Thunder

by Aconitum-Napellus

Illya is being held and tortured in a tropical country for the vital information he is carrying. Although what Illya suffers is extreme, it is also researched, and if I'd written it true to life it would be many, many times more unpleasant. People are suffering worse than this. Torture is never justified. I'm being horrible to Illya but it's a very dark time in my life. Be kind.

The thunder is so heavy it sounds like oil drums being rolled across the sky. It reverberates through the metal at Illya's back, thrums into his aching bones. But the water is slapping at the metal too, and he knows that it won't be long until it rises all the way, up over this awful metal tank set in the mud, over the hatch which is screwed shut from outside. He will have to pray that it won't rise as high as the top of the pipe which has been crudely welded to the box to give him air. Again he wonders who thought of this terrible torture device. Who conceived of the plan of keeping someone captive in a rusting metal tank which twice a day is drowned by the rising tide?

Which is worse? The being shut in here, or the being dragged out and tortured? He doesn't know. When he's lying on the floor of the hut on the edge of this tidal estuary he knows that that is worst. When they're kicking him or stubbing cigarette ends against his skin or tearing the nails from his fingers he knows that is worse, far worse, than anything he's ever felt. But when they put him back in this awful tank and they close the lid, when he hears the screws close the thing down tight, when the rubber seal is pressed down and he's in foetid darkness waiting for the tide to rise, then he knows that he is in hell.

He lifts his shaking hand. His ring finger is still dripping blood, and he puts the raw fingertip into his mouth and sucks at it, giving low, guttural moans at the pain. It's such a weird feeling, his finger without any nail at all. The blood is iron-rich and immediate on his tongue, and he suckles at it, moaning, rocking, trying to contain and process the pain. Just pain. Just his nerve endings screaming in protest at their brutal exposure. But there's so much pain, there's been so much pain for five long days. They've asked him to talk, screamed at him to talk, wheedled at him to talk, and he's lain there and taken so, so much pain.

Something hits the top of the tank, a thousand little pats of something. Rain, he thinks. He doesn't see lightning, but the thunder is grinding through the metal and the tide is rising and the rain is slamming down. It's so hot outside and the metal has been heated to scorching by the sun, but as they dragged him back through the mud he saw that the clouds had closed over. He tasted the metal of the air and the humidity was cloying, and when they threw him into the tank the first roll of thunder began. And now the rain.

If it rains the river will rise. If the river rises the downflood of brown water will meet the tide, and the water will come up, up, up, and it will get as high as that crude metal pipe, and then the water will surge into the tank.

He still has his clothes. They are in tatters, but he's still nominally clothed. So perhaps if the water really starts to come he can tear off fabric and push it into the pipe and stem the flow. Perhaps that will work, if he's strong enough to hold the fabric there, if the water doesn't just soak through, if he doesn't run out of air before the tide starts to ebb…

The fear is so strong that for a moment he can't catch his breath. He's trying, trying to breathe in, to suck the hot, metallic, stinking air into his lungs, but his rib cage won't move, his diaphragm is still and he just can't breathe, can't get a breath, can't –

He slams his head back against the rusty metal, slams it so hard that it's a red and black bloom in his brain. But it's enough of a shock to force his lungs to work. He drags in breath. He can taste piss and shit in his mouth because the air is full of it, because he's been in this box most of the time for five days, and the place is fouled with his waste. But it's air, and it's in his lungs, and it gets to his brain, and he sits there panting, trying to control that terrible, clenching fear.

He lets himself feel the pain again. Sometimes that's a way to focus. The pain is awful, but it's so immediate that it stops him thinking about the threat of the rising water and the fear of drowning. They've done so much to him since he was captured, but the shot to the knee has been there all the time, ensuring he was in pain from the very start. He can hardly walk when they make him. He feels that hot pain, the sore, throbbing pain. The bullet went through just below the knee cap. Perhaps that means he's missed the terrible, career-ending damage that would be wrought by a shot straight through the joint, but he thinks the tibia must have been splintered and the pain is there all the time, all the time, pulsing and pushing out into his thigh and shin and calf. The bandage they put around it is rusty dark and stiff with blood, and he's going to get infected, his leg is going to get infected, he will get septicaemia, he will die in fever and misery and –

He gives out a terrible, long noise, something of a growl and a sob and a scream. He presses his hands out at the rough rusty metal on either side of him, presses and presses, and his tortured fingers are in agony, his shoulders ache. He bangs in a futile way and feels his knuckles split on the rust. The banging hardly makes a noise against the sound of the water but his fingers scream pain. The rising tide is drumming in waves at the sides of the tank. It's splashing over the top, effacing the spattering rain for a few moments before allowing it back to knock onto the metal in little patters. It's like little fingertips striking the top of the tank, like a hundred little hands, and then there's a slap and the tank shudders, and a wave sweeps over the top. For a moment there is silence, and then the fingertips start again.

He fears each time they shut him in, a perverse fear that they won't shut him in tightly enough. He fears that the screws won't be turned enough to make a seal, and then the water will seep in around the edges, push out his air, rise higher and higher until he's choking underneath it and drowning in this awful place under the waves. So he silently prays each time for them to take due care to seal him in, to make sure there's no chance of anything getting in – or out. He prays for his incarceration to be complete.

He holds up his hands in front of his face, but he can only see pale shapes, like ghosts floating in the air. So little light comes in through that pipe. Sometimes he puts his eye to the end and stares at the little disc of sky, blue, or grey, or purple dark. But now the rain is dripping in, straight down the hole. It's fresh water, at least. He should be making use of the fresh water. He cranes his neck backwards and touches his tongue to the rust-salt-blood taste of the metal, and lets some of the water drip into his burnt mouth. It hurts his neck. Oh, it hurts. They kicked him in the back of the neck last time they had him out, and it hurts to move his head. But it's water. It's fresh water. If it keeps raining the water will keep running down, even when the tide is in. If the tide doesn't come too high… If it doesn't come too high...

It takes forever. He hates that time when the water is fully over the tank and he's lost beneath the waves. The pipe keeps dripping water and the river makes strange sounds as it embraces the sides of the tank, but he sits there and keeps breathing and tries to bear the pain and the solitude and the awful claustrophobia of being locked in this place. He sleeps and he wakes and his stomach twists because he's so hungry, and he's so thirsty that he feels sick. He tries to catch those raindrops through the pipe but it's not enough. He fears the freshwater drips turning to a salt water deluge, and every now and then some salt water gushes down the pipe from an extra high swell, and he holds his breath, waiting for the gush to become a flood.

It doesn't happen. Thank god it doesn't happen.

At first it's a relief when the tide goes out and they come through the mud to get him. When he hears the screws being turned he cries with relief and when the first breath of fresh air comes in around the seal he gulps at it like a diver emerging from the depths. But then they grab him by the arms and pull him out and drop him on the sulphurous mud. He has to stand up almost immediately, and his knee and leg collapse under him and the pain makes him dizzy. The mud sucks at his bare feet and ankles and he tries to walk but he can hardly even stumble. They drag him towards the shore and that little two roomed hut. The fear of the tank flips over to a fear of that awful plank shanty up ahead, of the concrete floor and the men inside. He has a deep fear of the pliers, and that lump of a battery with wires attached, and the smouldering cigarettes, and the boots, and the electrical cable they use as a whip.

They scream at him, and they whisper in his ear, and they layer pain upon pain, kicking his shot knee, between his legs, his stomach, his back. This is just their warm-up. This isn't the real thing. He lies there on the floor and his head throbs and he feels like a living carcass, not a man. They don't even bother to restrain him most of the time, because he's too weak, too helpless to resist.

They move around him, discussing what to do to him as if they were planning dinner or how to spend their evening. He lies there, face down, shaking, so tired, so overwhelmed with pain. Someone takes hold of his arm and jerks it away from his body, and the fear of what's going to happen makes him almost sick. A boot descends. Al stands on his right arm. Emil stands on his left hand with all his weight while Guido prepares his tools. He can't struggle. He's too weak. His left leg hurts too much to allow him to kick.

He watches out of slitted eyes, can't help but watch, as Guido pushes the blade of a penknife under the nail to start its separation from his flesh. He screams at that even though the worst is yet to come. It still hurts. It hurts so much. Then Guido takes the pliers and pinches the end of his nail and pulls and pulls and twists, peeling back the nail with the delicacy and concentration of an artist. All the while Illya screams in a formless, wordless sound, using the primal force of that sound to thrust some of the pain out of his body into the air. He screams, and he sobs, but he doesn't talk. He doesn't tell them anything. He hardly speaks any words because he's so afraid of letting something spill.

And then it's done. It's off. Guido is holding the nail with the pliers and his finger, his whole hand, is screaming with pain, and he's dizzy, gasping, so close to vomiting. He stares at the fingernail as Guido dangles it before his face, bloody and shredded like a remnant from an abattoir. He stares at his own blood. Emil moves his boot off Illya's hand. Al releases his other arm.

'Do you want to tell us now?' Guido asks, and Illya can't form words, but he moves his head, just a little. No.

They sit back and watch him while he lies there on the warm concrete floor, panting, shaking, his finger streaming blood. Too sore to touch to the ground, too sore to move, too sore to allow him to even think. He has two fingernails left. Two left. The others are gone, the fingertips raw and clotted with blood and painful beyond belief. To persuade him further they dip his fingertips in that ever-present cup of chilli oil, and the pain explodes through the limits of his body. It's so large it seems incredible that it's confined to him, that they don't feel it too. The whole world should be reeling from this pain.

They smoke and talk amongst themselves. They need a break from the effort of their work. Someone turns on a tap that splashes water onto the concrete and he drags himself close enough to lap water into his mouth. He stares at the blood on his hands, on the ruined places where there used to be fingernails, and watches the red swirl with the water, mix with the dust from the floor, and drain out into the marshy ground outside. He lies there and eats the bread they throw him even though he feels too, too sick to eat, soaking it in water and pushing it into his mouth piece by piece. Just using his fingers to pick up the bread hurts so, so much. The food feels revolting in his mouth despite his hunger. He hopes it stays in his stomach this time.

While he struggles to eat they drink beer from bottles and eat good food from cans. When they feel like it they piss on him. Someone kicks him and they laugh as he gives a grunting sob.

Then they turn the tap off and he just lies there, eyes closed, cheek in the water, the side of his head in the water. When they're ready to start up again with their torture they use him as an ash tray, stub out their cigarettes on his palms and on the agonised wounds of his fingertips and on the soft skin of his belly, and then Guido crouches next to him with the pliers in one hand and that cable whip in the other and asks him to decide what he wants to try next.

He almost sobs. He doesn't want to try anything next. He doesn't want to be forced to choose. He thinks of sitting in Napoleon's apartment, a martini in his hand, his body free of pain. He chooses that. To go home. To be safe.

'Come on, little man,' Guido says, stroking the pliers along his jaw. 'What would you like us to do to you next?'

His mind is a raw, quivering, dizzy mass of pain. He wants to plead.

'Умоляю, умоляю,' he murmurs, because it's hard to hang on to English when it hurts so much. He's shaking so hard. It's so hard to think.

Guido tuts and smiles and warns him that if he doesn't choose, Guido himself will choose both, and the battery too, and he tries not to weep as he decides whether he'd rather have another nail torn off or lie there while they whip him over and over on one tiny strip of skin with the cable.

'Or you could only tell us what we want to know, Mr Kuryakin,' Guido wheedles. 'Just tell us what we want to know. A few little codes. A few addresses. Nothing more. And it will all be over. All of it will be over.'

But he knows what Guido means by over, and while there's life, there's hope, even if hope is nothing more than four blank letters to him right now. So he lies there and murmurs, 'Whip. The whip,' because he can't stand the slow agony of having another nail torn off.

'Just as you like, Mr Kuryakin,' Guido says, as if he's just chosen a wine to suit his dessert. 'You see how gracious we can be.'

