.
“Well?” Feeling he’s at a disadvantage, Illya puts his full impatience into the word. His frustration with his gappy memory and traitorous body both.
“I figured, if you’d really wanted me to, you’d have asked me when you were in your right mind. I’m going forget about the whole thing, act as though I’d never heard it.”
“Yes, that’s probably best.” When he can raise his head without feeling he’s going to vomit, then he’ll sit up and put the pressure on, demand Napoleon tell him what the hell he’s talking about.
“But…” Illya sits up anyway, needing to see his partner’s face. Napoleon has never sounded so unsure.
“…but I’ve been finding it somewhat difficult, in practice.”
The feeling of warm fingertips combing through his hair. He remembers, or thinks he remembers. He must have been babbling the whole time Napoleon was putting him to bed, his touch raising thoughts that are never far from Illya’s mind, though he can usually keep them from his lips. He returns to the memory of Napoleon’s touch, to the feeling of absolute safety, the knowledge that this man, at least, will never hurt him.
He catches Napoleon’s eye and smiles. “You’re finding it difficult to forget my propostition?”
He hopes he doesn’t look as ghastly as he feels.
“Very.”
“Well, I don’t know what counts as my ‘right’ mind, but why don’t you and I go back to bed?”