Thunder: An Epilogue

by Aconitum-Napellus

Part Two of Thunder. After his torture in South America, Illya is on the long road to recovery, and trying to reconcile his memories of his ordeal with his future with U.N.C.L.E.

An Epilogue – John Masefield

'I have seen flowers come in stony places

And kind things done by men with ugly faces,

And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,

So I trust too.'

Thunder rolling across the sky like something being dragged on a vast wooden floor. It's so hot, but the raindrops are starting to hammer down now; great splats the size of English pennies hitting the paving, sending up little puffs of dust from the bone-dry stone. The surface of the pool is roughening under the sudden breeze. There's a little chill in the air, but Napoleon doesn't seem to notice the chill or the wind or the rain. He raises his hands above his head, stretches his back a little, and then executes a perfect dive from the board into the pool. His body cuts into the water with hardly a splash. He becomes a pink and black Picasso of shapes, gliding half the length of the pool, before he comes up for air, turning, treading water, looking back to where Illya sits under the veranda roof, and grinning.

'Give it a few months and you can join me,' he calls, wiping water from hair which is shining charcoal black.

Illya slips his bookmark back into his book, closes the black leather cover, and folds his reading glasses into his pocket. The rain is pattering at the metal of the veranda roof, pattering on the stone flags that surround the pool, pattering down on the metal hood of the barbecue that sits only a few yards away.

That sound… The thunder rumbles again and the rain slams harder onto the veranda roof and that metal lid of the barbecue. Napoleon is ploughing up and down the pool in a perfect crawl.

Bile rises in Illya's throat. He pushes himself quickly to his feet, arranges himself on his crutches, and tries to head to the door.

The little volume of Masefield drops from under his arm and he struggles to pick it up. So hard with the crutches, with the cast on his leg, without fingernails to help him form a grip. Napoleon is completely unaware. Illya scrabbles the book from the ground, shoves it under his arm again, hobbles towards the door. It bangs behind him, and he tosses the book onto the coffee table across the room, swings himself on his crutches over to the record player, drops a disc onto the turntable and sets it going, turning the volume up loud to drown out the sound of the rain.

He drops down into an armchair, lifts his plastered leg onto the footstool, and rests his head back, trying to focus only on the music. But the music reminds him of what he's lost. He certainly can't play his guitar, and his oboe and English horn feel impossible. He's lost the dexterity in his fingers for now, and having no nails adds another layer of impossibility. There's a piano in the house and he sits down at that every day, trying to get his fingers to comply with the wishes of his mind. But it hurts to stretch between the keys and the fingers are unresponsive and sluggish, and when he presses down his fingertips prickle and sting. He doesn't even know if that pain is real or psychological. The doctors can't tell him. He's constantly conscious of his damaged fingertips with the little half moons of nails growing back from the nail beds with such agonising slowness. So more often than not when he tries to play the piano he ends by slamming the lid shut over the keys and storming, as well as one can storm with a broken leg, into another room.

That awful patter of the rain. It would be wrong, he supposes, to get Napoleon to remove or cover up everything that takes on that metallic sound under the rain. He's supposed to face his fears; at least, that's what the psychiatrist keeps saying. He has to be able to face his fears if he ever hopes to get back on the job.

So he makes himself sit in the armchair and listen to the sound of rain striking metal. He listens to the thunder rolling across the sky. It's not quite the same. It's not like being trapped in that metal tank. There's no vile cocktail of shit and salt and piss and rust and blood in here. The owner would be horrified, he is sure, at anything approaching that. There are little bowls of pot pourri in various places, so the rooms smell of dusty perfume and clean carpets and little else.

The door bangs open. Napoleon is standing there, naked but for his black trunks, towelling water from his hair.

'Hey, partner,' he says, his expression moving from neutral to a little concerned. Illya realises he's rocking in the chair, and stops abruptly. 'You okay? I didn't realise you'd come in.'

'It was raining, in case you didn't notice,' Illya says rather tartly. 'I'm not supposed to get my cast wet.'

'Ah, well, you were on the veranda,' Napoleon shrugs, pulling on a robe and dropping his towel over the back of a chair. He strolls easily over to the record player and turns the volume down a little. 'I thought you'd be all right.'

Another rumble of thunder. The rain increases, a cacophony of drops on the metal all around the house. There's something closing in on Illya, a terrible memory coming over him like a creeping fog. Trapped. Listening to the rain on that tank. Waiting for the tide to rise. Thunder dragging through the metal walls…

'Illya. Hey, Illya.'

He jerks his lungs into life. He feels a knife edge away from vomiting.

'If I could control the weather, I would,' Napoleon says softly.

He's crouching in front of the chair, a hand on Illya's arm. Illya looks down. That cast has been off for less than a day and his arm looks pale and weak, like a root dragged up from underground and blanched in water. It doesn't look like his own arm. His hand, with its slowly regrowing fingernails, doesn't look like his own hand. Sometimes he feels like he's inhabiting the body of a stranger.

'No one can control the weather,' Illya mutters.

If only he could walk with ease. He would get up out of the chair and put on a waterproof and go outside and walk and walk. He feels a core-deep longing to climb a mountain, utterly alone; to stand on a rock that sticks out over the void and scream into the thin, cold air until everything is screamed out of him and he collapses like a puddle of bones and skin.

But he's done enough screaming. He did enough of that for any lifetime, eight weeks ago, eight long, short, fleeting weeks. It feels like forever. It feels like yesterday. He's spent days in hospital, been under the surgeon's knife more than once, spent hours in physiotherapy, long, long hours talking to psychiatrists and counsellors. But it still feels like yesterday that he was lying on the floor in that hot, foetid hut, screaming his lungs out through his mouth; yesterday that he was huddled in that terrible rusting metal tank waiting for the tide to rise over him, feeling the pain of broken bones and torn off fingernails and whipping and bruising and a hundred electric shocks. Everything is healing. Even his mind is healing. They keep telling him that. But do any of them really understand? Have any of them ever been reduced to a raw and screaming slab of flesh at the unmerciful hands of other men? None of them understand that. The only one to come close to understanding is Napoleon.

'Come on, buddy,' Napoleon says. 'Give me a couple of minutes to throw on some clothes, and then we're going for a drive. Yes?'

It's not really a question. His inclination would be to say, no, Napoleon. I'm too tired. I'm too sore. I'm too – But he's not that tired, he's not that sore. He just curls away from activity like a snail from the sharp end of a stick, because although he wants to climb, to run, to disappear into the hills, it's all curtailed by the leaden cast on his leg and by the weight of his tired mind.

He sighs, looks over at the little black book of poetry on the table, then back at Napoleon.

'All right. I'm all ready,' he says.

He's wearing light slacks cut to fit around the cast. A poloshirt with an unbuttoned collar. A shoe on his right foot, nothing on his left. The break is so close to the knee that he has to have a full leg cast and the bone was so shattered by the bullet that he's not supposed to put any weight on it for at least three months. He's so sick of the cast. Sick of the itching, sick of carrying around that weight, of hardly being able to touch his foot to the floor.

'Can you pass me my book?' he asks.

Napoleon picks up the book, flicks through it, then passes it over.

'Maybe we can pick you up something else in town,' he says. 'A mystery, maybe. How about a romance? Illya, have you ever read Agatha Christie?'

Illya wrinkles his nose. 'I'm quite happy with the books I brought, thank you,' he says.

He has a couple of journals, some novels, a few Russian language books that are new to him that he was lucky enough to pick up in a Greenwich Village flea market. Thank god for beatniks and their pretentious aspirations. It makes him a magnet whenever he goes into one of those clubs – oh, a realSoviet! – but it also means they scour the earth for authentic books in Russian and then toss them back to flea markets when they give up on their silly aspirations to learn the language of the exotic enemy. He likes these thumbed and tired copies much better than the pristine volumes ordered in for him to respectable bookshops. He likes the scent of them and the feel of the paper, and how sometimes someone's name and hometown is inscribed in Cyrillic in the front. It makes him feel like less of an outcast.

