Let the record reflect from the outset that Illya was not worried. He was not worried about Solo, he just wanted to check on him. Because of reasons.

Reasons like the ice storm that had knocked out power across half the city and burst pipes in the other half. Reasons like the wind and sleet that made the roads unsafe and the alleys between buildings impassable. Reasons like the fact that he wasn't answering his telephone. Reasons like the fact that La Mie was still closed at nine in the morning on a Wednesday.

Reasons.

So really, Illya was perfectly justified in going and breaking into Solo's flat.

He was not, however, prepared for what awaited him there.

He lets out a startled hiss before he gets control of himself, because it is freezing. The hall outside had been chilly, but the rooms within are nearly arctic (and Illya would know). He can't see his breath, but it's probably just a matter of time; it's well below freezing outside, and only getting colder.

He closes the door behind him, glad for the thick gloves he wore on the way over. The flat is silent, absent even the sounds of air or water moving through vents and pipes. That would explain why his telephone call had gone unanswered, then, if the power were out, and perhaps a pipe had frozen or burst elsewhere in the building.

Solo's flat is not what Illya would have expected. For starters, it's not above the bakery where any sensible person would choose to live. Illya's next guess would have placed him in a house in a different, nicer part of the city altogether, but that's not it either. Rather, Solo lives a few blocks away from the bakery in the wrong direction, in an old and frankly unattractive apartment building.

Solo had given him the address at some point, more of an off-hand remark than a meaningful exchange of information, and Illya's knowledge of the city hadn't been complete enough to place it. He'd taken a cab over from the bakery, though, and been thoroughly surprised by the stop.

The flat itself is nice enough, he supposes — or it would be it the heat were working — and he indulges in a bit of harmless snooping on his search for Solo. The space turns out to be surprisingly impersonal. For someone as loud and colorful as Solo, it's quite colorless, and the decorations are tasteful but rather bland.

The mystery of the missing color is solved when he nudges open a door that turns out to be a bedroom. It's dark inside, but once his eyes adjust he sees that rugs of every color and pattern known to man are layered over one another on the floor, and the bed is almost totally obscured by blankets, throws, and what may even be a couple of towels, all of different hues and designs.

Apparently Solo had responded to the growing cold by bringing every scrap of moveable fabric into the bedroom and adding it to his magpie's nest. Not entirely unreasonable, but a fully sane person would have just left.

And let it never be said that Napoleon Solo is sane.

"Cowboy?" Illya calls softly, and is rewarded with a slow roll of movement from under the mountain of blankets on the bed.

"I hope that's not you, Illya," comes the muffled response, "because I'd hate to have to kill you for breaking into my apartment and waking me up."

And that, that does it, because Solo doesn't use his given name, and more importantly, Solo doesn't sleep. He's up before five most mornings, ready to open the bakery at seven on weekdays and eight on weekends, and he stays well past closing to clean and prepare for the next day. Illya had once recommended that he hire some help, and Solo had been so scandalized that Illya might as well have offered to stab him.

If the bakery were closed because the storm had rendered it unusable in some way, that would be one thing, but for it to be closed because Solo was still asleep at nine o'clock? Unheard of.

"What's wrong?" he sighs, resigning himself to the worst possible drama as he picks his way across the haphazard floor. "Are you sick?"

Solo's head appears from under a thick ochre blanket in some vaguely geometric print. "Why would I be sick?" he demands, gathering righteous indignation about himself like a cloak. It does little to counteract his incredible bedhead or the fact that he still has blankets pulled up to his chin.

"You take day off," Illya says. "You never take day off."

"I'm not allowed to take a vacation?"

"Да, you're allowed to, but you don't."

"Well, I am today. Goodbye." He retreats back under the blankets, and it's not like Illya can blame him — it's cold, after all — but he can pursue further information. He does this by taking a handful of blankets and yanking them down around Solo's waist, revealing his curly mess of hair and a forest green sweater.

Solo lets out an ungodly yelp at the sudden intrusion of cold air and scrambles to burrow back down under the warmth. Illya is extremely unnerved at the sound, and wonders for a frantic moment if Solo actually is sick, until he realizes that it hadn't come from Solo at all, but rather from a cat who had been curled up in the curve of his body.