Guido smiles and passes the cable to Emil, who is a devil with that thing. They pull down his trousers to bare a place on the back of his thigh that hasn't yet been touched, and he hears the whistle of the cable through the air. It hits, a stinging line of fire, and he jerks out a cry of pain, but before he can catch his breath there's the whistle and crack again, and he chokes on an in-breath of air. It strikes him like a burning brand, over and over and over again with expert aim on exactly the same line of flesh.

And then he's lying in vomit and he's pissed himself with the pain, and he can feel blood trickling hot and slow down the back of his thigh. His shot knee is pressing against the concrete and he can feel every pulse of blood through his body. He's shaking like a man with a fever. His hands are vibrating slabs of pain. The tips of his fingers throb and throb and throb, and flies land on him and walk in his blood, and mosquitoes whine close and land and bite. His bones hurt. The back of his thigh is on fire, it's on fire, and he can't move at all. He's so dizzy, so sick, his mouth so dry and his throat raw with screaming, and he sees Guido crouching by him again. He hears the scrape of the battery on the floor and he closes his eyes as Guido says, 'Now, the codes. The addresses.'

Illya lies very still and keeps his eyes closed and feels the terrible pain through all of his body. The waves are so strong he is hardly aware of anything outside the limits of his own flesh. His teeth clash together and each breath is a moan. They roll him over onto his back, and he lies there, moaning, his trousers still around his knees and his underpants wet with piss. He doesn't care about that. He's covered in piss and shit from being in the tank. He's covered in river mud and blood and vomit, so wet underpants don't mean a thing. The pain is the only real thing now. His body is hardly his own. It's just his pain that really belongs to him.

But the battery scares him so much. He only had ten fingernails and he's lost eight of them. He only has ten toenails. The whipping takes effort on their part. But with the shocks they invent such diabolically cruel ways of hurting him, and they can just sit there and shock him over and over, shock the same places over and over again. They can carry it on for hours.

They brush back the sides of his torn shirt to bare his chest. They pull down the sodden underpants and he gasps and grinds out an incoherent sound of pain as they brush the chilli oil onto his genitals, onto his nipples and lips, and those places sear and throb and become so, so sensitised to pain. They tape the first wire to his balls as if it's part of a medical process. They sluice water over him from a bucket. Then they touch the second contact to his nipple, the current flashes, the pain explodes through him.

He's screaming, spine arching, every muscle in spasm. Time has slowed down. He can't move, can't stop screaming, the pain goes on and on and on –

And the current dies. He's no more than a sack of bones, drenched in sweat, for a little while unable to move a single muscle. His mind feels far away, dazed. Everything is far, far away.

'The codes. The addresses,' Guido says.

The concrete is hard and warm underneath him, and sopping with water. Movement comes back. He's trying to pull his knees up, gasping at the sickening pain in his balls, trying to roll onto his side. They won't let him. They tie him by his ankles to rings in the wall. They tie his wrists up above his head so he's splayed and so, so vulnerable. He tries to see through the red haze of his vision and tries not to hyperventilate and tries to keep those easy words from falling from his lips.

'Sixteen codes,' Guido says. 'Five addresses.'

They swim in his memory. The numbers swim visually just behind his eyes, it seems. They would be so easy to repeat. Emil puts a cloth over his eyes and ties it roughly, and he lies there in darkness, panting, waiting.

'The first code,' Guido says, and without warning the wire touches his other nipple, the burning shock jars through him. His arms fight against the ropes, his legs jerk, his shot, broken knee wrenches, and he screams again.

'The second code,' Guido says.

The sweat is breaking out over his body. He's lying in sweat and piss. This time Illya shakes his head and tries to hold in his terrible fear, and just before he expects it the wire touches the soft head of his cock. The jolt is so much greater this time because the contact points are closer and because the chilli has left him flushed with blood, and his scream is so powerful it almost makes him sick.

'The third code,' Guido says, and he holds his breath, because he doesn't know where it will come, when it will come, and when it does come, touching his stinging lips, he convulses and screams again and again.

Those codes are there in his mind. They're there. It would be so easy to give up the information. So, so easy. There's so much pain. He sobs out his pain. He must not tell them those codes and addresses. He can't.

'The fourth code,' Guido says, and he sobs, waiting for the wire to touch. Sixteen codes… Five addresses… He can't. He can't. He can't take this any more.

They push up the blindfold, touch it to the thin skin of his eyelid. For a moment he's blind, screaming, screaming, screaming...

It's still raining when they take him back again. He can't walk, and his feet drag loosely through the mud as the men struggle to carry him. The water is starting to lick at the edge of the tank, and the river beyond is a wide brown mass, churning where fresh water meets the in-surge of salt. He hates the tide but it gives him a reprieve. He is sobbing and mumbling with pain, but he didn't talk. There is still the dragging of thunder across the sky and rain spits down and hits his back through his torn and filthy shirt. Each drop is a cold little shock on his skin. The air is so hot and humid it feels too solid to breathe.

Dusk is growing in the air and the birds are making a last minute cacophony and the river slurs along as it meets the incoming tide. The men's boots suck in the mud and his bare feet sink into the mud and the sulphur smell almost chokes him. One of them holds him up while the other opens the lid, and they let him look into the tank for a minute, at the bottom swimming in water and sewage, at the rusted metal and the water outside that's starting to slap against the sides.

'You only have to tell us some codes and addresses,' Emil says. 'It's very easy.'

Illya stares at the water in the tank, the oily sheen, the lumps of his own shit. He looks at the surging brown river that's coming up to drown the shore. He's so tired and hungry. He's shaking. He's lost too much blood.

'Just a few words, Kuryakin,' Al chimes in. 'You don't need to go in there. A few words, and you can have rest, good food, a bed.'

He isn't afraid of letting his emotions show on his face. He knows his eyes must be nothing more than films of blue. He knows his face is blank. His face is bruised and his lips are split and swollen, but he says, 'And give up all this?'

Emil spits on him. He kicks him in the back of the knee, right where that bandage is. He falls hard against the metal edge in front of him, the pain exploding through his leg, and for a moment he can't see. But then his vision clears and he climbs into the tank without being forced. He crouches himself down, lowers his buttocks into the foul few inches of water, biting back a cry as he bends his shot knee and flexes his raw whipped thigh. He rests his arms on his good knee and ducks his head, and they shut the lid with a clang. He can hear the screws tightening. He blinks in the sudden dark and waits for his eyes to adjust. They give him a parting jeer but he can't make it out. Their words don't matter. He sits in the dark and waits.

The rain drums on the tank, and the tide is coming higher and higher. The thunder rumbles and he feels it shivering through the metal. The oppressive heat is starting to turn to a cold that makes him shiver, makes the sweat on his body feel like the touch of a ghost. He's so thirsty. The electric shocks make him sweat so terribly. And then another wave crashes over the tank, and there is no more sound of rain. He's under water now. The tank is under water. The tide will inch higher and higher and he must pray to a god that doesn't exist that it won't go over the top of the pipe.

My god, my god. Please, god… Please, please...

A non-existent god won't listen to him any more than Guido and his men. He tries to pull his mind away from such idiotic superstition. He thinks about the geography of the area, of what lies further up this river, of the width of the estuary and the statistical chances of heavy rainfall making the water level rise a significant amount. But it's not just the rise he has to fear. What if tree trunks come crashing down the river? What if the current becomes so strong the tank is turned over and over and washed out to sea? He doesn't know how strongly it's anchored. He doesn't know how much it can take. He imagines the tank being taken, being bowled over and over in the water, and the sea rushing in through the pipe. He imagines drowning there in the darkness, salt water in his lungs, and he gives way to the fear, and sobs.

When he stops crying he's still there in the tank. He's still trapped. There's still a little light coming through the pipe and there's a drip, drip, drip of the rain and it splashes on his leg, but there's very little definable sound now. He can't hear the thunder any more, and he doesn't know if that's because it's stopped or because of the insulating power of the water. There's a strange sound, an odd surging sound that reminds him of being in the bowels of a metal boat. That's the current passing by the walls of the tank, the water rumbling against the metal. It's a sound that's there all the time, until the tide ebbs and he starts to hear the splashing again.

He leans against the cooling metal wall and lets the constant rumble of the water act like a lullaby in his head. He breathes very slowly, in and out. He tries to bear the pain through every part of him. He tries to bear the feeling of being buried in water, and he stares at the little light at the end of the pipe and hope fights with a terrible fear, because the light and the air are so good but so scant and so easily cut off. As night falls the light will go and he'll be left with just the air, but it hardly tastes fresh because the stench in here is so strong, and it's easy to forget that there's life out there, so close but so far away.

He drifts in and out of sleep, and his knee throbs, and the back of his thigh pulses, and the places on his stomach and the underneath of his arms and his flanks pulse, where they have whipped him before. The cigarette burns sit like hot little carbuncles on his body. The electrical burns sear and throb on the most sensitive parts of him. They target the softest places, the most painful places, without a shred of human mercy, without a thought to human decency. He knows if he were a woman he would have been raped by now, and he thanks god their interest, although focussed on those places, has never turned sexual.

He wakes again. It's dark, and there are waves slapping against the tank. So the tide is out, the rain has stopped, but it's night, so they won't come and get him, and he doesn't know if that's a relief or not. He doesn't know if he can bear the endless claustrophobia of sitting here in this tiny space while the tide seeps away, while the mudflats are laid bare. He can't bear to be sitting here still as the water laps slowly but surely back around the sides of the tank and covers him up again, buries him in a living grave.

He can't stand it. He can't, he can't. Adrenaline surges through his body. He needs to kick his legs out. He needs to get up, to run. But he can't move his legs from their bent position and he can't stretch his arms out at full reach and he can't catch any fresh air and when he moves spasmodically in a reflex reaction everything hurts so much that he cries out aloud. His voice reaches the walls of the tank and is stopped, a strange kind of muted echo that reminds him how alone he is, how trapped he is here. He can't bear it. He needs to run. His arms and legs thrum with the need. His heart feels as if it's about to burst. His ears are singing. He has to get out of here, he has to get out, and for a moment he gives way to utter panic, and he beats on the metal walls again and he screams and screams and screams and screams.

Quiet. There's quiet. The quiet is so strong it presses on his ears. And then the tank reverberates as if someone has hit it very hard with a metal pole. The clanging comes again, again, until his ears are ringing and his head is splitting apart. It's like sitting on the inside of a bell. Then he can hear voices, low and muted in the dark outside. There is laughter. The slight scent of tobacco smoke drifts through the hole. And then there is a thud, the sound of footsteps on the lid above him, something pours in through the pipe, something hot and splashing that hits his leg and flows down into the foul sludge at the bottom of the tank. Someone is pissing on him, pissing through the pipe. He woke them up with his screaming and so they're punishing him. He wonders what extra payment he'll reap tomorrow for disturbing their sleep.

The air's getting stuffy. Why's the air getting stuffy? They've blocked the hole. They must have. But they don't want to kill him. They won't kill him. The information he has is too valuable. That's why he can endure all of this, because not talking is the only thing that keeps him alive. So they'll unblock the pipe. They must. Guido would kill them if they let him die.

And then there is air again. He was just getting sleepy, just starting to feel that terrible safe warmth of suffocation. But there is air again, they smash at the tank again, and then it is quiet. They must have walked back to the hut, and he is all alone. Even though they hit the tank, even though they pissed on him, he misses their company. He wants to call out, come back, come back. He opens his mouth but his voice croaks. He drops his head back against the metal of the tank and stares into the darkness and again he thinks he'd rather be in that hut, rather be lying on the floor being kicked and whipped and burned, than here alone waiting for the tide to rise too high, waiting to die in salt water and his own waste and trapped in these metal walls.