Napoleon has left the room. Illya passes his thumb over the soft leather cover of the Masefield, over the little dents of the gold lettering on the front. This couldn't be further from a thick Russian tome. He bought it in a bookshop in Cambridge, brand new; had it signed when Masefield was a guest at a Trinity College dinner. Perhaps that's why sometimes he feels so divorced from his people and his culture, because this little volume of the most English of poets feels more dear to him than any of his Dostoevskys or Tolstoys.

He opens the book and tries to turn the thin pages to the poem he loves the most. Damn his fingernails. He has to lick the end of his finger to get the page to turn.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…

Such irony there. Such irony that he loves that poem so much, that he served, however briefly and nominally, in the Russian navy, and that stepping on the deck of any ship smaller than a frigate makes him want to heave the contents of his stomach over the side. So ironic that he loves to swim in the heaving water at the edge of the land, but if the salty stuff gets into his mouth it makes him gag.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide,

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied…

His heart aches inside him. It hurts to swallow. He doesn't even know why that's making him cry, but that seems to characterise him at the moment. Poetry makes him cry. A bright, bright sunny day makes him cry. The thought of Kiev in winter makes him cry. A bird swooping from telegraph wires to the branch of a tree makes him cry. Ridiculous. It's all utterly ridiculous.

'Come on, tovarisch,' Napoleon says.

He's back in the room, fully dressed, beautifully presented. Illya swallows on the ridiculous feeling of grief and closes the book and drops it back onto the table.

'Maybe I can't call you that, though,' Napoleon is saying, eyeing the book. He puts on a ridiculous English accent. 'All right, old fellow. Lickety spit.'

Despite himself, Illya smiles.

'Your English accent is worse than your French,' he says.

((O))

They drive away from the little rented cottage, Napoleon in the front, Illya stretched out in the back with his broken leg resting across the bench seat. The rain is still spattering down, the windscreen wipers push back and forth, the tyres shush on the wet road. Illya tries to bring all of his counselling to bear. He doesn't like sitting in this metal box, even if it is above water, even if it does have windows, even if it's light years away from a rusting metal tank on the edge of a tropical river, with a sealed down hatch and a pipe to let in air from above the waves. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like the sound of the rain on the roof. He doesn't like the enclosure.

'We're not going far,' Napoleon says.

He reads Illya so well. He can't even see him properly. He just glances at him every now and then in the rear view mirror, and their eyes meet, and then Illya looks away. But still, he reads him so well. Napoleon knows he's finding this hard. He knows that the rain on the metal of the car and the enclosure of the small space is hard for him. He ought to know. They had to stop enough times on the drive up here so that Illya could get out and turn his back on this metal box and breathe.

Napoleon has been tortured. Of course he has. Most active U.N.C.L.E. agents encounter torture at some points in their career. The entry requirements are so stringent because an U.N.C.L.E. agent has to expect to be put through torture, wounding, deprivation, extreme danger. They have to be trusted to retain vital information under excruciating pain. There's always a possibility of death. And of course Napoleon has been tortured. A couple of times Illya was there, but he knows there have been other incidents, back before they were partnered. Times when Napoleon was put through terrible pain, times when the fear of death hung over him like a Damoclean sword. So Napoleon knows. He is the closest of anyone to understanding.

'Come on, IK,' Napoleon says.

The car is stopped. Napoleon is holding open the door with one hand, a huge black umbrella held aloft in the other. Illya shuffles across the seat, leg first. It's always so awkward getting in and out. He manhandles his crutches out through the door, sets the feet on the ground, swings himself up. Napoleon holds the umbrella perfectly so he isn't even dripped on. He looks up to see where they are, and they're outside the little rustic inn not far from the house, that tries so hard to emulate an English pub, and fails.

He walks alongside Napoleon up the narrow path, Napoleon walking on the edge so Illya has firm footing, and holding the umbrella over him as if he were a visiting head of state. The crutches creak and click on the stone, and his recently uncasted arm aches. It would have been easier to stay in the house, to sit by the unlit fireplace and read a book. But Napoleon is right to get him out. He knows that's true, really. Napoleon opens the door, lets him go through, shakes out the umbrella and closes it and leaves it in a stand at the door.

'Lovely summer weather,' he comments to a pretty young member of staff, and she smiles and tells him how the mountains always make for unpredictable weather.

'Should be dry again later,' she promises. 'Least, that's what the weatherman said.'

Napoleon asks for a table where it will be easy for Illya to sit. The girl takes them to a place near the rear of the room. There are a couple of armchairs with a low table, by a window that looks out over a slope of trees thick in green leaf. The girl carefully arranges a second low table by one of the armchairs so that Illya can rest his leg on it.

'Looks like you've been in the wars,' she says brightly. She catches sight of his hand as he reaches out to the back of the chair, and her face blanches a little at his sore and nail-less fingers. 'Oh my, whatever happened to you?' she asks.

Illya just looks at her, wondering how he should answer. I was held captive and tortured for almost a week. They tore off my fingernails, among other things. One just can't say that kind of thing. The only time he alluded to torture to someone outside of the profession they didn't know how to reply. So he avoids telling the truth, if he can.

'Illya is very accident prone,' Napoleon says, saving him.

The woman looks at him enquiringly. She obviously doesn't believe this is the result of an accident. But Illya just puts on his reading glasses and settles into the chair, glad to be able to prop his foot up again. He shouldn't really be walking at all, not more than is absolutely necessary, but it's so hard to get the wheelchair in and out of places. So he walks, and it makes his leg ache and swell, and the doctor berates him at every consultation.

Napoleon goes over to the bar and comes back with two pints of beer. Weak. Chilled. It's nothing like what Illya enjoyed at home or grew to love in Cambridge, but it's beer nonetheless, and he picks it up left handed because he's grown used to favouring his less damaged left hand over his right, where he lost all his fingernails and sustained that break to the radius when he was spasming from the electric shocks. He broke fingers and small bones in both hands, or rather, they were broken for him, and the cool of the pint of beer is pleasant on the aches.

He's gone again for a moment. For a moment he's not in this pub at all. He's lying on the floor while they set him up for those terrible shocks, anointing him with the chilli oil, preparing that awful skewer. It's so vivid. He can even smell it. The vomit. The blood. The shit and the dank smell of river mud. He can smell the sweat and the scent of water on concrete. It's so real it's as if he's falling.

'Hey,' Napoleon says, gently taking the glass from his hand and setting it back on the table.

He's biting his lip into his mouth hard. He can feel it, the ghost of the pain, the ghost of their hands on him. He takes in a deep breath, exhales slowly, re-focusses on the room around him.

'It takes time,' Napoleon tells him.

He turns to look into Napoleon's face. He looks so perfect. No scars. No wounds. Not a hair out of place.

'Eight weeks?' he asks bleakly.

Napoleon shakes his head. 'No. More than eight weeks. You're not going to forget it. But you're going to learn to deal with it. You're learning to keep it from always being right at the front of your thoughts.'

'I suppose I am.'

It's not always there. When the flashes come on him he is recovering himself sooner, pulling himself back. His dreams don't always centre on electric shocks and screaming pain. They're still terrible at times. They still have him waking up, gasping, drenched in sweat and trying to scream, but they're not just straightforward representations of his time in that hut or the tank any more. They are convoluted, changed, and slowly easing.

Napoleon offers him his pint again.

'Drink your drink, huh?'