The cat, a long-haired tabby with white markings, wriggles out from the top of the blankets and immediately puffs up to twice what Illya assumes is its normal size. It stalks across the bed towards him, somewhat hampered by the uneven surface, and Illya finds himself unnerved once again.

No, not unnerved again; unnerved still, because everything about Napoleon Solo is apparently designed to be unnerving.

"Solo," he says carefully, as the cat sniffs the air around him, "why do you have a cat in your bed?"

"Who, Lady Margaret?" is the muffled response, and Illya has to consciously unclench his fists.

"Unless there are more," he says through gritted teeth.

"No, just the one."

"Then by process of elimination, it would have to be Lady whatever, wouldn't it?"

"No need to be rude," Solo huffs, snippy even through his many layers of blankets. "And in case you haven't noticed, it's very cold. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement."

"About that," Illya starts, and then stops. "Come on, Cowboy, I'm not going to talk to blankets all morning."

There's some shifting and some shimmying, which sends the cat jumping down off the bed, and then Solo's head re-emerges, hair in even greater disarray than before. "Carry on," he says easily, and Illya rolls his eyes.

"How long has heat been out?" he asks.

"Some time yesterday, I'd imagine. Stone cold when I got back."

"And were you planning on doing anything about it, or…?"

Solo pins him with a flat look. "Peril, I've just gotten warm for the first time in nearly twelve hours, so if you'll excuse me, I don't plan on moving again until it's absolutely necessary. Now be a good man and put my cat back in, would you?" He rolls over, putting his back to Illya and making to pull the blankets back over his head again, and Illya leans over and grabs his arm to stop him. He's expecting Solo to be annoyed, but he's not prepared for him to jerk, to flinch with his entire body and land on his back once more, face ashen and drawn. Illya lets go as though burned, shocked into stillness and silence. "Don't," Solo grits out, eyes shut tight and sweat starting to bead along his hairline. It looks like he's about to pass out; if he weren't lying down, he already might have. "Don't do that."

Meanwhile, Illya's mind is racing with thoughts of what-ifs and maybes, running through lists of everything that can go wrong in a kitchen with large knives and heavy objects and hot surfaces.

"What is it?" he asks fervently, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pressing a hand to Solo's forehead. He's not feverish, so that's good, but his skin is clammy, which is not. "Solo, what's wrong?"

Solo doesn't answer, focused as he is on breathing deeply through his nose, so Illya folds the blankets carefully back from his left arm, the one he'd touched, but whatever's wrong with it is concealed by the thick cable knit of his sweater. There is, however, the edge of a bandage peeking out from the cuff of the sleeve.

A sleeve that will certainly not come off without a great deal of grief.

"I need scissors," he says, and pushes himself up, but Solo shakes his head vigorously.

"No," he says tightly, "I'm fine. It's fine. Just...just give me a minute."

"That is not fine," Illya snaps. "I need to get sleeve off to look, and I need scissors to—"

"Peril, stop. It's okay, just don't grab it like that again, that's all." His voice is steadier now, and so what Illya really hears is "please don't cut my sweater," rather than "please just leave me here to die." Normally he wouldn't give a damn about the man's wardrobe, but it really is cruelly cold in here.

"What happened? Illya asks.

"Burned myself," Solo admits. "Scalded, really. It's not too bad, just hurts like the devil to touch it."

"When?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

So he'd burned himself badly enough that it was still excruciating the next day and then come home to find that the heating had failed. And the thing of it is that Illya's actually angry with him. He knows that it's nonsensical, that Solo hadn't done any of this on purpose and there's really nothing he could have done to prevent it, but that doesn't stop him from wanting to wanting to take Solo by the shoulders and shake him for spending the night injured and freezing and alone, when Illya—

'Illya what,' he doesn't know – would have come and helped him? Would have come and gotten him? Would have taken him back to his apartment and let Mrs. Vanlian fuss over him all evening? Cares about him? – so he sets that line of thought aside.

Illya weighs his options, and arrives at the inevitable.