They've promised that when they've torn off all his nails, fingers and toes, they'll start on his teeth. They say they'll cut off his balls and shove them in his mouth. They say they'll break his fingers one by one. They say he'll be more animal than human, that he'll beg them for death. He has no reason not to believe them. And all he needs is to give them sixteen codes, five addresses. The knowledge burns in his mind, burns just behind the curve of skull that makes his forehead. He wants to say it out loud. It feels like a compulsion, a protection: say it out loud now, alone in the dark, and he'll be able to stop himself blurting it out later, under the stress of severe pain, when he'd do anything to make them stop. But he daren't risk it. He daren't. They could be listening. There might be a microphone in that pipe. He daren't say a sensitive word out loud.

Instead he talks to himself in Ukrainian, talks in Russian, babbles to himself in the certainty that he's not saying anything sensitive and that if they are listening they won't be able to understand. He talks to people of his past, to his mother and father and his old school friends. He sings; lullabies, rousing patriotic songs, bawdy shanties, popular hits. He wishes he could wipe his mind clean. He almost wishes he could die.

He drifts again, falling asleep, waking up, his back aching, his wounds throbbing. He feels sick, his lungs are heavy. When he tries to take a deep breath he coughs and his lungs burn. Is he starting to feel the heat of fever? Is he succumbing to the filth and humidity and infected wounds at last? He wakes and listens to the sound of the river brushing the sides of the tank. He sinks back into sleep and his dreams are broken and tortured and full of pain. And then there's a little light in the tank, and then a little more, and he hears the screws turning again, and he's almost determined to fight this time, even if it kills him, because he's sure that he'll die one way or another very soon.

But when the lid lifts open, the hinges squealing, he blinks in the light and he's so weak and he's so tired that he doesn't even lift his head.

'My god. My god...'

He is dazed. He must be delirious. The light seems huge and he's dizzy and tired, and he must be delirious.

'Fuck, Illya. When he said you were in here I didn't believe – '

The relief is so huge that he loses all his strength. He could sob. He looks up, blinking, into the face of Napoleon. Napoleon, his face splashed with mud, his hair a mess, a spatter of blood on his cheek. Napoleon. God, it's Napoleon.

Napoleon is reaching arms down into the tank, his hands open, and Illya stares for a moment before lifting a shaking hand. Napoleon takes one look at his ravaged fingers and says, 'Jesus.' He grabs him under the arms and hauls him bodily out onto the mud. Illya falls sideways, slaps sideways onto the sucking mud, his face in the mud, breath heaving into his burning lungs. All of his muscles are in agony from the cramps of the electric shocks. There's so much pain. He has no strength left. With Napoleon here suddenly he has nothing left to give.

'Shit, Illya,' Napoleon says. 'Come on. Can you walk?'

'Try,' he says. His face hurts. His lips hurt. 'I can try.'

He is more carried than walks. Napoleon's hands are under his arms, digging into his armpits, and all his weight leans on his partner as he staggers through the mud. Outside the board hut are three bodies stiff with rigor, lying almost on top of one another, left there like rubbish put out for collection. The pool of blood around them is sticky and darkening and covered with flies. Inside the hut stinks of blood. The floor is covered in blood. Napoleon must have shot them in there and dragged them outside. The sights of that room, the rows of tools, the battery, make him shiver, but Napoleon gently ushers him through into the other room, the room he never saw inside, and lowers him down onto a narrow bed. His back has been whipped raw, but he lies down on it. It's all just part of the pain.

'I had to wait for the tide to go out,' Napoleon says, kneeling down at his side, touching his fingers very lightly to one of the split bruises on Illya's face. 'Six hours. I didn't believe him when he said you were in there. All I could see was that pipe above the waves. But you weren't anywhere else. I looked everywhere else...'

Illya feels so dazed. He stares up at the corrugated undulations of the metal roof and feels the bed under his back, under his wet and filthy clothes, and he doesn't know what to say. It's hard to believe any of this is real.

'You killed them,' he says eventually. Those men inflicted so much pain on him, and now they are dead.

'I killed the first two straight off,' Napoleon says. 'The other tried to run, after I'd found out where you were.'

Illya turns his eyes a little to look into Napoleon's face, trying to work out if he believes that. Would Napoleon just shoot the man in cold blood?

'I found your gun in a drawer,' Napoleon says. He looks around, grabs a limp towel, starts to brush some of the mud from Illya's skin. 'I saw your hat in a corner, and your blood on the floor. I saw that battery and the bloody cable and – '

Napoleon is making excuses. It's obvious. He shot that man in anger, Illya is sure, not because he ran.

'Jesus Christ, Illya,' Napoleon says, and his voice shakes. 'I found one of your fingernails on the floor...'

Illya lifts an arm a little, ruefully. He's missing three of his nails on that hand. His fingers end in bloody, swollen stubs and trails of dried blood mark the back of his hand and wrist. He had never realised that fingers could bleed so much until he had lain there and Guido had peeled off his first nail with pliers. He hadn't realised how much a half inch square could hurt.

Napoleon looks at those fingers and then looks away.

'Did you tell them anything?' Napoleon asks. He's looking straight into Illya's eyes. 'I have to ask.'

Illya shakes his head, and then he coughs, and Napoleon leaves the room, comes back with water, puts the tin cup to his lips. Illya drinks and drinks and drinks, and then says, 'I didn't tell them anything.'

'Good,' Napoleon says. He puts a hand on Illya's shoulder. 'Good. I had to ask.'

Illya closes his eyes and feels the pain all through his body, the itching of the mosquito bites, the stiff agony in his knee, his matted hair, the damp stench of his clothes. And he must have drifted away for a moment, because he's coming back from a kind of unawareness, blinking, and Napoleon is saying, 'We're safe here for a while. I want to get these clothes off you, get you cleaned up.'

'Oh,' Illya says.

'Can you sit up?'

He almost laughs. He's spent hours and hours and hours sitting in that tank. The only times he could lie down were on that concrete floor out there, while they were torturing him, and in the little breaks between. But can he sit up now? Can he? It's all so different. He can't think.

'Come on, Illya,' Napoleon says, a hand on his shoulder again, and Illya heaves his sore muscles into action, curls himself up, lets Napoleon peel the ragged and filthy shirt from his arms. Napoleon hisses as he sees the cuts, the weals, the burn marks all over Illya's torso. He stops for a moment, and just lays his hand on Illya's stubbled cheek. Illya tilts his head a little into that gentle touch. Then Napoleon says in a falsely light tone, 'Is there any part of you that isn't damaged?'

Illya snorts. 'My feet,' he hazards, although his feet aren't really unharmed, not after all that time submerged in the filthy water of the tank, not after they stamped on them and kicked them. 'They hadn't got to the nails on my feet yet...'

It's surges over him. He remembers how they whipped him and kicked him and stood on his hands and ground their cigarettes out on his flesh. How they used that battery and the wires in such terrible ways, burning his mouth and lips and eyelids, the inside of his nose, his ears. How they pressed back his knees and pushed metal into his rectum and attached the wire to that. How they wrapped the wires around his balls and the soft head of his cock, and –

Suddenly it's too much. He's collapsing inside. Tears run down his cheeks as Napoleon continues to ease the shirt from him, tosses it to the floor, and then puts his hands softly on Illya's arms, saying, 'It's okay now. You're all right now.'

He isn't anywhere near all right. He knows that. But he's safe.

'All right,' Napoleon says, letting him go, and Illya lets him ease off the trousers and underpants together. Napoleon hisses as he sees the bandage on Illya's left knee. 'Christ, what's that?'

'Gunshot,' Illya says. It hurts enough just to have Napoleon pulling the trouser leg down past the bandage. 'That's how they captured me. I suppose I should be grateful they bandaged it, but it was only to keep me alive.'

Napoleon growls low in his throat, touching the bandage lightly with his fingers.

'All right,' he says. 'I'm going to get you clean first, and then I'll take a look.'

'Do you have medical supplies?' Illya asks.

Napoleon smiles. 'I brought the full kit. I thought you would have gotten yourself into some kind of trouble after the communicator went dead.'

He's suddenly dizzy. He's so tired and hungry and in so much pain. Napoleon's arm shoots around his bruised shoulders before he falls backwards, and Illya murmurs, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' but his ears are screaming and he can hardly see.

'Come on, come on, Illya.'

Napoleon is patting his cheek. He's lying down again and there is something under his feet, raising them a little. He's utterly naked in this humid, tawdry room, and Napoleon is kneeling by the bed, patting his cheek, looking into his eyes.

'There you go,' Napoleon says. 'You're all right. Just fainted a little. Now, you just lie there.'

What else can he do? He's pinned to the bed by faintness and nausea. He lies there, and Napoleon cleans him thoroughly and gently with a rough cloth and a bowl of cool water, washing off blood, shit, vomit. He wrings the cloth out into the bowl and the water is a dull red-brown. He gets fresh water, a new cloth, and cleans Illya again, helping him to roll onto his front so he can dab the blood from his back and legs, wash between his buttocks, swab some of the dirt out of his hair. The cloth is cool but sore on his burns, agonising on the bruised and bloodied welts from the whip, so tender around his swollen knee. When Illya rolls back Napoleon cleans his face gently and carefully, wiping away mud, salt, tears, blood, vomit. He is so gentle over the bruises, but it still hurts.

'Now, come on,' Napoleon says. 'I want you on the other bed because this one's wet and filthy.'

He holds out an arm, and Illya takes hold of it and hobbles, wavering and nauseous, across to another narrow bed. There are three in the room. Three men. Three torturers. Three beds. He thinks vaguely of a children's story. What is it? Goldilocks and the Three – what is it? Bears? Wolves? Something about comfortable beds and каша – no, porridge – and an indefinable threat, being in the wrong house, stealing food. He can't remember where he first learned of that story.

He lies down, faint again. Napoleon smiles and fetches a dun coloured rucksack, and says, 'All right. I'm going to have a look at that knee.'

He starts to try to unwrap the bandage, but it's too dirty and thick with blood. He gets out a knife instead, cuts through the layers, and Illya hisses through his teeth and his vision swims again.

'Christ,' Napoleon says, an ejaculation of shock and disgust.

Illya manages to lift his head and look. The inside of the bandage is full of maggots, a crawling, squirming mass. Napoleon looks as though he's going to be sick, but he goes to the little window and throws the bandage straight out onto the ground, then turns back, shaking his hands and grimacing. Illya drops his head back to the pillow and stares at the ceiling, and doesn't look as Napoleon continues to tend to that searing wound.

'I need to get it cleaned up,' Napoleon says. Then he adds, 'Well, it's disgusting, but they might have kept you alive, IK. They've probably eaten any decaying flesh.'

'Oh,' Illya replies. 'Small mercies...'

'Small mercies,' Napoleon echoes.

He is looking through the medical supplies. He has a syringe and vial in his hands. And then he slips the needle into Illya's thigh and he starts to feel a merciful easing of the pain all through his body. He is sleepy, so sleepy. He is naked and lying in a vile shack on the banks of a wide tropical river, and his torturers are lying dead outside, but he slips so softly into sleep that he doesn't even know he has gone.

((O))

He is hot, too hot, sweat itching under his spine, between his thighs, sweat on his 's a scent of food in the air. But everything hurts. He hurts so much.

He blinks and stares at the corrugated ceiling as it swims into focus, and he can feel a strange breeze. And then he sees Napoleon, fanning him with the metal lid of a large tin, and he blinks, trying to work out where he is, what's going on.

'Nice to have you back, partner,' Napoleon says.

Illya murmurs something but even he isn't sure what. His mouth is dry and his lungs hurt, and he's so hot.

'You've got a bit of a fever,' Napoleon tells him. 'The doctor expects it to come down soon.'

'The doctor?' Illya asks, bewildered.

Napoleon points at himself meaningfully. 'Me, mon ami. I'm the closest thing to a doctor for fifty miles. I've given you antibiotics and I've given you painkillers, and I put antiseptic fluid on your wounds while you were out. I want you to sit up and take some anti-malaria medicine because you're covered in bites and I guess you haven't been taking it for a week or so?'

'Oh,' Illya says. 'No. I – '

He feels so confused. He feels as if he's fallen down the rabbit hole. 'Are we still – How long – '

'We're still where you went to sleep,' Napoleon nods. 'You've been out about eight hours. You must be hungry, yes?'