He isn't really supposed to mix alcohol with the painkillers and anti-depressants he's still taking, but he does. The alcohol makes the painkillers work a little better. The anti-depressants make the alcohol a little more effective. He takes the pint and downs half of it, because it's warm in here despite the rain, and Napoleon says, 'Can I stand you to lunch?'

He smiles. Puts the pint down, wipes his upper lip.

'Thank you, Napoleon.' After being close to starvation for that horrendous week any offer of food is a good one. He makes an attempt at black humour. 'As long as you don't have chilli.'

Napoleon laughs. 'I wouldn't think of it, partner.'

He suppresses sudden nausea. He can't stand the acrid scent of chilli. But he pushes his reading glasses up his nose and picks up a menu from the table, and starts to peruse the possibilities for good food.

((O))

It's so good to be able to have this time. It's good to be sent away at U.N.C.L.E.'s expense and good to have his partner with him as a friend, as a confidante, and as a necessary protection against hostile attempts against him. Thrush don't give amnesties to damaged agents. They just go after them with even more persistence, like a wolf going for the weakest member of the herd. Illya has been isolated from current sensitive information for just that reason, but he still knows plenty of things that Thrush would love to extract.

Sixteen codes. Five addresses. At least that burden is off his hands. But he's so vulnerable at the moment, and he feels it keenly.

He sits on the veranda again, leaning back in the cane chair, his foot up on a high stool. The girl at the bar had been right about the weather. The clouds are clearing away and the sun is burning through the gaps, and water steams from the paving around the pool. Napoleon is outside too, wearing an apron, fussing to get the barbecue lit, because he bought two enormous steaks in town and he's planning on a good dinner to follow their lunch.

Illya sits and watches him. He has his book but he's not reading. He tried, but the words jumped like ants on the page. He's tired after going out, after eating that good lunch and then being pushed around the local town, over the uneven pavements, in his wheelchair by Napoleon. His leg throbs and aches despite the painkillers and really he wants to sleep, but he can't muster the energy to go back inside. His bed is downstairs; the house is only one storey; but he just can't make himself move.

His counsellor has spoken to him at length about depression. It's to be expected. It's nothing to be ashamed of. He's been through hell and for the moment his life is vastly changed. For the moment he's disabled and in pain, and he's getting over terrible trauma. But that doesn't make this awful, leaden feeling any better. The tablets help overall, but he still periodically slides into a pit.

Napoleon moves around, in and out of the house. Illya doesn't exactly watch him, but he sees him in a series of freeze frames, now at the barbecue, now at the table beside it, now standing and looking at the pool and the garden beyond, now coming out of the house when Illya hadn't noticed him going in.

'Coffee,' Napoleon says, putting a cup down on the table beside him.

The hood is closed over the barbecue. A small amount of smoke or steam escapes from the edges, and there's a rich scent of meat and charcoal in the air.

'Oh. Thank you,' Illya says.

He wonders if he can get together the energy to drink. He wonders if he's thirsty. He just wants to sleep.

'Come on, IK,' Napoleon says, patting a hand onto his. 'Talk to me. No point brooding. You're not on the Steppes any more.'

He never was on the Steppes. He's from Kyiv. Russia is not an amorphous blur, all vodka and steppes and cossacks in fur hats. But he doesn't correct Napoleon.

'I'm tired,' he says.

'Yes, I can see that. But you're not just tired.'

He suddenly snaps. 'They tortured me for six days, Napoleon. Six days. I have never been in such a hell as that and I don't ever want to be in such a hell again. I don't want to – '

He breaks off, because he is dangerously close to saying it. I don't want to go back. I don't want to be an agent any more. All of the counselling, all of the physiotherapy, is aimed towards getting him fit for duty again, and he doesn't know if any of it is worth it.

If he could get up and walk away… If he could dive into that pool and swim until his limbs ached… If he could dive into that pool and let the weight of his leg cast take him down and down and –

He rubs his hands over his face, feels the roughness of the healing scars there. The thought of drowning in that water is simultaneously beautiful and horrific. The thought of peace, of being away from his terrible thoughts, is such a draw… But there's the memory of being in that tank and hearing the water rushing past outside, the terrible, terrible fear of the salt water flooding in, filling up that tiny space, of being trapped in there with no way out, and finally breathing only water into his lungs…

He's covered in sweat, his breath coming in short little gasps. Napoleon is just sitting there, watching him, watching him as he breaks down. Sometimes he feels as though he were still under interrogation. The counselling feels like interrogation. The only difference is that they don't threaten him with pain. Not physical pain, anyway.

'Sometimes,' he says very deliberately, very bravely, it feels, 'I feel like throwing myself into that pool and letting the water take me.'

Napoleon casts a glance very quickly at the pool, startled, and then back again at Illya. His gaze is penetrating.

'Illya, have you spoken to the psychiatrist about that?' he asks in a very controlled voice.

He snorts with a kind of little laugh. 'Not about the pool,' he says. His eyes are on the water. Napoleon's gaze flicks to the pool again, back to Illya again. 'No, not about the pool, of course. I haven't seen him since I came here. But about those thoughts. Yes. About – ' He clears his throat, then says, 'About suicidal thoughts. About watching the water flowing in the East River, and thinking about throwing myself in. The cast would make a very effective weight.'

Napoleon swallows, and Illya laughs again, a bitter little sound.

'Over us the bright stars, under us the drowned,' he quotes almost under his breath. Then he looks up to meet Napoleon's worried eyes. 'I don't intend to commit suicide, Napoleon. Anyway, drowning is for romantic women in books, isn't it? A gun is much more masculine.'

As Napoleon glances back into the house Illya shakes his head. His gun is in there but he has no intention of using it.

'You don't need to worry. The psychiatrist isn't worried. Not really. He and I have discussed this – very extensively. It's not – It's not quite as clear as it seems.'

Napoleon regards him critically, his head a little on one side. 'I don't know. Wanting to drown yourself seems pretty clear to me.'

Illya shakes his head impatiently. 'It's not clear at all. It's more like the water in that tidal river. Full of mud. I have fleeting thoughts, but they're a response to overwhelming pressures of emotion. They're a – a need for peace, not a desire to die. I fought so hard to stay alive back there. I don't want to die. It's a fleeting feeling and it goes very quickly.'

Napoleon puts a hand over his then and just lets it rest there. He doesn't flinch at all from the ragged and scabbed ends of Illya's fingers. He hasn't once flinched from all the things he has to do for Illya to prevent him having to have a nurse here with them.

'I don't want you to die either, Illya,' he says. 'So if you have any feelings like that, any at all, any time, just tell me, yes? Will you do that?'

Illya smiles. He won't, of course. He shouldn't have told Napoleon this time either. But he nods, and says, 'Of course, Napoleon. But – ' He takes in a deep breath, holds it for a moment, then lets it go in a long slump of his chest. 'Napoleon, I don't know if I want to come back and face that threat again. I just don't know.'

'You're thinking of retiring from being an active agent?'

He shrugs. He doesn't know. He doesn't know how to answer that question. That's the question that's been going around and around in his mind for weeks.

'From being an active agent. From the whole damn thing, maybe.' There are tears in his eyes. 'I don't know. I – I don't know what I could do with myself. I suppose I could do anything. Become a – an airline pilot, a fashion designer, a – a – I could take up quantum theory again...'

Napoleon snorts. 'Illya, all of those possibilities are as ridiculous for you as each other. You're an agent. You were made to be an agent.'

'I thought I was made to be an agent,' Illya murmurs.

He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, puts it down again. He looks at the blue water of the pool again. The urge to pitch himself in is gone. It seems insane.