"You're coming home with me," he decides aloud. "I'll pack you a bag."

Solo puts up some token protests, but once Illya reluctantly agrees to bring his cat, as well, he subsides, and directs the packing process from his bed, sitting up and heavily wrapped against the chill. Illya's breath starts to fog the air as he moves about. Once the bag is packed and the cat is ensconced in a box padded with towels, Illya helps Solo ease into his coat and wrap his scarf. If he notices an apparent stiffness in Solo's left arm, or a clumsiness in his fingers, he keeps it to himself.

He'll leave that for Mrs. Vanlian.

He gets Solo and his things (and his cat, which is still just a bit too much to swallow) up to his apartment without incident, and settles Solo in the kitchen with a cup of hot, strong coffee in his hands – or, hand – and an afghan over his shoulders before crossing the hall to knock on the Vanlians' door.

"I'm sorry to bother you," he says when Mrs. Vanlian opens it, "but I need your help with something."

Illya has more than his fair share of experience with first aid, but Mrs. Vanlian sees Solo as yet another wayward son, Illya's still trying to tamp down that strange, seething anger, and hell hath no fury like a mother whose child has been injured doing something stupid.

He explains the situation to her, and sees the cold, hard light of an imminent scolding gathering in her eyes.

It vanishes as soon as she sees Solo, of course, and she greets him with all her customary warmth. He returns her affections with a rather awkward one-armed hug, but his expression over her shoulder is perplexed. Illya smirks, and Solo's eyes widen as he realizes what's about to happen. Sure enough, Mrs. Vanlian pulls away and presses him back into his seat.

"Illya tells me you've hurt yourself rather badly," she says in Russian. Solo tries to dismiss her concerns, but she continues. "He also says that you spent the night in an old, unheated building instead of asking your friends for help." Illya hadn't said that last bit in quite so many words, but the image her statement evokes – of Solo huddled in the corner of some decrepit warehouse, stubbornly ignoring the voice of reason literally knocking at the doors – is not actually all that inaccurate.

"The phone line was dead," Solo says, and yes, Illya had tried to call him to no avail. The anger wavers, then steps back into irritation, since the bakery has a phone, as well, which may well have been fully functional.

Mrs. Vanlian concedes the point with a touch of wariness, like she's not quite sure she believes him, but poses no further accusation. "Come on then," she says, "let's take a look."

Getting Solo out of the sweater is rather a lot of work, since he flinches and pales anytime someone touches his left arm, but between the three of them they manage to get it off without too much incident. Solo's left shivering in a white t-shirt, and Mrs. Vanlian has Illya get him another blanket before she turns to the bandage wrapped from his wrist almost to his shoulder. She carefully unwinds the cloth to reveal the telltale blisters and angry red splotches of a scald wound — a bad one, at that.

"Oh, Napoleon," she breathes, "what happened?"

Solo gives a vague account of a new recipe and a foolish mistake and a vat of something boiling spilling all down his arm, but he doesn't give specific details and his Russian is clumsier than usual. Mrs. Vanlian doesn't press him, though, just squeezes his good arm and kisses him on the top of the head, promising to get him all fixed up.

She returns from a raid on Illya's bathroom with a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine, and a tub of Vaseline. Solo bears it impassively until the iodine hits a spot where a blister had torn away, revealing raw, spongy flesh, and Illya has to push his head down between his knees and remind him to breathe while Mrs. Vanlian crouches in front of him, wiping his face and neck with a cold towel and murmuring soothing Russian nonsense. The iodine likely burns worse than whatever had scalded him in the first place, but infection would be far worse than either, so they take a short break and then continue.

There's one more raw spot, larger than the first, and waters down the iodine before applying it but Solo still goes rigid and pale and needs Illya to hold him still so that Mrs. Vanlian can finish. She does, then daubs the whole thing liberally with Vaseline and wraps it all carefully in two layers of gauze. Together, she and Illya get him to the couch — a two person job, because Solo's more than a little unsteady on his feet after everything, and Illya's afraid of jostling his arm.