He should be hungry, but it's very hard to tell. He tries to sit up, and Napoleon helps him, pulling the pillow up against the metal bed head so he can rest back in comfort. His leg is still throbbing, all his body is sore, his fingers hurt so badly, but he can feel the fresh, clean bandages and the residue of the painkiller in his blood.

He looks down at himself, lifts his throbbing hands. The burns on his palms are bandaged. His fingers are bandaged in clean white strips, three on the left, every finger and the thumb on the right. The pain surges as he looks at them. In a flash he is there, lying on the floor, someone's boot crushing his hand and Guido pulling so steadily with the pliers, pulling off the nail in splintered, bloody strips. Does it hurt, little man? Am I hurting you? Do you want to tell me now?

'Чорт,' he hisses. He's back in the bed, back looking at the bandaged fingers. His stomach is roiling.

'Come on,' Napoleon says, and he holds out a couple of pills on his palm, and a tin cup of water. He eyes Illya's hands then says, 'Open up,' and he pops the pills in and puts the cup to his lips.

Illya swallows the pills painfully.

'Anti-malarial,' Napoleon explains. 'Hey, is your mouth okay?'

'Electrical burns,' Illya says economically. He remembers them prising his mouth open, slipping the wire in, touching it to his tongue and the inside of his cheeks. He remembers his scream being mangled around the muscular convulsions of the shocks.

'I'll try to get that food cooled down,' Napoleon says. He goes away and spends time stirring and blowing, and comes back with a tin plate covered in some kind of mess of food. 'It's all out of cans,' he says, looking apologetic. 'Canned beef. Canned potatoes. Canned tomatoes. Canned carrots. Lucky they were well stocked.'

'It's about a thousand times better than old bread,' Illya says.

Suddenly he is hungry, so ravenously hungry. They fed him intermittently, carelessly, and he brought it up so often when they were torturing him. He was lucky to get a chunk of bread in a day, and more lucky if he kept it down.

Napoleon pushes a spoon into the food and lifts it towards Illya's mouth, and says, 'Here comes the airplane.'

'Sometimes I think you're insane,' Illya complains, but he takes the food. Napoleon has let it cool to lukewarm but it still stings on his burnt, split lips. He's so hungry. He swallows that spoonful, another spoonful, another, until the plate is empty and his stomach is starting to feel full. Napoleon potters away, turns on the little gas ring, boils water. He comes back with the tin cup again, full of coffee, and he pours condensed milk into it which swirls and mixes in creamy thickness until the liquid is almost cool.

Illya reaches out to take the cup between his palms. But Napoleon holds back and says, 'Not with those burns on your palms. Not on your life.'

Instead, he holds the cup to Illya's lips, and Illya sips the dark liquid, and it feels amazing to swallow something so rich after all this time. What's his mouth had in it recently? Bread, mud, blood, salt, vomit, sewage, water. Nothing like coffee. Nothing at all.

'That good, huh?' Napoleon asks him with a smile, and Illya gives something of a smile back, what he can manage with his swollen, burnt lips.

'I'm not your typical Friday night date, am I?' Illya asks, eyeing his partner.

Napoleon chuckles. 'That's okay. It's Tuesday,' he says. He puts the cup aside. 'You should get more sleep. I want to move on as soon as you're strong enough. They've got a radio. We can't be sure they don't have contacts who'll miss them.'

Illya looks towards the window and sees that dusk is falling. It comes fast here in the tropics. He's suddenly very aware of the soft sound of the river outside, of the chattering of the birds. Then there's the hiss of another shower of rain, the drops striking the metal roof, and he remembers the tank, and shudders. It's like a balloon of cold expanding inside him, remembering that place.

'Sleep, Illya,' Napoleon says. 'I'm going to set up a few traps for unexpected visitors, then I'll sleep too.'

((O))

Napoleon potters over to the door, slips through into the outer room, goes to stand in the doorway to watch the rain. The river is rising again. That terrible tank is almost covered. He remembers the stench when he opened the lid, the sight of Illya hunched and filthy, sitting in three inches of foetid water and covered in blood. He thinks about what would have happened if the floodwaters rose above that pipe, and he shudders.

Those bodies are still outside the hut. The rigor is still in them, and they make a gruesome little pile in the failing light. He doesn't have much time before it will be properly dark, so he works fast, dragging the bodies one at a time down to the edge of the river where the tide will take them. Better than attracting scavengers to the hut. He looks at their faces as he drags them, and feels no regret. After what they did to Illya he feels no regret at all.

He comes back inside, washes his hands, washes the mud from his boots at that tap in the bare, bloody room. He lets the water swill over the floor and brushes out the worst of the blood.

'Quite the housekeeper,' he murmurs to himself.

He lights an oil lamp and the soft yellow light makes it suddenly look pitch dark outside. He eyes the little radio uneasily. Perhaps the men were meant to check in. Perhaps someone will call for a report. Either way, they won't be safe here for long. So he works quickly, stringing up empty cans across the windows and doors, placing them so they'll clatter if anyone tries to get in. He suspects no one will come this soon, at night, but he needs to be safe. He needs to let Illya rest before they start the gruelling journey out of here. The congestion in his lungs worries him. The bullet wound worries him. The fever and the ever present threat of infection and sepsis are more worrying still. Thank god for antibiotics.

He takes the lamp down from its hook and carries it through to the other room. Illya is sleeping, but not settled. He moves and mumbles and moans. His face is hardly recognisable from the Illya that Napoleon knows, it is so altered and swollen with wounds. It was only his tawny hair that was immediately recognisable when Napoleon opened that awful tank.

He gathers up Illya's filthy clothes and goes back into the outer room, where he does what he can with soap and cold water to make the clothes wearable again. They are bloodstained and torn, the trousers stiff to the knees with mud, the fabric rank with human waste, the underpants almost too foul to touch. But he washes them. He wrings out the sopping garments and hangs them from nails to dry. He makes sure the door is bolted and the windows fastened, and then he goes back to the inner room and sinks down onto a bed and rubs his hands across his face.

They have three guns; the two handguns and a rifle. There is plenty of ammunition. The dead men left behind guns of their own but they shouldn't be needed. He wonders if Illya can handle a gun with his hands as they are. Perhaps with his left hand, where a couple of fingers are unbandaged... Illya is as good a shot with his left as with his right, but he's in such a terrible state.

He gazes across the room at his partner. Illya is still naked, and it's so warm that no covers are needed. He is more bruise and burn and welt than healthy skin. His wounds are red and sore and inflamed. His face is a mess of bruising, and Napoleon doesn't like the sound of the wheeze in his chest.

He comes close and examines the whip marks. Whoever did that was a skilful practitioner, laying the cable down over and over on one spot of skin until it cut deep into the flesh and the area around became a storm cloud of bruises. Illya has been punched and kicked and whipped. He's pocked with cigarette burns, nasty, scabbed and weeping. He's marked with electrical burns on his nipples, on his face, but they're worst on his genitals, on his perineum, and leading into his anus. He'd expected that, because those are the most sensitive places on the body and always a target for torture, but he still recoiled from the thought of the pain Illya must have endured. When Illya was deeply asleep after that first dose of morphine he looked closely at those burns, and when he gently rolled back Illya's foreskin and saw bloody discharge from the slit of his urethra his stomach flopped over at the sight. Inserting an object into that tube is a horrific torture technique. Put that together with the electric shocks, as he's sure they must have, and it's a recipe for the most excruciating agony.

He strokes a single finger gently along a small patch of undamaged skin on Illya's arm, feeling a rising of bile and sorrow at how Illya has suffered. What a hellish way to earn a living. What a truly hellish way.

He reaches up and pulls the mosquito net properly around the bed. He can hear some of the whining devils in here, invisible in the dim light. Illya is covered in bites as it is. So he makes sure the net is tucked around him securely, kills the oil lamp, then by the light of a flashlight he takes himself to the other bed, lies down in his clothes, arranges his own net, and goes to sleep with his gun still in his hand.

((O))

Illya wakes in stifling heat, stifling darkness. He thrashes out with a hand in panic, and his swaddled fingers hit something web-like, clinging, bewildering. He can't feel because of the bandages. The cry is emerging from his mouth before his brain catches up, reminding him he's in that hut, in a dead man's bed. His brain reminds him that Napoleon is here, that he's as safe as he can be, that the torture is ended.

But his fingers hurt like hell and all the burns and whip marks hurt like hell. He is covered in sweat and he's short of breath and desperate for water, and what the hell is that thing he can feel around the bed?

There's a flash of light in the darkness, and Napoleon says, 'Illya?'

He pants, trying to steady himself, but his voice is shaky when he replies, 'Yeah.'

There's a shuffling, a grunt, the creak of the other bed. Then a matchbox rattles, a match hisses into bright flame, which is transferred to a soft yellow glow as Napoleon lights the lamp. And now Illya can see what the web is. It's a mosquito net tucked around the bed, protecting him as he slept.

'Y'okay, Illya?' Napoleon asks. He sounds very sleepy. He rubs his eyes like a sleepy child.

'Thirsty,' Illya replies, so Napoleon sighs and pads into the other room and comes back with a cup of water. Illya tilts his head up and Napoleon tips the cup against his lips, and he drinks the cup dry.

Napoleon touches his forehead with the back of his hand, and asks, 'How do you feel?'

Illya tries to give a dry smile, and his lips throb. 'Like I spent a week being tortured,' he says, because he feels like hell, and he's in so much pain.

Napoleon tuts. 'I'm trying to work out if you still have a fever, or if you're just hot.'

'Oh. I don't know,' Illya confesses. He's hot all through. His lungs ache. He feels so tired and confused and shaky but how is that any different to how he's felt since they shot him and brought him here?

Napoleon holds his hand against Illya's forehead for a moment longer, then says, 'Well, now is a good time for more painkillers. You can have more antibiotics in the morning. Wait a moment. I'll get some more water.'

So Napoleon leaves the room again, comes back again. He fetches the pills and puts them on Illya's tongue, and Illya swallows them down.

'Hey, now, what are you doing?' Napoleon asks as Illya tries to sit up further.

Illya grimaces. He really doesn't want to move, but his bladder is heavy inside him. 'I need the little boys' room.'

'Oh. Hell,' Napoleon says, looking around. 'There's an outhouse out back, but I really don't want you to – '

Illya huffs out breath and with great determination he turns and puts his feet to the floor. All his muscles are in agony but the concrete feels like warm velvet under the soles of his feet. His shot knee sears with pain.

'Just take me to the window,' he says, the pain tight in his voice. 'That's all I need.'

So Napoleon supports him as he hobbles to the window, reaches around to open it, and the dark, warm night air billows in to the room. Illya rests his hips against the frame and uses his left hand to angle his cock over the sill.

'Lovely decorations,' he says as the string of empty cans clanks above him.

'I thought the place needed something,' Napoleon tells him. His hand is still under Illya's arm and he's still taking a lot of his weight.

Illya leans there, willing his body to cooperate. It hurts so much that his muscles take a while to relax. And then he lets out a hot stream of urine, and he hisses at the pain of it.

'Yeah, I saw the blood,' Napoleon says, as if Illya has mentioned what's causing the pain.

He keeps his eyes on that stream of urine that glitters in the lamplight and disappears into the night. And he remembers lying splayed on the floor, Emil kneeling between his legs, smiling, holding that metal skewer dipped in chilli oil like a prize with one hand and stimulating him to something of stiffness with the other. His brain racing. What's he going to do? What's he going to do?

Guido saying,Why don't you just tell us, little man? The addresses. The codes. You can be saved this pain.

Lying there, the hand touching him so intimately, and then the skewer touching the slit of his cock, pushing, entering his urethra with the chilli laden oil on it. The pain of it billowing through him like a bomb blast. Screaming, trying to jerk away, not being able to jerk away. That steel skewer pushing relentlessly deeper and deeper into that agonised tube while he struggled helplessly and cried out and swore at that awful pain. And then the battery being brought over, and the wire twisted into a connection with the loop of the skewer, the water thrown over him and the current surging from contact to contact through his convulsing body. The current always centering on that metal rod deep inside his cock. God, that pain... That terrible pain...