He did think he was made to be an agent. It seemed like the perfect thing. His life has taken such strange turns. He seemed perfectly pitched for life as an academic. The walking stack of books at school. The one everyone cribbed answers from. His undergraduate degree, then the Sorbonne, then Cambridge. If it hadn't been for that stint in the navy, reminding him of the wonderful vitality of an active and disciplined life, he could have sunk into quantum theory, found himself buying a house in Cambridge, ended up cycling around the city in a tweed jacket with patched elbows, captivating his students with his mysterious Russian persona.

But he didn't. He had never been able to settle for that. Even while he was studying for his PhD he had itched for other activities. Batting on the cricket team, coxing for the rowers, keeping up with his gymnastics. He had travelled down to London to explore the streets, roam the museums, seek out the best new jazz, the best classical performances at the Albert Hall, and to talk to other scientists at the cutting edge of their field. And so he had fallen into conversation with the right people at the right time. Whenever he disappeared his fellow post-grads made jokes about him being a Soviet spy. In the end he fell into it, recruited by U.N.C.L.E. as one of the most promising young men to come out of Russia at that time.

It had been the perfect life. He loved his life. He loved having puzzles to solve. He loved travelling around every continent on the globe. He loved having access to the newest weapons and explosives and having permission to play with them. He loved playing characters and roles. He loved the thrill of walking a tightrope between life and death, and always coming down on the right side in the end. He thought he loved it all.

'It's just too much,' he says. 'It was too much, Napoleon. They put me through such pain...'

His arm aches. His leg aches and throbs under the cast. His fingers are full of twinges, and the raw and exposed places where his fingernails should be prickle and hurt. He still has sores on his back and legs from the whipping that won't quite close over, and the doctors are talking about skin grafts and further surgery. And he has the memories. God, those memories… Of all that he suffered the electrical burns healed the fastest, but the memories are the worst. The sensation of them pushing those chilli dipped rods into his urethra, into his rectum, letting him scream at the pain, then attaching the wires and sending the current through him. Shocks so strong that in his spasms he broke bones. God, god…

'Illya, you don't have to make any decisions yet,' Napoleon is saying.

He comes back as if from far away, sees Napoleon, sees the water of the pool, sees the shrubs and trees at the end of the garden. The blue of the sky is far, far away beyond all of that, arching up over everything.

'Waverly wouldn't even consider accepting your resignation until you're signed off by Psych,' Napoleon says. 'You don't have to make any decisions.'

He's cold and he's drenched in sweat. It's so awful when he falls into that pit of memory. It's so real. It's like being transported back in time.

'Just try to relax, wait for these steaks to cook, we'll eat dinner, and then you can go to bed. A good night's sleep – '

'A good night's sleep will not fix this,' Illya cuts across him irritably. 'Anyway, I haven't had a good night's sleep in over two months.'

'Now now,' Napoleon says lightly, tapping a finger on the table, smiling gently. 'That wasn't what I was going to say. A good night's sleep will help, that's all. You know I've been tortured too, Illya, in the past.'

'I know,' Illya murmurs, almost groans. He wipes the sweat away from his face, from his neck. 'I know.'

'It wasn't as bad as what you've suffered. It's never been that bad,' Napoleon continues. 'But I have been tortured. I have been held in horrendous conditions. I have lived in daily fear of death.'

'I know,' Illya says again.

He knows that's happened. A couple of times he's been the one who got Napoleon out, who discovered him in those awful conditions and brought him home. Napoleon has been through these terrible times when he questioned his life's purpose, and Illya has talked him round. Maybe that's why Waverly told Napoleon to come with him now, in the hope Napoleon will return the favour.

He wipes his damp hands on his trousers, looks up, smiles a little.

'I do know. I appreciate your being here, Napoleon. I really do.'

Napoleon gives him a smile in return, strokes his arm lightly, then raises his own mug of coffee towards Illya's.

'What are partners for? So. Try to relax. Wait for these steaks to cook. Have a good night's sleep. Take a proper dose of painkiller tonight, okay? You want me to rub your foot?'

Illya smiles again. What a good friend. What an amazing friend Napoleon is. He doesn't wait for Illya's reply, but goes inside, comes back with a small bottle of oil, kneels down at the end of Illya's plastered leg, and starts to rub the aching and the knots out of what of his foot sticks out of the cast. Illya tilts his head back against the cushions of the chair and closes his eyes, just letting himself feel Napoleon's fingers plying themselves about the tendons and muscles of his foot, stretching out his toes, working out the awful stiffness. At times he hardly feels that his foot is part of him any more. It's just made of aching, not flesh. He has such strange feelings about the leg in the cast, as if it's not his, as if it's not there. But with Napoleon's touch his foot, at least, starts to belong to him again.

'I'd do the rest of it if I could,' Napoleon comments, looking up with a flashing smile. 'But the cast doesn't permit and what remains is too high up. People might talk.'

Illya sniggers. The idea of people making anything of this is ridiculous. He couldn't imagine getting hard for the Queen of Sheba herself at the moment, much less Napoleon. Even when the beautiful female therapist massages as much of him as is decorously possible during physiotherapy he doesn't have the slightest stirring of desire.

He catches himself then. It's so strange how his mood fluctuates; how he can go from the numb, grey depths of depression to the thought of drowning himself in that water, to smiling at Napoleon, to laughing at what he says. His chest feels lighter. His mind feels more awake. It's a terrible, terrible place, that void that comes on him at times, and it's so hard to stagger out of it, but Napoleon makes him talk, and talking helps.

((O))

It would be easier, he thinks, to have the physiotherapist and the counsellor come to the house. Easier for him, at least. But the physiotherapist he's assigned to while he's away doesn't leave his clinic in the city, and the counsellor is just a block away from the physio, so it makes sense for Napoleon to drive him in to one appointment and wait around, and then take him to the next straight afterwards.

So Illya sits in the clinic while this new therapist checks his recently de-casted arm and checks the tightness of his healing scars. Then he has to be put through gruelling exercises which cause him far too much pain.

'I thought I was done with torture,' he mutters as he stands there, sweating, wearing no more than his underwear, going through exercises designed to keep the muscle of his thigh well toned while keeping the weight off his foot.

'Now, Mr Kuryakin, if you think this is torture you should get out more,' the physiotherapist smiles as Illya stands between parallel bars, chilled with sweat, his leg a throbbing stack of pain.

There is a blaze of anger rising in him. It flares high, high, almost bursts out, but then he checks it and forces it away.

'Did you read my notes, Mr Schumacher?' he asks in a voice that would freeze hydrogen down to a solid lump.

The man flicks a sudden look at him. His eyes travel to Illya's hands, red with effort, white about the knuckles where they grip around the parallel bars. His gaze lingers on the savage, raw ends of his fingers.

'I'm very sorry, Mr Kuryakin,' he says, touching a hand lightly to his shoulder. 'I see a lot of people and that was a stock response. An insensitive stock response.'

'Then you did read my notes,' Illya murmurs.

God, he's tired. He's so very tired. Despite Napoleon's intentions and the correct dose of painkillers, he still woke every few hours with the pain in his leg.

'I read your notes,' the man nods. Then he says, 'I think that's enough for today. You're obviously exhausted. I'd like to see you again on Friday, though. If you make an appointment through my secretary...'

'Of course,' Illya says.

He wishes he could take a shower. He's tired of washing with a bowl of water and a flannel, all to keep the cast dry. Those terrible thoughts run through his head again. To be able to have this all be over. To be out of this, away from this, away from everything he ever associated with U.N.C.L.E. and torture and physical and mental pain. He doesn't know if he means death, or retirement, or just some kind of impossible limbo. Just something, some way to make all of the voices in his head stop, to make the pain stop, to set himself free.