"Would you like to stay here, or come back with me?" she asks once he's settled, stroking damp hair back from his forehead. "The children are all at school, so I can promise a few hours of quiet."

"Oh, no, I'd much rather bother Peril," Solo murmurs, eyes closed, and that's how Illya knows he's all right.

"That's fine," Mrs. Vanlian smiles, "but you'll let me know if you need anything." It's not a question.

Solo hums his assent, then Mrs. Vanlian's taking Illya's arm and leading him out of the main room and into the bathroom.

"He should be fine," she says quietly, explaining the reason for their odd sequestration, "but I don't think he cleaned it yesterday so you'll have to watch for infection. You know what to look for?"

Illya nods.

"And you'll come and get me if you need help?"

"այո," Illya agrees.

"Good boy," she smiles, and gestures for him to head back out into the hall.

"I'll come check on you this afternoon," she promises in Russian, and if Solo were a normal person, he'd simply accept it. As it is, he raises an eyebrow and starts to protest as politely and eloquently as possible. "D'ap," she interrupts, pointing at him in manner that has subdued many an ebullient child. "Just you try to stop me, Napoleon Solo. Try, and see what happens."

Napoleon deflates; Mrs. Vanlian softens. "Get some rest," she says gently. "Healing takes time."

"Yes, Mrs. Vanlian," Napoleon mutters, wisely giving in.

"Be good," she tells them both, and slips out. There's a soft snick as the door closes behind her.

"Nice place," Solo says eventually, breaking the newfound silence. "Heating and everything."

"Running water, too," Illya agrees blandly. "And three working hands between us."

Solo snorts. "Yes, all right, I should have asked for help. Happy?"

"Not particularly."

"Well, there's not much I can do for that, I'm afraid." Solo rearranges the blankets around himself and slides a little further down the arm of the sofa. "Would you mind letting Lady Margaret out? She's probably asleep, but no living thing should be trapped."

Illya goes over to the bed, where Solo's bag is sitting next to a suspiciously quiet box, and carefully lifts the lid. The cat is indeed sleeping within, curled into a circle with its feather-duster tail tucked over its nose and front paws. Its fur is long and soft-looking – on impulse, he runs a hand down its flank, and should have expected the way it startles, lifting its head to reveal a silky white throat and chest. A small chirrupy trill has the distinct cadence of a question, so Illya holds his hand out for a sniff. He's never been one for cats, but he's never precisely disliked them, either. He just never spent much time around them, and doesn't know how to act. The fact that Solo, of all people, should have one…. It's not that odd, but still. It's just one more surprise, just one more facet he hadn't been anticipating. Every time he thinks he's starting to understand the man, something catches him off guard. It's like he's doing it on purpose.

Infuriating American.

Apparently satisfied with his scent, the cat butts its head up under his hand, and Illya obediently scritches between its ears.

"Why Peril, are you bonding with my cat?" There's a smile clear in Solo's voice, and Illya almost startles. He's so rarely quiet, after all.

"Not on purpose," Illya says, still not looking away from the small animal so happily receiving his attentions, and Solo chuckles.

"She's a sweetheart, isn't she?" He pats his lap and clicks his tongue, and the cat gives Illya's hand one last nudge before jumping down off the bed and trotting across the room to hop up onto Solo's lap. "I found her not long after I'd moved to the city. She was doing all right on her own, but I think most of us do better with a home. She certainly seems to agree." Illya can hear the purring from across the room as the cat stands on Solo's chest, tail waving lazily in the air, accepting its due affection.

"You do not seem the type to take in strays," Illya says, and then immediately realizes how untrue that is. Solo had taken him in just as surely as the Vanlians had; the fact that he (and the Vanlians) have now taken Solo in doesn't do anything to change that. But the words are already out, and Solo doesn't appear to take any offense.

"No," he says, "I suppose not. But some are just too hard to resist, don't you think?"

"Perhaps," Illya allows, but all he can think is I know.

Thanks for reading! This story will have three chapters, and although I'm aiming to have it finished before the holidays I'm not sure what my posting schedule will look like. As always, please feel free to leave any feedback you'd like to, and hopefully I won't keep you waiting too long before the next bit!