'Hey,' Napoleon says, jogging him a little. 'Don't pass out on me.'

'Not passing out,' Illya murmurs. His forehead is against the window frame. He's sweating. 'I'm not passing out,' he says more clearly. 'I need to lie down.'

It's as if he's more helpless now than when he was being held captive. Now he doesn't have to stagger without help, because Napoleon will help him.

'Come on,' Napoleon says, and he helps him back to bed, lets him drink more water, and tucks the mosquito net back into place. 'That's it. Go back to sleep now.'

Napoleon goes back to his own bed and turns out the light, but Illya lies for a long time in the darkness, his mind turning and turning on memories that won't go away. In the darkness they are so real.

((O))

In the morning he eats a stew of canned beef again, spooned into his mouth by Napoleon, who is as attentive as a mother bird with a chick.

'Protein,' Napoleon says. 'Just what you need.'

The fever is down and the rain has stopped, but his fingers and lash wounds are oozing pus and everything hurts so terribly. Napoleon tries to make a proper inventory of his wounds. He definitely has some broken fingers and maybe some of the fine bones in his hands. He might have cracked his forearm but he doesn't know if it was from them kicking him, standing on him to hold him down, or from the terrible spasms when they were shocking him and his wrists were tied with rope to rings in the floor. There might be cracked ribs and a fractured cheekbone to add to the list. It's so hard to tell. Everything is just a mass of pain, one pain merging in to another.

'You won't be able to walk much on that leg,' Napoleon says as he unwraps the bandage to take a look.

'Will I have to?' Illya asks bleakly. He looks himself. The knee is swollen and stiff and the bruises spread wide around the head of his tibia. The bullet wound is yellow with pus too, and it sears as Napoleon pours antiseptic into the long gash.

'The boat's a couple of miles up river, if it's still there. I came in by night on the tide, left it further up where there's cover. It's rough country. I suppose I could go fetch it but I don't like the idea of leaving you.'

'Me?' Illya asks with a faint smile. He feels dizzy just sitting up. 'I'm in tip top condition. I could take on a water buffalo if I needed to.'

'Hmm,' Napoleon grumbles as he starts to re-wrap the wound in fresh bandage. 'No, I don't want to leave you here. We'll go as far as you can away from this place and then I'll bring the boat down.'

Illya looks down at his bare feet, at his mercifully undamaged toenails, and says, 'I haven't seen my boots in a week.'

Napoleon nods over towards the corner of the room. 'Don't worry. I borrowed a pair from our friends. They look your size.'

Illya glances over at the pair of boots. He recognises them. He remembers lying on the concrete and watching those boots as they paced past him. He remembers the foot swinging back and then coming in hard to kick him in the face, the ribs, between the legs. He remembers lying there staring at every detail of stitching in the leather while that boot crushed his hand, while Guido knelt with the bloody pliers and pulled and pulled and pulled. Falling unconscious from the pain, and those boots being the first thing he saw when he came around.

'Illya,' Napoleon says.

'Sorry,' he murmurs. 'Sorry. It just – I wish you had some of those amnesia pills with you.'

Napoleon looks at him with deep sympathy. 'Medical pulled them a couple months ago anyway, tovarisch. Too many side effects. I'm sorry. You could do it the old fashioned way. There's some whiskey in the stores.'

'No,' Illya says. He hates using substances to solve mental problems. It makes him feel out of control. 'No, better save that for the journey.'

'I'll make coffee,' Napoleon says, going back over to the little stove.

'I could do with using the bathroom, while the water boils,' Illya mentions.

'You want help to the window?'

Illya smiles. 'Not for this, no.

He sees Napoleon looking him up and down. He's still naked and he feels wrapped in pain, as if his wounds are clothing. His nudity just doesn't matter. His body has ceased to be a private thing. He has been stripped and reclothed multiple times. He has been touched with incredible intimacy, only to cause pain and humiliation. His genitals and anus became nothing more than gateways to pain, like his mouth, like his nipples, like his navel and underarms and inner thighs. He has lost control of bladder and bowels, he has lain on the floor sobbing and vomiting and screaming. He lost all dignity in the past week.

'I don't want you walking to that outhouse,' Napoleon is saying. He goes over to the corner, picks up a galvanised steel bucket. 'You can use this, and then I'll slop out. You want some privacy?'

Illya sits up a little more, and faintness washes over him.

'No,' he says. 'No, I don't care. Can you help me?'

So Napoleon puts the bucket by the wall, helps him up, helps to lower him down so that he's sitting on that narrow rim with his back resting against the wall. The bruises and wounds on his buttocks hurt so much on that metal rim. His head swims.

'Hey,' Napoleon says. 'Are you okay? Are you sure you can – '

He remembers lying on the floor in the other room, wetting himself from the pain, shitting from the pain, shitting in a liquid stream from the electric shocks. He remembers being closed in that tank and getting desperate, more desperate, more desperate still, and eventually struggling to pull down his clothes in that tiny, foetid space and doing it in the slopping few inches of water, and the stench billowing to fill the tiny cell.

'I'm sure I can,' he says.

He's not going to be reduced to doing it lying on the floor again. He keeps his lower back hard against the wall, pulls up his knees as far as possible, drops his head as low as he can because he's just so dizzy. Napoleon crouches and holds out his hands, and Illya rests his forearms hard on the steady platform of Napoleon's forearms, and he pushes through the burns and the pain.

'That's it, buddy. That's it. Back in bed now.'

He's panting and sweating and his ears are screaming, and Napoleon is helping him back to the bed. He's hardly aware of finishing on that bucket, but he must have done, because Napoleon is helping him back to bed, laying him down, patting cool water onto his face. He's so sick. He's so tired of the pain. He so tired of those vivid flashes of memory that plunge him back into the horror. He wishes he could cry.

'You're safe now,' Napoleon says. 'It's all right now.'

The memories are like ghosts, worse than ghosts because they're so real. At times it's like being dipped back into that time, drenched in it. All night he drifted in and out of dreams of the torture. When he's awake his memory is plagued by the torture. He turns his head away from Napoleon and tears run from his eyes. The water is starting to boil on the little stove and he thinks of the pain they could have caused him with boiling water, and for a flashing moment he's fearful of it. He became fearful of their every little movement because he never knew when their innocent actions might turn to pain.

'Hey,' Napoleon says. 'Do you want that coffee?'

He wrenches himself into a semblance of normality, and says, 'Yes, please, Napoleon. Yes.'

Napoleon puts a hand very gently on his shoulder, hardly touching because of the bruises. He doesn't say anything. He just lets his fingers rest there.

'I'm all right,' Illya makes himself say, because the look in Napoleon's eyes is likely to make him cry again.

'Yeah,' Napoleon says, with no belief in his tone, but he turns away and makes the coffee.

'Here,' Napoleon says, showing him the cup. He blinks and focusses and thinks about sitting up, then he says, 'I'll drink it in a bit. Thank you, Napoleon.'

((O))

Napoleon is worried Illya won't be able to make it to the boat. He's worried about trying to make him travel, worried about staying here, desperately worried about the thought of leaving him here while he goes for the boat. It's rough land and it will take hours to get up there. He stands there with the coffee cup in his hand and watches Illya as his eyes glaze over, as he goes into another place.

Illya is largely just as out of control as when he was a captive. It falls to Napoleon to make all the decisions. He can't quite trust Illya to be honest about his capabilities, more because Illya will overestimate than because he will lie. But how does he, Napoleon, judge what Illya is capable of? How does he know what to do?

He stands there looking at him, listening to the creak of the hut as the wood and metal expands in the growing heat of the day. It's stopped raining, thank god. It will be so much harder if they have to walk in the rain. He wishes he could make Illya a crutch but there's no way Illya could hold it with his hands as they are.

He goes over to eye that radio. It's been dead so far, but if the men were meant to check in regularly someone could already be growing suspicious. He makes up his mind suddenly, swiftly. They need to get out of this place. All personal feeling aside, Illya is the sole trustee of those codes and addresses. He has to get them back to New York. He doesn't doubt that Illya remembers them and he prays that he let nothing slip to his torturers. Illya says he didn't, but he's suffered so much, been put through so much terrible pain.

He gathers up Illya's clothes from the nails where he hung them. They're dry now, if stained and torn. There's still a dubious smell about them of faeces and mud. He takes them back to Illya's side and feels a twinge of unease again. He's not asleep, he's sure, but his eyes are closed and he's so pale, except for peaks of red on his cheeks under the bruising. His face, that angelic face that the women of U.N.C.L.E. coo over, has lost all of its symmetry with the burns and bruises and swelling. And his hands... His torn fingertips are weeping through the bandages. Napoleon is so worried that the antibiotics won't be enough to stop sepsis setting in, not in this environment, not with these limited medical supplies and without a real medical professional to see to them.

He touches his fingers to Illya's shoulder, taking note of how thin he is, how sharp is the rise of his collar bone under his hand.

'Illya,' he says.

Illya blinks his eyes open and turns his head.

'Sorry, Napoleon. Yes, I'm ready for that coffee. Thank you.'

'Oh.' He had forgotten the coffee. 'Yeah, I'll help you with that. Illya, I want to get moving as soon as possible. It's not safe here.'

Illya exhales, and looks so tired. 'Of course,' he says after a moment. 'Yes, you're right. It's not safe.'

'Illya, will you be able to make it, walking?'

Illya's eyes travel about the room, settling on little details. He brings his attention back to his own body, looks down at his swollen knee.

'I can try,' he says.

Napoleon's worries flood out in words. His fears about leaving Illya behind, about having to leave him somewhere in the rancid, mosquito infested trees that grow further up the river, about leaving him in the hut and their enemies coming and discovering him there.

'I can try,' Illya says again. It's obvious he really isn't up to decisions. Napoleon can bounce his thoughts off him all he likes but he's not going to get rational help.

Napoleon rubs his chin and sighs and says what he's been trying not to say.

'You, know, I've been thinking. Illya, I know it's terrible, but the safest place for you to be is in that – '

Illya's expression stops him before Napoleon can finish the sentence.

'I'm not going back in that tank,' he says. 'No, Napoleon. They can shoot me. They can torture me. I'm not going back in that tank.'

It is so rare that Illya looks truly fearful, but it is fear that Napoleon is seeing now. He has a real, visceral fear of that tank, and Napoleon doesn't blame him one bit. But he needs to get Illya back safely, Illya the messenger as much as Illya his friend.

'All right,' Napoleon says. 'All right. I'll help you with that coffee then I'll get you dressed and pack us some things.'

((O))

His leg hurts so much. All of his wounds hurt so much, but he can hardly touch his left foot to the ground and he's only able to walk with Napoleon's arm around his back, holding most of his weight. He is pouring sweat and he's dizzy and thirsty and short of breath. The hut is still visible behind him. They haven't even made it to the trees. Walking through that outer room was like a reminder of hell. Just the scents were enough. When he saw the battery there on the floor his heart jolted and he was lying there again, screaming himself hoarse while those three men moved about him, plying the current through him in stronger and stronger bursts, laughing as he screamed.

'All right, Illya?'

'I'm doing all right,' he murmurs. He's not doing all right at all. He's in so much pain. He feels so faint.

'Come on,' Napoleon says. 'The ground gets a bit more solid soon. That'll be easier for you.'

So he stumbles on across the pocked, marshy ground, trying so hard to ignore the arrows of pain in his left leg, trying to ignore the hot throbbing of his fingers and the pulsing of the burns. Every movement hurts. But Napoleon is right. The ground does get firmer. It is a bit easier. But still, it hurts so much. Sweat runs down his spine and pours from under his arms and trickles down the centre of his chest and down the backs of his legs. He makes a mis-step, his knee twists, the pain is so sudden and sharp that he vomits before he can stop himself.