The physiotherapist is very solicitous in helping him wipe away the worst of the sweat, get his clothes back on, and get to the wheelchair so that he can roll himself out into the reception and make that appointment. He hates the vulnerability of moving around in the chair with his leg stuck out in front of him, being so low down and so at risk and so very immobile in a world made for people who can walk. But Napoleon is out there in the reception, and he smiles at Illya and waits while he makes his appointment, then says, 'Want me to push for a while? You look tired?'

He is tired. His arms ache. So he says, 'Yes, please, Napoleon,' and he folds his arms over his lap while Napoleon takes control of the chair and pushes him into the lift and they ride in silence down to the ground floor.

He opens his eyes again as Napoleon wheels him backwards out of the swing doors of this tall building and the heat of the street rises up around them. He puts on his tinted reading glasses; they afford him a little bit of darkness, a little bit of shelter from the brash world.

'Counsellor now, yes?' Napoleon asks, and Illya sighs. He feels as though he were about to enter into a long tunnel. He doesn't want to go.

'Yes,' he nods.

The car isn't far away. Napoleon takes him there, helps him out of the chair and into the back seat, folds the wheelchair away into the boot.

'I look forward to being able to ride up front like an adult,' Illya says as Napoleon gets into the driver's seat.

'And being able to drive, I'm sure,' Napoleon comments with a quiet laugh.

There's a sudden flash in his mind, as vivid as those terrible memories of his time in the hut, his time in the tank. But this is like a flash of brilliant sunshine. He is overcome with the memory of sitting at the controls of a helicopter, tilting it forward, skimming through the air with the sun blazing down through the glass bubble and the ground racing past beneath. The excitement is like a drug in his veins. The knowledge that he is doing, that he is being, that he is on the very edge of the peak of life. He wants so badly to be active again, to be alive again.

'Yes,' he says, shaking himself back from that wonderful moment of brilliant clarity. It was like diving into a sunlit pool. 'Yes, it will be good to be able to drive again.'

((O))

There is a tank round at the side of the house, an old tank. Perhaps it was to take overflow from the gutters. Perhaps once it stored oil or other fuel. But it is an old, rusting metal tank, just the size of that tank in which he was enclosed for hours on end, for six long days, under the in-rushing and out-flowing tide. Such an innocent looking thing. There's no lid to shut it closed, not now. There's a little water in the bottom because of the recent rain, and clods of earth and sickly strands of grass and weeds.

He stands there, leaning on his crutches, just looking into that tank. He saw it first when he went to make a circumnavigation of the house, just to get some exercise. He saw it there, rusting, dirty-red, pushed up against the wall of the house. No doubt this is a place where guests are not supposed to go, but Illya has never been an ordinary customer of anything.

That first time he saw the tank his heart seemed to clench and his blood ran cold. He turned around, hobbled away. He never made the circumnavigation of the house. But he needs to face his fears. That's what the counsellors keep saying. He's not a cowardly man. He never has been. He's always been ready to tackle his fears face on.

But this isn't the same. God, it isn't the same… He doesn't know why, but it's different. Those awful experiences are burned into his mind. The slight buzz from electrical wires sends horrors through him now. He looks at the enclosed shower cubicle in the bathroom and shivers. Any tight space makes his chest become tight in sympathy.

He leans one arm on the crutch and frees his other, rubbing his fingertips over the friable rust which is powdery and flaking and hot in the sun. The scent rushes up into his nostrils. Iron. Blood. He is there in the tank, huddled, his broken leg forced to stay bent and in such agony. So much pain through his entire body, and the scent of blood and shit and piss all around him. The sound of the water outside, rushing past, rushing past. It's so dark, so tight and closed and the air never fresh, never cool in his lungs.

The sound of someone moaning brings him back to himself. It's him. It's his lungs, his throat, pushing out that deep, low sound. He's leaning on the edge of the tank and the rust scent is rising up around him in the heat, and he's moaning in a dark, formless way.

The heat and light of the day come back in a sucking rush, like the undertow of a wave. Napoleon should appear now and say something reassuring, but he doesn't. He's in the house, showering in that shower stall that Illya can't stand to think of. So no guardian angel appears, and he is standing alone in this channel between the house and the high fence, leaning on the tank and looking into the wet and muddy mess inside. He rocks back and forth between here and then. The sun on the back of his neck, the sun pressing through the thin cotton of his shirt. The darkness of that tank, the raw and endless power of the tide and all that pain. He forces himself to keep looking, smelling the scent of the rust, looking at that sluggish dirty water, remembering standing ankle deep and barefoot in mud with his leg screaming agony and his torn fingertips screaming agony and his entire body aching and searing from the cramps and burns. He remembers looking into the water swimming with his own shit and his own blood and piss. The sky reflected on the oily surface. The sound of the river water slipping by.

He's not there. He hasn't been there for two months. It was such a short and fleeting time, but it felt like so, so long. Sometimes it feels as if the rest of his life were a blur, and those six long days make up the majority of his existence.

He knocks his knuckles against the side of the tank. It makes a dull clang. He remembers them beating the tank with sticks until his ears rang because he woke them in the night with panicked screams. So long ago. So near.

He rubs the red dust from his hand and picks up his crutch again and turns his back on the tank. At least he managed to come and look. At least he made himself come. He carries on walking past the tank, along the half-shaded passage between house and fence, through to the front yard where the car is parked and the paved driveway that leads in a sloping curve down to locked gates that are just out of sight. This is a secure place. Nowhere is entirely secure from Thrush, but this is pretty good.

He carries on round the house, up the wider area on the other side which is lush with bougainvilleas and other shrubs. Around to the back where the pool shimmers under the sun, the water casting beautiful shadows on the blue tiles beneath. The garden slopes away beyond, an undulating slope that dips down into an area of shrubs and trees, and then rises towards the far boundary which separates this place from the uncultivated beginnings of the hills beyond. If he were mobile he would have explored to the far end by now, and probably climbed the fence or gone through a gate to walk in the wild landscape. He doesn't even try to explore on these crutches. It's too hard.

His leg is starting to ache and throb. It's been down for too long, and it's swelling inside the restrictive cast. He needs to elevate it. So he goes back to his chair on the veranda, to his little stack of books and his reading glasses on top. He gets his leg up awkwardly onto the high stool he uses to prop it on when it's really aching. He fingers the books. He's hardly touched the physics journals. He doesn't seem to be able to concentrate. Maybe Napoleon is right about reading Agatha Christie.

He picks up his Masefield and flicks awkwardly through the pages.

Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.

He is filled with an abrupt bitterness. His eyes drift up from the page to settle on the rippling surface of the pool. What grandeur is there in sinking to the bottom of a pool like that; in being found by his friend, bloated and beyond help? What grandeur would there have been in drowning in that foul tank, or succumbing in the end to the violence of their torture and being thrown, broken and ruined, into the clutch of the tide? That's not an unknown door. That's not grand. It's just meaningless and sad, so, so sad.

His skin prickles as if a ghost has brushed past him. It isn't grand to die. His hand flexes. He almost throws his beloved Masefield across the patio in front of him. He feels betrayed. He clenches his hand closed, though, and then lays it flat on the pages, feels the warmth and the thickness of the layers of paper. Life is so fleeting. He got that book so long ago. He was so young. He didn't realise it then, but he was so young.

He leans his head back in the chair and closes his eyes. He's healing. He is healing. Really it's just the leg, the worst of the cigarette burns, and those welts that won't heal. And his fingernails, of course. Those things, and the memories. So much has healed; the lighter of the welts are just scars now; the cast is off his arm; the less ingrained burns have become shiny patches of scarred skin; there's not pain any more when he uses the toilet from the metal rods they forced inside him and shocked him with. It's just his leg, the worst of the wounds – and his mind…

His mind drifts back to that last session, the one with the new counsellor. He had been uncertain about seeing someone outside of the U.N.C.L.E. team, but there was no other choice while he's away from New York. He remembers walking into that room, distrustful. Looking around at the books on the shelves, at the comfortable chairs and the obligatory psychiatrist's couch. Illya had taken the couch merely because it afforded him the chance to elevate his leg. He had been expecting the session to be awful. But this man... His first words had not been an interrogation of Illya's experience but a confession of his own. He had been a serving soldier in Korea. He, too, had been tortured. At that admission something so strange had happened. Without uttering any words at all, Illya had found himself sobbing. So much of the session had been wordless, but he felt himself surrounded by understanding.

There's a clink of ice against the sides of a glass. He opens his eyes. Napoleon is putting two tall drinks down on the table beside him, their sides beaded with condensation, slices of lime mixed up with the ice and liquid. Next to them he puts down a little dish of pills.

'A Moscow mule, tovarisch,' he says, dropping himself into the chair next to Illya's and leaning back into the soft cushions. 'I thought it seemed apt.'

'It's no more from Moscow than I am,' Illya comments.

'Grumpy Russian,' Napoleon complains.

Illya picks up his glass and lets his eyes rest on the beads of water that cover the outside. They disappear under his fingertips, coalesce into bigger drops, run down the outside of the glass. He looks at his raw and nail-less fingers, where the skin has nominally healed but it still looks like something that has been ripped from its shell. Sometimes he circles his fingertips over the remaining two nails, and feels a ridiculous sense of loss at the stunted ruins on his other fingers. The regrowth is so, so slow and he still can't be sure his nails will be free of deformation.

'Not grumpy. Just accurate,' Illya says. He takes a mouthful of the cocktail. It is good. 'It's an American drink, invented in New York in 1941. It was designed to sell vodka.'

'Ah.' Napoleon laughs then. 'No wonder it's an American drink. You don't need to adulterate vodka to sell it in Russia.'

'Contrary to popular opinion, not all Russians are incorrigible alcoholics, Napoleon,' Illya chides him quietly.

Napoleon looks at him seriously then.

'Are you doing all right, Illya?' he asks. 'You had a long day yesterday, with the physiotherapy and counselling all in one day. Maybe it would be better to have them on separate days...'

'Don't be silly, Napoleon. We'd spend all our time driving in and out of the city,' Illya tells him quickly. 'There'd hardly be any point in being here. Yes, I'm all right. Yes, it was a long day. Yes, the counselling was hard. I'm sorry I haven't spoken much since. But I'm all right.'

Napoleon just looks at him, then pushes the little dish of pills towards him.

'Painkillers. Antibiotics. Anti-depressants,' he says. 'It's that time of day.'

Illya smiles. He takes the pills without protest, downing them with a mouthful of the spicy ginger-vodka taste of his drink.

'Some good things come out of your country's fascination with the Soviets,' he smiles, lifting the glass towards Napoleon. Napoleon smiles a most charming, innocent smile, a smile of true gladness.

'You like it?'

'You know I like it. That's why you made it. Yes, Napoleon, I'm all right after the counselling yesterday. I even think I gained more from it than all those sessions with Psych. The counsellor served in Korea.'

'Oh,' Napoleon says slowly. He, too, served in Korea. Illya knows he doesn't like to talk about it. Illya has been lucky enough never to serve in an active war.

'Well,' Illya says. He doesn't really want to talk about it either, but he says, 'He's been through a few things that resonate. It was good to be able to talk to him.'

'Ah,' Napoleon says. 'Well, that's good, Illya. That's good.'

They will be here for another week and a half. Illya will see the counsellor here another three times. He has hopes.

((O))

He's lying on that floor, the concrete warm against his cheek. He can see blood on the floor, and he knows it's his blood. It's running down the little channels in the concrete, the little rough grooves that were left when they put the stuff down. It's all so vivid. The red of the blood. The smell of the blood, of water on warm cement, the smell of cigarette smoke and burning flesh. He feels so sick. His stomach is a churning mass.

He watches their feet on the floor, their boots moving around him. What are they going to do next? Will they bare a patch of flesh and whip him? Will they tear off another nail? Will they tie him down, splayed, and drag that battery across the floor and ready him for the shocks? He's so scared. He's so, so scared.

His leg hurts so much, so much. He tries to drag himself away, because he knows they're going to get that battery next. He has to get away, to get those codes back to U.N.C.L.E., to get away. His leg is so heavy, it's like trying to drag a dead body. He hears the hum of electricity in the air. He's so scared, and he tries to scream, tries to drag himself away, tries so hard to scream –

There's a tumble, a thump, it's dark, he's thrashing out, trying to scream, but there's something wrapped around his arms. Then there's a voice.

'Illya! Illya, wake up! It's all right.'

The bedside light comes on, and he lies there, blinking, on the floor next to his bed. He's tangled in sheets, sweating, and his leg hurts so much. He's gasping for breath, and Napoleon is there in pyjamas, hair ruffled, rubbing his eyes. He crouches down, puts an arm under Illya's back, lifts him up a little, gives him water.

'Better?' he asks.

'My leg hurts,' he says tightly, but at least he can talk now.

Napoleon unwraps the tangled sheet and examines Illya's toes and the flesh of his upper thigh.

'Swollen,' he says economically. 'Let's get you back into bed, huh, tovarisch?'

So he smooths out the sheets, then helps Illya to heave himself back into bed, checks the air conditioning, brings him iced water, opens up his palm with two painkillers on it.

'I think it's time, yes?' he asks.

Illya smiles and takes the painkillers while Napoleon arranges his leg on its wedge of cushions again, and the pressure starts to ease a little. Napoleon sits down on the end of the bed and idly pokes at the toes that are sticking out of the end of the cast. They feel stiff and half-numb, and when Napoleon starts to rub at them Illya sighs and rests his head back on the pillow.

'Same old nightmare?' Napoleon asks.

The memory is starting to swim, to turn into shreds, but he nods. He remembers enough.

'It's always the same old nightmare,' he says.

But he knows that's not quite true. He knows each one is subtly different. They vary between the dreams of the hut and the dreams of the tank, and each one is subtly different. He lies there, looking up at the ceiling, remembering those little shreds. The scent of blood. The fear of pain. The knowledge that he has to get back, has to get back. He has to pass on those codes.

That bit is new, he thinks. Perhaps that's an evolution. Most of the dreams before focussed only on the pain and the fear. There was no purpose but escaping the pain. No driving force but the driving force of abject fear. But he knew in this one that he had to return those codes. That was there in his mind. He had to bring the codes back to Waverly. He lies there thinking about them. They were so engrained in his mind, it was as if someone had burnt them into his synapses. But he's hardly thought about them since.

'The information I brought back,' he says, looking up at the ceiling, watching a small spider moving slowly across the great expanse.

'The codes and addresses?' Napoleon asks. His hands don't stop in their steady manipulation of Illya's aching toes.

'Yes. Those. I passed them on all right, didn't I?' he asks.

It all feels like something of a blur. Arriving back at Waverly's office after that long week in hospital and the endless flights and the hour long drive from the airport. Being wheeled in, in a chair, in such pain, so tired. He has a kind of robot's memory of reciting those codes and addresses, but it's all wrapped in a dark, heavy shroud. He gave the codes and he left, and he was wheeled down to the Infirmary, and he let them lift him into a bed, and he slept such a long, heavy sleep that it felt like dying, like drifting away. And then he couldn't remember them any more. He couldn't care. He didn't want to hear a word of what had happened with those precious codes he brought back.

'You passed them on all right,' Napoleon nods.

The light in the room is very dim. The spider has crawled into a corner and he can't see it any more. All of the far reaches of the room are dim and disappearing beyond the glow of the bedside light.

'What happened with them?' Illya asks.