'Illya, you can't,' Napoleon says.

'I can,' he grates, eyes closed, clinging to Napoleon as well as he can with the terrible pain in his hands. His mouth is foul with the taste of the vomit. Then he feels something pressing on his lips, and he opens his mouth automatically and Napoleon pours a little water in.

'All right,' Napoleon says. 'All right. Come on. Another few steps. Look, there's a log up ahead, yeah? You see it. Let's make it to the log.'

So Illya opens his eyes and sees the log twenty yards ahead, and he makes for it, seeing nothing but it, until it's right there in front of him.

'All right,' Napoleon says again. 'Okay. See that tuft of grass? That hummock that's going yellow. That one now. You get to that one and you can have a swallow of whiskey, huh? Nice, good whiskey.'

So he tries again, stumbling forward, watching that lump of grass. Then Napoleon is lowering him to the ground and unscrewing the lid from a bottle and tipping it up against his lips. It burns and goes straight to his head, and he sits there a little while, until Napoleon hauls him up again and says, 'Right. There's a ditch a way up ahead. Next target. We'll make it to the ditch.'

It's increasingly obvious that he isn't going to make it. Everything is starting to swim so badly around him. His leg hurts so, so much with every step and he retches again and brings up more half-digested food and the whiskey he's just drunk. He tries to see, to see where that ditch is, to work out how far he's come, but his ears are screaming and he can hardly see at all, and Napoleon's voice is very faint, saying, 'Come on now, Illya. Come on. Just a little further.'

He can't. He can't. The screaming in his ears is too much. A neon spatter flashes in his eyes. Everything fades away…

...And then he's – oh – so much pain, so much pain, the heavy sickness in his stomach, his fingers are great, thick, throbbing masses of pain. His stomach is pressing hard against something, he's jogging and swaying as if he's on a horse, but his head is hanging down, all the blood is in his head, his lips throb, his bruises throb, his ribs ache. The scent of sweat is all around him and he blinks and sees muddy ground moving, grass and roots and leaves and the back of – of Napoleon's legs, his trousers splashed with mud, the heels of his boots, as he walks slowly and steadily over the ground. He tries to make a sound but his lungs can't catch air. He tries to move. Napoleon slows and stops and then grunts as he crouches and heaves Illya from the fireman's lift onto the muddy ground, leaning him back against the bole of a tree.

'Decided to wake up, huh, partner?' Napoleon asks.

Illya blinks at him. Napoleon's face is red and shining with sweat, and he's panting hard.

'Where – How far – ?' he asks.

'About a mile,' Napoleon tells him. 'You know, I wouldn't recommend your weight loss method but I'm glad you lost some pounds over this last week. I must get ten percent extra milage with the new streamlined Kuryakin.'

He's too sore and sick to either show amusement or disgust at Napoleon's levity.

'About a mile,' he says, lolling his head back against the tree.

'Yeah. Another mile or so to the boat.' Napoleon becomes very serious. 'How do you feel? Think you can walk a little?'

Illya sits there, staring at the trees and the tangled undergrowth, feeling the heat of the sun beating down.

'There's a path,' he realises suddenly.

'Yeah, and I don't like it. There's a village six miles up the river and I don't know the natives can be trusted. Maybe they use the path to get down to the coast – or to that hut. I'd rather not be on it but I can't carry you and cut a trail and you can't walk unbroken ground. You think you can walk?' he asks again.

Illya thinks of the biting and stinging things that must live in this humid, overgrown place. There are ants everywhere. He isn't happy sitting on the ground, even though he isn't confident of how far he can walk.

'Help me up,' he says.

'Hang on,' Napoleon says, and he gives him two white pills and whiskey to wash them down. 'Okay. That's it. Up and at 'em, partner.'

So he struggles to his feet while Napoleon packs the bottle back in his rucksack, and his leg collapses and he drops to the ground with a thump. Napoleon helps him up again, holds him steady, hard against his side, and says, 'Okay now. One step at a time. That's it.'

And Illya starts to walk again.

((O))

Thank god for vanity, regular fitness tests, and the U.N.C.L.E. gym. All three of those things help Napoleon to keep in shape, and without them he doesn't think he would be able to do this. Illya collapsed again after five hundred yards of painfully slow progress, and for a few minutes Napoleon just sat there next to him and dropped his face into his hands, despairing that they would ever make it. But he drank a little water and girded himself, and now he's breaking the path down towards the boat, Illya slung over his shoulder again. Napoleon is panting and soaked with sweat. It's starting to rain again and he doesn't like the look of the sky, but they need to get to that boat. They need to get out of this area.

There's a shout somewhere behind them. He can hardly twist his head to see, but there they are, coming out of the scrubby undergrowth, rifles raised. There's a crack, a bullet whistles past. Thank god most people aren't great shots, especially under pressure. Thank god they can't risk killing Illya because they need the information he holds. He can't get out his gun, not with Illya over his shoulder, so he keeps on fighting across the ever softening ground, the boat in his sights.

He's knee deep in mud and staggering when he finally reaches the boat, and he drops Illya none too gently over the side, and his rucksack after him. It's a small launch with a very rudimentary cabin, and he doesn't bother dragging Illya inside, but just arranges him on the deck where he can keep an eye on him. Shots crack overhead again. The men are trying to run but they can't run in the mud. If they had any sense they'd stop and shoot the boat, but they just keep shooting wildly and staggering in the mud.

As another bullet whistles by his partner stirs and groans and mumbles something; an incoherent, pleading cry of pain. He puts his hand on Illya's cheek and murmurs reassuring words, then he turns himself swiftly to sorting out the boat, getting it out into deeper water and ready to leave. For the first time a shot cracks through the hull, mercifully above the waterline.

Napoleon is soaked to the thighs and covered in mud, but at last the boat is afloat, the engine starts first time, and they pull away from the shore. The men on the river bank throw up their arms, shout, hurl curses, then remember to start shooting again. But now they're on the way down the river, keeping to the deep central channel, retracing those painful two miles that they staggered on foot in a few minutes. The men are left far, far behind. Napoleon sees the hut on the shore first, and then that awful tank just sticking up above the waves, and he's never been happier to say goodbye.

They're out on the sea then, cutting out a good way from shore to be certain of deep water. He lets the engine idle for a moment and turns back to look at Illya. Is he unconscious or sleeping? Maybe it doesn't matter. He gets the chart from the little cabin and spreads it out and looks at it. It's fifty miles up the coast to reach the place where he hired the boat. From there he can pick up his rental car and get Illya to the city almost two hundred miles away, and from there they can take a plane. It will be a gruelling journey. Even when they get to the airport it won't be easy. There's no direct flight to New York.

He sighs and rolls up the chart and turns back to the wheel. The clouds really are gathering in earnest now and the wind is whipping salt water into his face and he feels the first cool drops of rain. The surface of the sea is covered in little white peaks. The boat is beginning to lurch, and Illya moans softly as they pitch and settle, pitch and settle. Napoleon doesn't like this. He doesn't like this at all.

((O))

Illya comes awake suddenly, gasping, murmuring, 'What? What?'

Napoleon is trying to pull something over his arms and the ground beneath him is somehow swaying and lurching. He's wet through and he feels so, so sick.

'Life vest,' Napoleon says tersely. 'Come on, Illya. Help me. I need to get back to the helm.'

'What?' he asks again, dazedly.

'Life vest. Get it on. I need to look after the boat.'

He stares up into grey sky and suddenly recognises the scent of the sea, the feeling of a boat pitching underneath him. It's raining and Napoleon's face is white with worry, and Illya suddenly struggles to get into the life jacket and Napoleon secures it at the front.

'What can I do?' Illya asks.

'Stay there. Stay still. Let me look after the boat.'

He tries to sit up. His head swims. He needs to see the horizon, to get fresh air, to try to get a grip on the awful seasickness.

'Illya, stay there,' Napoleon barks, and his tone is such that Illya obeys. He lies there on the hard deck and watches Napoleon standing there in a fierce wind and spray. He watches the clouds roiling above him and the rain lashing down and every breath he takes in is short and painful and he feels so damn sick. It's a wretched sickness, seasickness. It pervades every cell. It makes his head swim. The boat is pitching so hard that he rolls to the left, rolls to the right, bangs against hard protuberances. Napoleon can't spare a moment for him because he's fighting so hard with the boat. Napoleon is a sailor, he remembers. He owns his own thirty foot sloop. He's grateful for that.

So he lies there and stares at the sky and tries to get over the terrible swimming feeling in his head. If he can just sit up... He could be of more help sitting up.

'Napoleon,' he calls.

Napoleon spares him a look, but he turns back to face the sea ahead before asking briskly, 'You okay?'

'Yeah,' Illya says. Everything hurts. His fingers hurt. His knee hurts. His chest burns when he breathes. He knows he's useless, but he says, 'Napoleon, I must be able to help.'

'You help by staying there out of the way,' Napoleon says in an uncompromising tone. 'I'm serious, Illya. You're extra baggage. Stay out of the way.'

He knows enough not to feel hurt, but he feels so, so frustrated at his uselessness. Still, nothing will make his head stop swimming. Nothing will miraculously heal his knee or make him able to use his hands. He imagines gripping the wheel with those hands, and the thought is so bad it makes him dizzy.

He lies back on the deck, lets his head loll back, feels the pitch and slant of the boat. He's so tired. He feels so ill, in so much pain. His body is prickling with sweat and his lungs feel so heavy and every breath burns.

Napoleon is there at his side again and Illya asks, 'The boat? Why – ?'

'Take these,' Napoleon says, pushing bitter pills into his mouth. 'Yeah. Drink. That's it.'

Illya swallows the pills and stares at Napoleon's face, and then he's staring at the sky and Napoleon is gone. Has time become elastic? What's happening? He feels so ill.

Guido is leaning over him. He tries to scream but he can't make a sound. Al is standing there carving shavings from a stick with his knife and grinning, and Guido is doing something with the battery. That knife is carving his fingernails from his hands and Illya is trying and trying to scream but nothing happens. His lungs heave and burn but make no sound. Something slaps over him, cold water drenching his entire body, and for a moment he's aware of something closer to the surface, of the taste of salt and a glimmer of sky. But then there's Guido again, Emil pulling down his underpants, taking hold of his legs and jerking them apart. The fear paralysing him. The vulnerability of his exposed cock and balls. Oh god. I'll tell you, I'll tell you... But he can't remember the codes. His tongue won't work. Guido is holding that wire. He hears the rip of tape being pulled from the reel, feels the wire touching to his balls, and someone is tearing at his fingernails again. The pain is too, too much, and he's waiting for the electric shock, and –

'Illya! Illya!'

He's so hot. So hot. Napoleon is there and the men are gone, and Illya stares.

''Poleon?'

Napoleon's hand is on his cheek.

'Come on now, Illya. That's it. Wake up.'

He stares into the sky above him. It's blue again. But he's soaking wet. The deck is slopping in water. Napoleon's hand is shaking his arm and he wants to say, Stop it, that hurts, but he gives a vague mumble instead.

'Come on,' Napoleon says. 'Come on. Back in the land of the living.'

'You didn't drown me,' Illya says eventually, and Napoleon smiles.

'I tried my best. I had to lash you to the boat because I was afraid I'd lose you over the edge. But we made it.'

'Oh,' Illya says.

'Come on,' Napoleon tells him, undoing the straps of the life jacket and easing it off. So they must be safe now. The boat is hardly rocking at all.

'We're still – we're back – ' he garbles.

'We're in dock,' Napoleon says. 'The storm blew itself out. Nearly blew us out too, but we're okay. Think you can make it onto dry land?'

'Oh,' Illya says again.

He tries to sit but the world swims around him, and the next thing he knows Napoleon is hauling him up, out of the boat and onto beautifully dry land. His legs tremble and his knee gives way, and he stumbles where Napoleon takes him, whimpering with pain. The sun is beating down, he is baking hot, the sea water is steaming from his clothes. Then Napoleon is holding him but also arguing with someone in Spanish. Illya tries to stand and tries to focus. Napoleon hands the man a wad of money and the argument is over.