Napoleon smiles. He looks as if he has been waiting for that question for a long time.

'We brought down seven satrapies. We got to four of the five addresses of top Thrush leaders in time to take them in. We cut off forty percent of their South American activity, restored liberty to three villages, released sixty seven prisoners, and saved the lives of three U.N.C.L.E. agents.'

'Oh,' Illya says quietly. That seems like a lot.

'Without that information we couldn't have done anything,' Napoleon tells him. 'And those agents would be dead.'

'Who?' Illya asks. He's watching the corner of the room, waiting to see if the spider will reappear. 'Who were they?'

'The agents? Maria Azevedo from the Rio office. Leroy Washington and Humph Zelert from our office. They weren't in great condition, but they're out, alive.'

'Oh,' Illya says again. He remembers Leroy and Humphrey disappearing. It was almost six months ago, he thinks. They had been thought dead. He feels a little rise of gladness at the thought that his information caused their release. 'I missed Leroy,' he says. 'I'm glad they're all right. Are they all right?'

Napoleon gives him a rueful little smile. 'Malnutrition, sickness. Torture, of course. The girl is in a sanatorium back in Rio. Washington and Zelert are home now, recovering.'

'That's where that leak was coming from,' Illya ponders. 'Was that it?'

He had known there was a leak when he went to South America. He had been on his guard because of it, but it hadn't prevented his capture. Perhaps he had been captured because of it.

'Possibly,' Napoleon nods. 'Things do seem to have tightened up since we got them out. We can't be sure. None of them are absolutely sure what they might have said. There were a lot of drugs involved.'

'Of course,' Illya nods. He doesn't blame them. It's easier to resist pain than drugs. Pain is something you can hang on to. Drugs just make everything unfold and spill out. He can be glad, he supposes, that he wasn't drugged in that place. But the pain was enough. It was enough.

His fingertips prickle. Little stabbing pains run through his skin. The memory of pain is a hard thing to bear.

'You should try to get back to sleep,' Napoleon says, stopping the rubbing of Illya's foot and pulling the sheet over his leg.

Illya grunts. He wants to turn on his side, lie on his stomach, curl his legs up to his chest. Anything but lie on his back like a corpse with one leg elevated on a stack of pillows, stiffened by plaster. He wants to sleep without pain.

'You'll be grumpy in the morning,' Napoleon chides him with a gentle smile.

He comes up to the head of the bed, pours out a couple of sleeping pills from the bottle on the night stand, and offers them to Illya. Illya takes them with a mixture of reluctance and relief. He doesn't like them, but he needs sleep. Then Napoleon pulls up a chair, and looks at the books on the night stand. He picks up one of those journals that Illya hasn't yet been able to focus on, and flicks through the pages.

'If you're a good boy and try to go to sleep I'll read you a story,' he says.

Illya grunts again, but he won't turn Napoleon away. It's curiously comforting to have him sitting there after waking from a nightmare. It makes the dark corners of the room seem less dark. It makes the dreams seem further away.

'Now then,' Napoleon says in a ridiculously gentle voice. 'Are you all settled down?'

'Don't be ridiculous, Napoleon,' Illya says, but he snuggles a little further down into the pillows and closes his eyes.

'Good,' Napoleon says. 'This little tale is called, An Exact Quantum Theory of the Time‐Dependent Harmonic Oscillator and of a Charged Particle in a Time‐Dependent Electromagnetic Field, by H. R. Lewis Jr. and W. B. Riesenfeld.'

'Hmm,' Illya grunts. Napoleon sounds out of his depth, with that slight mocking tone he takes on with things like this, but it sounds fascinating to Illya. He will need to try not to be too fascinated. He's so very tired.

'Abstract,' Napoleon says. 'The theory of explicitly time‐dependent invariants is developed for quantum systems whose Hamiltonians are explicitly time dependent. The central feature of the discussion is the derivation of a simple relation between eigenstates of such an invariant and solutions of the Schrödinger equation.'

Illya lets the words flow over him. He has to not listen properly, to just listen to the rise and fall of Napoleon's voice. It's obvious that Napoleon has no idea what he's reading, and that helps. There's something very warm about the American accent, something very warm about Napoleon's voice.

'As a specific well‐posed application of the general theory,' Napoleon continues softly, 'the case of a general Hamiltonian which settles into constant operators in the sufficiently remote past and future is treated and, in particular, the transition amplitude connecting any initial state in the remote past to any final state in the remote future is calculated in terms of eigenstates of the invariant.'

Maybe the tablets are starting to kick in. He's starting to feel that warm heaviness of sleep

'Two special physical systems are treated in detail,' Napoleon continues, but the warmth is really there now, his eyes feel hot, his arms are starting to feel loose and heavy. 'An arbitrarily time‐dependent harmonic oscillator and a charged particle moving in the classical, axially symmetric – '

((O))

The sky is so very blue above him. It is a cliché, Illya knows, to say that there's not a cloud in the sky, but it's true, at least as far as he can see. The blueness arches over him, darker at the zenith, lightening as it moves down and passes out of his field of vision. He remembers days of summer at home, when it seemed as though the heat and light would never end. He remembers lying in the park or down by the river, just staring into the blue above him, feeling as though he were magnetised to the surface of the earth, with an endless drop below into the void of space.

Lying here now, he can feel himself as that straw-haired boy, thin and itching with energy, lying down for a few moments to let the sun melt into his bones. He can feel himself as the man he is now, pushing through his thirties at a terrifying rate, thickened somehow and so changed, but still in essence that boy. The same bones. The same hair being lightened by the same sun.

There are differences. He can't escape the differences, not now, not with the thick cast stiffening his left leg, not with the little round scars of the cigarette burns and the long shiny scars from the whip slashes. Not with the still-weeping wounds in some places. Not with the memories.

There is the sound of water splashing. Napoleon is cutting up and down the pool again. Illya feels a little twinge of envy. He would love to be in that pool.

This is so different to that hut. He lies here on the sun-warmed paving stones, his leg elevated on the sun lounger that should be underneath him. But he chose to lie on the stones. He chose to have that heat rise up out of the stones into the bare skin of his back, and have the sun beat down onto the bare skin of his chest and arms and leg. It's like the hut because the ground is hard and warm underneath him, but it's so, so different. The sun seems to ease into all of his joints and soften away the pain. It sinks into his forehead, into his cheekbones, eases out that slight headache which is a residue of bad sleep. He can feel it on the toes of his broken leg, feel it slowly penetrating the cast.

He feels the heavy dullness that sits in the centre of his body, that dullness that the anti-depressants and the counselling are working so hard at lifting. It's hard. It feels like a part of himself. It feels like part of the gravity that keeps him pinned to the earth. Somewhere in that heaviness is the memory of everything that happened to him; the memory of being trapped in that tank; the fear of a creeping, horrific death; the constant draining pain, the sharp pain, the deliberate, cruel pain. All of those things are there in that heavy darkness in the centre of him. But he lies here on the paving stones with his eyes closed, and the sun eases in, and it seems to diminish that darkness somehow, as ambient light diminishes a shadow.

He's wearing no more than brief black bathing trunks, even though bathing is way off limits at the moment. The sun pushes through the elastic fabric of those trunks too, eases through into his soft flesh. It's a good feeling.

He drops his arm sideways, eyes still closed, and lets his hand drape into the water of the pool. It's just cool enough to be pleasant against all that heat, and he lies there, feeling the ripples, feeling the currents made by Napoleon moving through the water. He could lie here for hours. He could lie here forever. No one screaming at him or kicking him or threatening him with unthinkable pain. There's just the soft sound of the water splashing, the soft heat of the sun. So good. So relaxed.

'Didn't your mother ever tell you to use sun cream?' Napoleon asks.

He blinks his eyes open, turns his head. Napoleon is standing in the shallow end of the pool, head, shoulders, and dripping torso out of the water, squinting against the sun and smiling.

'I used sun cream,' Illya says sleepily. The chemical smell of it is all around him. His skin is covered in it.

'Good,' Napoleon says. 'I know how you burn.'

He tugs playfully at Illya's fingers, which are still in the water. That human touch is such a pleasant thing. Illya smiles. Then Napoleon turns his attention to the cast on Illya's leg.

'Doctor tomorrow, I think,' he says, poking his wet finger at the dirty-white of the plaster. 'I think you cracked the cast when you fell out of bed last night.'

Illya angles his head up a little to try to look, but he can't see against the dazzle of the sun. Not after lying there with his eyes closed.

'I don't want to go anywhere tomorrow,' he murmurs, because he's so comfortable here in the heat that the thought of moving, even tomorrow, is too much.

'Nevertheless,' Napoleon says. 'You're going to get it checked out.'

And then he turns back towards the deeper end of the pool again, makes a flouncing kind of dive back into the water, and starts to swim again.

Illya turns his head back to the sky, stares at the blue, closes his eyes. He tries to let that shadow of heaviness ease away. They've been at this house for almost two weeks now. The peace is helping. The counselling is helping so much. He is safe. He is healing. Even his leg is healing. Even his mind.

((O))

The saw buzzes and vibrates along the length of the cast. Illya sits on the narrow examination bed and watches it with fascination as the circular blade moves on and on, steadily down the length of his leg.

'Almost there,' Napoleon murmurs.

There's no need for Napoleon to sit in on this consultation, but since he drove Illya to the hospital he's tagging along, and he sits there making little quips and comments and angling his head to watch the posteriors of attractive nurses whenever they walk by.

Finally it's done and they crack open the cast and peel back the bandages like someone revealing hidden treasure. Illya feels a curious moment of unease just before the leg appears. He remembers Napoleon cutting away the blood-soaked bandages eight weeks ago, and finding a horrific mess of maggots in the wound. When he's not dreaming about the hut or the tank his dreams are haunted by that cast. They're haunted by the cast splitting open like a hatching egg and containing nothing but a squirming mass of grubs. They're haunted by the cast opening up and revealing that there's nothing inside, that his leg is gone, the cast just a hollow prop. Or it's the leg of a mannequin, or it's no longer attached to his body, or all the flesh and muscle has gone and there's nothing but bone. Those dreams rush over him as they start to open up the cast, and he clenches his hands and tries to hide his fear.

'All right, tovarisch?' Napoleon asks, and Illya forces a laugh and says, 'Of course. It's only a cast.'

His leg is there. He stares at it, tries to recognise it as his own. It is white, the muscles wasted despite the physiotherapy, because there's only so much one can do. The wound is a dark purple-red thing just under his knee, an ugly and jagged line caused first by the bullet and then by the surgery which pieced his shattered bone back together. It all looks like a mess.

The first thing Illya does is to scratch his thigh. He rubs his mutilated fingertips and his two remaining nails over that skin and tries to make his brain understand that it is his leg, that it still belongs to him. He looks between the pale skin of his leg and the discarded cast. The cast looks like some kind of unearthed dinosaur bone, dirty white and tattered at the ends, but his leg seems no more real. It's so strange to be able to see it all the way from hip to toes, one long, connected limb.

'I think the first port of call is a better x-ray,' the doctor says, touching his fingers lightly to Illya's wound. 'It wasn't too clear through the cast. Then we can assess exactly how you're healing and how to progress from here.'

'Will I be able to have a shorter cast?' Illya asks hopefully. He longs to be able to bend his knee, to be able to sit properly in a car, to be able to use the wheelchair without his leg sticking out in front of him in such a ridiculous way.

The doctor smiles apologetically. 'Not with the break so close to the knee, I'm afraid. It needs proper support. It looks like you've been doing too much weight bearing as it is. You're having a little more pain than you should at this stage. I think the angle of the cast needs to be adjusted, and you need to keep it off the ground,' he says, emphasising those last five words.

The limb looks like something that's been unearthed from a grave, but his skin is flushing red where he's itched it. The nurse wets a cloth and starts to gently clean the surface. That warm, wet touch of the cloth is wonderful, somehow helping his brain to connect that white limb with the leg that he used to own.

Napoleon leans over to take a look.

'You'll have to be careful you don't walk in circles when it's off for good, Long John Silver,' he says. 'Until you've regained the muscle at least.'

'When I go walking with you it's a miracle if we don't end up turning in circles anyway,' Illya grumbles. He has a natural sense of direction, but with Napoleon it doesn't come so easily.

Napoleon looks wounded, but he smiles.

'All right,' the doctor says, gently probing at the scar over the break again.

Illya winces a little. That, too, helps to reconnect the reality of his own leg with his mind, but in a very different way.

'X-ray, Janet,' the doctor says, looking at the nurse. 'And then bring him back up here, please. Don't worry, Mr Kuryakin. We'll soon have you plastered up again.'

Illya looks down at his leg again. He doesn't want to be plastered up again. He's so tired of that cast. He wants to own his leg again.

'I'll go speak with x-ray,' the nurse says.

She walks out with the doctor. Illya is left alone with Napoleon, and for a moment the silence is very large. Illya's eyes are on his leg, still trying to reconcile that white flesh and the dark hairs with the leg he knew. He stiffly moves his toes, watches them move, makes his mind understand that he is making them move. His foot seems very far away. His ankle looks bony and weak, his foot like a flat, dead fish.

'Want me to rub your foot?' Napoleon asks, and Illya winces.

'Not with the cast off. Thank you. I feel as if my leg will fall apart if I move.'

It's such an odd feeling, that feeling that his leg is not his own, combined with the knowledge that his leg will not act for him as it always has. It will not act as a sturdy prop. If he tried to stand on it now he knows he would collapse in pain.

'It's always weird,' Napoleon says, and Illya knows he understands. They've both had enough broken bones through their careers.

'Yes,' he murmurs. 'I just wish it were fixed so I can get on with my life.'

'Do you know what that life will be?' Napoleon asks, and he looks rather nervous as he waits for the answer.

Illya pushes his fingertips against the skin and muscle of his thigh just above his knee. That flesh will be covered again soon. It's like catching a glimpse of something revealed by mist. It feels as though it will be so, so long until he can have his body back again, whole and well. But he desperately wants to have it back. He needs to have it back. He needs to have more purpose in his life again than lying by a pool in the sun, than drinking tall iced drinks and reading Masefield, and flicking through physics journals and not taking in a word. Only the Masefield has stuck. He's been reading so much Masefield recently that it's engrained in his mind.

'Illya?' Napoleon asks him softly, putting a hand very lightly on his arm. 'Illya?'

He thinks of the terrible things that he suffered, of the unrelenting sadism of his torturers. He thinks of Napoleon who came over sea and through forest to get him, and who lifted him from that terrible tank on the edge of that endlessly flowing river. He thinks of the kind hands of the nurses and doctors who have helped him through this time, the hours the counsellors and psychiatrists have sat listening to him talk and weep. Masefield gives him words. Those words are so far away from the blood and mud and filth of that hut, so far away from the pain, but then, so is he now. He is getting further away every day.

I have seen flowers come in stony places, he thinks, deep in his mind. He wants to live again. He wants the thrill of colour, of sensation, of life.

He looks up. Napoleon is still looking at him, his eyes worried, his hand still on Illya's arm.

'U.N.C.L.E.,' Illya says eventually. He feels such a strange mix of weary inevitability and excitement at saying that word. It is like dropping back onto a rollercoaster ride. 'My life will be U.N.C.L.E.. It always has been U.N.C.L.E..'