'I was only meant to have the boat for two days, and I brought it back with bullet holes,' Napoleon says.

'Bullet – ' Illya echoes.

'They caught up with us just as we were getting to the boat. That's why we need to get out of here, pronto. Come on, comrade. Not far to the car.'

'Home?' Illya asks rather incoherently.

'Hospital, I think,' Napoleon replies.

Illya wants so much to be home, but he feels so bad, so on the edge of something terrible, that hospital sounds perfect.

((O))

There is a long, blurred time when he is hot and helpless and so confused. There's something round his neck. He can't move his head properly. There's a cannula in the back of his hand and Napoleon comes and goes and there are nightmares so real he wakes screaming and struggling. He can feel that awful rod deep in his cock again and he tries to tear it out with bandaged hands, and Spanish voices tell him, 'No, no. The catheter has to stay.'

He sinks back into sleep again, into those dreams, those screaming dreams where he's on the floor in that hut and those three men are there with him, laying pain upon him in every part of his body. And that skewer… He can feel the skewer, feel it in there, and he's waiting for the shock to snap through his body, and –

He tries to scream and nothing happens. His voice is a dry rasp. But he's not in that hut. He's not in the hut and he's not in the tank. Something is stopping him moving his head. He moves a hand thick with bandages, tries to reach that awful thing that he can still feel in the centre of his cock. A hand closes around his wrist, then he hears Napoleon saying, 'Illya. Listen, Illya. It's a catheter put in by the doctors. Leave it alone. It needs to stay in.'

He blinks and focusses and for the first time in days, it seems, he's aware of where he is. White covers. A clean bed. Strip lights above him. The scent of disinfectant.

'Oh,' he says vaguely. 'Have I been ill?'

Napoleon is sitting in a chair by the bed.

'Just a little,' he says with a wry smile. 'You were clever enough to succumb simultaneously to a chest infection and septicaemia.'

He tries to digest all of that. He wonders about his fingers. He moves them stiffly and the pain is still hot and sore. He can feel a cast around his right forearm, coming down over his hand.

'Listen, Illya,' Napoleon says seriously. 'You've been out of it for a while, so you needed the catheter and a faecal collection bag. I know it's not pleasant, but it was necessary, and you need to leave them alone.'

'How long?' he asks.

Napoleon looks at his watch. 'About seventy-two hours. You're a sick Russian but the aim is to get you well enough to fly. You've been on an antibiotic IV since you came in.'

He does feel ill. His lungs still feel heavy and his breaths burn.

'Napoleon, I need them to take out the catheter – ' he begins very seriously, trying to sound calm, but Napoleon shakes his head.

'No go, IK. The catheter is giving your urethra a chance to recover from the damage they inflicted. Long story short, you'll probably have it for a while longer yet.'

Illya tries to contain the ridiculous spike of panic at that thought. He can't bear the feeling of that tube inside him. It's too much. There were too many times. Lying on the floor, Emil getting that awful skewer and dipping it in the oil and pushing it into his cock, sliding it in with a grim intensity as Illya screamed. Nothing sexual, just a means to an end, a way to make those shocks hurt as badly as they possibly could. He remembers him shoving another piece of metal into his rectum, and those two places being connected by those terrible, terrible shocks. He can't bear it. He just can't.

'If they don't take it out, I will,' he says, but his voice is shaking and something terrible is happening, because he's trying so hard to keep himself together, but it's not working.

'Hey,' Napoleon says. 'Hey.'

He is crying, shaking, the sobs just falling out of him as if he is overflowing. He feels so ill, so tired, so sore, and he can't stop sobbing.

'Illya, listen. They can't take it out,' he hears Napoleon say through the mist of his tears. He knows they can't. He knows they won't. But he can't stop those awful sobs. He's too ill, too tired.

There are people dressed in white coming into the room. A nurse bending over him, someone trying to usher Napoleon out. But Napoleon won't go. He keeps repeating the Spanish words for U.N.C.L.E. and showing his card, and Illya tries to control this terrible breakdown because it doesn't help, it's just making him feel fevered and ill, and then someone does something to the drip bag hanging by the bed, and warmth envelopes him, and everything fades away.

((O))

The x-rays revealed just how many fine breaks and cracks those men left in Illya's bones. Ribs, cheekbone, fingers and hands. A hairline crack in the right forearm. A crack in one of his cervical vertebrae that, thank god, doesn't threaten the spinal cord. It makes Napoleon sick to think of what was done to him, how his body was used without mercy.

The doctors see him as something of a fascination. They don't get to treat torture victims very often. So they pore over him like an arcane text, taking note of the muscle strain from the electric shocks, debating whether his arm was broken by the spasms from the shocks or if that boot-shaped bruise caused the crack, examining the depth of the wounds made from being whipped with electrical cable, trying to separate cigarette ash from scab in his weeping burns.

It's all such a strain. They're still in that country, still so far away from safety. Napoleon doesn't dare leave Illya. He suspects everyone. If the boat he hired was traced by the men on the shore – and how many people bring back a rental boat with bullet holes in it? – then they can connect that to the car he drove away in. If they find out where he returned the car there's a chance they'll pick up the taxi they transferred too. Illya is a distinctive mark, a blond in a dark-haired country, a man half-unconscious from fever and terribly injured. So then they'll find the hospital, and then they'll find this room, and then he will be the only thing between them and Illya being back in their hands.

So he sits in the room at Illya's bedside for as long as he's allowed. When he's ushered out he sits in the corridor, right outside the door. He sleeps in a chair, eats in the corridor or by Illya's bed, takes toilet breaks only as rarely as possible. And Illya sleeps again, and wakes again, sleeps and wakes. The doctors come in to examine him, the nurses come and go, changing the bag on the catheter, emptying the faecal collector, cleaning and re-dressing his wounds, sponging his skin, changing his sheets beneath him. Illya wakes and sleeps, eats and drinks, and gradually a little more colour comes into his skin, the swellings subside, the wounds start to look a little less angry. Napoleon sits beside him and talks to him, reassures him, tries to settle the dark thoughts that are obviously turning in his mind, because torture never leaves anyone with a calm and clear mind.

He learns the first time he gets in food with chilli in it that Illya can't stand that. He unwraps the burrito brought to him by a nurse, inhales the scent of chilli in the filling, and suddenly Illya is vomiting over the bedclothes, and Napoleon tosses the food aside, grabs a bowl, puts it under his mouth.

'Take it away,' Illya grates, panting in breath, his face white.

'Uh – the burrito?' Napoleon asks, and Illya grunts yes, so he wraps it back in its paper and takes it out of the room, calling for a nurse at the same time. 'What was that about?' he asks as the nurse tuts, wipes Illya's mouth and chest, starts to strip off the soiled bedding.

'Chilli oil,' Illya says. 'It was chilli they used to sensitise my skin. I can't – '

'Okay,' Napoleon says. He goes over to the basin, washes his hands with antiseptic smelling soap, comes back to his partner's side. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'I'm sorry.'

When he thinks of how much an unguarded touch of the strongest chilli seeds stings on lips alone, his eyes water. There's another little narrative of pain to add to his knowledge of what Illya suffered. He knew they used something to sensitise him. The doctors had spoken of chemical burns. But he hadn't known what it was.

'I'll eat conservatively from now on,' he promises with a smile, brushing Illya's fringe from his sweaty forehead. 'Okay?'

'Okay,' Illya replies. He still looks queasy. 'I'm sorry. You should get something else to eat.'

'I'm fine,' Napoleon promises. He'd share some of Illya's food when dinner comes, but he knows Illya will eat the lot, and needs to. He still looks far too thin. 'I'll ask one of the girls to fetch me something later. They're very good.'

'I'm sure,' Illya says dryly, and Napoleon smiles, and Illya smiles in return. It's so good to see him smile.

((O))

Is it morning or evening? The light is a little golden but it's hard to tell if it's dawn or a late summer evening. He doesn't know which way he's facing, and that's unnerving. But he's waking up again after another long sleep, and Napoleon is still there, looking exhausted, his jaw dark with stubble, bags under his eyes. There's too much pain, but there's something soft over the top of it, something that makes the pain cease to matter. Whenever he wakes he finds the world smells of antiseptic and food. For a long week everything smelt of shit and piss and blood, of mud and salt water. But now it's all antiseptic and badly cooked food.

'Hey, partner,' Napoleon says as he blinks and pulls himself up a little in the bed.

'Morning,' Illya says. 'Or – evening?'

'Right first time,' Napoleon replies. 'Morning. It's early.'

'Oh,' Illya says. 'Have you slept?'

'A little,' Napoleon tells him, and Illya wonders if that's true. Sometimes over the last few days he's seen Napoleon sleeping, but not often. His gun is always within reach and he's always ready for trouble.

'You should sleep more,' Illya says.

'Not until I've got you somewhere secure.'

A little chill runs through Illya's core. Most of the time he's too tired or too sore to think properly, but when he's lucid like this the fear of being taken and tortured again makes his blood run cold.

'When can I get to somewhere secure?' he asks, trying not to sound plaintive.

'Soon,' Napoleon promises. 'You're doing all right. The blood poisoning is pretty much beaten. They were afraid you might lose some fingers but they've got the infections under control now. You'll see a surgeon in New York and if the nail beds are intact you might get normal fingernails again.'

Illya regards his bandaged hands blearily. 'Well, that's something to look forward to,' he replies dryly. Just under the surface something is very close to cracking. He used to have normal fingernails. He used to be healthy and whole.

'You're lucky they didn't make a pirate of you,' Napoleon says in his flippant way. 'With a hook for a hand and a peg leg it would have been almost obligatory, and what self-respecting pirate gets seasick?'

'Very funny,' he murmurs.

Napoleon smiles. His smile is like the sun appearing on a dull day.

'Glad you've gotten your sense of humour back. It's the last requirement before they'll let you go.'

'Let me go?' Illya asks, suddenly feeling even more awake. He can feel the cast on his leg, on his arm, the pain all over his body, that awful catheter still in him. He still has a drip in his hand.

'We can get special dispensation from U.N.C.L.E. to allow you to fly. Waverly wants you back in New York asap. You're carrying something important, remember.'

'Oh. Yes...' Five addresses. Sixteen codes. Information so important that he was tortured without mercy. He survived so he could deliver that information to Waverly. It's the entire reason he's being looked after like this. Not himself, but what he carries in his mind.

Everything seems to drop away, all of a sudden. What is he? A delivery device. A container to be cracked open. A safe with the most complicated of combinations.

'Illya,' Napoleon says warningly. 'Over-thinking is a dangerous hobby.'

He feels like he's falling, plummeting downwards into a void. He's back in that hut, on the floor, screaming. His body is nothing more than a useful cage to hold his mind, a cage that can be used to tear his mind apart with pain. His mind is nothing more than an envelope holding a message. That's all that matters. To his enemies he is an entity of nerve endings, of gateways to agony. To U.N.C.L.E. he is a carrier pigeon. Where is Illya Kuryakin in all of that? He used to be right there, content in his skin, content with his life. Now whatever makes him himself is something split apart, small, rattling around in this cage of pain, and who cares about that?

'Illya,' Napoleon says softly, dabbing a handkerchief gently to Illya's face.

He raises his left hand, touches his unbandaged thumb and finger to his cheek. His face is slick with tears. He feels so numb and far away, and the further he drifts away the more vividly those flashes come; lying on that concrete floor, rope on his wrists and ankles, electric shocks plunging through his flesh. Lying there while Guido peels away his fingernails. Lying there while they kick him and whip him and paint that chilli oil into his wounds and onto his agonised genitals and push their metal probes into his body and apply the current to the most sensitive depths of him. Sitting in that terrible, terrible rusting tank while the water slipped endlessly past the walls and he felt as though he were buried alive.

'Illya,' Napoleon says again.

He's shaking, sobbing, he blinks and sees the ceiling with its polystyrene tiles, the flicker of the strip light, the tube going up to the drip bag, the top of the window frame and a little bit of sky.

'We need to get you home,' Napoleon says. 'There are things you need from the infirmary that they can't give you here.'

Counselling, he means. The treatment here is all physical, nothing more. In U.N.C.L.E. they will set psychiatrists on him and they will pull out his thoughts. It will be like performing bowel surgery on the mind. Their aim is to turn him into a functional agent again. Nothing more.

'I don't know if I want to go back,' he says. The words shock him. He hasn't spoken them out loud. But he's thought them to himself, over and over. He thought that in that hut. What salary, what lifestyle perks, can compensate him for this pain?

Napoleon doesn't say anything. He puts his hand on Illya's shoulder, very gently because his skin is still clouded with bruises in so many places. Somehow his lack of words is better than a heartfelt speech. Somehow that touch makes Illya feel as if Napoleon is reaching through the cage and managing to touch the small and battered core of his being that is hiding somewhere inside.

((O))

The looks from the stewardesses range from sympathetic to wincing to horrified. Illya supposes he must look terrible. He still has the neck brace. His lips and cheek and forehead are still swollen and bruised and the stitched-together splits are horrible streaks across his face. His hands are still bandaged and bloody fluid still seeps through the coverings if they're not changed every few hours. His arm is in a cast, his leg is in a cast. He was taken to the plane by wheelchair, carried up the steps by Napoleon, and deposited with great care in a seat in First Class. He doesn't take much notice of the glances of the staff or passengers because his mind is so caught up with the fatigue and pain caused by moving. They've taken out the catheter at last, thank god, but that means he has to think about when he needs the toilet, and Napoleon will have to help him get there, and he has brief little flutters of panic wondering if he'll be able to stand the enclosed cubicle, because every small space jerks his mind back to that terrible metal tank.

'Nothing to do now until we're home,' Napoleon says reassuringly.

'Nothing to do until we reach Mexico City,' Illya corrects him.

'Well, all right, pedant. There's a change of planes,' Napoleon acknowledges, 'but I've made sure the airline is aware of your needs. You'll be all right.'

That means they'll be met with another wheelchair, Illya supposes, and he'll sit like a good patient in the First Class lounge while they wait the three hours between connections. What will meet them at JFK, he wonders. Will he sit in a taxi, or will U.N.C.L.E. send a special vehicle? Do they care enough for that?

'Here,' Napoleon says, shaking pills out of a bottle and holding them up towards Illya's lips. 'A couple of these and you can sleep through the flight.'

Illya shakes his head. He knows the painkillers will help, that they'll send him into a drowsy stupor, but he doesn't want to be drugged any more. The pain is still so bad, but he's sick of drugs. He felt more alive when he was lying on the floor in that hut. He felt more alive when he was so close to death than he did over this last week, attached to tubes and pipes in a hospital bed and so full of drugs that half the time he didn't know if he were awake or asleep.

'Be a good patient,' Napoleon tells him, and Illya clenches hard on the urge to snap. His temper is so close to the surface at the moment.

'I don't want any painkillers right now,' he says firmly. 'I don't need any painkillers. I'm not having any painkillers.'

'All right,' Napoleon says, holding up his hands. 'All right.'

Illya subsides. He's prickling with anger but he's tired and in too much pain despite his determination not to take the pills. He sits there as the aircraft engines roar into life and the plane taxis towards the runway, and the white noise and constant vibration and the warmth of the cabin wear through him like running water. Napoleon fastens his seatbelt for him and unfastens it once they're in the air. Cigarette smoke drifts through the cabin. People talk in murmuring voices. Napoleon orders drinks and lifts the tumbler of scotch to Illya's lips. The alcohol sinks in, mixing with the residue of painkillers already in his blood. He is so tired, and despite everything he sinks away into sleep.

It's like that all the way to Mexico City. Travelling is so tiring when you're in pain. The aircraft touches down. Napoleon helps him to the door, carries him down the stairs, puts him in the wheelchair that's waiting there. He sits in the lounge in that wheelchair, drinking alcohol, dozing, waking up again. Napoleon persuades him to take the painkillers at last, and at last a little feeling of relaxation enters his spine. The drugs don't work as well any more. He's getting too used to them. But they're better than nothing, and the alcohol helps.

He uses the toilet in the airport, because he couldn't stand the thought of the tiny room on the aeroplane. Napoleon takes him in, hobbling, and he looks at the narrow cubicle doors and says, 'Urinal,' even though it's so much easier to sit. He can't go into those little rooms, can't squeeze between those grey walls.

'All right,' Napoleon says, and helps him, holding him up like he did in that hut, when he used the open window as his urinal. Another man comes in and gives him a long look. Just looks at him. Napoleon's hand moves to his gun, but he's just looking, probably wondering what happened to the poor guy with so many bandages and breaks.

Napoleon helps him back to the lounge and this time he sits in a deep armchair instead of the wheelchair, and then he's waking from sleep, Napoleon is saying, 'They're boarding, comrade. Time to take to your chariot again.'

It's too much. He's so tired. It was easier, in a curious way, when he was in that hut. There it didn't matter if he cried. He could sob and scream for as long as he liked. He was already undone there. He had been exposed and taken apart further than any man should be, and it mattered so little if he cried. If he cries here, a man in public, a man in front of other men, people will mutter and stare. People don't want to know about the existence of torture in clean, safe spaces like airports. They don't want to believe how real it can be or how vulnerable we all are to pain. When they hear reports of things like this happening they tell themselves the victims deserved it, or that no one could be so cruel. They tell themselves that certain professions carry a price or that government security demands extreme measures, or that these stories are made up to gain sympathy for a cause.

So he can't give in and cry, but he wants to. The wheelchair trundles along over the smooth polished stone floor and Napoleon's footsteps clack down behind him, and he closes his eyes and lets the neck brace keep his head from flopping back, and flashes of that terrible time flood over him, again and again. So much pain, so much pain. His body a nothing, a lump of meat put there to absorb pain.

'...no, he's okay,' he hears Napoleon say, and Illya jerks his eyes open. Napoleon is holding up his U.N.C.L.E. card. Napoleon has his passport but Illya's is long gone, along with his identification card and everything else in his wallet. He wouldn't resemble a photo I.D. anyway.

'Yes, it's all been arranged,' Napoleon is saying. 'You should have had confirmation from U.N.C.L.E. New York. Have you got that? Illya Kuryakin. He's an U.N.C.L.E. agent. Soviet nationality. Special dispensation to travel without a passport.'

It's all more complicated than it was on the flight in to Mexico, but Illya lets it wash over him. He answers their questions when they ask them, but he doesn't engage. And then finally they're being allowed to board, Napoleon is carrying him again, putting him down at the top of the stairs, helping him to get to his seat.

'I think I'll sleep,' Illya says.

Napoleon regards him with brown eyes. 'Are you okay, partner?' he asks. There's no trace of humour, no veil at all. Just real concern.

Illya smiles a little. 'I'm alive,' he says.

That's the thing, isn't it? He's alive. Blood still moving, heart still pumping, cells still dividing. He can still remember those sixteen codes and five addresses. He's still carrying that sacred information. And he's alive. Every line of pain, every ache, every soreness, all tell him that he's alive.

'You're alive,' Napoleon nods. 'And we'll be home soon.'

'And Waverly will have his codes and addresses,' Illya murmurs. 'And then I'll be done.'

It's all sinking again. He feels so heavy. His fingertips sear and he looks down at his left hand, at the only two nails he has left, index finger and thumb. He feels as though he were rocking back and forth, in and out of reality. He remembers lying on the concrete floor and the pain running through every nerve, screaming until his throat was hoarse. The red, red blood dripping onto the floor, the foot standing on his hand with all its weight, seeing the raw flesh of his finger being exposed like meat from under a shell.

Napoleon's hand is on his arm, and despite everything he's crying. An adult in his thirties, a grown man, and he's crying like a child.

((O))

Waverly's office is just the same as it always is. The table is there, round, slick, with its leather writing pads and the black chairs like monoliths all around. It's a world away from that hut, from that tank. It's cool even though the New York summer is baking hot. The sun beats at the windows but the air inside is fresh and sweet. Napoleon rolls the wheelchair towards the table, moves aside a chair, pushes Illya in as if he were at any briefing. Waverly hasn't even got up from his chair. His pipe is lit and the woody scent of burning tobacco wreathes in the air.

'Well, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly says.

'Not very, sir,' Illya says, choosing to interpret those words in another way to how they were meant.

'Ah, well, of course,' Waverly murmurs. He draws on his pipe, exhales a thin cloud of smoke, then lays the pipe down.

Napoleon takes the chair next to Illya, looks sideways at him, catches his eye. It's a silent little check. An are you all right? He gives a minute smile, but he's so tired. They got in from the flight an hour ago and the intervening time was spent getting from the airport to headquarters, and Illya just wants the chance to lie down. Just a precious few hours lying down. He was so sick of lying down in the hospital, but he so badly wants a bed and proper pain relief.

'Yes, you'll be able to get down to the Infirmary soon,' Waverly says. He's more perceptive than he looks. He cultivates the air of a rather forgetful old gentleman, but he's sharp as any man a third of his age. 'We have a specialist surgeon ready to consult on those fingernails, and I hear you might require surgery on the leg wound?'

Napoleon clears his throat. 'Ah, yes, on the leg wound, and on some of the lacerations from the whipping,' he nods, and Illya's grateful for his stepping in. He feels so very tired.

'Well, of course,' Waverly nods. 'Of course. Then we should get down to business, gentlemen. The codes and addresses, Mr Kuryakin?'

It's so sudden he doesn't feel it coming. It's like a drench of ice water over him. He spent so long resisting giving up that information. All of a sudden he's so fearful, a formless fear, a baseless fear, because there's no reason now to hold back. This is the culmination of it all. This is where he unburdens himself. Waverly doesn't need to torture him. But he's terrified. His throat is so dry he can't say a word.

'Here, Illya,' Napoleon is saying, touching a glass to his lips, and he sips, expecting water, but it's brandy instead. He coughs, takes another mouthful, lets it sink down his throat.

'Psychiatry will be speaking to you too, Mr Kuryakin,' Waverly says, and Illya hardly knows how to respond. That awful feeling washes over him. He's a commodity, nothing more. Get back, pass on the information, have his cracks sealed, return to the field. Do any of them really care?

'The codes,' Waverly says.

He forces himself to focus. He scrapes together some professionalism. All the while Napoleon is looking at him and holding that glass of brandy, ready to give him another sip. He looks down at his hands, at the white dressings that hide the ugly mess of his fingers, at the cast that covers his right forearm and the cast on his leg. And he starts to recite that precious information, steadily, carefully, every single bit.

When he's done he hardly knows what to do. He suddenly feels dizzy. It's only the neck brace that keeps his head upright. Everything hurts so much. His fingers throb. The welts and burns throb. His ears scream and he can hardly see.

'Hey,' Napoleon says, pushing the brandy at his lips again, and he suckles at it, drawing it in in exchange for the information he's just given up. He tries to pull himself back together again, tries to focus on the room. Waverly is checking over what he's written in his tight, sloping hand. But then he looks up and smiles, and suddenly he's the head of an international organisation no longer. He's a kind great-uncle, a man of compassion.

'Get down to the Infirmary, Mr Kuryakin. You look exhausted,' he says. 'Mr Solo, you're off duty for a while. Will you look after your partner, please?'

'With pleasure, sir,' Napoleon says. He gets up, puts his hands on the back of Illya's chair. 'Next stop, bed,' he says, pulling the chair away from the table, turning it around so Illya's no longer looking at Waverly, but at the door ahead of them, which opens smoothly as they approach.

The corridor stretches ahead of him, grey and anonymous. Illya's eyes droop closed, blink open again, close. He's so tired. There are so many thoughts and nameless feelings swirling in his head, but he's too tired for any of them. No thoughts of his future, nothing of the past. Just exhaustion and pain.